
Julien
2.1K posts

Julien
@Julien5050
I share ideas from my mind and from books // Kardashev scale climber // 🇨🇭




This is how European political groups voted on Chat-Control. Green: Stopping Chat-Control Red: Allowing Chat-Control The difference was one vote.

Okay let's see who can reply to this

this might be fav feature in here since fleets, makes it feel like your own lil community speaking of... friends of friends! hii! show me something cool you've built below 😁


Starship is the Hope that our future is bigger than our past It will enable us to build a civilization beyond Earth - a true multi-planetary civilization among the stars

@_The_Prophet__ My bet : Elon will soon reply to a post.






SpaceXAI + Tesla TERAFAB Project Goal is a trillion watts of compute/year Most must necessarily go to space, as US electricity is only 0.5TW

@_The_Prophet__ My bet : Elon will soon reply to a post.

@_The_Prophet__ My bet : Elon will soon reply to a post.




Note that since we are all identical (under the skin), and all born with an identical soul from the standard Antechamber of Souls, the same lives would work well for all of us. Yes I am a Liberal and believe in Science


In the short story, "Fragments of a Hologram Rose", William Gibson points out, with some poetic license, that a hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle. I write stories. So it's my job to understand how they work, and why people do or don't like them, which is especially important for interpreting reviews and beta reader feedback. The reason @tszzl liked "Project Hail Mary" the novel, but not the film, is actually something that happens all the time. Novels aren't based on one major idea. A story of one idea is a short story. Novels generally need anywhere between four and ten major ideas, and they should usually interlock in interesting ways. (This, incidentally, is why novels are much harder to write than short fiction.) A novel is generally around 100K words, 120K if it's science fiction, because there's more to explain. Fantasy is even longer. A movie generally lasts about two and a half to three and a half hours, because that's what people will sit through before starting to become restless. That won't fit four to ten major ideas, fully fleshed out. It just won't. Yes, you have pictures and sound instead of just wordy descriptions. But it's not the word count that won't fit. It's the full collection of major ideas. Which means that if you're turning a novel into a screenplay, you have a few choices to make. First off, you must choose whether to try to fit all the ideas of the novel into the movie in full form. This choice has a single correct answer, and that answer is "no". A movie will not fit a full treatment of four to ten ideas. Full stop. If you try, you get a confusing, disconnected fever dream, and audiences will exit the theater afterwards, if not halfway through, wondering what the fuck that was. So, having made the correct choice to not stuff everything into the suitcase, and then jump up and down on the lid until the hinges break, you then have to make another decision. You must choose one or two of the major ideas in the story to focus on, and consign the rest to a sketchier treatment, penciling in abbreviated versions of them where they touch the elements you have chosen to focus on. This is the choice that you, oh scriptwriter, must make. Which slice do you wish to take through the whole of the story? Which angle to you want to show it from? Which elements will you focus on in depth, and which will you leave for a quick five minute sequence or two-sentence explanation so you can get on with focusing on the others? This choice is not entirely unlike what happens when some readers appreciate your original novel. Some of your audience will absorb all the ideas and love them, love the way they all fit together. But others will like one particular idea, or two, and merely tolerate the rest, driven forward by the promise of the next piece of their favorite thread. In way, when you write the novel into a script, you make that choice FOR the reader, selecting the particular thread, the particular idea, the angle of the rose. And you will hope it's the angle that most of the audience will like. For @tszzl, it wasn't. The majority of the film was made from his least favorite parts of the book, focusing on the working relationship between Dr. Grace and Rocky, and the plot framework of the threat to Earth, rather than on first-contact linguistics, solving engineering problems in space, or the xenobiology of the soliophage microorganism. @tszzl, who is not a professional storyteller, can't be expected to parse all this out, of course. Not his job. A reader's job is to know whether he likes something, not why he does or doesn't. What he really wants isn't "Project Hail Mary" the film, it's "Project Hail Mary" the miniseries. A US-sized "season" of 12 to 15 hour-long episodes would fit every major idea of the novel, in full color, with time and breathing space to do so because it would not be limited by the endurance of the human posterior, or, presumably, by budgetary concerns. His real problem is the problem that every gifted mind on the planet faces to some degree... he lives in a world of people who aren't as much like him as they are like each other, and they would rather see a story about a friendship that awkwardly bridges the gap between species than one about engineering problems in space. Since he is in the minority here, I think the scriptwriter's choice was a wise one. Did I enjoy the film? Yes, I did. More the novel, in fact. But not for the reason you think.











