io9 
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San Francisco, 5:47 AM
Sun Nov 8
11 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/08/09
10/06/09
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10/06/09
Something built for WAR ought to look wicked, fast, dynamic, not like a tugboat.
10/06/09
10/07/09
10/07/09
-Command Center is in the center of the ship where it is most protected
-Few windows due to firefights and atmospheric loss if they were damaged
-Rounder design as it isn't blocky looking compared to the original
-Interior very Spartan with nearly everything serving a specific purpose
Yes I'll admit that I wasn't too fond of the missing plating and rough exterior at first, but that was the charm that the designers of the series built in. It's like that beater car you drove in high school, it's not the best but you love it.
10/07/09
10/06/09
10/06/09
Besides, the Valkyrie's look advanced enough that I don't think much re-imagining would be necessary. Since 'updating' would probably make them look like an F-22 Raptor, that conjures images of Michael Bay's Starscream. DO NOT WANT.
10/07/09
10/07/09
I think the Veritech design is one of the best examples of 20th century novelty/ingenuity in design. I am dreading it being molested for the movie. F-15s (16?) are a little dated since the first design, and I want to see this thing look good.
10/07/09
@gods-n-clods: I Think the YF-19 design from Macross Plus was an excellent reworking of the original Valkyries. The YF-21? Meh.
10/07/09
If they knew what was good for them, they'd just go back to the original source, and make a live action version of "Do You Remember Love?", the Japanese movie that summed up the essence of the entire series.
But yeah, there've been probably dozens of newer Macross style fighters made since the originals. The YF-19 has been one of my favorites for years.
10/06/09
Which, of course, is not a bad thing. Might as well borrow from the awesomest.
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10/06/09
I'll take issue with that-- the movies *are* beautiful to look at, the concept art was quite faithfully rendered in the films.
Watch the prequels with the sound off; the visuals are outstanding. Even now.
It's the *rest* of the movies that suck.
10/06/09
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10/06/09
I mean... If someone comes to me with a written scene in which missiles are fired at a ship, ships dodge furiously, missiles catch up only to explode IN FRONT of the ship in a cloud of stupid spider bots, which proceed to dismantle the ship VERY SLOWLY... Well at that point I'd probably book a week for Lucas at an asylum for the totally disconnected from reality.
10/07/09
One thing to say about Star Wars though is that at least some of its concept art gets used much later on. Several unused prequel designs and some Ralph McQuarrie concepts have been utilised in, or inspired elements of the ongoing Clone Wars animated series. New character Cad Bane was himself inspired partly by an OT bounty hunter design. So you may see some more good stuff showing up in the future.
10/07/09
A missile catches up to a ship = explodes. Boom. Exciting
A George Lucas missile catches up to a ship = tiny stupid robots which artoo has to fight and then have to be scraped off by a wing. SCRAPED OFF?!
Lucas never fails to take an exciting thing and add three more things on to it, thus fucking ruining it forever. he can't just have somebody swing a lightsaber. That somebody has to flip three times and land on a tiny piece of metal floating in a lava lake. It's a fucking disaster.
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10/07/09
If LeGuin was wrong, you have to show how she was wrong. But you aren't doing that! You're just re-writing her argument, but with the word "escapist" in place of the word "myth"!!
You're basically just re-writing the definition and attributing everything that used to be attributed to mythic literature to escapist literature. Escapism can be dark? Escapism can teach us about society? You're talking about myth.
You can't simply efface a definition because you want it to be a point. If you call escapism the new mythic, well sure... but then something else becomes the new escapist. And you're left with no advancement at all. You're just written 10 000 words just to change a name.
10/06/09
Been entertained reading the entire discussion and eventhough I disagree with some of the posters, the level of civil discourse on this thread has been just amazing.
While it's almost impossible to always "hit a homerun everytime you come up to the plate" the article, the theme, and the response to it has raised the bar and shown -without a doubt - i09's potential within the SF community.
Wow.
10/06/09
10/06/09
Too soon? Or to never be mentioned again? ^_^
10/06/09
10/06/09
And this is one of the problems with escapism. When you're "soaring," you're not paying attention to who is picking your pocket. The capitalist masters win by having you make money for them working in their business all day long, and then spending your money on their escape tools to forget about how boring, alienating, and pointless it was at night. I don't blame anyone for wanting to escape this world, but there really is no escape. You're still in it paying rent, 24/7.
10/06/09
1) "It's a space designed by marketing committees to create a high-end aesthetic image that customers wish to identify themselves with by buying expensive products that make them feel better about themselves."
Okay, but what makes that not art? Are you saying that artistic choices were not made in the creation of that high-end aesthetic? Or is it just because it's selling something? Is "true art", then, something which sells ITSELF as the product (the music, painting, photograph, comic book, regular book) rather than selling something else?
2) "It's basically the entire message of the Mac/PC ad campaign: be cool by spending more money in order to associate yourself with cool-looking objects and hip people."
Isn't that also the message of "true art" as you've described it? Being cooler and hipper and more aware than the brainless, tacky people who don't associate with the right kind of art?
3) "That's not art to me, that's vanity."
All "true art" is vanity, isn't it? Why should any of us care what desperately important thought some self-described artiste is having?
4) "When you're "soaring," you're not paying attention to who is picking your pocket."
Doesn't this sort of assume that one is or should be feeling at war with entertainment media? And how, in turn, does this reflect on the art world? Is a pocket picked by an artiste any different or better?
5) "The capitalist masters win by having you make money for them working in their business all day long, and then spending your money on their escape tools to forget about how boring, alienating, and pointless it was at night."
Isn't this really just projecting your own shitty job situation? Do you honestly think it's true that everybody in our society is feeling bored, alienated and pointless? Do you really think that every person defending "escapism" in this thread feels that way about their lives? At what point does a statement like this go from being a judgement call to just being judgementalism?
6) "I don't blame anyone for wanting to escape this world, but there really is no escape. You're still in it paying rent, 24/7."
And that's kind of the rub anyways, isn't it? Even artistes need to pay rent. "True art" is a privileged position that essentially skims off the top of civilization. The problem you've outlined with corporations isn't really a problem of corporations: it's a problem of competition. The corporations just make art for the plebian rabble.
10/06/09
Harvey Pekar had a 40-hour a week menial day job as a Veteran's Hospital file clerk schlepping around a cart full of files while producing his best work, which he paid people to draw and paid to publish out of his own limited income. Not much privilege there.
"Why should any of us care what desperately important thought some self-described artiste is having?"
This is a sit-com level cliche not even worth addressing.
10/06/09
"This is a sit-com level cliche not even worth addressing."
Okay, but only if ""Wow cool" is not a philosophy, it's a dead soul drooling into cold oatmeal" is a sentence dappling like the sunshine through a baboon's toes in the jungle. Given how eager you've been to project your misery, alienation, boredom and pointlessness onto everybody else, should you really be talking about cliches?
10/07/09
10/07/09
Allow me to paraphrase a line that I find quite hepful to keep things in perspective and stop from turning depression into a philosophy. It comes from CS Lewis' Screwtape Letters, wherein Screwtape is advising his student that an ideal world for the work of His Infernal Majesty is one in which people believe in demons but not angels. That is, they take the existence of evil to mean that there is no such thing as good at all. They allow the fact of death to sap them of the enjoyment of life.
I am quite aware that everything we love dies, as well as ourselves. Of course, I also believe that we stop being dead at some point down the road, whenever God decides. Nevertheless, if you want a life of dead souls drooling into cold oatmeal, allowing the fact of death to sap you of the enjoyment of life is the way to go about it. That would be far more horrid than the vivid reflections on the Sublime and the Beautiful that enrich life and inspire those "oh wow" pointes supremes moments.