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San Francisco, 6:16 PM
Sat Nov 7
12 posts in the last 24 hours
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10/29/09
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(Also, upon some quick searches I'm finding interesting articles on how the issue of Native Americans and land ownership is an historically sticky one...) #airship
10/29/09
Now I'm about to be a bad commenter by not looking up what I'm about to say: Regardless of whether or not "Native Americans" (I keep using quotes because European settlers encountered several different tribes) had notions of land ownership, they were organized enough to push a pitiful band of settlers into the sea. #airship
10/30/09
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This isn't the MF II, it's the HMS/USS Liet-Kynes (serves two masters). #airship
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All information comes from 1491 by Charles C. Mann #airship
10/29/09
The Mayflower people were just about evenly divided between the religious Separatists and the traders, with a few hired guns (Miles Standish, et al). They first tried to land at P-Town, but couldn't navigate the shoals; their next landing was at Nausset, where they pillaged a few graves for souvenirs and stole the winter corn supply. Finally they (probably didn't) land on Plymouth Rock, where my 11th G-G-grandfather was born.
Generally the Puritans and Pilgrims traded with the natives, except for liquor and firearms.
They don't tell you the story about the Pilgrim who was hanged as a habitual criminal or the guy who "liked" sheep.
ROW THAT SLOOP BILLINGS, YOU BASTARD! YAAA! THE NEXT TIME THEY TURN THE MAYFLOWER 2, YOU BETTER INVITE ME!
(Sorry. It's the ancestral family grudge coming out again...) #airship
10/29/09
(I was the kid in the Thanksgiving pageant in 3rd grade complaining that it wasn't historically accurate.) #airship
10/29/09
(As long as I'm rattling on here...)
"Die out or be absorbed" Remember what happened to the trading colony in what would later be Maine, around 1615 or so. All guys. The natives let them starve and later bought them as slaves. Do believe the Pilgrims had to go rescue them.
The natives were no nice guys. They kept slaves and had a widespread slaving network, the other natives they captured they tortured to death, they cleared land and hunted by setting wildfires and in the Midwest they set up buffalo jumps and let a good percentage of the meat just lie there and rot. Ecologists not them.
The pilgrims had steel; that was like having the atomic bomb, especially since around 1600 the Seneca started pushing into MA/RI and taking over from the other tribes. #airship
10/30/09
10/31/09
all true. "literally changed the earth under their feet" Quite literally--they brought earthworms into North America. I've heard some talk that some of Ye Olde New England Stonne Walls might have been built by the natives, which implies year-round settlement, as do the ossuaries on Cape Cod. It's also possible that smallpox was carried into the "New World" by European fisherman much before the Pilgrim/Puritan landed (the story about Lord Jeff Amherst and the smallpox blankets isn't true).
More than likely if the Glorious Rebellion hadn't happened and a lot of people went to "Northern Virginia" (New England) because of the 30 Years War, the Puritans would have been driven out. Believe L. Sprague DeCamp wrote about that scienerio in one of the Wheels of If stories. #airship
10/31/09
Yeah, but you'd lose half the cast from starvation during the first winter.
And watch out or that one Pilgrim kid who got fined for fornication a few years later and bore such a grudge that he never joined the church until he was on his deathbed (no names need be mentioned) #airship
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Wait, I just thought of something: what if it's happened exactly like this already? I think I just blew my own mind.
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(Also, nice catch with the multi-pass, wasn't sure anyone would get it.) #airship
10/29/09
@AmishJohn: #airship
10/19/09
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You can also have time travel used as a predictive tool. So its not about changing the future, merely knowing what it is.
(eg, buying the winning lottery ticket using time travel requires no paradox, as long as you dont claim till after you return).
You can even use time-travel in a story merely as a direction to travel in. Seeing the universe from a 90 degree rotated angle gives you a very weird perspective on the universe. (hmz cant quite remember the short story that had that). #paradox
10/20/09
Watching Flashforward after seeing Primer is like being forcefed baby food after dining on the world's finest cuisine. #paradox
10/19/09
10/19/09
You simply have to write with possible endings in mind. Every question you raise, you must already know *a* answer too.
You cycle the plotlines, wrap up some, introduce more. Farscape pulled this off very well (imho). They had zero-day notice of cancellation, but as they didn't have so many ongoing plots, a miniseries pretty much wrapped it all up.
Thats the problem with BSG.
They had a whole season to wrap stuff up and failed too. Length wasnt their problem, just bad writting. They had enough notice.
Of course, sometimes the opersite can happen.
Babylon 5 wrapped everything up really nicely in its 4th seasons, only to get renewed and struggled :P #paradox
10/19/09
I would see SGU kind of like Star Trek Voyager. Lost in space, have to get home, have some adventures along the way. We knew Harry Kim was attached to his parents but we didn't have to go into every hockey game his father failed to attend or how heartbroken they were when they found out he was lost in space. Janeway had a husband but a simple picture of him on her mantle was enough to get the message across that she cared for him. Each season ends with a cliffhanger, but the crux of the show is that they have to get home.
BSG had a premise of "we have to get to earth", but then got distracted with the destinies and visions and so forth. The second main storyline was the religious angle. They could have really done something with that and I felt ripped off with what we got. I think the two storylines about the voyage and religion caused conflict as to which was more important and the show to lose direction, of course this falls on the heads of the writers as you say. #paradox
10/19/09
10/19/09
God I hate twists. #paradox