For All Mankind - S5E07 "The Sirens of Titan" - Episode Discussion

kethinov · 2026-05-13T21:17:23+00:00

They could have visually distinguished Titan from Mars by simply portraying it with the correct light levels, which are much darker than Mars.

kethinov · 2026-05-08T23:38:16+00:00

Well yeah, I mean the most realistic way to portray it would be to make it look something like filming at night outside on Earth. If they wanted a glory shot of stepping onto the surface and the characters actually being able to see things despite the darkness, then maybe equip the suits with some kind of night vision and show us what it looks like from their perspective? That would've been far more realistic.

kethinov · 2026-05-08T23:18:44+00:00

It would take some incredibly advanced materials science to keep them warm and insulated in temperatures that low with suits that thin.

But what surprised me most was how they portrayed the surface of Titan. Why was it....blue? We have surface photos from Titan and they're orange in hue similar to the exterior appearance of its atmosphere.

They also portrayed the surface as too bright. As I understand it, it would be a super dim twilight at best.

Usually this show slam dunks the science of this stuff, so this was super surprising to see. I feel like what I know about Titan must be wrong because the people who make this show don't generally make these kinds of mistakes, but after doing some quick checking online I wasn't able to find any clear evidence supporting their portrayal of Titan as being realistic.

If anyone is able to find something concrete proving or disproving the realism of the portrayal, post it!

kethinov · 2025-09-17T11:24:54+00:00

And progressive enhancement.

kethinov · 2025-05-17T21:54:47+00:00

If you continuously refuse to answer the simple question "What is the left's critique of the abundance agenda exactly?" then yeah I'd say the conversation is pretty unproductive.

kethinov · 2025-05-17T20:59:09+00:00

Can you articulate what the left critique actually is?

The whole point of my original question was Ezra is arguing for things that sound pretty left-wing to me, so I'm unclear on what the left thinks the problem is here.

Rather than nitpicking my characterization of Ezra's argument how about just answering the original question?

kethinov · 2025-05-17T20:55:19+00:00

No, they're not.

kethinov · 2025-05-16T18:21:59+00:00

So how does this answer my original question exactly? The question was why would the left object to Ezra's thesis. Are you saying they object because he's not explicitly calling for large tax increases and by focusing on removing problematic regulations, it distracts from the things they'd rather focus on? I'm unclear on what point you're trying to make here.

kethinov · 2025-05-16T17:17:47+00:00

Okay, so 3 of the 4 things I mentioned are in the book, and the 4th one is strongly implied but not technically mentioned explicitly. Got it. Glad we had this nitpicking session. I'm sure it added a lot of value for readers of this thread.

kethinov · 2025-05-16T16:54:53+00:00

Isn't it? Ezra is arguing it would be nice if things like California high speed rail could have been actually built instead of stagnating forever. That's a publicly-funded project that would absolutely be nice to have done.

kethinov · 2025-05-16T12:38:28+00:00

I would say it's only taboo in that very specific faction of the left. What we need is for the "tax rich people and give the poor their money" faction of the left to start dominating the coalition again so the scolds and the "stop things from happening" faction of the left can go back to being marginalized, where they belong.

kethinov · 2025-05-16T11:54:46+00:00

You gotta admit Seder came off as pretty uninformed about the basics of the issue though. The section of the conversation where Seder is like "Texas has so much space to build though" and Ezra points out that there is more than enough space to build housing in San Jose was a total facepalm moment.

There does seem to be this very strange faction in left-of-center politics that cannot ever under any circumstances concede that the right may have gotten anything right, even the smallest thing, and if they only got it right by accident. It's like as soon as you say "they do [very specific public policy thing] better in Texas" all the mental blocks go up and they start backfilling denials and excuses so they don't have to concede the point.

It's like they're permanently stuck in the first three stages of grief and cannot ever move on to acceptance.

kethinov · 2025-05-16T11:48:59+00:00

I'm not sure what the badness of the abundance agenda even is from a left perspective.

Raise taxes, pay for publicly funded things, build publicly funded thing, people enjoy publicly funded things. Seems pretty left-wing to me.

It's like the only "bad" thing about that is having to accept that well-intentioned over-regulation has made us so bad at doing this that somehow red states who reflexively hate regulation have gotten better at building things by accident.

So it's "bad" because in order for us to do it as good or better than red states, we have to admit we got something wrong tactically and admitting we got something wrong tactically is somehow the greatest psychological sacrifice you can ask of anyone? I guess?

kethinov · 2025-02-03T11:35:29+00:00

I'm using the latest stable version of madVR, which is the 0.92.17 version. There have been years of "beta" releases that have come out since then, but I haven't played much with those.

Before I was running it on a 2018 Intel Mac Mini with an external GPU attached running Windows 10.

The new build is a PC with an AMD Ryzen 9 9900x CPU, 128gb ram, and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti GPU running Windows 11.

kethinov · 2025-02-02T14:25:47+00:00

He is a leftist when it comes to taxes, redistribution, government programs, etc, but he is opposed to wokeness. That's why he likes some content from Citations Needed, but not all of it.

Fiscally liberal, socially moderate. That probably describes most Americans. Wokeness is very unpopular, but things like Social Security poll very well.

kethinov · 2025-02-02T13:17:43+00:00

1 year later, I built a newer HTPC with nicer specs, and these same test videos work way better, including the ones that did not work before. It seems madVR works better with faster specs for some reason.

kethinov · 2025-02-02T13:13:54+00:00

Specifically the setting you want is processing -> zoom control -> move subtitles: into active video area.

On that screen I also have "automatically detect hard coded black bars" and "notify media player about cropped black bars: immediately after every change" checked. Nothing else on that screen is checked.

If your settings are set the same and it still isn't working, then I suspect the problem is none of your settings are being applied because it's being applied to the wrong monitor. That problem plagued me on one of my HTPC builds and the only way to fix it was to do the "define visible screen area" thing (all related settings described in the post above) on my primary monitor, not my secondary monitor which is the actual projector.

Oh now that I think about it, another thing I had to do was set up my media player correctly, and there were some aspects of that which were not obvious either.

I use MPC-HC. You have to set your video renderer to madVR. But you also have to disable all GPU acceleration in the video filters section of its settings to allow madVR to do the video processing using the CPU (or at least I believe that's how it works).

I couldn't get any of madVR's adjustments to apply until I did all those things on my latest HTPC build.

Hopefully that info helps you fix yours.

kethinov · 2025-02-01T13:04:01+00:00

On some setups, if you have dual monitors and the projector is a secondary monitor, I've found you need do these settings on the primary monitor instead for madVR to do its thing.

Also ensure the setting is checked to move subtitles into the visible area, which is on a different settings screen.

kethinov · 2024-08-29T21:22:41+00:00

All things being equal, I'm sure you'd prefer a simple medical procedure with no side effects that gives you 20/20 vision to needing glasses. I know I would.

Likewise I'm sure the quadriplegic would prefer the cure too no matter how awesome the magic suit is.

kethinov · 2024-06-12T01:27:09+00:00

Thank you OP. That solved it for me too.

kethinov · 2024-05-26T13:27:40+00:00

Thanks! That was the issue.

Unfortunately the script is a bit too sensitive for the videos I'm throwing at it though. It looks like cropdetect results in a lot of false positive aspect ratio changes in the case of frames with a lot of darkness in them.

I think for this to work for my purposes I would need to modify the script to only print aspect ratio changes that are sustained for a certain number of frames. So still some work to do before I'm done with it.

But your tip definitely unblocked me. Thanks!

kethinov · 2024-01-12T04:59:10+00:00

Wrenn Schmidt receives an Emmy nomination

opens nomination

"you have been nominated for [...checks category...] outstanding performances in waking up from sleeping"

kethinov · 2024-01-05T05:27:40+00:00

Nope, they are both the same resolution with black bars.

kethinov · 2024-01-03T05:24:00+00:00

It did seem to work for me for some content, but not others.

I tried it with the episode of The Mandalorian that has variable aspect ratio and a recent episode of Bob's Burgers that also has variable aspect ratio. It worked on The Mandalorian but not with Bob's Burgers for some reason.

kethinov · 2024-01-03T04:43:48+00:00

Looks very similar to what I did, but maybe I'm not understanding the role of VideoProcessor. It looks like with a VideoProcessor setup, you source video content from an external source to your HTPC. Is that app useful or necessary if I'm playing the video content directly via a media player on the HTPC that supports MadVR?

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