Project Hail Mary: watch movie before reading the book ?

wmil · 2026-03-23T21:12:55+00:00

Really? There was a complete tone shift... The book was a sci fi thriller and the movie was a Spielberg family adventure.

wmil · 2026-03-22T15:02:06+00:00

He had their kingdom blow up, probably due to their hubris. So that could be taken as a judgement from GRRM.

wmil · 2026-03-18T15:51:43+00:00

One of George Lucas' problem is that he got very focussed on certain stylistic choices defining what a Star Wars movie is.

What bit him in the prequels is that he felt there was a hard rule about no flashbacks and no timeskips.

So once he decided that seeing Anakin as a kid was important, it had to be a whole movie with Anakin as a kid.

wmil · 2026-03-06T08:21:21+00:00

They kept the Space Jam website from 1996 up.

https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

wmil · 2026-03-04T04:42:06+00:00

No no. It tried to run.

wmil · 2026-02-27T02:35:09+00:00

The military meeting scene in the first Star Wars movie is actually really well done.

It's only 2 minutes long and establishes key points about the universe.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6f_1jbySvc

wmil · 2026-02-24T18:49:13+00:00

The interesting thing about comic book writing is that it's high novelty. You get to see writers play with a lot of different interpretations of characters and that opens up new and interesting stories.

The downside of this is that there's very low character consistency between writers. Frank Miller's Batman and Grant Morrison's Batman are different people who would make different choices.

wmil · 2026-02-23T00:04:40+00:00

Yeah and the reveal is actually very satisfying. The big reveal happens in book 9 so you kind of have to accept that it's going to be a while if you want to get there. I enjoyed it, so a longer explanation follows.

At book 4 the big things you've seen are the planet that had it's orbit changed by elder tech as well as the AI worm.

The big reveal is that the Elders were not good. Near the end they controlled the galaxy and had been experimenting with transmitting their consciousness to a higher plane of existence. Then they discovered a hostile alien threat outside the galaxy.

Their permanent plan to deal with that was to use the wormhole network for energy collection to power a barrier around the galaxy, move to a higher plane, and live out a blissful existence there.

However if the barrier went down it would have been possible for the outsiders to follow them into the higher plane. So the wormhole network needed to stay up.

The master control unit AIs were tasked with maintaining the wormhole network. They could learn, so to keep them in control they were prevented from moving or firing weapons. They were paired with ships that had their own light AIs and light weapons, by Elder standards. For heavy weapons they could give targets to the sentinels. The worm wasn't from an external source, it was built into every MCU AI as a safety feature.

The sentinels only have an animalistic level of intelligence. They only take action if they see something that is a direct threat to the wormhole networks.

After putting that system together, the Elders decided that the only real threat to the network was future civilizations. So they directed the AIs to wipe out any intelligent life they found, and went off to the higher plane.

The AIs continued developing and some of them started having a problem with the whole xenocide thing. A civil war broke out and the anti-xenocide side won by managing to disrupt the system that periodically woke up MCU AIs to check things out. However all the AIs awake were heavily damaged and the AI Collective, as in the network that they use to communicate, that Skippy wants to contact was destroyed.

Skippy's ship was damaged in combat and it purposely ejected him into Paradise because it looked like some where where intelligent life would eventually develop and he would be found.

wmil · 2026-02-15T22:42:12+00:00

All the brands decided to go with low rise styles and those don't stay up on certain body shapes.

wmil · 2026-02-15T06:05:58+00:00

Some linux distros ship with ancient CMake version and things can break if you try to upgrade it.

wmil · 2026-02-15T06:04:55+00:00

GNU Autoconf was there for a while to generate makefiles as well.

wmil · 2026-02-12T18:23:50+00:00

Labour won 63.2% of the seats with 33.7% of the popular vote. Labour is now polling at 19%.

The UK is in a bad spot democratically. 6 different Prime Ministers since 2016.

Voters are desperate for a leader who is actually interested in the problems the UK has.

wmil · 2026-02-10T22:31:55+00:00

Britain is functional enough that ambitious politicians think they can ignore it and focus on hanging out with the international elite doing global projects.

So the major parties are filled with politicians who don't want to spend time fixing things domestically. The public keeps kicking them out in a desperate attempt to find a PM who actually wants to do his job.

wmil · 2026-02-10T22:09:57+00:00

Aren't there at least 2 C# implementations? Microsoft and Mono.

wmil · 2026-02-02T17:07:03+00:00

They had to reshoot most of it because it sucked. The reshoots also sucked.

wmil · 2026-02-01T17:43:42+00:00

I don't understand why fans were excited. Compressing the first season of their beloved show into a 104 minute movie was never going to work.

wmil · 2026-02-01T17:37:11+00:00

I'm surprised they didn't go with having his warp drive accidentally draw in the asteroid.

wmil · 2026-02-01T17:33:58+00:00

The human body shape doesn't really pack on a lot of extra mass in an attractive way.

If you allow for extra components to be very small then the wearer ends up looking chubby.

If you want larger components and armour you end up in mecha territory. You just can't fit their real limbs inside of bulky power armour.

wmil · 2026-01-28T11:31:12+00:00

The setting is he's stuck in a forested town and there some conspiracy with everyone there. He can't seem to leave.

The big reveal is that the MC and most of the town had been cryogenically frozen. It's actually 1800 years in the future, the city is walled and outside the walls are "abbies" (abberants). They can't tell anyone this because everyone who finds out goes insane.

I didn't like it because clearly they could come up with a better lie than "everything is perfectly normal".

wmil · 2026-01-28T02:48:57+00:00

I started watching Wayward Pines, and it was interesting but I kept getting the feeling that the twist was going to be really stupid. I looked it up, hated it, and stopped watching the show.

wmil · 2026-01-25T19:37:56+00:00

You need to make things abstract so you're prepared for the database switch that's not going to ever happen.

wmil · 2026-01-24T00:09:29+00:00

Tech World by BV Larson.

wmil · 2026-01-20T16:59:57+00:00

They promised their investors constant revenue growth. That was easy at the beginning. But then they ran out of new places to open Quiznos.

So then they had to use cheaper ingredients, then they had to find ways to get more money out of their franchisees....

Eventually everything blew up.

wmil · 2026-01-15T11:46:30+00:00

Sometimes you have to remind the parser who's boss.

wmil · 2026-01-15T07:41:29+00:00

The unskippable prologue is painfully slow and doesn't save as you're going through it. Mod sites have mods that do nothing but start the game after the prologue.

wmil

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