Have you ever loved something, only to realize it’s a commercial flop or just obscure? What’s something that deserves more light than it got?
One of my favorite super hero movies to this day is the original kick ass. Beats the pants off any marvel movie by miles. Not exactly a flop but criminally underrated.
Bryan Fuller’s TV opus, primarily Dead Like Me and Pushing Daisies, although the first two seasons of Hannibal are really excellent writing and storytelling. All his work deals with death, but each has something slightly different to say about it.
It’s not that obscure, but Perfect Blue (1997) has not left my mind since I first watched it.
Games: Epistory and Nanotale. Both typing games from Fishing Cactus. Absolutely beautiful games that have interesting stories and you get to practice with your typing skills. I love both of these games so much.
Tv: Sliders. It was fairly popular when it was running and got kind of weird at the end, but I love that show. It was one that my family got together to watch every episode each week when they were on broadcast. I was also part of an early online petition to save the show and move it to the SciFi channel. I was also part of the early online petition to save MST3K, back when online petitions actually worked.
Movie: Ghostbusters Answer the Call. People will disagree with me but I unapologetically DGAF. That movie is hilarious and I love putting it on when I work out. It’s a far better Ghostbusters movie than the last two garbage ones that were put out. It has everything from the original: dark adult horror comedy about scientists who save the world. The last two were not true GB movies, they are family friend teen coming of age movies with a plot that depended so heavily on nostalgia that they felt like a crappy cash grab. ATC is my second favorite GB movie behind only the original. Holtzman is my hero!
It’s a far better Ghostbusters movie than the last two garbage ones that were put out
💯
It was the CGI Spengler at the end that sealed the deal of garbage movie 🤮
At least ATC honored Harold Ramis with a bust
Zero Effect (1998 film). Charming, smart, funny Holmes update with great performances.
H-E-R-O by Will Pfeifer (DC Comics)
“Love Me, I’m a Liberal” by Phil Ochs.
I enjoyed Zero Effect quite a bit. But yeah, you don’t see much praise for it.
Cloud Atlas is my usual mention.
Favourite movie and it’s usually a fairly even split between people like myself who love it and people who think it’s garbage.
Not much middle ground
Rewatched it with my wife recently
Sat on the edge of my seat as the stories came together… Wife was completely non-plussed
I went into it blind, and immediately had to go read the book.
This isn’t alone as a movie steering me towards a book. But nothing else has spurred a drop everything else response like that.
Couldn’t stop thinking about that film for weeks after watching it.
PK. A Bollywood movie that really resonated with me.
Not a single piece of media, but I want to make an apologia on behalf of amateur sci fi writing. No the prose isn’t going to wow you, but I love seeing other people’s unfiltered imagination at work.
I’m very much into worldbuilding, and I’ll devour fan wikis without even consuming the source material. My knowledge of Warhammer 40K and D&D is almost exclusively from various wikis. Seeing regular people build their own little paracosms, with or without accompanying art or fiction, I find very engrossing.
As for actual media, judging by how little representation the series gets in the US, I’d say Custom Robo. I thoroughly enjoyed the single entry on GameCube that Nintendo localized here.
I read book #1 (Revelation Space) and am one chapter into #2 but the RS world building is dramatic and has stuck with me. I haven’t read Dune and can’t compare (and doubt it’s comparable), but I I’d say it’s comparable to the ~2021 movie where there’s desolate landscapes that aren’t irrelevant, technologies that are demonatrated, not explained, and converging story arcs between multiple characters and times. I find it enjoyable because for the most part, it’s grounded in known physics. Near-light speeds and no wormholes. Interstellar voyages, but they’re still so slow they rely on refrigerated sleep.
The books have reviews that get more mixed as the progress but yet, people keep reading through. I’m mentioning it because there is a wiki that seems pretty detailed, though I have done much to keep it unspoiled. There’s the original 00s trilogy plus a 2021 4th main book, a separate trilogy, a support book, and over a dozen smaller works from as far back as 1990 with half being short stories and half being novellas, where the author was finding his footing and filling arcs.
Generally, the problem readers have is that the author introduces promising story arcs and dilemma solutions, only to abandon them and never mention them again. Then the endings feel rushed and anti climactic. But I’m someone who thoroughly enjoys playing Elite Dangerous, a space sim that’s “a puddle a mile wide but an inch deep” because I simply love the immersion and use my imagination. Elite is to sound design what Reynolds is to world building.
I’ve never seen any of the Dune movies (save for a few minutes of the David Lynch movie while at a friend’s house one time) but I read the first few books back in 2015 (11 years ago 😮) I enjoyed the first book very much but got less and less interested with each subsequent book.
Language is an aspect of worldbuilding I love. Sci fi rarely dwells on the language barriers between sapient species, but for me it’s the main event.
Star Wars actually gets it right with Chewbacca. An alien is very unlikely to be able to have a vocal tract capable of approximating human speech, so the best you can hope for is a bilingual conversation where both parties speak their own languages. And of course there’s nothing that says a language has to be based on sounds. Rikchick (sp?) is a sign language that uses tentacles.
The semantic space of an alien language is likely to be very different as well. Aliens with different senses will have a different Umwelt (subjective perception of their environment), and will have different words to describe their experiences. It’s common (though recently challenged) linguistic wisdom that humans are incapable of describing odors independently of analogies with the source of those odors (earthy, floral etc), or emotional reactions to odors (stinky, fragrant), or comparisons with taste (sweet, sour). Visual sensations (colors) have words that are completely divorced from any source that exhibits those colors. Green describes an instance of subjective experience independent of any green thing, but (most) well-studied languages have no such facility for smells. There are no “odor colors”.
Now if dogs could talk, they might have such odor colors, since dogs live in a very smelly world.
I got carried away there, but I wrote it, so now you have to read it.
Foundation on Apple TV is a visually beautiful show and follows the books generally well with a few caveats.
As a fan of the books, I was initially pretty upset with some of the changes, but I’m glad I stuck with it. The show is it’s own thing that goes to some fascinating places.
I haven’t read the books, so I can’t comment on that, but wow, Lee Pace kills it as Day.
And shout out to Jared Harris for being in this and The Expanse
This show keeps popping on my radar and I mean to snag it, and then, as with many things in my life, it disappears into the void.
Absolutely check it out.
Within a Deep Forest Freeware, came out in 2006, by Nifflas. You’re a ball.
Love the soundtrack, love the controls, love the design. It’s perfect.
It looks like a cutesy Zelda clone, but it’s so much more than that. It’s dark with extremely atmospheric music. It is a “knowledge-based” game, with metroidvania/Zelda aspects.
The puzzles are phenomenal, and I don’t think it can ever be replicated.
I just finished up Deaths Door and watching that video really reminded me of it. Looks fun, thanks for sharing.
I liked Death’s Door. TUNIC is far better, IMO.
Story time:
I had just beat Hollow Knight and was messing with Elden Ring, and the oppressive souls-like atmosphere was getting a little stale, so I went browsing the steam store looking for something more upbeat. Oh what’s this? A cute little Zelda clone? Sounds like just what the doctor ordered.
No. No it wasn’t.
Not only was it another souls-like, deciphering that writing system absolutely consumed me, to the point I had to uninstall the game for a while because I was losing sleep over it.
spoiler
I’m 99% sure Trunic is based on the Shavian alphabet. Both scripts are phonemic writing systems for English. Both use rotated letters to contrast voiced and unvoiced consonants, but the real clue for me is that both Trunic and Shavian use single letters for rhotic vowels.
Oh, but the music is great. And I really one other devs to go further with the “manual as gameplay” concept.
Little King’s Story presents as a cutesy Pikmin-like on Wii and Steam (I played it on Wii. Not sure about the port.) but it’s got deep, challenging gameplay and the story absolutely pushes boundaries of video game narrative. I only played it the once years-and-years ago, but it really worked its way into my psyche. It deserves a place in the conversation about video-games-as-art alongside standouts like Shadow of the Colossus and Journey.
Stella Glow!
I played it on the 3DS. The story is pretty good, the music is gorgeous, some of it is voice-acted, and I loved the JRPG and dating sim elements.
Apart from my spouse, I cannot find anyone else who has heard of, let alone played, the game so I can geek out with them over it. 😭
Gomi, an early $5 iOS game that involved eating successively larger objects until an objective was reached, utilizing the tilt feature. It had so much potential to be a game with a medium to large speedrun/highscore community.
Joe Pera Talks With You
It’s a treasure and it’s hard to get people to watch it. I’ve watched the series all the way through at least four times, by now. It’s sadly short, so not too hard to do.
His weird grandfather appeal totally worked for me. A man operating at a quieter/calmer frequency than the chaotic world around him, completely at peace with his lot in life.
I think I like what he represents, more than who he is
