Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Starver]

Although I can't remember enough to put a source on it, I remember when Aliens³ came out (if that was the one) and the dog-infesting chestburster became a dog-like Xenomorph that this act was decried as being very un-canon.  So obviously A3 (if it is that one, been a long time since I've seen it) is evidence for this being so, but alternately might be the only evidence for being so (or the origin of all later assumptions along those lines) and might well be discounted by some 'true devotees' of the genre.

I tend to be rather traditionalist about such things (and/or easily led by my peers of the time, who tend to be somewhat traditionalist in this regard as well), so you can guess what I think.

[Sergius]

Of course you can include AvP2 as another (un?)canon example of this happening.

I honestly don't know who decides Aliens canon. I'm not even a fan of the series.

I'm not much of a fan of traditionalist "this is the way it's always been, they changed it it's ruined now" thinking either.

From the original 2 movies we never see a Xenomorph that didn't chestburst from a human either, as they exist only as eggs. I suppose any "(dis)continuity" ideas from Fanon come from novels or other stuff I have no idea exists.

[Scoops Novel]

We can agree that you'd have to be an idiot to have not destroyed the earth by now if you persist in trying too, right?

[Starver]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-sBROXalU4

That is all...   

(..except, Novel?  Would I even dare to try?  The Doctor protects the planet!

Yrs Sincerely,
Herr Osterhagen.)

[Scoops Novel]

 . I'm just saying, if you're "prepared" to have an angry doctor after you, you would try not to fuck it up as hilariously, right? Adoring time lords rather then fearing them is a recent development, after all.

I'm just irritated at the stupidity of the recent series, ye ken .

[Vattic]

Of course you can include AvP2 as another (un?)canon example of this happening.

I honestly don't know who decides Aliens canon. I'm not even a fan of the series.

AvP isn't considered canon. In AvP Charles Bishop Weyland founded the Weyland Corporation where as in Prometheus it was founded by Peter Weyland. They both die at quite different times too. Admittedly I don't really understand why Ridley Scott gets to decide what's canon or not.

[Sergius]

I just watched Fred Claus last night, and a couple of things jumped into my mind. Some of these apply to other Christmas/Santa/North Pole movies:

• Like, when someone says "you have until XX time to deliver all the presents", what exactly is the Timezone of the North Pole? (Ok, ok, normally this is like whatever United States considers its "main" timezone, or wherever the protagonist's normal friends happen to live. Normally New York, for some reason, seems to be the center of Christmas movies) (I'm also aware that during December the earth is tilted in some angle against the sun, so there's a sunset/dawn, but that has nothing to do with an absolute clock, as this hour would literally change completely around the year... actually, scratch that, as there is no dawn in the North Pole from about october to march)
• They depict this deadline as something that needs to be done in the next 4-5 of hours before dawn. Wouldn't it make more sense that they actually have 24 hours to deliver the presents to the entire world? And they would start with the zone that is about to dawn first. So basically they just need to outrun the Sun, they have something like one hour to deliver presents in each time zone. Instead, they go flying all over the place, something like US->China->France->Mexico->US Again->Eastern Europe->Hawaii->US Yet Again, and they have to do it "before dawn" whatever that means in the World Clock

[Starver]

Haven't seen that, but the truly international measure of time would probably be UTC.  (And/or GMT, which is virtually identical to that and all the other slight variants[1], for all intents and purposes, and of course you'd ignore the switch to BST in summer.)

[1] Each of which claiming to be more accurate to the Earth's spin, or to celestial movements, or keyed to a given atomic clock.

[Neonivek]

They depict this deadline as something that needs to be done in the next 4-5 of hours before dawn. Wouldn't it make more sense that they actually have 24 hours to deliver the presents to the entire world?

In theory this could be explained as having 4-5 hours before you miss houses... or it could be explained as 4-5 hour window within the 24 hours.

But mostly it is just a poorly concieved time crunch.

[Sergius]

Haven't seen that, but the truly international measure of time would probably be UTC.  (And/or GMT, which is virtually identical to that and all the other slight variants[1], for all intents and purposes, and of course you'd ignore the switch to BST in summer.)

[1] Each of which claiming to be more accurate to the Earth's spin, or to celestial movements, or keyed to a given atomic clock.

Why would the North Pole be UTC? and why is it so important that it's 5AM UTC? The point is to give boys their toys before they wake up at... arbitrary wake up time (5:12 am or something). You can still "make it" to 5AM UTC and fail to deliver at the proper times in different locations, I think.

EDIT: I was going to mention that the International Date Line isn't even at UTC, but I wasn't sure of the relevancy.

They depict this deadline as something that needs to be done in the next 4-5 of hours before dawn. Wouldn't it make more sense that they actually have 24 hours to deliver the presents to the entire world?

In theory this could be explained as having 4-5 hours before you miss houses... or it could be explained as 4-5 hour window within the 24 hours.

But mostly it is just a poorly concieved time crunch.

Well, my point is that even 1 hours before <arbitrary deadline> you could have irrevocably missed a few places where it's already dawn. So at 4 AM, you still have 1 hour before missing the deadline, but if you hadn't delivered to somewhere in an earlier timezone, you already failed.

I understand what you mean about the "window" tho, so in essence (let's say you can't start until the whole family is asleep - midnight, being generous), so if the magic sled can't deliver to an entire timezone in a single hour, it can start at the IDL "UTC+14:00" after 12 AM *local*, then go around the world and narrowly hit the 5 AM deadline *local* in the last timezone "UTC−12:00", so in essence that gives 24+5 hours of time to do everything)

Still, you can't miss the starting 5 hour window in the first place or you miss dawn... yet you still have 24 hours to go before "time's up".

[Starver]

Haven't seen that, but the truly international measure of time would probably be UTC.  (And/or GMT, which is virtually identical to that and all the other slight variants[1], for all intents and purposes, and of course you'd ignore the switch to BST in summer.)

[1] Each of which claiming to be more accurate to the Earth's spin, or to celestial movements, or keyed to a given atomic clock.

Why would the North Pole be UTC?

Why would it be anything else?  I'm just suggesting that "Zulu hour" is a more logical standard than any other, in the absence of any locality-based cues.  Bits of Greenland are UTC+-0 (although that's more because of locale, other bits are up to UTC-4 adrift).  Scott-Amundsen base at the south pole uses UCT+12/13 to match New Zealand (IIRC), so some link of that kind might be used, I suppose.  (I think there's an Arctic link to Bergen or Oslo's tz, which is probably +1.)  What's the ISS? It could be on Houston time (although it's International, so while Mir was probably on Moscow time, that sounds like a bad bias), but it's probably UTC-based, if at all, regardless of the rapid sunset/sunrise cycles they encounter.  (The reverse happens for the Mars Rover controllers.  They tend to sych their Earthly base, and even their own sleep cycles, to martian 'sols' (about 40 minutes longer than Terran day's), but there are varying schemes in use to cater for this dislocation.  And that doesn't apply at all to our own planetary poles, so forget I mentioned it.)

and why is it so important that it's 5AM UTC?

Like I said, I've not seen the film.  How about we nitpick that idea, though... oh, wait...

EDIT: I was going to mention that the International Date Line isn't even at UTC, but I wasn't sure of the relevancy.

Of course it isn't.  It shifts back and forth at different latitudes, to satisfy local geopolitics, but theoretically is at the midpoint of the UTC+-12 transition area.


Anyway, everyone knows how Santa does it (magic!), so anyone else given the job (or a similar one) is undoubtedly similarly endowed with time and/or space-bending abilities.  Especially whatever the thing that makes the ratio of chimney/ventilation duct/letterbox/keyhole diameter to Santa-girth a value greater than one...

[10ebbor10]

The ISS is synchronized to UTC time, as compromise between the Houston and Moscow control centers.

[Sergius]

Either way, when it is 5 AM (the deadline) in UTC+0, there's a big chunk of the world where it's still anywhere after 5 PM, plain daylight of the day before! You can't expect Super Sled to have already delivered presents to those locales!

And even if the North Pole is at UTC -12 (last place to "dawn"), you could still be well within the deadline and still have utterly failed to deliver to certain locales.

[10ebbor10]

There's but one explanation. This film took place during the events of The Day the Earth stood still.

Note: I haven't seen either of the films

[Neonivek]

Honestly I always kinda wanted to write a story that is basically like this: What if Santa was not only real but unquestionably real (as in anyone who goes to the North Pole can find him) but lived basically in our world (well sorta).

I can just imagine a news documentary that critcises Santa for bringing toys to starving third world countries when he could easily bring food... or people trying to find out how Santa works as well as how old he is exactly.

Yet I somehow suspect that exists.