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Author Topic: what tv shows are you currently watching?  (Read 126118 times)

Folly

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1005 on: June 28, 2024, 10:36:03 pm »

Dark Matter is based on a novel of the same name.

The premise also shares a lot of similarities to Rick and Morty, though the overall presentation is completely different.
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Frumple

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1006 on: June 28, 2024, 10:54:19 pm »

More than just that... it's not a common premise, exactly, but I've seen it more than just once or twice, in both broadly sci-fi and broadly fantasy settings (and in multiple forms of media, including gaming). If it sounds familiar you've probably just ran into something riffing on more or less the same theme. It's not precisely easy to trip over, but it's also not surprising to have done so at some point, somewhere.
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Starver

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1007 on: June 29, 2024, 12:49:29 pm »

Remember, that if your scenario has a traversable multiverse at all, it's unlikely that just the one constituent universe has created a multiverse traversal capability.

If you have any version of multiverse with countably-infinite variations upon the theme, it would probably have a ('lesser', but still) countably-infinite number of traversers arriving at a countably-infinite number of other worlds (some 'virgin' and new to the possibility, some already having had their own departure-tech and possibly even would be more skilled (and/or reckless) with the ability, and/or dealing with those that intrude with their own).

One way or another, Evil Twin/Good Twin will probably happen (and probably... because why not... Much Eviller Twin/Insufferably Good Twin/etc, or maybe just a lot of Blue And Orange Morality where you can't even tell who is protagonist or antagonist on the grand scale).

Unless you have something (e.g. Baxter/Pratchett "The Long Earth" setup) that makes 'prime Universe' somehow more unique[1], which does rather depend upon one or other '-centric' viewpoint (even in TLE, though, we discover that 'step East/West' isn't the only way to go, nor is Earth necessarily the focal factor for any given 'line' of universes).


(I suppose there "has to be a first", just like we may just happen to be the first (and/or last) inhabitants of our own universe (or at least easily testable parts thereof[2]), but it's highly unlikely that we're actually that special, if it turns out to actually be easily doable. And if it's not actually so easily doable, then that might be the reason why we don't have good evidence of anyone doing it before. - But still more likely that they have, just not left any/enough-of-a mark on our own history, than we're going to be the ones who kick it all off.)


Choose your own scenario. For every Sliders treatment, a Star Trek or Red Dwarf or Primeval-type treatment. And countless literary variations that... I very nearly went and tried to explain[3].


[1] In 'The Long Earth', it seems less a factor of the universe, more a factor of what happens when you force a degenerated 'Longness-unable' arm of the general homid races to sit in one place, crowd together and have to become 'civilised', as opposed to just passively exploiting the apparently easy ability to step 'sideways' and maintain a more pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer lifestyle as befits all such nomads-across-worlds. Thus, in this 'Earth prime', the special thing seems to have been not being dimension-capable.

[2] What with Relativity, it's also possible that every suitably intelligent and enquiring civilisation that develops has developed 'before' absolutely every other possibly detectable civilisation has arisen. That is, of course, a problem/side-effect of regular space-time. And who is to say what meta-relativistic effects might occur when it comes to trying to work with the meta-chronology in a possibly hotch-potch multiversal configuration. 'Narnia time' could be at play, or 'rumpled paper touches rumpled paper' (you can jump across, where it touches another universe, but then you have to wait until the corrugations in the 'time dimension' coincide again, for that or any other spacial meeting-spot), or 'skewed pack of playing cards' (each card 'contains' a roughly equal history, but jumping from one to another sends you futher up/down its timeline), or there's temporal circularity wherever all dimensions (including the non-space one(s)) wrap around.

[3] There's the short story (a "Tales From The Spaceport Bar"-type one, can't remember who wrote it, but probably one of the '50s/'60s/'70s types) with the guy with the Universe-Hopping-Backpack. Used it to jump universes a few times, may now be looking for 'home' again. Gets chatting to a 'local' guy (in the latest univere he's passing through), probably in the aformentioned bar, who turns out to be a bit knowledgable about the theories involved. Local guy points out that the energy needed to step from one universe to another would be... well, about as much as contained in any given universe... Are you sure you've arrived from another universe? "Pish tush, the backpack works, just watch me disappear onward to the next universe (as I try to find home again?)..." Backpack-Guy 'jumps', backpack does indeed need as much energy as is in a universe, i.e. the universe he's departing, meaning that there's nobody now there able to marvel at how Backpack-Guy just vanished, because they had vanished (and the bar, and the whole universe). And, of course, that has more than a few implications for BG's quest to 'find the way back home, from where he started jumping'. ((Though not all such treatments that I could convey are actually built upon such deliberately exact principles. Most are, at best, written in exactly as much as they need to be as a secondary plot-excuse to support the "everyday modern man from our type of world finds himself somehow in a parallel and Vikingesque alternate present, due to many-worlds theory and some historic chance change in how history went" conceipt which is the true aim of the tale.))
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McTraveller

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1008 on: June 29, 2024, 01:02:22 pm »

I've never understood how any concept of "infinite universes" doesn't fall afoul of "wouldn't that require infinite energy" situation.

It's sort of outside my comprehension ability to know if that is any kind of sensible at all.
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Frumple

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1009 on: June 29, 2024, 01:51:11 pm »

Eh, if you got infinite universes, presumably some subset of them have infinite energy they can and do spare. The premise works itself out.
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Starver

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1010 on: June 29, 2024, 04:02:22 pm »

Well, if "a universe" can arise from nothing (which is one of the possibilities for a one-and-only universe suddenly Big Banging out of whatever version of the Quantum Foam must exist in such an idea... maybe) then there's no feasible reason why you can't duplicate (or have spontaneous creation of) multiple other universes, as well, even unto an infinite (practically, effectively and/or actually) number of them.

But the main arguments against it in actual 'real life' metaphysics may or may not be relevent in any fictional treatment. A good Hard-SF setting will perhaps at least have The Answer sitting in its production 'bible', if not explicitly invoked. Most will just do "we need <this> to happen, for the stories, so...". Or even "story"... e.g. the number of ways Doctor Who 'explains' the time-continuum ( or discontinuum!)...

I'm sure we could discuss fictional multiverses' various treatments until the cows come home. (I'm also sure that we could do the same with real multiverse-theory, given how up in the air those ideas all are.)
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Il Palazzo

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1011 on: June 29, 2024, 04:13:15 pm »

Conservation of energy is not a universal law. It's a property of a particular type of systems - those that exhibit time-translation symmetry. That symmetry is broken on cosmological scales, so there can be no unambiguously defined energy conservation. So the question of where does the energy come from doesn't need an answer, because it's ill-posed, even before you get to multiverses.
For example, any finite patch of a universe with dark energy in it, expanding forever, will have its energy content increase without bound.
So you can have something like eternal inflation spawning infinite universes, each containing potentially infinite energy. And that's completely kosher.
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McTraveller

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1012 on: July 06, 2024, 07:58:51 pm »


Second season now of Picard.  I'm trying to remember if the pervious iterations of the show had this much deus ex machina... way too much "coincidence".  Of course there is the Spoiler antagonist, so I guess it's to be expected?  Definitely more reliance on ridiculous plans than I recall though.  Except for maybe some of the original crew movies... those definitely had some ridiculous plans.

I do feel that everything's still missing Roddenberry's vision though.  It's sort of there on the periphery, but not front and center like it used to be.
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Il Palazzo

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1013 on: July 06, 2024, 09:00:18 pm »

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Myself, I'm half-heartedly trying to consume Dexter. I'm getting a feeling that it would have been the best thing ever had I watched it back when it first came out. But there's been so much quality tv since, that it now seems tepid, quaint, and derivative.
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McTraveller

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1014 on: July 07, 2024, 06:34:48 am »


I never finished Dexter... first couple seasons were engaging but after a while the wife and I just sort of lost interest.  Can't say exactly why, to be honest...
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Starver

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1015 on: July 07, 2024, 10:57:30 am »

Ah, Dexter... I sporadically used to watch that, due to it being badly and oddly scheduled when it first appeared on terrestrial TV (when anything else was the exception, not the rule) over here. I probably therefore dropped off watching it before it got to beyond the first couple of series.

I remember I liked the premise, at the time. But I suppose, different tastes, and you just might not consider it a killer serial!
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hector13

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1016 on: July 07, 2024, 12:13:33 pm »

I think I watched four or five seasons of it, and it rather lost its way long before then.
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McTraveller

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1017 on: July 18, 2024, 11:12:00 am »

Picard

I miss actual models of ships.  The CGI is strong in this one.  You just can't beat the realism of the "small" NCC-1701D model used in the show.  Even the "large" model was better than CGI.
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King Zultan

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1018 on: July 19, 2024, 02:38:55 am »

Practical effects always look better than CGI, especially in large scale scenes.
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Inarius

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Re: what tv shows are you currently watching?
« Reply #1019 on: July 19, 2024, 02:43:01 am »

I suppose it's not very original but i'm currently watching the Bear and Shogun :)
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