Jonathan Hartley's old account

@christopherbrown @killyourfm Best space battles ever though, no contest.

@VHasch@universeodon.com @schmod@xoxo.zone hard disagree. When cars break the traffic laws, other people die. When cyclists go through red lights, the stakes are orders of magnitude lower, and the welfare at risk is their own. Responding to a post which rightly lays the blame for road injuries and fatalities at the feet of drivers, who opted to ride multi-ton death machines, by lashing out at cyclists for harmlessly breaking some rules because you are mad at them, is classic avoid-the-point victim blaming whataboutism.

@flargh Why not BOTH?!?!?

@VHasch@universeodon.com @schmod@xoxo.zone Sure! It's a valid point. But how often does that happen, compared to how often a car runs someone over? Why are you derailing a conversation about the large and obvious problem by complaining about a much smaller problem? It's like showing up to a breast cancer charity event, and saying "I'd have more sympathy for breast cancer victims if they paid more attention to rabies!" Yeah, sure, rabies is real. But that is an astonishingly tone deaf & unproductive way to operate.

@christopherbrown @killyourfm ...but it has no pretensions about literary allusions, subtexts, mythic resonance. Or, to be more precise, the places where it does attempt this are its weakest aspect. Not for the usual reasons this sort of thing fails, such as being goofy or inscrutable. But because the sync between the series and the books was fragmented, and the resulting havoc meant that all the tv show's biggest, most cosmic mysteries just sputter out, unresolved and pointless...

@christopherbrown @killyourfm ...and are then replaced, unremarked, by whatever is presented in the next series. As an example, take the protomolecule from series 1. Where did it actually come from? What was it's purpose? Was it accidental that it ended up sitting dormant in our solar system for billions of years, or was that part of its creators plans? Why did it turn people into nuclear zombies? What was the intended purpose of the gate it created? Maybe these are resolved in the books.

@christopherbrown @killyourfm But the TV show drops the whole thing and moves briskly on to completely other mysteries, a pattern that is repeated again and again. So, as a result, although it reaches for greatness, in the end those parts of it only really serve as an epic but ultimately meaningless backdrop to the gritty politics in the foreground.