Order of Kilopi
We have been watching an Australian show called Offspring via Netflix. We are very near the end of season 1 and these fictional characters with their fictional scenarios have got me so upset with the treatment of the main character (Dr. Nina Proudman). I mean as upset as if this was really happening to a person I know. A deep, visceral response. Wild.
CJSF
"The sun is a quagmire
It's not made of fire
Forget what you've been told in the past
Electrons are free
(Plasma!) Fourth state of matter
Not gas, not liquid, not solid"
-They Might Be Giants, "Why Does The Sun Really Shine?"
lonelybirder.org
Bad Post-Doc
I'm about to get to the scene in Twin Peaks I most adamantly don't want the kids watching, and neither kid seems to be awake yet.
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Order of Kilopi
Twin Peaks and Firefly are two "geek badge" shows I just have not been able to "get" through over the years, despite giving them a whirl now and then. Well, I have actually watched all the Firefly episodes, and I did enjoy Serenity (the movie), but Twin Peaks.. I just can't get past the first few episodes. You've maybe heard of people saying certain works (of art or whatever) "speak" to them. Well I feel like Twin Peaks is whatever the diametric opposite of that is. And I don't know why.
CJSF
"The sun is a quagmire
It's not made of fire
Forget what you've been told in the past
Electrons are free
(Plasma!) Fourth state of matter
Not gas, not liquid, not solid"
-They Might Be Giants, "Why Does The Sun Really Shine?"
lonelybirder.org
Order of Kilopi
What's a geek badge in this context? All I can find using that as a search term are actual badges with the word "geek" written on them.Originally Posted by CJSF
Or does my T-shirt featuring the key-ring from Room 315 at the Great Northern Hotel actually count as a geek badge? (If so, I will burn it immediately.)
Grant Hutchison
Order of Kilopi
It was a sort of tongue in cheek reference to gatekeeping (not a positive thing) where you are expected to "get" or enjoy certain hallmark/landmark series or films to be considered a "real" fan of a genre.
CJSF
"The sun is a quagmire
It's not made of fire
Forget what you've been told in the past
Electrons are free
(Plasma!) Fourth state of matter
Not gas, not liquid, not solid"
-They Might Be Giants, "Why Does The Sun Really Shine?"
lonelybirder.org
Order of Kilopi
Ah, OK. Thanks.
I guess I'll keep my T-shirt then. I didn't buy it to pass a gatekeeping test; I bought it to confuse my friends.
Grant Hutchison
Bad Post-Doc
Speaking as someone who does not care for Lord of the Rings to the extent that I joked with a friend that they would take away my geek credentials, I can understand. I've liked Twin Peaks since its initial airing, but I can absolutely understand not liking it. It's very much either something you like or you don't.
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Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Order of Kilopi
As I recall, you don't care for Doctor Who, either. Geeks come in all varieties.
I watched about the first half-hour of Twin Peaks when it first came out, changed the channel, and haven't been back.
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.
Order of Kilopi
I don't get why so many people seem to care what other people think in this regard, or want to create in-groups and out-groups based on such preferences. A colleague of mine watched all six seasons of Lost, with reportedly no enjoyment whatsoever, just because it was a popular thing. He couldn't believe that I'd turned off after about 40 minutes and never gone back to it, even when "everyone was watching it". How desperate for topics of conversation do you have to be to watch a hundred hours of television you aren't interested in?
As my grandmother used to say, "It wouldn't do if we were all alike. But if we were, we wouldn't need so many television channels." (She lived long enough to be incredulous at the prospect of a third TV channel in the UK.)
Grant Hutchison
Bad Post-Doc
I do not. I just recently finished a sampler like the one I made for you but Doctor Who-themed, for a friend, and that took so much more time than yours, because I kept reaching the point where I couldn't even look at another Doctor Who quote, much less laboriously hand-sew one!
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Order of Kilopi
I've been watching Des, an ITV drama about the Scottish serial killer Dennis Nilsen. ITV has a reasonable history of producing this sort of docudrama while respecting the victims and not glamorizing the murderer, and instead examining the impact on people who become involved in the situation--a social worker in the case of Fred West and Appropriate Adult, or the investigating police officers in This Is Personal (in which the murderer, Peter Sutcliffe, spends almost all the time off-screen). This one focussed mainly on the police and on the man who wrote a biography of Nilsen, Brian Masters. We got three interlinked and excellent performances from David Tennant (Nilsen), Daniel Mays (Detective Chief Inspector Peter Jay) and Jason Watkins (Masters).
I'm feeling a bit sorry for Tennant, though. Reviewers seem to have become obsessed with his accent. I've seen a reviewer claiming that Tennant "can't do Scottish accents", and another (who had obviously looked up Tennant's place of birth) claiming he was using his "native Scottish accent". He was actually working pretty hard to reproduce Nilsen's characteristic northeastern Scottish accent, often called Doric: you can hear a sample on YouTube, and it's a long way from Tennant's own rather posh West Lothian accent.
I'm not sure Tennant got it entirely right--he has the Doric lilt, but some of his vowel sounds seem a little low, and the real Nilsen (interviews are accessible on line) had considerably shifted his accent after living in London for a couple of decades. But it was undoubtedly a very good effort.
Grant Hutchison
Order of Kilopi
You colleague sounds, perhaps, pathological. I don't entirely disagree with you regarding who "cares", but I think in general it's not wholly different from part of the reason we're all posting to this forum. It's shared interests and social organization. But more to the point is that I was subtly (and perhaps not entirely successfully) pointing out that gatekeeping in this vein is not good. In fact, it can be considered a form of bullying.
CJSF
"The sun is a quagmire
It's not made of fire
Forget what you've been told in the past
Electrons are free
(Plasma!) Fourth state of matter
Not gas, not liquid, not solid"
-They Might Be Giants, "Why Does The Sun Really Shine?"
lonelybirder.org
Order of Kilopi
Well, "pathological" seems a little unfair, especially since you've only just encountered him in an internet anecdote. He just had a strong desire to fit in with a perceived norm. He sensed an in-group/out-group divide forming around Lost, and made a decision about which side of the divide he wanted to be on, even if that cost him in terms of time and boredom. People do that all the time--his is just a very marked example of that sort of behaviour. He was prepared to pretend an interest in order to align himself with a particular aspect of social organization. There's a lot of that about.
Yes, I understood that. I was agreeing with that point. I'd go farther, and suggest that what happened to my colleague is a kind of unconscious bullying. People are endlessly sorting themselves into in-groups and out-groups, and dispensing (or at least, attempting to dispense) subtle social punishment to the out-group du jour. To paraphrase Kingsley Amis, I understand why they do that, I just don't understand why they do it so much.
Having spent my life inhabiting out-groups of various kinds, I've come to realize that there are ways of dealing with this sort of stuff that don't involve falling into line with today's trivial social norm, but it doesn't mean I find it any less bemusing.
Grant Hutchison
Last edited by grant hutchison; 2020-Sep-18 at 04:31 PM.
Order of Kilopi
Someone on the other forum used "I give you the breath from my lungs", just out of the blue, the other day. I could instantly identify the episode. First new series, episode two, BTW.
How about Tennant's normal accent, or at least the one he uses in interviews? I've always thought he exagerates it a bit. Oh, and speaking of his accent, when US TV remade Broadchurch they cast him as the detective again, with an American accent. Perhaps the worst American accent I have ever heard!
Cum catapultae proscriptae erunt tum soli proscript catapultas habebunt.
Order of Kilopi
Like a lot of people, especially actors, he shifts registers quite readily. He was born about halfway between Edinburgh and Glasgow, and brought up on the fringes of Glasgow, and a lot of his intonation is what's sometimes called "weegie-light"--that is, a sort of watered-down Glaswegian accent. (I kept picking up little hints of that underlying the Doric accent he assumed in Des.) In interviews, I hear him shift accents between a slightly Anglified general Scots and middle-class Glasgow. These are certainly far from being exaggerated Scottish accents--I hear both in normal conversation very frequently.
Perhaps you're contrasting his interview voice with the accent he adopted for Doctor Who, which was Estuary English with just a faint thread of Scots running through it.
Grant Hutchison
Bad Post-Doc
Watching Challenger: The Final Flight on Netflix. I didn't watch the Challenger explosion in school, because my school couldn't afford the TVs for the whole school for us to watch things like that, but I do very clearly remember being stopped in the halls by a teacher's aide I'd had the year before who knew I was interested in spaceflight and told what had happened. So I remember some of this--the initial shuttle launch, for starters--but there's a lot I was too young to know.
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Order of Kilopi
I saw that Netflix was planning to show this documentary and while I appreciate any well-done work on the space program I am a little baffled as to the timing - maybe because the 35th anniversary is coming up? (I also wonder if we need another documentary about Challenger? )
All that said I’ll almost certainly watch it, even with the sadness I feel each time I see the explosion video. Unfortunately I saw the actual explosion live and in person because I was working on a project in Cocoa Beach that week and was outside the building to see the launch.
Order of Kilopi
I happened to be home that day and hadn’t bothered to get up to watch, as it was supposed to be a routine launch except for the unusual crew mix, and I had seen plenty of Shuttle launches by then. A friend called and told me to turn on the TV and I was almost immediately dumbfounded when I did so. They repeated the tape of the launch many times, including the scene of McAulliffe’s parents as their faces go from happy and proud to . . . something else. My eyes still get a little misty when I focus on that.
My friends and I had a lot of discussions about it, what it might mean for the future, etc. over days and weeks after that. It ultimately was a major blow to my view of NASA.
I might watch that show, but I remember a lot of it, and they weren’t great memories, both the event and aftermath.
"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is hard to verify their authenticity." — Abraham Lincoln
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Established Member
Sorry for going off topic for a bit but as you are talking about 'Scots Accents' -- . I have been listening to a radio serial of late set in WW2 and one of the characters is said to be putting on a false "posh" accent. She is supposedly adopting, badly apparently, something called a "Kelvinside" accent. Google says that such a thing actually does, or did, exist. I wonder if it is still used and is it noticeably different from the normal 'Glasgow' accent?
Order of Kilopi
I was in college at the time, and on campus, but I wouldn't have been able to watch it live even if I had wanted to because it was only carried live by CNN, which required cable, which I didn't have in the dorm. There was no NASA TV at the time either.
And like you said, I had watched the first couple of launches, but by 1986 it had become pretty routine.
As above, so below
Order of Kilopi
I was so excited by the prospect of a teacher in space that I faked being sick so my parents would let me stay home from school that day. I was alone, watching the (I think) PBS stations broadcast of the launch which was free from the usual network TV commentary. I knew all the stages of a usual shuttle launch by heart, and knew the throttle up was coming, shortly before SRB jettison. I remember clearly thinking as the engines were throttling back up, "I wonder what would happen if one of these things blew up?" .. and then the vehicle disintegrated in front of my eyes. I remember jumping up from the couch and running to the TV, repeatedly whispering, "No no no!" and was so sick I almost vomited.
13 year old me knew I hadn't caused it - at least logically - but that sick, sinking feeling was always conjured up by any replay of the incident up until recently. My view of NASA was jaded for a very long time after that, and I followed the Rogers Commission investigation and report closely.
I don't know if I'll be able to watch Challenger: The Final Flight or not.
CJSF
"The sun is a quagmire
It's not made of fire
Forget what you've been told in the past
Electrons are free
(Plasma!) Fourth state of matter
Not gas, not liquid, not solid"
-They Might Be Giants, "Why Does The Sun Really Shine?"
lonelybirder.org
Order of Kilopi
Yes, still used, and very different from standard Glaswegian. The accent is called "Kelvinside" or "Morningside", after two middle-class areas in Glasgow and Edinburgh respectively, but it's essentially all one accent, characteristic of moderately wealthy Scottish folk from the Central Belt who send their children to private schools. You hear it a lot in the film The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), albeit performed with varying degrees of success. Clip here. Sir Malcolm Rifkind has a more moderate version of the same accent in this clip.
Characteristically, speakers pronounce the short Scots front "ah" as "eh", and the "ai" diphthong as if it were the vowel of "say". They pronounce their r's, but tend to omit terminal l's. I think you can hear all that going on in the Jean Brodie clip.
It's widely supposed to have come into existence a century or two ago, when aspiring or newly wealthy Scots modified their native accent to bring it closer to Received Pronunciation, which was then the prestige accent in the UK. But now it's an accent in its own right, passed down from generation to generation or acquired in (certain kinds of) school.
Grant Hutchison
Established Member
Thanks for that explanation. That clip of Dame Maggie showed her using very much the same accent that was being attempted/satirised in the radio play. The character reverted to a much broader, accent when she forgot herself.
Bad Post-Doc
They showed the explosion in a way I'd never seen before--someone's home movies. And then a full episode about the investigation; they'd spent a lot of time in the bits leading up to it talking about people who'd tried to blow the whistle before the accident.
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Order of Kilopi
I saw it live as well. I worked for a NASA contractor at the time and watched from our parking lot at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station just across the river from KSC. I did programming for range safety, and remember the concern over the record cold.
Order of Kilopi
For years I used to deliver a lecture on data presentation, to various audiences, talking about how to present data clearly. The second half of the lecture always used data of relevance to my audience. But the first half always started with the viewgraph slides the engineers from Morton-Thiokol had used in their presentation the night before launch, in an effort to persuade their managers and the NASA representatives to cancel the launch because of the forecast of extremely cold weather.
In ten stages, I would "debug" the original viewgraphs, in which it's not at all evident that there is a temperature dependence for O-ring failure (among other things, the data were presented in order of launch date, rather than temperature). At the end of my ten steps, I had ten rules of good data presentation, and a graph that compellingly showed the launch was heading for disaster.
Given the pressures and culture of the time, it still might not have prevented the launch, but it would have been a lot harder to ignore or misinterpret.
Grant Hutchison
Order of Kilopi
Tried watching Away and I couldn’t get past the issue of the crew dynamics.
Order of Kilopi
I've been watching Amazon Prime's Utopia which is said to be a remake of a British show. I'm a few episodes in but I'm not sure if I'm going further. It started out weirdly interesting, but then people started getting killed right and left. Without getting into too many details, there is a conspiracy and a developing pandemic as part of the story. That part doesn't bother me, but the fact that half the characters appear to be insane mass murderers does. It's getting too ugly for me to enjoy.
"The problem with quotes on the Internet is that it is hard to verify their authenticity." — Abraham Lincoln
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Order of Kilopi
Sounds similar to the UK series. There was an initially intriguing plot and some nice visuals, but a lot of pointless violence delivered in that oddly popular "Ho ho, all in good fun" manner that really sets my teeth on edge. (Looking at you, Killing Eve.)
Grant Hutchison
Bad Post-Doc
Finished up Kingdom yesterday as it was leaving Hulu. A nice, pleasant show about a Norfolk solicitor (Stephen Fry) that ended on an astonishing cliffhanger.
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
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