Not a month goes by without me thinking that line 
It’s the best worst movie I’ve ever encountered and Mr. Reeves 3rd best role.
Should I ever reach the 1%, I want to buy the rights & fix 3 things: The CGI, the max storage capacity of brains & the effing pacing! Why are old movies soo slow? Saw it when it came out & that was such a disappointment, even though it helped cement my techno-utopian dreams 
Same with Tankgirl: great idea & cast, just so slow.
Loved the fish scene & got me thinking why this adaptation might be good, even if it’s bad: We need the attitude back! The valiant outcasts fighting against the corporations, the power. Even if it’s but a fable, we need more depictions of people fighting back against capital.
Of course capital is producing it
Charlie Stross has made that point a few times as well…
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I watch a lot of things that might be called slow. Stuff with long takes and space for the actors be observed. But are they actually slow?
I watched the TV show “below deck” the other day and it’s hyperkinetic. The camera careens about in edit with plenty of shake to boot. Most shots barely last a second when they are shooting “verité” but they tell you what they are doing before the episode starts, several times during, recap at the end and, guess what? The same points are being talked about and explained to you (will they get together / get fired) episodes later.
Or some TV shows stuff happens, and then more stuff happens, and it just keeps on happening to set problems in the path of the characters to drag the show out rather than finish it. In one sense it’s fast, but the experience to me is it dragging on and taking forever to get nowhere.
Or another example of fast and slow in a film v a comic. The movie of Watchmen took the panels of breaking into prison to get Rorschach as a story board so they fleshed it out into a full blown fight sequence. Sure it was “fast”, lots of cuts and people moving and claret all over the screen and all that*. But I was bored by the fact that the story was actually the next bit. That was all action, and all drag on the film.
Some people find action scenes pretty boring, some find sex scenes boring, some find scenes where actors act boring.
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Apropos of nothing, I recently discovered a link to an anthology I haven’t read since shortly after it was released in 1985. Gibson’s short story “The Gernsback Continuum” still hits like it did when I was 17 - he wrote it in 1981, 3 years before Neuromancer.
Channel 4 did a banging adaptation of it too, with the amazing Toyah Wilcox guest starring:
https://www.rudyrucker.com/mirrorshades/
Eh, no onebox - Rudy’s old school like that
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Thank you! I never knew that existed.
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The problem with Tank Girl is that it tried to make ninety minutes out of a collection of irreverent comics with no real concern about continuity. Tank Girl was fun as a comic, might have made a good series of short films like the first animated Æon Flux series, but a full movie was like sitting down to a buffet of nothing but jelly beans.
I just finished the first season of Silo, and its attention to detail and at the same time not letting those details get in the way make me hopeful for following Case. But don’t expect scrappy underdogs: if they stay true to the source, remember that Case, the former data thief for the mob, is not working for anyone but himself, and none of the characters were trying to fight the Man. Only do the job and get their cut. None of the characters in Neuromancer are moral, not even Armitage. And Peter Riviera is downright creepy.
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Huh. Agreed. I wasn’t trying to genderfy the TEAM who would be required to produce it. Theres no single person that would be credited. But yeah, its a loaded sexist trope, so I apologize for using it if you were offended.
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I’m a miserable old grump who hates subscriptions because I forget to cancel them, and Disney is £7.99 a month with no ads.
That said, the new Shogun is getting a lot of good reviews and my wife is Japanese so it might be worth subscribing for a month to watch that.
We stick with Netflix because it has such a lot of good Japanese content.
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Yeah, he scrapped the third novel in the Halting State/Rule 34 trilogy because a major plot point he felt would be perfect fodder for a black comedy happened in real life, IIRC
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I’m not 100% sure about Apple’s TV+ service, but other Apple subscriptions you can buy a monthly subscription and cancel right away and it will still work for the remainder of the first billing period (a month for example).
If that doesn’t work, maybe a calendar reminder to a TODO with a date reminder?
I’m not great at remembering to do stuff in a month or two or every other week. So I use calendar reminders for things like “heartwork dogs” and weekly reminders for other stuff. It was life changing when I got my first PDA (a palm pilot), a job long since taken over by my phone.
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Personally I never imagined “the color of a television tuned to a dead channel” to be static, I assumed it was the ‘black’ of a channel that wasn’t showing anything, except CRT’s couldn’t do black, so it was more of an off-black like this
Which is kind-of the colour of clouds, slightly lit by scatter from streetlights
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No need to apologise, glad that you didn’t get annoyed. Could have been me. Language is difficult, as is the rest of the world. And I always struggle with both.
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This has prompted me to re-read the book, at least by audiobook
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I sometimes get a bit nostalgic for the old analog CRT TV sets. About 1% of the static was from the cosmic microwave background, so after closedown you coud watch the remnants of the Big Bang for a bit before finally switching off.
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Someone, it might have been Cory Doctorow or maybe Neal Stephenson, has definitely done the line “The sky over the port was the searing blue of a television tuned to a dead channel”, and so updated that line to the era of blue meaning “no signal”.
Sitting here just now, it occurs to me that people look to the sky for signs and portents, so having the entire sky just be like “$ATZ NO CARRIER” is a really solid foreshadowing of themes of isolation and poor communication.
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Or Neil Gaiman.
“The sky was the perfect untroubled blue of a television screen, tuned to a dead channel.”
Neverwhere
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It was Neil Himself, in Neverwhere.
If you want an opening line for your surrealist post-post-cyberpunk novel, allow me to point out that HDCP’s failure move is to display snow on the screen, but it’s rainbow colored instead of black and white. It’s also deliberately generated, as a signal to the user that something is not working.
“The sky over the port was the seething rainbow of an HDCP cable failure. Chibi shook her head as if a little agitation would dislodge last night’s nootroopic cocktail from her synapses, and furtively glanced around to see if anyone else was staring at the morning sky as if they expected it to show them a text from an ex-lover”
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Got it before me. Hey, at least it was a Neil/Neal.
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