(no subject)

[nameandnature]

Well, I'm back. Here's what I did on my holidays (note laptop in background, and Firefly and Battlestar Galactica DVDs, and Chronicles of Amber in my lap). Oh, all right, there was also swimming and scenery, but most of the time was reserved for the important things in life. It was fun.

You lot all seem to have been busy, so I'm queuing up open tabs in Firefox as I accumulate stuff I'm replying to. So far, we have:

• robhu's encounter with the smarmy sort of atheism which thinks all religious people are stupid.
• atreic's posting on going to a High Anglican church at Easter, cathedral_life's response about religious practice and rationality and atreic's thoughts on the mind/body problem as it applies to religion.
• terriem pointed us at songs as bullet lists. It reminded me of the Powerpoint suicide note story that The Onion did a while back, but The Onion is lame about access to old stories these days, so I can't link to that.

So, Battlestar Galactica eh? Unlike Firefly, it's not getting cancelled as it's apparently very successful. There are certain similarities. Both have the same cinema verite, handheld look (in both the filmed and CGI shots: not surprising as the same CGI company did both BSG and Firefly). Both focus on people rather than on the particle of the week, both are serial rather than episodic, allowing character and story arcs to develop. (I'm curious about the way the BSG's makers try to distance it from science fiction: they seem to assume that SF means Star Trek, which as far as I'm concerned is an occasionally fun but weak example of the genre).

What are the differences that might explain BSG's success? BSG is a big story: an entire civilisation in danger, a Biblical exodus, and characters who are political and military leaders. We rarely see the underdogs in the BSG universe, but since they have so little freedom of action, that's not very surprising. BSG is darker: no snappy comebacks and laugh out loud moments. Oh, and let's not overestimate our demographic: while Inara is pretty, we see rather more of Number 6 in BSG, and BSG is generally sexier.

I like them both, although I think it'll be interesting to see whether BSG can keep up its early promise now it has become such a hit.

Comments

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

I don't have a major major problem with them thinking that religious people are stupid, what was really annoying was how they weren't willing to discuss what they thought - or perhaps rather that they were incapable of doing so.

I really like your new icons btw :-D

You can use the internet archive to link to old Onion stories btw.