Is anybody else watching The Expanse?

They're automated drones that act like tugs.

ah! ok

why are tugs needed at all times in deep space?

Because the Nauvoo wasn't outfitted with thrusters (it being a generation ship) and firing up its engines would've melted Tycho Station into space slag. Some neat details here, I don't think it's too spoilery: https://expanse.fandom.com/wiki/Tycho_Manufacturing_Accelerator_Tug

ah i get it, like external micro-steering :)

(aka tugs lol)

i was reading them more like the reaver ships in serenity, but i guess if you look carefully they all look the same

"lids on and load up"

alex has an accent!

Just like a Texas-y accent though no? None of them have a wacky made up space accent like the Belters.

the all-blue protomolecule room inside the nucleus inside the ring reminds me (inexplicably, given the colour scheme) of cult 1957 east german TV fairytale the singing, ringing tree

http://images.rottentomatoes.com/images/spotlights/2007/rtuk_obscura_0803.jpg

actually there's quite a lot of blue there i guess

here's the entire thing (which i haven't seen since the night thatcher resigned lol)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhVFcy4ZMIg

yes that's true chap, but in my (evolving) theory, belter-speech isn't so much an accent as a syncretic urchinspeak patois* unrolled as a political act of defiance and subversion: mars was officially settled (in discrete communities which largely retained their speech-of-arrival even despite the fight for independence) whereas the belterworld is much more fluid and piratical and marginal and etc

also in dramatic terms it makes sense for earth and mars to be on a level language-wise for the big set pieces, which a third accent would probably fuck with

(also lol belterspeak being extremely unstable of manifestation is acceptable in one made-up way of speech if you can give it a rationale -- if that's what i'm even doing -- but i think two of them would tend to suck a bit) (a LOT)

and getting the mars one to be stable wd just end up annoying

for me the true Martian accent is Bobbie's Australian one. i kind of pretend everyone else has one. making the best of an inhospitable desert world.

dude it's NZ-samoan

DAMMIT

shohreh aghdashloo meanwhile has a BA in international relations from brunel

i still think it's weird how quickly she became a good guy given that we saw her literally torturing a belter in person in S1

brunel's very well regarded

"regrowing a spinal cord is a delicate procedure even under the best circumstances"

trudat!

Alex comes from mariner valley which was colonised by Texans and Indians so he has the classic mariner valley drawl. The writers make a big deal of this in the books.

Bobby is from Londres Nova which clearly doesn’t have a distinctive accent because I’m not sure it is mentioned once.

nu-coquenie

if you bear in mind what's happening w/her spine, drummer's mini-waldo in the final ep of s3 is as bad-ass as ripley's in the finale of aliens

I like the way this show has an arse-kicking grandmother with a voice like razorblades, and it makes perfect sense.

finished my rewatch of the expanse s1-s3, now rewatching the singing ringing tree for the first time in 29 years just in case it's relevant expanded universe material

Belterese is a creole of a bunch of different languages, so of course they're not going to speak like Holden or Alex.

the books go into the origins and syntax of Belterese -- but yeah, it works really well in the context of the show because it can sound credible spoken by actors with wildly disparate accents.

i think my added point also works onscreen which is that density of irl marginal accent in fast-changing multicultural contexts is often an in-the-moment political decision of codeswitching: you deepen or soften the weirdness and the threat -- the refusal to communicate merely politely and helpfully -- by choice depending on who yr talking to and how. this is a dimension you'd probably omit in a book in the actual dialogue (you might mention it in descriptions of the dialogue), but it's something inventive actors can have fun with, and that's going on here

errinwright is one of most deliciously hatable baddies in the history of tv

a few thoughts on S2:

- plowing the nauvoo into eros is so awesomely bonkers. the very implausibility of it makes concrete the stakes of what would happen if eros is allowed to continue. extremely strange however that it's now "unguarded" given its importance to jp mao and by extension to errinwright? and presumably mars knows how important it is given what happened on phoebe?

in any case the speed with which a skeptical holden agrees to the nauvoo plan is pretty whiplashy! he goes from never wanting to see miller again to partnering up with him on the hijacking of a multitrillion pound spaceship and scuppering the most ambitious migration attempt ever attempted in human history. he grits his teeth real good for a second. and naomi's basically like - I'm down for whatever!

- the roci crew decides to annihilate the médecins sans frontières dudes. good scene. tense. but like GUYS THE DEBRIS. did they not think of it?? if they'd played those cards slightly differently, diogo's nuke is fine and miller comes back. they fucked up big time!! but nobody ever says sorry.

- speaking of miller and his nuke, he seems to have had a real death wish this whole time. he volunteers for spin station boarding duty, then for the nuke planting spacewalk, then takes the fritzing nuke from diogo. fine, buddy. but then in E4, once the nauvoo's missed eros, suddenly he's like hey guys, you want to get me off this rock? what, NOW??

and this is nitpicky but i thought nuking eros would spread protomolecule all over the system in a million tiny pieces (TM james frey)

in s4 the roci goes off through a supplied wormhole to a far-off galaxy where they encounter the deep descendents of the nauvoo 2, who have added to the tales of their religion told over tens if not hundreds of generations a great deal of cross detail abt these ARSE HOLES who ripped them off back in the old solar system days, and now (unexpectedly) a reckoning can come!

(ok i think there's a glitch in this plot timewise but handwave handwave alien protomolecule alien ideas handwave handwave there i fixed it)

lol extremely down for that

extremely Chernobyl vibes from this on rewatch btw obv

unbearable contrast between the near-lethal speed of the roci and the lumpy wheel of miller's dolly ker-flopping along the infected corridors of eros

"you're going to negotiate with a woman who thinks she's a spaceship??"

i wrote a thing far upthread abt it being hard to judge scale and position in the actual outerspace scenes but it now strikes me this difficulty (in fact somewhat resolved after the first series in the CGI or animation or whatever) is replicated in the metaphysics of the story: let's use a spaceship as a bomb! what if a person was a molecule? what if a molecule connected the entire cosmos together?!?

it's like a sequence of fevered panics abt how things fit alongside one another in proper relationship once we enter a zone (nearby space) where a lot of the ways we judge such things just aren't around us any more

also everyone onscreen is always super-aware which moon is where! i'm not! are you? ceres? it's er no i don't know which planet ceres goes round

(i mean obviously it's important to them and anyway they have tech which instantly reminds them but there's a kind WOAH factor to all these extra layers of knowledge, plus the need to file things in three dimensions rather than just two, which i think is quite well brought to bear)

Ceres is an asteroid/dwarf planet/whatever, not a moon, but diagetically, I think most people know about it because it's one of the first/biggest objects in the solar system that humans were able to spin up to create gravity and begin to make habitable, and thus one of the largest achievements in human engineering.

And besides, there are only a handful of colonized extra-terran astronomical bodies.

i didn't put what i was getting at very clearly ("no!" i hear you cry)

i don't find this surprising or unconvincing, it's part of their world -- yes of course they know in their bones lots of stuff i have a v dim grasp of at best -- but the show is i think very good abt getting across the mind-expansive* element of this newer layer of technical knowledge, even as they're showing basically p ordinary people who've mastered it (alex is an excellent space pilot but he's not a marvel superhero). so we get the high-speed mastered competence but also retain a sense of the OMIGOD WOW cultural effect it's going to be having

a LOT of onscreen SF is not actually that good at bringing these two wings of SF into such intimate working contact? (except sometimes conceptually sometimes, like with the stunt eps of o/g stark trek where the alien is an omnipotent baby or all the people on a planet are under the age of 10 or whatever). but i'm talking abt a different kind of juxtaposition of ordinary and extraordinary: like we can actually get a sense of it in the fingertips of these ppl, even if some of them are basically twerps like the Xtreme rockhopper-racer -- they have casual physical dominion over a space and its technics that we can currently only dab it on diagrams, but this show is good at getting across a (of course faked) sense of what might be practical; and routine and even tiresome abt such mastery, without masking what we find startling

lol i need to go to bed, i don't think this is any clearer at all

*blimey i think i just twigged something

What’s very clear is that belters have become very good at orbital mechanics and survival in deep space. The ones that didn’t got dead. I assume they imbibe complex ballistics with mother’s milk and grandpa’s kibble. I love the whole slingshotter subculture because it is a very recognisable.

drummer: "you control thirty nukes, you're the most powerful man in the solar system"

Johnson: "then how come you won't make me a cup of coffee?"

drummer gives him the stinkeye.

BUT after eros blorps into Venus and Earth is saved.... johnson's watching it on TV and drummer walks in with.. coffee

also I'm pretty sure when the Roci and the belters return to Tycho as conquering heroes, Diogo gets with the bartender who had earlier laughed him off. "this one's for you, Miller" he says as she leads him away

What’s very clear is that belters have become very good at orbital mechanics and survival in deep space. The ones that didn’t got dead. I assume they imbibe complex ballistics with mother’s milk and grandpa’s kibble. I love the whole slingshotter subculture because it is a very recognisable.

mark i love your thoughts on the big-smallness of this show.

xp:

http://up-ship.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/feb59a.jpg

For those who never handled one, that's a slide rule.

Maybe this is a stretch but the sudden thrust of Gs, the maneuvering of such vast hulks of gear in frictionless space, feels like it has a narrative echo in S2E5-7 - when the ballad of Miller and Mao slingshots into a new story of factional conflict. The story of Phoebe and Eros, which has been barrelling along at a million miles an hour, skids into a new trajectory. Suddenly it's not just the military brass who has a tribe. The Roci crew get testy with each other. As everything starts splitting apart, Dawes appears. Holden keeps saying they have to stick together, but who's he talking about? The Roci? Alone in the universe (apart from maybe the poor Medécins sans Frontières dudes) it's a genuinely cooperative unit - Mars, earthers, a belter - all working together, partly out of necessity, partly out of fear, partly out of idealism. But everybody else? C'mon Holden - you're dreaming

re slide-rules: i keep my BRITISH THORNTON AA010 (comprehensive) within reach of my writing desk! Still in its (p ugly 1970s dark grey plastic case). It was a bit of a swank purchase as a 15-yr-old, we were steered towards a much more basic one

https://i.imgur.com/nNQ7VuG.jpg

(note breakfasty croissant crumbs i shd probably have swept up first, what can i say, i'm a PIRATE)

for some reason reading irony-poisoned twitter this morning reminded me of this exchange

naomi: are they hypoxic?
krisjen: they're whistling past the fucking graveyard

mark - did you notice that all-in-one spraypaint technology has been leveraged for tattoo parlours? diogo gets his belter neck tattoo in about 10 seconds flat! another set of craftspeople put out of work by technology :(

There's this old SF magazine cover of a space pirate gripping a slide rule in his teeth:

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/7a/27/85/7a278551149fbd27a84644729e8851d2.jpg

Oh, fuck, already posted, somehow it didn't show for me until I made a dickhead of myself.

tracer: this technology already exists!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D_yFpMNU8AA2iN4.jpg

the hair!!!!