Arthur C. Clarke was writing stories with communication satellites orbiting Earth a decade before the USSR launched Sputnik.  He, Heinlein, and Asimov were visionaries.  But I don't think anyone other than Kubrick had the kind of vision to breathe life into the story and get it up on the big screen.

I can understand why people don't care for 2001.  First time I saw it, it was just 'some weird movie' to me.  As I've grown older, I've developed more appreciation for it.  2010 had some great moments in it, even if it wasn't the cinematic masterpiece that 2001 was, and I really appreciated the fact that it got produced at a time when the Cold War was still very much alive and showed no signs of going away, because of its premise of individuals on both sides having to look at the politically-motivated choices of their superiors and decide, "No, that's wrong, and I'm not following that order."  (Granted, their decision to reject their orders was the reason they survived, but it was still a gutsy thing to do in an era where people still worried that the original Red Dawn was a plausible premise...)

I'm with you about The Way of Water, though.  I saw the first one reluctantly, and while it was a visual feast, I was not impressed with the story, and while I'm not surprised that it got a sequel, I have no intention of seeing it (maybe when we get it at the movie theater and I can see it for free, but I'm certainly not paying money to go see it.)  I was reluctant to see Top Gun: Maverick, but I enjoyed it far more than I expected to.

Shifting gears a bit...weird weather around here.  It rained a couple of days after Christmas, and then again for the past 2-3 days.  Most of the snow was gone (at least down in the valley...the rain storms that came through laid down something close to 5 feet of snow up in the mountains, on top of what was already there, and we REALLY need it.)

And then, this morning, it was supposed to start snowing again.  I woke up early, and took a look outside, and there was a light dusting of snow.  Got ready for church services, got dressed expecting light snow or rain, opened the front door...and there was a good 2-3" of snow on the ground and it was still coming down HARD.  Got home from church, looked at the weather forecast...it said the snow would keep falling for another couple of hours and then turn to rain, and it was supposed to warm up a good 8-10 degrees...but I decided to shovel the snow, anyway, figuring it'd be better than having wet slush that may or may not freeze overnight...

I spent a couple of hours shoveling the front walks, fired up the snowblower and did the driveway and parking area, and then the city sidewalks all the way to the far end of the block (a neighbor had cleared the walk up to the edge of our driveway...), then cleared the snow from the outlet of the driveway (where city snow plows had piled it up) for the fourplex and one of my neighbors...and it was still snowing.  Went inside, got something to drink, peeled off my wet sweatshirt and dried myself off, fell asleep for half an hour or so, got up to run some errands...it's still snowing.  Went to the store, stopped at Taco Bell to get something to eat, drove to the theater to update ads for the coming week...it's STILL snowing.  Not as hard, by any means, and the cloud cover lightened up to the point where places that had been cleared had started to melt off snow that fell on them after clearing.  But I'm glad I didn't bank on it raining.

Oh, and I rolled 19 and 20 for sifting through the intel...

daughter from NC came up last Tuesday, her kids got to play ion snow , 2  days..it rain Saturday, but , it waited until we  finished playing football.

  suosed to rain around her, most of thr week...i didn't  look too far  down the road.

One of my dad's favorites;  I became familiar with it from a VHS he had, and watched when I was home sick from school.     I played briefly in an rpol game that used it as an influence (including being set in the 70s, lol).      The episode with the undead biker, especially creepy, lol.

There's a lot of stuff that's popular I have little liking for.

The MCU, for example, I find vastly overrated.     There've been a few I like, but others, I've had a hard time sitting through to the end.    And yes, this is coming from someone who does like the superheroic genre.

In general, I'm more pro novel than cinema.   Most of my greatest influences are from authors and books.

  For me?  My tastes  make the MCU  the standard bearer, while  ( to me) DC is just a  weak sister. when i was a kid  , i bought  Marvel , the DC comic i bought were  SGT Rock,  GI Combat and Fighting forces ( which had a dog as one of the character's, that was a real dog, as the  soldiers fought the enemy and Dinosaurs and such! )

SGT  Fury ( the  real fury) was  the  war mag for MArvel. I liked the 1st two Fantastic  4  movies   That Ian Ioan Gruffudd ( also liked him in Horatio Horn Blower  series)

I never watched, nor never will, the 3rd one, They smshed the canon all to hell, i won't even watch it for free!!

 Disney + had  some good shows, i wayyyy behind watching  them, i disagree on some movies/shows they  made or are making. and to try to justify them, they  will have  some  easter eggs, or direct leads to the  'first string' heroes.

 I was one of those folks who help 'build' marvel, as i  saved the meager   cents i had to by the 'next' comic...I have waited years  for  a 'real movie" and Marvel  started it off., and eneverrlooked back.

 as i grew  up SCI-FI and fantasy were made fun off, stupoid  show, critics cried...

 now, the last 10 years  its  been good.. i hope the New D&D  move   does well.

 I was a typical girl growing up my parents were into Sci-Fi so Star Trek was on when I was young, and the old sci-fi shows and movies. The thing that changed me forever was reading two books by Heinlein, Stranger in a Stange Land and Friday.

Lol, are you assuming I'm a DC fan, because I'm not pro MCU?     I'm much more Marvel. Little DC at all.

"MCU" refers to the movies specifically (the C = "cinematic"), not the Marvel comics & graphic novels.     Though I think the two are kind of blending together, lately.

I like a certain period of the comics, and not so much the movies.   Many of which wreck favorite characters in their re-renderings of them.

Heinlin is a talented writer, for sure.  CJ Cherryh is my particular favorite;  by far, the biggest influence on my own approach to writing.

Sci-fi wise Star Wars was my first love and something I’m still big into, I liked Starship troopers; the film was good, the book was better, Bladerunner is brilliant as is The Expanse (Books and series). Never really got into Star Trek it was always a little too “clean and Shiny” for my tastes. Super hero movie wise The Watchmen is my go to film.

On a side note I’m kind of waiting on Meari to see how she fares before I go any further Tarja.

 I read some Heinlin  Starship troopers... I even have the Avalon Hill Game  that was  real good  at following the  Book ( Skinnys, Neo-dogs  ect)



Tully Zetford  wrote a series  of  Books  on 'Hook, the Boosted man' years ahead of his time.

 John carter  and Books  like that when i was first starting to read them, i think i was 8 or 9.

Real life  WWI AirWair  stories  fact or fiction. i have some books written by arch whitehouse, who flew in WWI and  then wrote   Bios  and  fiction about it.

 Hornblower,   and  Alexander Kents's   sea faring   series, as was  Fox, written by Adam Hardy, has  a much more , Violent  take the  Kent, or Hornblower

 toss in my use  of    Avalon Hills war  games,  they were all mixed , into the stwe of this game.

 I did not  mean to say you were a DCU  fan ( U added after Gunnwent there)...i make comments  on a guy i have followed  for the late 4-5 years  who does almost nothing but MCU stuff..man? did he  ever make out, he just reached 1M  followers, he gives out  PS-% ( which i have never won, go figure), but  when he lives streams a watch party, you can see all the  stuff in his  living room, Life size Iron man armor and  Figues.. he also  has  music under 'Allfires; on most  music places.

 we had  hard back  'Tom Corbett' books, lost those in the 77 flood though, along  will my Comics  and some other books..::sigh::

I changed my post a wee bit ago to reflect that Joseph was talking to Stoly.  Please drop by the Mars thread when you have a moment.

I never got into comic books as a kid...my parents were very practical, products of rural Idaho in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression, and it was the rarest of occasions that I managed to arm-twist them into springing for a comic book.  By the time I was old enough to purchase them on my own, I was already steeped in sci-fi and fantasy novels and would much rather spent my money on 'real' books.  I think it started with a bunch of childrens' novels by Thorton W. Burgess, the characters were anthropomorphized forest animals, and the stories were largely about them living in the forest, occasionally interacting between each other (the mink would show up in the squirrel's story as a secondary or tertiary character, stuff like that).

Then Rankin/Bass televised their animated version of The Hobbit.  I think I was in second grade at the time?  By the end of the school year, I was reading my older brother's copy, by the time I was in third grade, I was reading Lord of the Rings.  We had a Bookmobile that came to the school every other week, I started finding other fantasy books there (Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain, some other less notable books and series...)

And then Star Wars came out.  My dad was a closet sci-fi fan, Star Trek was in regular rotation at home and he tuned into it quite often, had books about UFOs and Bigfoot although he wasn't vocal about them...so going into Star Wars, I had some background (I also vaguely remember Space:1999 on TV, but it was gone by the time I was old enough to really follow it).  I was introduced to Star Trek first, but Star Wars was my first true love.  I'm one of those who is comfortable with a foot in either camp, though.

My big intro to comic books came in college...well, actually, just before college, for reasons that had little to do with interest in comics.  I spent a couple of years in Sweden, and one of the people I met told me that the best way to learn the language the way people actually speak it on a daily basis (instead of the oddly formalized version that they teach in language programs) was reading comic books.  So, I have a couple of years worth of Transformers comics--in Swedish--along with a few X-Men and some Batman titles (including the comic-book adaptation of the first Tim Burton Batman film).  Got back to the states, didn't do much about comics (because I already know English)...and then I got a college roommate who had grown up on comics.  Seriously, the man was a walking encyclopedia of both Marvel AND DC, along with many of the lesser-known publishers.  That got me into X-Men for a few years...

But when Iron Man came out, I knew enough to realize where they could be going with all of this.  Then came The Incredible Hulk...and Captain America, and I knew they were building an Avengers universe.  Had no idea how far beyond JUST The Avengers they'd end up going.

But I also studied a lot of writing in college, so I'm really nitpicky about what works and what doesn't, for me.  For instance, a lot of people consider the first Thor as a major letdown...I thought it was incredible in the way it became almost Shakespearean, while maintaining a very modern sensibility.  But that was also the reason I had a hard time with a lot of the earlier DCEU movies...Zack Snyder makes beautiful pictures, but he is NOT a good writer.

So, I take them in stride.  I've been less than impressed with a lot of the recent Marvel stuff...feel kind of like they've made the same mistake, in their effort to move on from the whole Infinity War saga, that DC made in introducing their cinematic universe...too many characters, too quickly, with little or no connecting fibers between them, so they feel disjointed.  And without a clear storyline to work towards, the writing is really inconsistent.  I still watch them, because on the whole, I feel like they have a direction they're going and I'm curious to see where it's going to end up...but I don't feel the necessity to rush out and see them that I had with the early MCU movies (granted, part of that is that I work at a movie theater and I know, if I'm patient, I'll get to see them for free...but even then, I think we had Wakanda Forever for a couple of weeks before I sat down to watch it...as compared to The Winter Soldier, when I snuck onto the balcony on our opening night to watch it.)  I'm neither critic nor fan when it comes to comic-book movies...I try to see the good as well as the bad, and weigh the whole thing before I make up my mind about it.  And I'm not burdened with preconceptions of what the characters are supposed to be like...aside from the X-Men and Batman, I don't really know my comic book characters all that well, and even then, my knowledge of those characters is built around the writing of a handful of writers that worked in the late 80s and early 90s, and I've also seen enough retcons and rewrites and reinventions of characters that the notion of them being a little different for the sake of fitting into the MCU is just one more writer's revision to make them fit his storyline, as far as I'm concerned (but they better have a good story to tell!)

Getting into theater steered me a little more into 'traditional' dramatic scenarios...but sci-fi and fantasy are always going to be near and dear to me, and anytime someone puts together a movie in one of those genres that doesn't suck, I'm happy (which means I'm appalled that James Cameron has finally released a sequel to Avatar...not many movies I can think of where I cared less about the main characters or the plot line...maybe Titanic, but since I've only seen about twenty minutes of that and it didn't intrigue me enough to watch the rest of it, even though I've had the option for decades, I can't really say that I care less about it...the only reason I saw Avatar in the first place is because a group of friends took me to see it.  That group of friends did NOT go see Titanic...)  I'm even in the extremely rare group of people that recognizes the Star Wars sequels have some serious problems, but I still enjoyed them, overall (it's too late at night to get me started on that...I'll be here for hours, if I start analyzing what I liked and didn't like about them...*grin*)

just a tad  off topic. I played  Fallout  4..people  say it wasn't good? I loved it..i'll it in from time to time, , the  weapons. mods   for armor  and weapons, all that stuff is cool, and the interactions  are  close to Mass Effect..the facial features  help alot, especially and  comic  moments.

 Fallout  76 is bad.. i still play it, but its no where near fun. I still have to put in my  MassEffect editon  i got last year  from my daughter, that has  all the DLCs.

 those games helped  me  realize how much fun it is to have  an effect on the game. except for the horrid way ME3 ended.

But? war storys, Sc--fi and   Comics are my main focus ... with spy stuff   and revenge  films   close on their tail

I'm a sucker for good spy movies and heist stories (the whole Ocean's 11 series is high on my list of 'watch any time' movies!)

Changing tone yet again...I've just got to say how nice it is to have an actual decent winter this year.  Got up this morning, needed to shovel a little more snow, got to work and had to clear some more...it was cool seeing the park with everything covered with snow, and the clouds hanging down over the mountaintops in the background.  Warm enough in the valley that snow on pavement was melting off pretty quickly, but with the clouds down that low, you know it's still snowing up there.

A bunch of locations around northern Utah reported anywhere between 2 and 4 feet...FEET!...of snow, just from this last storm front that blew through...Dec 30 through Jan 2.  We had more snow in December than we've had in the last three years combined.  Supposed to have another storm come through by the end of the week.  I hope it keeps going...this is just about perfect.  Snows often enough to keep it looking like winter, it's not getting so cold that it's miserable (I loathe the parts of winter where it gets to be about 15F as a daytime high temp, especially because when it does that, it stays like that for weeks on end), fresh storms coming through keep the air moving so the pollution doesn't get to build up (and it also keeps the temperatures more tolerable...when it gets too cold around here, it won't snow, so having storms with warmer winter air coming through every week or so is GREAT).  I have a few friends who are starting to gripe about it snowing every few days, but I keep reminding them of how much they hated having brown grass in their yard because they were on watering restrictions because of the drought.  We have SO BADLY needed this weather.

rained like  heack today..had rain on and off since saturday..Alexa  warned me of 'Airel Flooding"..which are floods that happens  slower, over days  of rain!

We seem to be in a 'sweet spot', where we're getting snow but not getting blasted by it.  Some people I know went up to a casino on a reservation in Wyoming, doing entertainment for a NYE party...they've been snowed in for days.  The main road out from the reservation is closed indefinitely due to heavy snows and high winds, and the secondary roads aren't much better (and about twice as long to drive.)  I hope they all caught a break today like we did...

Because I went to dinner earlier tonight and when I walked out, it was trying to start snowing again.  I'm thrilled for us, but if it's hitting them again up there, they REALLY need a break.  Some of them have 'real' jobs they're supposed to be getting back to, some have pets at home that they're having to pay people extra to keep looking after.

This was just before the storms his Buffalo (it was the same storms)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgCf1VHjjsE

at 4:10 there is a scene of a snow covered lake.  That is Cheney lake I used to live next to as a kid.  now I live over a small hill to the right of that shot (a little over a mile in a straight line)

thats the snows  i remember from when i was little in PA,,we had a few over the eyarsm but  not  many, say? last 10-12 years

Crap, I had a beautiful long post for Harry and the net crashed taking it with it.

Such fond memories Roy back when Zob was more of a jerk

Ah, you're still a jerk, Zob, just not as consistently...*grin*

Roy you are such a charmer :)

:^]

:^]

I beg your pardon, I rather enjoy his assholery

 (Sends off a letter to Webster dictionary). Long shot but hopefully they will print this one.

lol...  already there only they have it under 'Nincompoopery'.  lol