RatCreature (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ratcreature) wrote2008-03-08 05:40 pm
ratcreature) wrote2008-03-08 05:40 pm
Entry tags:
- art,
- sga,
- sga: meta,
- sga: reviews,
- tv,
- tv: meta,
- tv: reviews
I watched the SGA season finale
I've mentioned it in my comments elsewhere that one thing that bothers me about this (besides the bothersome stuff others lay out much better of the way Teyla's story is handled, how everybody but the white guys dies in the alternate universe and so on), is that once again an alternate timeline we see is worse for *everyone*. Just like always. As if there was some kind of law that the main universe timeline has to be the best possible world except for insane bad guys, maybe. It's not just Stargate which does this, but it is certainly prominent, and I'm getting really tired of this.
I understand that for storytelling reasons the alternates kind of have to be dystopian so that there's the impulse to "fix" things, and as you may know Sheppard is my favorite character, so it's not as if I think the SG universe would be better off without him, rather the opposite, but for once I'd have liked to see that with alternatives usually some people loose, but others gain, especially in the long term. There are very few events that have only negative consequences in the long haul. Not even horrific things are all bad, say take the Black Death, horrible death toll of more than half the population, iirc over 70% in some areas (incidentally way higher than the SGA Hoffan virus), and yet, who knows whether the Renaissance would have happened if there had been no pestilence to destroy the structures of society in many places?
So I would have liked it better if it they had made it so that the alternate sucked for Rodney, Atlantis and Earth and so on, but went great, or at least okay, for not just Evil-Overlord!Michael but for the Pegasus populations. Like if they had made it so that the improved hybrids were less a "zombie army" and Michael killing most humans in the process, but say instead he eventually had developed an improved formula with less mortality that was then welcome as solution to the Wraith problem in Pegasus. And for Teyla's horrible fate they could have chosen something like having her converted into one of Michael's new people. Then Atlantis still would have faced a loosing battle against the new "alien menance" of human-wraith, so it would have been sufficiently dystopian, but at least more of a sense of that some people loose but others gain with every alternative.
Maybe then in the "real" timeline Sheppard wouldn't only have had to try to save Teyla, but also preserve the oncoming future "Pegasus Renaissance" that had come at such a high cost to Atlantis, and he would try have to try to get both. Hm, now I really want someone to write an AU like that.
On a rather random note, I liked Atlantis in the desert quite a lot, though I wondered about Sheppard in that sandstorm. I mean, I have never been in one, but shouldn't his skin have been more irritated or even abraded, especially since he seemingly didn't tuck his hands inside his sleeves or protected them, but still used them to shield his face?
Anyway, despite the less than ideal setup of the alternate timeline I enjoyed the Sheppard and McKay angst, Ronon and Todd's scene was fun, and if they killed Sam, at least she died heroically on a cool new spaceship, which is more than they allowed Teyla. I liked Rodney trying to make a life on earth with Jennifer too (and I kind of want one of Rodney's futuristic gesture controlled white boards).
Totally unrelated to SGA I learned a new piece of trivia today: I've always been vaguely puzzled by the color name "ivory black" because it seemed contradictory (ivory not being black and all). Then today I happened to look at the label on the back of a tube of acrylic ivory black, one that went into all kinds of technical detail that I have no idea what it means (it has some kind of numbers for hue, value, chroma and codes for the pigments and symbols for opaqueness and lightfastness and so on) but also had a list of ingredients and apparently that black is made from charred animal bones. Hence the name "ivory black".
And I get that historically, though I'd have thought that by now the color would be synthetic. I mean, it's not they are still grinding up lapis lazuli for ultramarine (well, I guess there might be people who are into restoration and such and make their colors themselves from scratch with pigments or specialty producers who still do that, but usually it's synthetic these days). So it's kind of gross that they still use animal bones, but that what the tube says in its ingredient list under the "vehicle: acrylic polymer emulsion" there's "pigment: amorphous carbon produced by charring animal bones". So I'm using the same pigment as my prehistoric ancestors, I guess, only in a prepared polymer solution rather than charring some hunted mammoth's bone myself. Still in my mind "gross" kind of wins out over "artistic connection across millennia of history".
I understand that for storytelling reasons the alternates kind of have to be dystopian so that there's the impulse to "fix" things, and as you may know Sheppard is my favorite character, so it's not as if I think the SG universe would be better off without him, rather the opposite, but for once I'd have liked to see that with alternatives usually some people loose, but others gain, especially in the long term. There are very few events that have only negative consequences in the long haul. Not even horrific things are all bad, say take the Black Death, horrible death toll of more than half the population, iirc over 70% in some areas (incidentally way higher than the SGA Hoffan virus), and yet, who knows whether the Renaissance would have happened if there had been no pestilence to destroy the structures of society in many places?
So I would have liked it better if it they had made it so that the alternate sucked for Rodney, Atlantis and Earth and so on, but went great, or at least okay, for not just Evil-Overlord!Michael but for the Pegasus populations. Like if they had made it so that the improved hybrids were less a "zombie army" and Michael killing most humans in the process, but say instead he eventually had developed an improved formula with less mortality that was then welcome as solution to the Wraith problem in Pegasus. And for Teyla's horrible fate they could have chosen something like having her converted into one of Michael's new people. Then Atlantis still would have faced a loosing battle against the new "alien menance" of human-wraith, so it would have been sufficiently dystopian, but at least more of a sense of that some people loose but others gain with every alternative.
Maybe then in the "real" timeline Sheppard wouldn't only have had to try to save Teyla, but also preserve the oncoming future "Pegasus Renaissance" that had come at such a high cost to Atlantis, and he would try have to try to get both. Hm, now I really want someone to write an AU like that.
On a rather random note, I liked Atlantis in the desert quite a lot, though I wondered about Sheppard in that sandstorm. I mean, I have never been in one, but shouldn't his skin have been more irritated or even abraded, especially since he seemingly didn't tuck his hands inside his sleeves or protected them, but still used them to shield his face?
Anyway, despite the less than ideal setup of the alternate timeline I enjoyed the Sheppard and McKay angst, Ronon and Todd's scene was fun, and if they killed Sam, at least she died heroically on a cool new spaceship, which is more than they allowed Teyla. I liked Rodney trying to make a life on earth with Jennifer too (and I kind of want one of Rodney's futuristic gesture controlled white boards).
Totally unrelated to SGA I learned a new piece of trivia today: I've always been vaguely puzzled by the color name "ivory black" because it seemed contradictory (ivory not being black and all). Then today I happened to look at the label on the back of a tube of acrylic ivory black, one that went into all kinds of technical detail that I have no idea what it means (it has some kind of numbers for hue, value, chroma and codes for the pigments and symbols for opaqueness and lightfastness and so on) but also had a list of ingredients and apparently that black is made from charred animal bones. Hence the name "ivory black".
And I get that historically, though I'd have thought that by now the color would be synthetic. I mean, it's not they are still grinding up lapis lazuli for ultramarine (well, I guess there might be people who are into restoration and such and make their colors themselves from scratch with pigments or specialty producers who still do that, but usually it's synthetic these days). So it's kind of gross that they still use animal bones, but that what the tube says in its ingredient list under the "vehicle: acrylic polymer emulsion" there's "pigment: amorphous carbon produced by charring animal bones". So I'm using the same pigment as my prehistoric ancestors, I guess, only in a prepared polymer solution rather than charring some hunted mammoth's bone myself. Still in my mind "gross" kind of wins out over "artistic connection across millennia of history".
no subject
Huh! that's really fascinating.
no subject
I noticed this when I started using acrylics for the first time, and I didn't know a lot about the different kinds of colors (still don't but at least I've tried a little now), beyond looking at their hue, and then for example I wanted to paint white highlights at the end of picture, but I had bought a tube of Zinc White, and I didn't get why it wouldn't cover the colors beneath even if I didn't make it thin or anything when I had read that you could paint lighter over darker acrylic colors, but it turns out that naturally Zinc White (made with zinc oxide as pigment) is much more transparent, and you use it in glazes and such I think, whereas it is Titan White (which uses titanium dioxide as pigment) that is more opaque. I hadn't known that it would make such a huge difference what kind of white pigment it was. Cluelessly I had just gotten a tube of white acrylic paint and thought it would work. Or when I tried ultramarine blue, it was always more grainy and less soluble somehow than the other blue I had and so on.
Also even the same quality grade, some colors are much more dominant in any mixture compared to very similar color that is made from a different pigment, like with the two different kinds of whites.
And I didn't know about the different blacks either. I've read a bit today and apparently originally there was "Bone Black" and true "Ivory Black" which was made from burning real ivory and had a better color quality than just burning any animal bone because of its higher carbon content. These days Ivory Black can also be synthetic by mixing inorganic carbon black and calcium phosphate, so not all are made from animals anymore. There's also other fully synthetic ones, like Mars Black (from iron oxide), and other kinds of carbon blacks like Lamp Black is also carbon, but from burnt vegetable oil historically or petroleum and other stuff today, but it is less used because it dries slower in paint and becomes more brittle according to what I've read than Ivory Black... so apparently pigments are still tricky.
no subject