Humour VI

Hater.Yeah the production values were a little low but I thought they did a good job with it. I have a soft spot for just about any space movie.What was wrong with the premise?I will have to take a look at Bebop Cowboy. Never heard of it.

I have no beef with the premise, only with the execution. Cowboys in space? I'm down with that.Cows in space? That makes no sense. A society with space-travel and genetic engineering technology doesn't hire a spaceship to transport a herd of heifers, it sends an email with the Bos taurus genome and ships some kind of "animal-maker" the size of, say, a refrigerator.Why would future guns look like 19th-century revolvers but sound like rayguns? That makes no sense. Why would you write a script where one guy asks the assassin if he's from the Alliance and the assassin asks "am I a lion?" before meditating on his various leonine qualities? That shouldn't have even made it to shooting. What the fuck? I was embarassed on their behalf, and on behalf of all the Whedonites who retconned that as some kind of seminal work in the art of honest dialogue.Why would you have an episode with the hoariest of all Western tropes, the hooker with a heart of gold, only its an entire brothel of heart of gold hookers called the Heart of Gold, and then call the episode "Heart of Gold" just in case there was one retarded person in the audience who didn't pick up on the trope by the first 30 seconds of the episode? And how would you do that much lampshading and not do anything at all to subvert the trope?Lazy, lazy, lazy. I've become a Joss Whedon fan, but I almost didn't just because Firefly was how I lost my Whedon virginity, and the whole thing was so phoned in. Swearing in Chinese is stupid - people always swear in their native language. And why would a show about how the Chinese settled a distant planet (solar system? galaxy? universe? They never actually say because Joss Whedon never actually decided) not star any Asians? At all?Even in the 20th century, firearm propellants are self-oxidizing (and therefore work in a vacuum as well as underwater), but in the distant future you have to put a gun in a spacesuit to fire it?I expect something more from my science-fiction than Mad Libs worldbuilding. I expect that if you're going to do funny physics tricks like have a gun fire through a spacesuit, you're going to actually do some research about the physics and chemistry of firearms - or actually make a decision about the technology of future guns, and stick with it.Space opera settings are highly dependent on technology. The Old West is a setting highly dependent on specific sociogeographic, technological, and political realities. Firefly gives no evidence that the writers thought about any of that at all.

Well that's simply not true at all. One of the things that's always bothered me in fiction is that the only things people say in their native languages (when they're foreigners in an English-speaking group), are the very phrases that you pick up quickest living in a foreign country - greetings, simple exclamations, yeses, noes and swearing. I often swear in Czech, even though my spoken Czech is terrible.What's more, if you look at countries heavily saturated with English-speaking media (the ones that don't dub, that is), you'll often find that people use 'fuck', 'shit' and the like quite a lot. Try watching any Dutch-language television.

Well no i swear in serbo-croatian, well most Slovenians do because our swear words suck.Slovenian swear words:
Naj te koklja brcne - may a chicken kick you
Tristo kosmatih - 300 furry ones
solit se pojdi - go and salt yourselfserbo croatian swear wordsjebo ti pas majku u dupe - a dog fucked your mother in the ass
Jebo ti konj slijepu sestru krvavim kurcem na majcinom grobu, dok otac slogiran gleda - A horse fucked your blind sister on your mothers grave and your father was peacefully watching.
Jebo jea u lea - he fucked a hedgehog in the back

No, I'm pretty sure it's true. I should clarify - people frequently use second-language profanity in an attempt to Bowdlerize their own speech to avoid social transgressivity, or as an affectation. But for real swearing - when emotionality or surprise or pain override one's social filters and genuine expression pours forth - people swear in their native language. There's just not time to do anything else. Swearing in a second language is something you can only do with reflection. Well, right. But they're doing the same thing Firefly tried to do, or other TV shows have done with words like "frack" or "frell" - to connote the impact and culture of swearing while conforming to broadcast speech codes. I assure you that when a Dutchman bangs his thumb with a hammer, he swears in Dutch, not in English.

Never herd any slovenian say let a chicken kick you when he hit his thumb with a hammer i did hear many other swear words when that sort of thing happened and they where not a part of the Slovenian vocabulary.Its not dosent have to be a part of your native language when you swear its the way you program your brain to deal with pain or shock or whatever that makes you swear. You could theoreticly go all Ned Flenders and shout out dudili gudili you'd just have to program your brain to do so in that typ of situation.

How old were you when you learned Serbo-Croatian? If everybody swears in it, I would suggest that it's not so much that they're swearing in another language, it's that Slovenian has simply imported Serbo-Croatian vocab to meet a language need.If I go into McDonald's and order a hamburger, I'm hardly speaking German.

Without having watched Firefly, form your description isn't the idea that the Chinese became some sort of dominant culture, and so their swearwords have been imported into the English-speakers vocabulary - just like Serbo-Croat swearwords in Slovenian and English swearwords in Dutch (they do use them naturally at times of shock, I can assure you of that, but it's also true that they're considered less offensive than native swearwords. So reality TV with some guy shouting 'Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!' after stubbing his toe is perfectly acceptable to broadcast at two in the afternoon).ABE: and, to reiterate, you're completely wrong. I know many non-native speakers of English who still swear in English in situations of pain and shock.Edited by caffeine, : No reason given.

But the only evidence of its dominance is the swearing? Like I've been saying - it's just not thought-through.

Um so ??The same could have happened 500 years in the future english could have been purged of swear words because of some religius crusade, and after a while they imported chinese swear words.

Maybe, but that's not what they say happened. And the setting doesn't support Chinese cultural supremacy, or give even a single example of it except for the convenient "we swear in Chinese now" dialogue, which allows the characters to curse - in swear words that aren't actually authentic Chinese profanity, it's just "ching chong ching" Chinese babble - but evade rules against profanity in TV shows.It's lazy worldbuilding. It's like having a fantasy world where you can have anyone learn magic by attending a university, and everybody knows you can learn magic by attending a university, but everybody in the background continues to live like they're in medieval Europe. It's about not thinking through the sociological consequences of what you've posited about your society.

Well the "companions" in this world do resemble geisha's so another theme that would point to Chinese dominance, oh and the ship alarm says the alarm in English and Chinese.

This off topic divergence seems the perfect opportunity to close this thread. Please go over to Humour VII for more funny.