unforum

[Jinja87]

[UPDATE] Scarlett Kite - June 30th - An article of mine

[RobPal]

This could possibly be the most informative entry Scarlett has ever blogged! A nice little map of A. Point that could prove very useful in the future of the game.

Finally she comes through

[Seej]

It might be more helpful in terms of narrowing down where The Advisor lives if she'd said which floors the Arboretum and bakery are on. She mentions the location of everything other than the landmarks we want the location of!

[Daffy889]

[ariadne_ac]

[Daffy889]

I assumed that Absalom and Tavent were the names of characters in the story.

Also, the theatrical performance of the show was reviewed in the Sentinel earlier in the year. Doesn't give us much insight into what the show is about, though.

[Leeravitz]

The actual *film* it puts me in mind of is the infamous (to some folks) 'Samson and Delilah', which is generally considered to be one of the cheesiest films placed on celluloid (you know, 'Plan 9 from Outer Space' territory) - so bad it's good (if you like that sort of thing). I can't remember when that was filmed exactly, but it would have been the late '50's, I think...which was why the comparison suggested itself in the first place...

But I agree - if something along those lines was in the writer's mind when they were coming up with the reference, then it sounds like a slip - up. A film made in '59 on earth might be a bona fide classic by now (say, a Hitchcock) but in Perplexian terms it really is only a few years ago. And, you know, you might be able to say that Casablanca is a 'classic' but would you say the same thing about The Usual Suspects. Maybe it's a valid use of terminology, but I agree, it's a little bit odd...

[Axys Denyed]

[Leeravitz]

Actually, just reading the blog back, the *real* sticking point is not so much that Scarlett mentions a 'classic cast' - I mean the 'classic' version of Star Wars is hardly *that* ancient, for example, but that she explicitly refers to the screens showing 'classic' rather than 'modern' movies. That appears to imply that these movies can't have been made particularly recently, even taking a fairly wide definition of 'classic' - surely anything in the last decade - 15 years is pretty 'modern'.

We have no problem hypothesising that Perplexian movie making may have existed for longer than it has done in our world - after all, their tech. may have been capable of creating pictures well before ours was...but '59 is by no stretch of the imagination a long time ago. Unless it stands for 159, of course! (I'm assuming it's not 59, as then there'd be no need for abbreviation!).

[Daffy889]

Actually, looking back at the timeline, it could be 159. The good old S. Marchant quote from 148 says "I shall not put stock in images lit up before me", suggesting some form of projected image (since a photograph wouldn't be 'lit up') was available at the time. Maybe that was a reference to the early film industry in PPC?

Of course, that leads to the question of why the year has been abbreviated, since this is usually only done to dates within the last 100 years to avoid confusion.

[Mosestrotsky]

One option I was thinking and I am sure a few others that if Scarlett gets to do this as a regular feature then perhaps we can make suggestions for locations?

If so where would folks want to look up next?

Old Town?
Newguard Ruins?
Mobius Strip?

[kayellehear]

That would be great but for the moment and for next few articles she's definitely sticking to places of interest in A.Point:

[Jaeneas office]

I assumed that 'Absalom and Tavent' was originally a Perplexian version of a Shakespearian play and that the 'classic' film version would be one of several films made of the play.

Much like 'Henry V', the classic film version being the Laurence Olivier 1944 and the not so classic being the Kenneth Branagh 1989. 'Classic' not implying that the 1944 version is necessarily better, just older.

So do Perplexians watch films of real people or are they animations? After all the only photograph of a real face is in the Ceretin ad which sometimes appears on the Sentinel web pages. All other references are drawn. Did something happen which put them off realistic representations of themselves? Or did they just get lots of crayons for Christmas?

Ta Ra

[Leeravitz]

In - game, they've made it sound like using line drawings is a bit of a current fad, because photography is aesthetically old - hat in Perplex City.

Out - of - game, I guess it depends. You might be positive about it and say that it gives the View from Earth writers a nice reward for their hard work; that it makes the Perplexian websites stand out when all around them on the web tends to be high - tech, digitalised and (perhaps for this reason) somewhat soulless; that it gives more 'character' to the imagined world than it might otherwise have.

Or you put on your cynical hat and declare that MC need to give their artist - in - residence something to do on a regular basis...

Take your pick...

[BrianEnigma]