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Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

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Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#141

Post by scandox »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #36

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a robot suit to ride around and fight things with." I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening. She was very innovative. Maybe…

She made free indirect speech [1] the cornerstone of the English language novel. She is recognized as a titanic figure. I don't know who would underrate her!

What I find strange is that people enjoy her books as romantic comedies because the world she represents is incredibly claustrophobic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech

Edited for clarification

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#142

Post by altairprime »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #107
altairprime wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how in Disney movies they shift smoothly from talking to singing? It’s just like that, only instead of the bass beat to the character’s song starting to play, her ‘prose’ (think ‘non-poetry words’, aka what most people consider books to be full of) shifts smoothly into Shakespeare-like syllable emphasis patterns. Listen for the percussion notes starting about ten seconds into https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM and…

This is a great example, and not odd as an analogy at all. It surfaces something subtle. Language architecture is really interesting, I think, for programmers who have bought into the LLM hype in any meaningful way. It's an important field to have a sense of. Tokenizers, for example, generally have multi-syllabic tokens as their base-level, indivisible unit. You rarely see this mentioned when LLM capability against n…

The Judoon have such a lovely language, though!

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#143

Post by 6P58r3MXJSLi »

just the same as Jane Austen is one hell of a statement.

Gundam actual influences are well known, Tomino himself talked about it, more than one time. Gundam was inspired by WWII stories, but the direct source of inspiration is Gerard O’Neill’s “The High Frontier”, in which there is depicted the O'Neil Cylinder, whose design has been literally copied verbatim for Gundam's space stations/colonies.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#144

Post by jacobjwalters »

Frotag wrote: post #84
jerf wrote: post #6

In the end, almost everything has a soap opera in it somewhere. People have a hard time processing stories that don't have a soap opera in them somewhere. For some people it's just impossible. There's really only a minority of people who are interested in stories that have no personal relationship stories in them at all. That's not to say that the parts that aren't soap opera aren't meaningfully different. I disagree…

I think a lot of character-centered conflicts boil down to the same set of problems, regardless of the setting. For instance, you often see "keep the status quo and die a slow death" vs "expensive, risky gamble". Sometimes the setting is a small midwest town, sometimes it's a spaceship on the way to Beta Virginis. Sometimes the solution is actually unique to the setting but often it's just "find a compromise, prevent…

The Expanse (both a recently completed book series and a cancelled yet mostly complete TV adaptation) is pretty good at this; it sets up a world with complex political dynamics, and lets things mostly evolve as a result of those dynamics, with the main characters largely just along for the ride. It takes the science parts super seriously too: ships have to worry about acceleration and debris fields during battle, communications have to account for the speed of light, that sort of thing. There's only the occasional injection of new technologies to push things forward about once per book/season.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#145

Post by regularfry »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #107
altairprime wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how in Disney movies they shift smoothly from talking to singing? It’s just like that, only instead of the bass beat to the character’s song starting to play, her ‘prose’ (think ‘non-poetry words’, aka what most people consider books to be full of) shifts smoothly into Shakespeare-like syllable emphasis patterns. Listen for the percussion notes starting about ten seconds into https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM and…

This is a great example, and not odd as an analogy at all. It surfaces something subtle. Language architecture is really interesting, I think, for programmers who have bought into the LLM hype in any meaningful way. It's an important field to have a sense of. Tokenizers, for example, generally have multi-syllabic tokens as their base-level, indivisible unit. You rarely see this mentioned when LLM capability against n…

The AI generated front page of HN posted yesterday had some generated comments in at least one of the threads that scanned and rhymed. It's clearly there in whatever model that was, and while it might just have been a confluence of having seen a specific word pair a certain distance apart in the learning data to account for the rhyming, I'm having a hard time explaining away the construction of a coherent meter.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#146

Post by beng-nl »

altairprime wrote: post #103
ifh-hn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not well read, and don't think I'd be able to finish any of the classics. As such I have no clue what "slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter" means. I came here for the robots.

You know how in Disney movies they shift smoothly from talking to singing? It’s just like that, only instead of the bass beat to the character’s song starting to play, her ‘prose’ (think ‘non-poetry words’, aka what most people consider books to be full of) shifts smoothly into Shakespeare-like syllable emphasis patterns. Listen for the percussion notes starting about ten seconds into https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM and…

Your desire to share knowledge and the pleasure of what you’re describing really shows; thank you for using your time so generously.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#148

Post by rsynnott »

skybrian wrote: post #89

When reading Jane Austen you learn a fair bit about the English upper classes of that time period. What do you learn from Gundam?

Learning stuff is a weird primary motivator to read fiction.

(I’m not sure you learn as much as you think; I mean some context leaks through but Austin’s characters aren’t necessarily _that_ archetypical. If you want that you might be better with a social history.)

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#149

Post by jpfromlondon »

eszed wrote: post #116
altairprime wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know how in Disney movies they shift smoothly from talking to singing? It’s just like that, only instead of the bass beat to the character’s song starting to play, her ‘prose’ (think ‘non-poetry words’, aka what most people consider books to be full of) shifts smoothly into Shakespeare-like syllable emphasis patterns. Listen for the percussion notes starting about ten seconds into https://youtu.be/79DijItQXMM and…

English major here, and your post is great . It's not complete, of course, but you've hit everything a beginner needs to know to get over the first hump of understanding, in a way that "expert" knowledge sometimes gets in the way of communicating. I doubt the reply I was writing in my head would have been better, and probably would have been worse, so thank you for jumping in. But (because I have to go there - and I…

>prosy

prosaic.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#150

Post by dghf »

jpm_sd wrote: post #43

Patrick O'Brian (author of the Aubrey/Maturin series) was a huge Austen fan and intentionally modeled his writing style after hers. Post Captain (book 2) is the most explicit homage, with a number of character names borrowed from Austen's work.

The early books in particular are Austen with sailing, swearing, and sex.
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