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Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

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Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#391

Post by Gormo »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #376
Gormo wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not seeing anything anachronistic about either term. "Seasons" is absolutely aligned to the way television series are still produced and distributed. "Box Set" implies physical media. Using the latter term to refer to something else sounds like a case of false advertising.

With the advent of digital music, "record album" morphed from referring to the physical medium, to referring to the recording that would be put on it. I think something similar is happening for "box set".

Not sure I'd agree. "Record album" never specifically referred to anything physical, and just means "collection of recordings", regardless of what medium is used for them.

The term "album" by itself did originally refer to something physical -- a collection of photos bound into a book by a glue made from egg whites ("albumen") -- but the semantic shift to "album" meaning any kind of collection offered as a single unit happened well before "record albums" were a thing.

But the term "box set" has not experienced a comparable semantic shift, and still implies the presence of an actual box.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#392

Post by ghtbircshotbe »

canucker2016 wrote: post #368
haspok wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ruined by the 3% that that they got wildly wrong. Please tell us about it! I always thought it's more of a 50-50 (it's an American series anyway), but I was only a kid back then, so I would be very interested to hear your complaints!

Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents. So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip. Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an…

I don't really understand the first episode. The idea as far as I can tell is that it's illegal to use employees who reverse engineered the BIOS to clone the BIOS, but it's legal to hire someone new, who presumably is also going to have to reverse engineer the BIOS in order to clone it.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#393

Post by anon84873628 »

b112 wrote: post #342
paulryanrogers wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I kind of love it when movies/TV don't follow the books too closely. It means more content in a world I enjoy without repeating too much.

I generally agree, and also that it's impossible to take a book to video without change. I tend to try to think of it like this, imagine Bob and Jim watched a battle scene, but one from the west, the other from the east side. Bob wrote the book, Jim the movie. Naturally, although it was the same battle, they'll have seen different things up close, and have different views on the battle overall. Having said that... It…

My problem is that the show essentially "says" the opposite of the novels.

For compelling TV you need recurring characters for the audience to become invested in. But the whole point of Foundation was that the individuals don't matter (mostly).

The show had to jump through all these hoops to keep the same actors around and make them heroes. And it expanded/emphasized the metaphysical element in a way that undermined the psychohistory. And IMO makes/will make (honestly don't know where they're at now) the series ending reveal far less interesting and thought provoking.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#394

Post by seplox »

ghtbircshotbe wrote: post #392
canucker2016 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the original poster, but when I was re-watching the series I also checked the reddit postings for each episode I watched. One of the comments for the first episode mentioned how laborious they made the act of dumping the IBM PC BIOS contents. So in the first episode, Gordon Clark, the HW guy (played by Scoot McNairy) had to dump the contents of the IBM PC BIOS from the ROM chip. Gordon extracts the BIOS chip (an…

I don't really understand the first episode. The idea as far as I can tell is that it's illegal to use employees who reverse engineered the BIOS to clone the BIOS, but it's legal to hire someone new, who presumably is also going to have to reverse engineer the BIOS in order to clone it.

The idea is that specifications are not copyrightable, but implementations are. So, the first team reverse engineers the work and writes a spec for the second team to work from. That way, you guarantee that the second implementation is free of copyrighted code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean-room_design

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#395

Post by sebastos »

jjk166 wrote: post #333
seneca wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The guy gives me chills, he reminds me of every sales douche who has ever tried to pull the wool over my eyes, or sell a customer something so horrendous and undeliverable as to be actively business ending. The thing is, Joe is supposed to actually have substance and vision. He's not faking it. The difference is that all those sales guys are pretending to be someone like Joe.

No, Joe wants to have substance and vision. The tragedy of his character is his slow realization that he just doesn't have it. Indeed it's the tragedy of all the main cast that each has some of what it takes to make something truly revolutionary, but they lack some key aspect. They each know that another has the missing piece they need, but they can't sustainably maintain a relationship with them.

Great take.

There's a line in the first season that runs as an undercurrent through the whole show ("Computers aren't the thing. They're the thing that gets you to the thing"). Joe originally says this to make the viewer think about technology, evoking the dawn of the personal computer and subsequently the internet. But later on, you're invited to re-interpret that statement as being about people: computers and technology were the thing that got the main characters to work together. It's the -people- that are the thing.

Part of what makes the show so good is that it's one of the few renditions in TV / movies of the joy of engineering something, and the constant tension that comes from working with great people. Great people inspire you, but they also challenge you. The show does a great job of portraying realistic conflicts that arise between different personality types and roles, as well as cleverly exposing the limitations of those personalities. With just Gordon, you'll get a stable and well engineered product but it won't be revolutionary. Joe has the vision but he can't actually _do_ the substantive part. Cameron has great substance and technical ability, but she's impractical and inflexible. Donna is responsible, effective, and clear-eyed - but unchecked, purely rational decisions erode the soul of a company into nothing. These differences frustrate our characters, and yet there can be no success without them.

I think many of us spend our whole careers chasing those rare moments where the right people are in the room solving problems, butting heads, but ultimately doing things they could never do all by themselves.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#397

Post by mikestorrent »

dakolli wrote: post #149
mikestorrent wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting how this thread has people saying they love the acting and people saying they hate it. I can't say as I found the acting itself to be amazing outside of a few scenes, but I never found it cringe enough to not want to see more. It'd be cool to understand more about what triggers this differently for different folks. A related thing I find difficult to watch is when characters are in impending danger too of…

It might be more of an issue with the story telling than the actors performance themselves. For instance the changes in Joe and Gordon's characters was confusing. Gordon goes from being shy nerd to reckless coke addict, like huh.. Joe kinda becomes a new age softy. The hacker house vibes were off, a bunch of 20-30 year old playing tag and having nerf gun wars.. okay, I guess. Its just very hard to suspend belief and…

I used to have big Nerf wars in an open plan office about a decade ago... it was real

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#398

Post by billbrown »

nobleach wrote: post #300
raffael_de wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have Lee Pace on the radar since Singh's The Fall. Your assessment of movie magic is only partially correct. Obviously, a character has to be convincing by himself but the heavy lifting of the illusion is done by the peer characters acting as if they believe the role he plays. "The king is always played by the others" Not sure who is to credit for this quote but in my opinion it is one of the most important insight…

Even though Pushing Daisies ended too abruptly, I thought he was GREAT in that series as well.

Check out Wonderfalls, his first series.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#399

Post by TurdF3rguson »

fugalfervor wrote: post #382
TurdF3rguson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main character suffers from DID. From trauma that happened when he was little. Maybe you didn't watch the whole thing, that seems pretty "human drama"-ey to me.

That's not human drama. That's a sensationalized depiction of a really rare disorder that 99% of the audience has no experience with and cannot relate directly to.

Of course that's human drama, the entire show is drama. Even the "spy thriller" subplot is motivated by death of Whiterose's partner and the need to put the world back the way it was.

Re: Halt and Catch Fire: TV’s best drama you’ve probably never heard of (2021)

#400

Post by EarlKing »

tptacek wrote: post #24
IBCNU wrote: post #2

And as I understand it loosely based on the fantastic and seminal book Soul of a New Machine. I had a great EM once who said I need to read it because nothing has changed in 40 years, and I keep a copy on my desk. Touching as well, as it's on Joe MacMillan's desk in the final scene of third season. What's so great about it is: - mushroom theory of management works - trust new graduates and juniors to win by not under…

Season 1 is Soul of a New Machine-ish, but about personal computing, not minicomputers, and is set in Texas. Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and Compuserve, and still in Texas. Season 3 is about the early commercial Internet, same characters, SFBA. Season 4 is about the Yahoo era of the Internet and about venture capital, also SFBA.

Correction: Season 2 is roughly about BBSs and QuantumLink (insofar as Mutiny is QuantumLink, anyway). Season 3 can be roughly summarized as "LOL, Norton".
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