Saturday and Tuesday and Tuesday

[jack]

Last Saturday, I cooked dinner and had sonic, mobbsy, martin, owen, mcg, alex and rob over and to watch Tron. Thank you for coming, it was fun! I was pleasantly surprised everyone got on well. Though I think a couple of people were a bit annoyed at a sudden Poohsoc critical mass :( And Alex was reading from a different page from everyone else as to why anyone would want to watch Tron at all, but I think we all enjoyed that. I lent him a stack of books to turn him into a proper scifi geek.

Tron is good. No, it doesn't make sense factually, but most of it feel right, and looks good.

For the record, apparently red/blue used to be blue/yellow, which is why the lightcycles and a few other other things are confusingly coloured.

For the record, no you *can't* digitise someone like that. Nor do the trials and tribulations exactly make sense from a programmatic perspective.

However, can anyone explain why Flynn goes red when he attacks that guard? Do you think it's just representative of stealing his uniform?

When I first saw it I was very puzzled why this happened (No, not not as a programmer, but just as Joe Average). Does it mean something? Is it just a random effect of the physics?

Comments

[simont]

I was given the novelisation of Tron as a present a couple of years ago. Like most film novelisations, it won't be winning any literature prizes, but like quite a few of them it has some interesting insights into what was actually going on which couldn't conveniently be expressed through the medium of film. (It is of course possible that those insights were made up by the novelising author, but since the novelisation also includes some deleted scenes which I recently discovered really were filmed, I'm inclined to assume for the moment that it does bear some relation to the original author's intent.)

According to that, Flynn does deliberately steal the guard's "uniform", and IIRC he's unpleasantly surprised when the guard de-rezzes as a result. When he changes back later, on the solar sailer, that's deliberate as well.

The thing that always amuses me about Tron is that its central message is so anti-corporate. Not what you'd expect from a Disney offering!

[simont]

(I don't quite RC, as it turns out: in the book he isn't surprised when the guard de-rezzes as a result of his uniform-theft, and doesn't waste any sympathy on him. It's only in the film that he looks a bit perturbed. But everything else I said here was accurate.)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

I had presumed he looked perturbed because he was turning red. Either way, thank you, that makes as much sense as I suppose I'll get.

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

However, can anyone explain why Flynn goes red when he attacks that guard?

It's an online multiplayer environment. He's obviously just unwittingly flagged himself as open to player-vs-player combat ;)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

OK..... That fits, the evil guys are all red, the blue guys only ever kill red guys (more or less). But then how does he go *blue*?

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

I think it's common for PvP flags to wear off after a period of non-PvP activity.

Of course, I'm making all this up. Mr T's suggestion sounds reasonable.

[saraphale.livejournal.com]

Except the bits about Player-vs-player, which I'm not making up. I wish I thought of these things half a second before clicking submit, instead of after

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

ROFL. It's ok. I wasn't taking it very seriously, and did know what pvp is.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Do you always call him Mr. T?

But that's not quite it, because it wears off exactly when he falls off the ship and Tron catches him, so it's either something to do with death, or to do with contact. That could sort of make sense -- maybe vouching by a never-red player could redeem a red player? :)

[robhu.livejournal.com]

Thank you for having me over [Bad username or site: cartesiandaemon' / @ livejournal.com] ! I'm not a very expressive person in real life, but I was very happy about being there :-)

I think Flynn was stealing the guard's uniform. I can't remember whether he then sneaks around at all? Is the next scene when he meets Yori? Probably not.

There are no users

[ravingglory.livejournal.com]

Yeah, maybe dragging Alex along wasn't the greatest idea. He did seem a bit out of place. I selfishly didn't want to take the bus in the dark by myself. (Though in retrospect I would have gotten there faster in the end had I done so)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Well, it might or might not have been, but I didn't think it was a problem really. I often invite anyone who might like to come, and if so, you're always hoping it's fun and having a risk that you'll end up with people who just don't fit in with each other. You'd have to ask him whether he enjoyed it or not, but I thought he did -- you have to start somewhere, you should see Tron, and asking people to explain what's going on is a perfectly natural form of communication.

I still have no good solution to transport into NE Cambridge :)

[sonicdrift.livejournal.com]

Which Martin? I don't remember a Martin. Was he hiding under the sofa being evil or something :)

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

Doh! Sorry, force of habit. I *invited* Martin, and he said he might come, and there were evil comments on the night, so it would be just the same whether he was there or not. (Hi Martin, if you're reading! Sorry, just kidding. It was fun, I hope you come next time.)

PS. Sorry for wibbling this morning, I was trying to schedule lots of things in my head :)