It is surprisingly disorienting to try and paste up a strip that looks like this. I have to crop borders I don’t usually crop! Everything is topsy-turvy! Basically, it is hard to be me.
As a kid I was sort of precocious in my active, early annoyance by how zero-grav was dealt with in older pop culture. The way people would just sort of bob, upright and in place, the way stuff just sort of behaved other than floating a little bit, etc. I could make a laundry list of specific offenses, but the thesis is simple: people who were involving zero-G in a production but who lacked the interest and/or the budget to simulate it accurately tended to simulate it inaccurately! This offended young me an awful lot.
But artificial gravity is its own set of problems. And I’m disappointed we never seem to get to see just boring old pedestrian outages in sci-fi; sure, there’s zero-G sequences in some shows and movies, but those are always set pieces, not random annoying daily-life disruptions. You’d need a whole skillset for dealing with unexpected floating in assumed-weightful contexts, I’d love to see that borne out by a smart TV writer. But we’ve previously established that I’d also like to see more toilets, so I think the takeaway here is that I am not really anybody’s target demographic.
But also! When you have an artificial gravity, there’s gotta be a whole process for turning that shit back on, right? You can’t just be like “welp, got that fixed, everybody enjoy your falling-related injuries!” Maybe you stage it on over a few minutes, first with a couple minutes of 0.05 and then rolling up evenly from nil to nominal gravity so everyone and everything gets a chance to have a nice slow drift to the floor before things get back to normal?
via #80 – the unbearable lightness of being a photon torpedo
