The Leviathan (SF Short Film)

So, there's this vaguely science-fictional short going around the Interwebs, entitled The Leviathan.

The Leviathan -- Teaser from Ruairi Robinson on Vimeo.

Truly, the CGI is epic. Other reviews are mixed; lots of people are very impressed with the quality of the rendering, although there's always that one snob who has to find something to criticize.

But I was overall, unimpressed. Epic CGI is no longer an interesting showcase in its own right; the story has to have some meaning.

The visuals around the crew are pretty good; the "actual work in space is hard work, done by the space-suited equivalent of chainhands" theme is well-illustrated, although nothing in the trailer emphasized the "involuntary" nature of the job; that also seems an unlikely handwave, as I can imagine a future where a *lot* of daredevil professionals would seek out a high-risk, high-reward job like that. (Harvesting the core component of an FTL engine would be a hella high-reward job.)

But the setting is terribly confused. Are they in a nebula? Are they above a gas giant? Why do men walk around the open bay of that larger recovery vehicle? Why isn't it enclosed? The setting has to be Jupiter or Saturn; they're clearly in a dense, gaseous place; they can't get FTL without the eggs, they can't get the eggs without FTL, so their first harvests had to be Jovian. If that's so, then a simple space suit isn't enough for the caustic, radioactive environs of even "upper" Jupiter. Don't these people have radar or sonar or some kind of "cloud penetrating" technology, even of the passive variety, that would let them track such a beast's wake through the dense, heavy cover? They have cheap and effective gravitics, which means they haven't talked to a hard science fiction writer about the consequences of cheap and effective gravitics.

All in all, I'll pay more attention to see if there's a good story being told here, but so far I'm not seeing enough thought put into the context implied by the trailer to convince me.

What A Bunch of Greybeards, And That's A Good Thing...

My first impression was , “What a fucking bunch of greybeards.”

I went to Beerly Functional, a get-together of down-in-the-trenches programmers who were either using or interested in using Functional Programming, and my first impression upon walking into the room was exactly that: What a bunch of fucking greybeards, myself included.

And yet, as I paid attention to what was being said, the reason why we were all there became more and more apparent. We were tired of dealing with lousy development cycles. The biggest promises of Functional Programming are that it narrows the gap, both temporally and spatially, between where you create the bug and where it manifests. Functional programming emerges from the needs of lifelong programmers to stop fucking around with code-run-debug cycles; they want to produce excellent code the first time; they’re willing to adopt strong constraints on shoddy thinking and poor code in order to avoid that. They want to make software that gives a damn. They want to make software that they are comfortable saying, “This cannot fail.” They value quality and correctness, whereas most business people… don’t know how to assess that question, and they see the rapidity and widespread availability of developers in the shoddy languages like PHP and Javascript as signs of those language’s legitimacy.

So we raised a glass together, and we took on our missions: to teach each other what we knew, to get better at our craft, and to sell it to businesspeople who need to know there’s a better, faster way to get quality code in front of consumers.  We were greybeards; lifelong programmers who, whether we’d made our millions or not, wanted to keep making great code, not graduate into management and executive by 30.   We wanted to be the best.  And we knew the tools were within our grasp.