ryanm

I think we're all missing the biggest scientific innaccuracy: where do the poops go when you flush the toilet in a vacuum-isolated levitating cube?

Neal Stephenson's Anathem would be a good choice for anyone hungry for more polycosmic fiction.

The robots gifted it in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it scene

Looks like they're mixing elements from multiple books again - the satellites and meeting himself from the third, the flying-back-to-your-hands guns from the second. Bit baffled by the opening "I was on the colony ship before stacks were invented" line though. In the books it's the invention of stacks that allows colonisation - there's no warp drive so physical travel between worlds takes multiple lifetimes. Colony ships carried a load of stored personalities and the means to manufacture bodies for them upon arrival, and were a one-time thing - there is no ongoing transport of physical items between worlds. Seems like an odd change to make - a trivial detail that makes the setting just a bit less interesting.

I'm not saying it wasn't justified by the plot, just that the surface-level optics of the scene would have it left on the writer's room floor were it being scripted today.

The bit where perfect aryan ubermensch Pitt busts out a heavily-accented Jamaican patois to speak to a black lady also raised an eyebrow.

Meet Joe Black was on over the weekend, and Claire Forlani's seduction of Brad Pitt struck me as highly questionable. Pitt's character spends the entire film gazing about in wonderment, having no comprehension of social cues and spooning peanut butter out of jars - Forlani's character has to assume that he's suffering from some developmental problem that impacts on his ability to meaningfully consent to sex, yet she kisses him with very little warning (Pitt's character freezes up at this point) undresses him (he continues to be completely passive) and then, to a rousing orchestral score, rides him like Seabiscuit. A gender-swapped version of this scene paints a problematic picture.

I think punching is heavily incentivised: you get full shields, a reload, and 200 points, but it has to be a full-on power swing - no love-taps.

This is pretty damn good - strong visual design and well-pitched difficulty levels. Turning off the autoaim separates the marksmen from the marksboys, and it turns out I am no marksman.

https://chiefobrienatwork.com/

I'd be super-interested if someone clever could calculate the required acceleration to take you to Neptune (with one planned stop at Mars and one unplanned stop before mars) in the timescales depicted in the film. I suspect the trip would involve being smashed against the rear bulkhead for the entire duration rather than floating about.

The Beat Saber mod scene has taken the next logical step: you can now mod the beatsaber app so that it tracks are loaded from shared storage. The upshot is that you can now add custom tracks directly on the quest (via, for some reason, a channel in Oculus TV), with no PC required after the initial mod application. Mod application (via sidequest) is pretty easy. Sidequest also allows you to sideload Tea for God, which offers a really interesting experience of wandering an infinite maze contained entirely within your playing boundary.

The packaging is very high quality, eminently reusable for long-term storage.