Greetings to the old bladerunners of alt.fan.blade-runner!

[jorgemor...@gmail.com]

I just rediscovered the group (didn't know it was still active!) and did some searches with my name. It's been a lot of fun re-reading old discussions!!

I'm currently quite unhooked from the topic. I haven't seen the film in YEARS, and of course, I've refused to watch 'Blade Runner 2049', because I think Dennis Villeneuve has desecrated a masterpiece in every way... starting by putting Harrison Ford in the story with a shoehorn, and thus ruining the wonderful and subtle aspects of the original story. I think this director really misunderstood Blade Runner.. I know he has done a good job with the visuals, but the story has always been the main value of a movie for me, and nothing of BR2049's attracts my curiosity. I have preferred to keep my mind decontaminated...

When I'm ready, I'll see Blade Runner again, the ONE AND ONLY.

Finally, greetings to Lukas Mariman, Lebrainboy, Elfblade, Netrunner, Nicklas Ingels, POD, Evil Sponge, Dennis Lodewijks, Ubik, Mellorman, StainlessSteelRat, czf, Dan Ryan... and all the old bladerunners who I can't remember now but once argued with me in this now legendary cyberspace.

Very special greetings! :-)

WEKurtz--------

[Ubik]

Hi WEKurtz, long time no see! I wouldn’t be able to abstain from seeing 2049 :)
In sadder news, I need to tell you that... When I found this out it hit me like a train. Netrunner and Lukas are not with us anymore. They have died some years ago before 2049 came out 😭😭😭

[Bernie Dwyer]

On Tuesday, 10 December 2019 10:21:20 UTC+10, Ubik wrote:
> Hi WEKurtz, long time no see! I wouldn’t be able to abstain from seeing 2049 :)
> In sadder news, I need to tell you that... When I found this out it hit me like a train. Netrunner and Lukas are not with us anymore. They have died some years ago before 2049 came out 😭😭😭

Wow. I check out this group for the first time in YEARS, and it's another bloody roll call :-)

So. Much. SPAM!!!!!!

P.S. where did you hear about Netrunner and LM?

[jorgemor...@gmail.com]

Ubik wrote:
> > Hi WEKurtz, long time no see! I wouldn’t be able to abstain from seeing 2049 :)
> > In sadder news, I need to tell you that... When I found this out it hit me like a train. Netrunner and Lukas are not with us anymore. They have died some years ago before 2049 came out 😭😭😭

God! I'm sorry to hear that, Ubik... Those interesting discussions would never have been the same without them. I'll bet they were the two most active members of the group. I'm in shock... :(

And speaking of old bladerunners, how are you? Must I deduce from your quick response that you are still an inconditional fan of everything related to Blade Runner? Still publishing here? Have you never had enough Blade Runner in all these years? And more importantly, what do you think of BR2049? I still haven't know of anyone who was convinced by the movie, beyond the excellent graphics and the SFX... :-)

P.S.: Were you a deck-a-rep'er? :-))))

Best regards!

> Wow. I check out this group for the first time in YEARS, and it's another bloody roll call :-)

Haha, maybe...

> So. Much. SPAM!!!!!!

Certainly, as I can see... And of the worst kind! :/

> P.S. where did you hear about Netrunner and LM?

I subscribe that. How did you know about their deaths, Ubik?

[john...@gmail.com]

Haha Bernie, it wouldn’t be afbr without a regular roll call :)
I’ve lost touch with this group for a few years and then I wanted to come back, only it seemed that almost no one was here anymore, people moved on Facebook, group called alt.fan.blade-runner. It’s there where I’ve read this post by David Spiro (he is quoting someone name Peter):

“Thursday, January 28 2016,

Dear friends of Lukas Mariman,
(note: I knew Lukas from the period I lived around the corner from his home)

Lukas was transferred to the local University hospital
last Monday, January 25, 2016, after suffering from liver issues.

I had last talked to Lukas about a month ago, over a landline hospital phone
while he was in a local hospital. He sounded upbeat and just fine,
explaining his liver values still needed to get better.

I tried to call his cell yesterday, but it went straight to voicemail.

Lukas unexpectedly died from sudden and severe complications last night at UZA hospital,
Thursday January 28 2016.

I would like to extend my heartfelt condolences to his family and to all those who
loved the truly wonderful man Lukas was.

Peter”

Before that, Rob Mellor posted on March 28, 2014 about Netrunner:

“Sad news for anyone who remembers Netrunner from the ng.
https://thepetersonchapel.com/david-andrew-caldwell/“

Lukas commented on this post saying “ I found out a few days ago,, when Richard told me. I had noticed his profile had disappeared.”

Needless to say, I was devastated. How the f*k is this possible, they were in their 40s-50s!!! Reminds me of Roy dying of the age of 5 :(

[Bernie Dwyer]

On Wednesday, 11 December 2019 01:56:33 UTC+10, john...@gmail.com wrote:
> Haha Bernie, it wouldn’t be afbr without a regular roll call :)
> I’ve lost touch with this group for a few years and then I wanted to come back, only it seemed that almost no one was here anymore, people moved on Facebook, group called alt.fan.blade-runner. It’s there where I’ve read this post by David Spiro (he is quoting someone name Peter):

<snip>

That would explain a lot. I've managed to largely avoid facebook and other "social media".

I mostly enjoyed BR2049, but for two problems: 1. It took too long to tell its story - some scenes could have been trimmed or cut entirely without affecting the story. 2. too loud. That might have been the fault of the cinema, but some of the loud bass notes were too much for the cinema's sub-woofers, and they were over-driven and "cracking". The audio levels in other parts were OK, so I suspect the audio mix was to blame.

I've got a fan-edit project slowly ticking away, if I ever finish it, I'll post a notification here.

[john...@gmail.com]

Hi again WEKurtz,
Yeah, lot of memories of discussions with Netrunner and Lukas. Netrunner especially had a lot of patience with my deck-a-rep stance, but Lukas always came to my help :) Still am on the rep side, can’t really ignore the clues, hahaha.

I remember one time Netrunner (I can’t bring myself to call him David, LOL) posted a message saying that he’s opening the encyclopedia part of brmovie to anyone who wants to help, to do something different with it, revamp it, whatever. I said I’ll do it then time passed and I forgot about it. After I found out he died, I kept my promise though, there an app on the iOS App Store hosting the encyclopedia. Too bad I only did it after he wasn’t able to see it done anymore.

Thanks for asking, I’m well (although I too had my some close encounters with death; “what seems to be the problem? ; would you like to be modified?”, hah). Yeah, I still love BR, it will probably never leave my mind and my heart until I expire, but I’m not posting here anymore, I came back because I noticed you posted something.

I’m still watching BR around once a year, I’m afraid of overdoing it because it would be a terrible thing to get bored with it :)

I liked 2049, but not as much as 2019. The atmosphere not exactly the same, I don’t like the wiiiiiide open spaces, I hate the Wallace character, and the ending seemed flat, very flat. Other than that, I liked it. how come you haven’t seen it yet? and how have you been doing all these years?

[Ubik]

Wise decision to stay away from Facebook Bernie :)
2049 is long indeed, but I didn’t mind, the longer the better BRorgasm :)
What’s the project you’re working on, if it’s not too secret?

[Bernie Dwyer]

Hiya - when I tell people that I don't do social media, they get a puzzled look and ask "Why?". I tell them I've been in the IT industry almost my entire adult life, and I've learned to not trust things that get very popular very quickly. When I see all the news about user data being harvested and sold, I'm glad I don't participate.

The "project" is a fan-edit of BR2049 to see if I can get 20 or even 30 minutes off the run-time. I'm also fortunate that I'm a part-time digital cinema projectionist for a film society, so I've got access to a digital projector, big screen and 5.1 audio ;-)

cheers

Bernie

[Ubik]

Nice :)

[WEKurtz]

> Still am on the rep side, can’t really ignore the clues, hahaha.

Agree 100%. I always said that Deck-a-human people is people who don't want to see the proofs.

> I remember one time Netrunner (I can’t bring myself to call him David, LOL) posted a message saying that he’s opening the encyclopedia part of brmovie to anyone who wants to help, to do something different with it, revamp it, whatever. I said I’ll do it then time passed and I forgot about it. After I found out he died, I kept my promise though, there an app on the iOS App Store hosting the encyclopedia. Too bad I only did it after he wasn’t able to see it done anymore.

Noble gesture on your part! Maybe he know you kept your promise.

> Thanks for asking, I’m well (although I too had my some close encounters with death; “what seems to be the problem? ; would you like to be modified?”, hah). Yeah, I still love BR, it will probably never leave my mind and my heart until I expire, but I’m not posting here anymore, I came back because I noticed you posted something.

Thank you, my friend.
I neither intend to publish here again, but who knows, maybe when I watch Blade Runner again, my fever will come back and I'll feel the need to tell my thoughts to the world. :-)

> I’m still watching BR around once a year, I’m afraid of overdoing it because it would be a terrible thing to get bored with it :)

Haha, you are a cautious man, that's good. Personally, I would never get bored with Blade Runner, but one day I found myself searching among tens of thousands of bottles from collectors to find out what could be the one used in the movie for figuring as Tsing Tao... and then understood it was the moment to STOP that madness. :-))

> I liked 2049, but not as much as 2019. The atmosphere not exactly the same, I don’t like the wiiiiiide open spaces, I hate the Wallace character, and the ending seemed flat, very flat. Other than that, I liked it. how come you haven’t seen it yet? and how have you been doing all these years?

:-))) Willpower, pride and the experience acquired with other film sagas. Alien, for example, whose sequels I'd love to delete from my memory.

Ok, my friend. Stay on the line, take care and
HAVE A BETTER ONE.

See you!
WEKurtz---

[Ubik]

Thank you, you too!

[b.du...@gmail.com]

On Thursday, 12 December 2019 04:13:09 UTC+10, WEKurtz wrote:
> > Still am on the rep side, can’t really ignore the clues, hahaha.
>

Yeah, not going to get into that again. I've *just* had my 18-year-old daughter watch BR, 3 prologues, and BR2049 over the last 2 nights. I think she's hooked :-)

She said Deckard was "rapey" in the original, and it's hard to argue otherwise, in today's climate. I always thought he was being forceful to break her artificial emotional shell, but I can see how it doesn't resonate right with today's audience. Didn't put her off, she "got" the whole redemption thing at the end, so that's good.

As for me, I've ordered the 5 BR 2019 comics, and I'm keen to see the anime currently in production.

Did anyone see "Tears in the Rain" - the fan-produced prequel? Can recommend +1.

[Ubik]

Like father like daughter, glad to hear that man :)
I remember we and Netrunner talking about whether Deckard’s actions were or weren’t sexual aggression, and he was arguing that they weren’t that, because Deckard raises his hands trying to reassure Rachael that he doesn’t want to do her harm. But I thought Deckard was on the verge of sexual assault a bit. In retrospect, I find it ironic that Ford said he disliked the idea that Deck is a replicant because then the audience would have nobody to identify with, nobody to root for. But Deck was actually an antihero, why would anyone want to root for or identify with an antihero, a guy that yes, had redeeming qualities, but he was the “rapey” guy, a guy who shot a woman in the back, shot another unarmed woman, who was a drunk?

I want to get the comics too, I was looking for a way to order them from Canada but couldn’t find one at that time. And thanks for telling me about the Tears in Rain fan project, just watched it, was good, amazing considering it was fan made. Have you heard about Slice of Life?

[Neil Rieck]

This post is for people who have not visited my BR sites.

old: http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/links/blade_runner.html
new: http://neilrieck.net/links/blade_runner.html

Storage space was limited at the old shared hosting site (which has been running from 1997-2017) so I have decided to move things to a private location on the cloud. BTW, there are no advertisements of any kind and nothing is for sale.

Okay, with that out of the way let me say this: I have learned a huge amount about Blade Runner origins by carefully reading secondary and tertiary sources which include tattered dust jackets of the original hard cover editions. Some of the stuff is really creepy like this fact:

http://neilrieck.net/links/blade_runner.html#german

FACT: Philip K Dick was a brilliant writer who learned how to read/write/speak German beginning with his public school education in Los Angeles.

Add to this the fact that he consumed a huge amount of recreational drugs as an adult (this is from the book "Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick") which left him psychologically unbalanced. One account has him taking drugs just to be able to stay awake longer so he could publish more material (some pulp writers were being paid a penny a word so you just needed to crank out more stuff; and Dick did this with drugs).

Because he could read German, he was one of many academics allowed to read confiscated NAZI material stored in the private library at UCLA (he was originally looking for material for the book which would eventually be known as "The Man in the High Castle"). Some of this NAZI material included the diaries of SS officers which was/is shocking inhumane. It was while reading SS officer diaries that he concluded "these people have no empathy" which triggered the idea for the Voight-Kampf machine.

QUESTION: So what do we make of all this?
ANSWER: Just as the NAZIs cold-heartedly oppressed and killed fellow human beings, it would appear that the Replicants (called Andys in book #1) were created to be oppressed. Like all good science-fiction, this should be a chilling warning to the rest of us to work hard at being better toward each other (and all forms of life)

Think about that during the December holidays.

A secondary horror theme runs though this material: The original book is titled "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and this relates to the fact that humanity has destroyed Earth's ecology in such a way that only humans can live here. So people who could afford artificial animals, like sheep, do so.

Even in Ridley Scott's original movie, the Tyrell Corporation presents Deckard with an artificial owl.

"Is it artificial?" "Of course it is"
ps. what we hear is not the same as what is spoken; just read her lips

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://neilrieck.net

[RoyBoy]

Thanks so much for letting us know WEKurtz.

FYI all,

I should have the source files to the afbr roll call, can be seen on Archive here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20130813014817/http://home.cogeco.ca/~blade2019/ng/

Should we resurrect it somewhere and make some updates? I want to respect their privacy, but also acknowledge their passing if agreeable.

[RoyBoy]

Yeah, on Wikipedia it's a recurring edit war with those who insist on calling it sexual assault. Yes to assault given pushing her back to the blind, as you said holding the hands up shows he's done and intends no harm.

But the real key is what Rachael tries to say while trapped, at least according to original shooting script: "I can't rely on my memory to..."

Now Ridley's shot version cuts it down for time and/or ambiguity, still it clarifies her leaving attempt isn't with Deckard's actions or desires but Rachael's acute doubt of her feelings given manufactured memories. Rachael desires Deckard as well hence not sexual assault (made clear by trust affirmation later).

BR2049 makes a point of addressing this... albeit a little heavy-handedly IMO.

- RoyBoy

[b.du...@gmail.com]

You're right - some people just don't pay attention.

Anyway, I hope all* you BR fans are safe during this virus thingy.

I've a housemate recently returned from the USA - she's in 14 days home isolation. If she gets sick, then *I'm* in 14 days isolation. Right now, I can't visit my father - 95 and in an aged care home. My brother and I set him up with video calls, so that's at least a bit of comfort.

*You deck-a-rep fans can f@ck right off, though :-)

[Martin 'Martinland' Schemitsch]

On Mon, 09 Dec 2019 20:21:24 +0100, WEKurtz wrote:

> I just rediscovered the group

Very nice - welcome back!

> I've refused to watch 'Blade Runner 2049'

> preferred to keep my mind decontaminated...

Haha, this holds true for me as well...

> When I'm ready, I'll see Blade Runner again,

Right, but you just missed the magic date!
I'm still a little bit disappointed that
they didn't re-release it one last time,
[turns out now that it really would have
been the last time for the near future]
which they (the other ones ;) did for
Back to the Future on their magic
date - oh well, we held our
own screening anyway. ;-D

> WEKurtz--------
Martinland

--
----------------------------------------------------------
"I don't know. I'm making this up as I go!"
(Ford as Dr. Jones Jr. in 'Raiders of the Lost Ark')
----------------------------------------------------------

[Martin 'Martinland' Schemitsch]

On Tue, 10 Dec 2019 21:50:48 +0100, Bernie Dwyer wrote:

> managed to largely avoid facebook and other "social media".

I am the same - no social stressworks for me, thank you. :)