Space Truckin' – The Nostromo (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Space Truckin' – The Nostromo (2012)

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Tangential: Alien(s) brought H.R. Giger to my attention, for which I shall ever be thankful. My parents visited Gruyères in Switzerland a couple of years ago, and whilst they didn't tour the museum[0] (his art isn't their thing) they did take a couple of photos of the sculptures outside for me.

I'll get there one day.

[0]: https://www.hrgigermuseum.com/en/

That website was really frustrating on iOS, had to close it before seeing much.

Swiss people can't ever grasp html

HTML was invented in Switzerland, albeit by an Englishman.

yes, that's the joke :)

Strictly speaking it was invented in France, although I'll grant you that depending on exactly when TimBL had the idea for it, it may have depending on which side of the office he was sitting on.

Giger art should only be enjoyed rendered on a CRT in a damp dark cave for that in-universe feel.

Actually Giger's sculptures are rather interesting. But I agree about the print and paint work. It's too deep in the uncanny valley - in a bad way.

Cerntenly not.

His cafè just opposite the museum is also quite something, chairs and tables from spine-infested shapes.

And when in Gruyères then one should taste meringues double crème, or fondue in colder months.

And last but not least - its a region of Swiss pre-alps, mountains up to cca 2000m high, lovely hikes all around in picture-perfect nature and fields (government pays farmers to keep it looking nice) and even nearby very nice via ferrata on Moléson peak which I did 2 weeks ago, this time with some snow. It overlooks the castle and whole area from avove. That was interesting and intense experience while being alone on whole mountain.

My dad took me there as a kid a long whole ago when Giger was still alive, it was really something. The bar is amazing and the museum is... oppressively dark in a very unique way, like anything Giger ever did I suppose.

There's several lifesize necronomicons/xenomorphs, some earlier and later variants, Sil and the skull train, a lot of art that was never used in Alien and sequels but some made it later into Prometheus.

I always loved how the Nostoromo looked futuristic, yet cramped and dirty. The narrow halls and small rooms reflect the minimalism you would expect from a greedy corporation that considers its crew expendable, while the clutter and disrepair reflect what you would expect from the apathetic, disgruntled employees.

In one of the myriad making of / behind the scenes docs I've watched over the years, they described how after the first set was built it was decided it should be more cramped, so they cut a horizontal swath out of big chunks of it and lowered the ceiling forcing the actors to crouch and duck as they moved around.

Fantastic decision, the claustrophobia really adds to the creep factor IMO.

It actually is a pretty accurate reflection of the internals of blue ocean vessels.

I’ve read it described as “used future” aesthetic.

The computer terminal with an annoying box jammed up against your right hand, but also enough space for an ashtray:

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQwxhqR...

I kicked myself on the second read for missing why the title mentions trucking: it’s in the article, buried a little, but Ridley Scott called this the “truck driver” version of sci-fi.

“Bachelor pad” sci-fi is another great description, and this subreddit uses the equally fantastic term “cassette futurism”:

https://www.reddit.com/r/cassettefuturism/

I think it’s why I love the Technology Connections YouTube channel too. A lot of the devices are like 1980s science fiction! (The article in this discussion mentions the set designers using rotary mechanical switches to automate blinking light patterns so, in a way, they were living in their own futurism.)

There's an actual Space Truckers movie! (Dennis Hopper, square pigs... it has it all)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Truckers

I loved this movie. I wonder how well it still holds up. I bet pretty well, if you go into it with the appropriate expectations.

I love the casette futurism aesthetics, I just wish I had a practial application for physical buttons and the like, and / or that the higher interest products in those collections were still available outside of museums.

I'm sure there's some modern day reproductions (Filo's products [0] come to mind), but they won't have the same feel due to different switching mechanisms and materials being used.

[0] https://www.fiio.com/echomini

I agree that the aesthetic made for an excellent film but I always thought that if they had sufficient power for FTL travel (e.g. massive fusion reactors or something) they could have powered a few extra light bulbs.

Although the ship in Dark Star wins the space-grunge contest hands-down.

Even today the brick and mortar stores of multi-million (billion) dollar companies have dirty bathrooms and broken lights.

The justification for the light situation in the movie is simple: corporate greed and human laziness (which fits nicely in the narrative as well).

> Even today the brick and mortar stores of multi-million (billion) dollar companies have dirty bathrooms and broken lights.

Last place I worked at (10M investment) the men's pisser didn't flush and the toilet paper was brown sandpaper that smelt like shit even before you used it. Horrible TL lights though, so not quite a horror scene.

I'd say it's not only the greedy corporations but maybe technical challenges. Compare with clutter on ISS or in earlier spacecrafts - also claustrophobic, narrow and packed with equipment.

With all the back and forth over the props, also with Ridley Scott scrapping loads of spaceship footage in order to reshoot everything after repainting the models, I get the impression that communication was quite bad in the production. I'm sure we've all encountered this in industry to some degree but having months of work tossed because it ain't look right must sting somewhat.

Sometimes you can’t predict what will work until you see what doesn’t. I’d say that if you’re really developing something new you should have that experience at least once of having something you’ve worked very hard on scrapped because it just isn’t right.

I was taken by how freely they spent months of man hours on things to go 'meh' and casually throw them away. Different world. Quite holistic with their production costs

Once production starts the costs for many roles are locked in and they work till it wraps, often due to union rules and contracts. Anyone working in parallel with the film crews just does whatever the director/producers prioritizes since they’re not getting sent home.

It's definitely a different world though because you’re not supposed to go under budget. If investors give you $100mil to make a movie, they want to maximize the return on that $100mil, so if you’re $5mil under budget, they want you to go and spend that money to make it even better (usually in post production now, but back then it was less of an option).

That's a great explanation thanks. There are many types of customers around and not many spend like that. They're treating it as an investment in a very direct way I guess.

This is just part of working in art and design. 90% of all my design work never made it to production. It’s the epitome of “the journey is the reward”. You need to find your satisfaction in doing the work not getting it released or you won’t last long.

What has always bothered me about this "interstellar mining" plot device (which is not only used in Alien, but also in e.g. Avatar): is it really somehow plausible to find minerals in other solar systems that can't be found much cheaper in our own solar system? Of course, you need some kind of McGuffin to justify your heroes going to other planets, but "to seek out new life and new civilizations" is much better IMHO than "just looking for substance XYZ that for some reason can't be found in our own solar system or synthesized much cheaper than the cost of ferrying it over several light years"...

In Avatar they are literally mining a room-temperature superconductor. If you had to think of a way to make interstellar mining plausible that certainly would be a candidate.

This has always been a sticky thing for me as well. These kinds of McGuffins lean towards physics are different in other parts of the galaxy/universe if there are minerals found only in certain parts of the galaxy. That would also imply there are other elements that we do not have on our periodic table. Unless someone has become able to stabilize some of the unstable elements to keep them around long enough to make some sort of material out of them, there's only so much unobtanium or dilithium nonsense I'm willing to accept.

> These kinds of McGuffins lean towards physics are different in other parts of the galaxy/universe if there are minerals found only in certain parts of the galaxy.

Or the local conditions are such that they produce different chemical compounds.

I'm not going to strike gold in my backyard, but people in Colorado might. There's not a lot of diamond production happening within reach underneath my location, but there's plenty in parts of Africa.

If we want to take it to space, there's not a lot of Helium-3 to be easily extracted on Earth, but apparently there's quite a bit more on the Moon.

I think you have to assume that faster-than-light travel is both possible and economical. At that point, far-flung supply chains across the galaxy really aren't any more surprising than the far-flung supply chains across the globe of our current reality. When distance becomes less economically relevant, other factors (like labor availability and costs, regulations, ease of access, security, etc) become more important.

FTL isn't even necessary. Consider the majority of tanker ships travel at bicycle speeds[1]. If you're transporting sufficiently profitable nonperishable goods in extremely high quantities, and have enough automated ships, you could have a functional interstellar supply line at a fraction of light speed.

Of course, this isn't how it's usually presented in science fiction, but that's because a sci-fi story about a non-sentient fully automated mining machine wouldn't be very interesting. Gotta get humans out there.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_steaming

And they said five year plans struggled with predicting demand ;)

I'd rather go with "for any delta in mining convenience between solar systems, there exists a level of FTL magic where shipping would become economically feasible"

Perhaps space slow steaming might be an option if your goal was to make a Dyson sphere exist before the star inside burns out?

Hogwash! We can do it much faster than that. With a machine in Alpha Centauri capable of flinging rocks full of rare earth metals back towards the solar system at 1/10th the speed of light, we could be up and running in <150 years.

This feels about as realistic as most of the spacetech proposals I hear.

I'd imagine insurance premiums to get quite ugly with all those 0.1c rocks passing by

Not my problem, I'll be long dead.

Well if you put yourself in the perspective of a time period where something like _The Nostromo_ actually exists - our scientific understanding is literally lightyears ahead of where it is right now. Meaning, our periodic table as it stands today is 1/10th the size of the future table. So it's reasonable to conclude that there are large swaths of never before even imagined materials out in the universe.

Novel materials - even those that occur naturally - are almost certainly molecules of elements that we already are familiar with. There might be some interesting things to find in the island of stability, but I'd say that practical FTL is a more plausible discovery than would be finding gross quantities of elements with 1000 protons.

You could perhaps find different concentrations of different isotopes of elements which could be useful. For some kind of super advanced material science/design.

Yes, isotopes too. Interesting point. Isotopes are sometimes just as novel as new elements - though I wouldn't consider their discovery to be expanding the periodic table.

If interstellar travel is possible then it probably means intrastellar travel had been possible for a long time. Which means most readily accessible minerals had already been mined in the solar system. Not to mention humans probably have settled throughout the solar system. Which means solar ecological movements have gained momentum throughout the solar system. After all, who would want mining near their vacation properties on the moon or mars.

The fact that interstellar mining is happening is evidence that it's cheaper than mining locally. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.

What a bizarre take. It's not a mcguffin. Both Alien and Avatar were based on economic/historical realities of their times and throughout history. Why do you think companies mine or drill for oil all over the world. Why not just stay within their national borders? You exhaust resources locally and you look for resources elsewhere. It's just common sense.

And the fact that superman can fly is evidence that people are lighter than air. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.

The costs (in money and energy) of the infrastructure to mine another solar system would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever it is here in our solar system.

Unlike the other poster, I don't think interstellar mining needs finding, I'm perfectly happy to lean back and enjoy the show. But whatever they mine would have to be very magical indeed to not be cheaper from any other process.

> And the fact that superman can fly is evidence that people are lighter than air. Otherwise it wouldn't happen.

Is this a serious response? What is your point?

> The costs (in money and energy) of the infrastructure to mine another solar system would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever it is here in our solar system.

Sure. Just like infrastructure to mine another continent would pay for a lot of R&D to synthesize whatever. And yet, we mine other continents. Not only that, in the not too distant future, we are going to mine the moon, asteroids, etc. I wonder why we don't just synthesize gold rather than mining for gold in south africa or some far distant place?

> But whatever they mine would have to be very magical indeed to not be cheaper from any other process.

And yet, history, science, economics and reality says you are wrong.

You do realize that costs come down right? Just because intercontinental travel was expensive in the past doesn't mean it is expensive today. In a world of engineers and xenomorphs, it's the least crazy aspect of the film that simpletons are hung up about.

But seeking out new civilizations etc is a noble cause, mining is dirty industrial space trucking types with an evil mega corp trying to make a buck out deadly aliens. Well that's my guess anyway!

I always loved Alien and Blade Runner because of this shared aesthetic. It gave the sense that the doomed ship Nostromo departed Blade Runner earth.

Owners of Frank Lloyd Wright homes licked their lips with glee when Bladerunner fans made the bricks-and-mortar movie-famous.

How Deckerd can afford to live in one post economic meltdown is a bit unclear. And those whisky glasses are worth a mint now too.

"Enhance" indeed.

Many go off-world to create real estate opportunities?

>How Deckerd can afford to live in one post economic meltdown is a bit unclear.

He's part of a precarious minority of semi-technical functionaries, armed bureaucrats afforded generous promotions and great inner leeway amidst the post-meltdown order of things, in return for their unquestioning allegiance to the same

Retconning 2049 into that was.. Hard.

Personally I prefer the PKD book. It was more nuanced. But the aesthetic of the first film was just wondeful. If somebody had sold cold cathode flouro umbrellas when the movie came out they would have cleaned up.

>Retconning 2049 into that was.. Hard.

After Deckard did an exemplary job, everyone liked it so much that they they replaced his entire cadre with simulacra.

>Personally I prefer the PKD book. It was more nuanced.

Oh absolutely! Just recently bought a fake animal and pondered it. Love PKD for selling various angles on the same trip for decades; wonder if his OG exegesis can be read anywhere...

I have a copy. Send me an email and I’ll upload it somewhere for you. It’s not a great read, but it’s interesting in places. You can use rob.crimedoer at gmail.

Gosh, apologies. I hope you catch this -- my burner email was wrong. It's robcrimedoer, no period.

In the "Deckard is a replicant" version that Scott has defended for years, I assume he's simply living in someone else's place (unaware that it's not his own).

That certainly makes sense. Everyone else is mostly occupying leftover spaces.

For those interested Deep Purple apparently originated the term "Space Truckin'" with their identically-titled song [1]. I'd be astounded if there weren't a copy of "Made in Japan" lying around somebody's apartment when they made "Aliens".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wv1ij7KxWc

This look all comes from Silent Running (1972).

Yeah, weird how that seems to never come up. I sometimes have trouble keeping the movies apart in memory (Silent and Dark).

But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake that somehow got stuck in the elevator scene (and lost all of the original's lightheartedness in the process), that absolutely is my favorite piece of scifi movie trivia.

> But Alien being barely more than a higher budget Dark Star remake

granted, but this wasn't a Point Break remake either. Dark Star is pretty much a student film turned into a blockbuster. Even El Mariachi->Desperado wasn't as different as Dark Star->Alien was.

people brush their teeth three times a day???

In space everyone can smell you scream

I thought the article was great, but I couldn't get that sentence out of my head!

Yeah three seems insane but less than two also seems insane.

Why? Brushing your teeth after each meal doesn't sound insane at all to me. It actually seems quite logical.

Bring a toothbrush to work and out with you during the day?

How often do you do it?

Two?

So you just eat lunch and then walk around with crap on your teeth like it was perfectly okay?

The recommendation on how many times to brush daily varies by country. In most spanish-speaking countries, for example , it’s thrice. (My unscientific poll: I googled for “tres veces al dia” and found media from a handful of countries promoting this frequency).

Latin American here: my coworkers used to (note: I'm remote now, that's why the past tense) brush their teeth after lunch, so if they also brushed in the mornings and before going to bed, that'd make it three times.

I didn't though, I'm not taking my brush & toothpaste to a public restroom at the office.

It’s okay if you don’t, like, dip your brush in the toilet or place it in a dirty counter, and miles cheaper than paying for dental treatments. And it’s not like you’re taking your everyday brush and paste with you daily, right? You keep a secondary set at the office?

Like I said, I didn't brush my teeth at work. When I went to the office, I tried to go in and out of the restroom as fast as possible, touching as few things as possible, and didn't linger to do things like brush my teeth, eat or play chess.

I didn't keep anything at my office, there were no lockers, no drawers, and the desk itself was messed with by the night cleaning crew.

> and miles cheaper than paying for dental treatments

You don't need to brush your teeth after every meal, that's a cultural thing. As long as you brush when you wake up and before you go to bed, that's ok.

I've been in some dirty public bathrooms, but those were typically in the expected places like bars and the like. However, this is starting to sound like you just have a mental thing about public restrooms. Not that I'm a therapist or even play one on TV.

Just because I won't brush my teeth thrice a day?

Wow... calm down, armchair therapist. Just do your thing and let others live their lives.

Most people do NOT brush their teeth after lunch. It's just a cultural habit. See the comment that sparked this.

You said this, "When I went to the office, I tried to go in and out of the restroom as fast as possible, touching as few things as possible"

which really comes across as you work in a disgusting place, or you might have a bit of an overreaction

Brush your teeth three, four or as many times as you like! As I said, beyond the minimum it's just a cultural habit. I knew one person who wouldn't consider her tooth-brushing complete if she didn't also brush her tongue, then removed "stuff" from her inner cheeks with a spoon... each time. (It's not a common practice, before you ask). She wasn't a dentist or a doctor either, I think she was a school teacher.

The overreaction thing is just your own baggage. Seems like a lot to extrapolate from so few words.

Keep it up until you're 20 or so until the enamel is properly hardened.

You know, I'm sort of frustrated that all the recent entries in the Alien franchise have been nostalgia bait. At this point I've seen those corridors so often I'm tired of them. A most unwelcome dilution.

Cameron doubled down on the aesthetic in Aliens, he just changed the genre from horror to action. Both films were "peak 80s" (Alien was '79) and just ooze with what must be the absolute pinnacle of science fiction vibes.

If you haven't seen these two films, you need to fix that this week. It'll change your life.

Scott tried to expand the aesthetics with Prometheus and Covenant. I felt the films did a great job of refreshing the look and feel while remaining faithful to the 80's. Unfortunately, the writing was trite and Scott's directing is averaging .200 at bat these days.

Romulus was not bad, though certainly not a masterpiece. At least it was better written and had better character arcs than Scott's recent films.

I'd rather have the performance of this series than whatever Jurassic Park or Star Wars have become.

Predator, oddly enough, has strangely been improving if you don't count Shane Black's entry.

I'm happy they keep making these, and I hope the writers and directors at the reigns keep experimenting rather than conforming to "safe" or "understandable by a general audience".

Alien and Aliens were masterpieces, but I've been consistently disappointed by everything after.

Let's agree to ignore the awful VS Predator crossovers for a second. I'm not sure they are canon anyway, and they are obviously cash grabs and not made with the same care of even the worst Alien movies.

Alien 3, while it has a cool idea (prison planet), is a mess as a result of executive meddling (the story can be read online). And they killed Hicks and Newt... bastards!

Resurrection was awful and awfully badly acted. I like Jeunet, but this was a hard miss. It has some cool visuals at times, typical of Jeunet, but the movie itself was embarrassing.

Prometheus was atrocious. Badly acted, badly scripted (characters making the dumbest of choices at every turn, professionals who don't know their profession -- xenobiologists who pet alien snakes, geologists who get lots at the first turn -- this has been discussed countless times). And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works. Aided by technology, Scott "pulled a George Lucas" and forgot the cardinal rule of scifi horror/mystery: less is more.

After this, I exercised the good sense of avoiding Covenant (the plot summary seems bad), and Romulus, and now the new TV show.

I think overall the gravest sin is that the Alien universe was meant to be sketched in the broadest strokes, and details and mystery kept, not overexplained.

I wish they had let the first two awesome movies rest in peace.

Extended universes suck.

P.S. same applies to Blade Runner. Then again, I didn't even like the sequel, so I'm sure I'll dislike the upcoming show :(

I tend to agree with your take on these movies, but I find I can enjoy some of them to a greater extent by rejecting the notion of what's "cannon".

For instance, I like the bleakness of Alien 3 opening with Newt and Hicks both dead. That doesn't spoil my enjoyment of Aliens, which ends on a triumphant note. These are different stories, and they can be treated on completely different planes. If you want, you can imagine the movies as representing alternate branching universes, where one branch led to Newt and Hicks dying in hibernation, and in some other branch that's too uninteresting to be put to film, they live happily ever after.

I also liked Blade Runner 2049, but I don't need to retroactively reevaluate the original Blade Runner in light of any of the questions that are settled in the sequel. In Ridley Scott's original film, Deckard's humanity is still open to question, regardless of what's presented in Villeneuve's version.

Of course when the sequel is complete trash, it's easy to ignore entirely. Terminator 3 being the obvious example.

While I agree that you can just mentally split the continuity and thus spare Newt from her fate, in doing so it means that the continuity after is meaningless. I did something similar with Star Trek Nemesis. It wasn't a great movie so I just rejected that Data died at the end. Everything else after is fan fiction and it's irrelevant whether there's some other android who carries his memories and returns.

I think there's a similar issue with Marvel after Thanos. Not as much that Endgame was a bad movie, just that the continuity was derailed and never grounded itself. Did Vision come back? Did Loki? Is the Fox Quicksilver canon now? Eh, who knows, the "real" state of the world has moved so much that it doesn't matter anyway.

> I think there's a similar issue with Marvel after Thanos. Not as much that Endgame was a bad movie, just that the continuity was derailed and never grounded itself. Did Vision come back? Did Loki? Is the Fox Quicksilver canon now? Eh, who knows, the "real" state of the world has moved so much that it doesn't matter anyway.

In a way, I feel like this makes it the comic-book movie that's spiritually closest to the comics.

> And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works.

Yeah, remember when the network forced Lynch and Frost to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer. Broadcast executives typically don't get it, scenarists often get too infatuated with their own worldbuilding.

Romulus was pretty good actually. If you want great newer aliens universe play the game Alien: Isolation. It’s the best piece of media in the aliens universe since Aliens. It’s an amazing experience and blows all of the later films/shows out of the water in regards to keeping the original “vibe” of the setting.

Oh yes, Alien Isolation is quite good. I must finish it some day!

You are right about everything from Alien 3 through Covenant. However! Romulus was pretty okay. It has some questionable plot decisions, and it's kind of soft continuity compatible with the two Prometheus-era movies. But it does work as an action-horror in the shared universe of the original films. Alien: Earth was also pretty good, it explores the setting without breaking it too badly, and it's fun with dangerous aliens that aren't THE Alien. There are some plot points that require very smart characters to be holding the idiot ball.

and now the new TV show

I actually enjoyed the series, much as I went in assuming I wouldn't. It works best if you pretend you've never seen another Alien franchise but read a summary of the first 2 movies.

> At this point I've seen those corridors so often I'm tired of them.

Heh, I can't get enough of them; it's a great visual design template to work from. And visual consistency of properties within a diegetic timeframe has to be taken into account, even if the newer entries' writers' rooms could profit from better talent...

That said, Alien: Isolation is still the best modern infusion into that universe, and one of the best games in my lifetime.

True, a brilliant and extraordinary game. We completed it with my kid a couple days ago, tons of fun.

A perfect replika of Alien the original movie and its retrofuturism.

Thanks for reminding me: I need to finish that game. Visually it's a masterpiece.

Alien: Isolation truly is an under appreciated masterpiece. One of the best video games ever made IMO. Aesthetic, sound design (put on headphones and watch the reactor purge scene or the spacewalk near the end it’s phenomenal sound design), emotional design, storytelling, it captures the setting in a way I don’t think anything has done since the first two films.

Have you watched Alien: Earth?

Yes, that and Romulus is what I was thinking of. Alien Earth has that whole fanfic-style flashback episode.

I love the franchise and my will to suspend my disbelief was strong yet the writing, acting and editing were soooo bad that I couldn't make it past the second episode. And that rock song ending entirely killed whatever was left of the vibe. I'm not even sure who to blame for this mess.

I'm a fan of the franchise but the fan service in the last movie was lame, it took me out of the movie a couple of times. And that's the reason why I resist to watch the series, afraid of more of the same stupid winks to the fans.

I'm happy to see they talk about Chris Foss. I saw an exhibition of him in Guernsey last year. Alhtough it's a bit dated, it's really nice to see his vision for Dune...

There is is, Spielberg spelled wrong as "Speilberg" four (all) times in the article.

Does anyone know why Americans do this regularly, swapping i and e especially in words of German origin?

perhaps due to ignorance for the mnemonic rhyme "i before e, except after c"

It's wrong in Einstein's name, twice.

heh, every rule has exceptions

Maybe because Anglos sometimes pronounce e like i and ei is more common in english spelling for a long vocal?

To be fair, German "ie" and "ei" is one of the few special rules which make no sense (or lost their sense in time). The 'e' in 'ie' is Dehnungs-e for elongation, just a notation that the i is longer pronounced (like Wiese, Biene). (Special rule: if ie is at the end of a word like familie (latin familia) often it is a diphtong and both vocals are pronounced).

"ei" is a bit stupid, because it is not pronounced "ei" but like "ai" or "ay" (eg Mayer).

The weirdest dipthongs in German are definitely "eu" and "äu". I mean, /oi/? Wtf?

I'm not sure the generalization is accurate. Most of us can remember the 'i before e' rule we were taught as kids, but the English language is a celebrated mess of borrowed words and guidelines masquerading as rules. It is admittedly confusing for native and non-native speakers alike, but if we throw a reliance on spell check into the mix, which does little to help with spelling a person's name, we just create more opportunity for degradation.

That said, it should be a pretty hard rule when writing about a person to, at the very least, check to make sure you spelled their name correctly.

Right, I before E except after C, except when you run a feisty heist on a weird beige foreign neighbor. Caffeine strung atheists are reinventing protein at their leisure. Plebeians may deign to forfeit either that or seize the language and reinvent it

Has anyone actually counted whether that rule is more often true than wrong?

Brief mention on Language Log back in 2009[0] says 'They are saying that teaching the list of "-cei-" words directly is a better strategy than teaching the rule: it is not sufficiently general to pay its way.'

Which is basically saying the rule is worthless?

[0] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1525

It might be silly to impose rules on the English language at all.

And yes, I realize by putting that in an HN comment to live on the Internet forever, the ghost of every English teacher I had growing up in the US is going to haunt me, one by one, until I am mad and rendered unable to communicate because the anarchic amalgamation that is the English language has lost any shadow of sensibility.

In fairness, I find it a perfectly wonderful language to get creative with, but I really do believe its evolution as a sort of Frankenstein's Monster, composed of parts borrowed from German, Latin, French, etc, has allowed it to transcend into something that broke free of any rules we tried to impose upon it. We're taught different ways to write an essay "correctly" for the sake of appeasing specific branches of academia, grammatical structures that are often awkward and completely at odds with how we actually speak, inducting more and more colloquialisms and slang into the accepted dictionary authorities each year as the stodgy old guard, once considered rebellious and fresh, passes on to the next generation.

English is dynamic and alive, in that way, leaving our educational curriculum running to catch up. Believing that, I cannot blame even the most eloquent native speaker for getting things "wrong" from the perspective of a non-native speaker. It's likely that they learned different and flimsy rules at different times from different sources.

The rule only applies to vowel sounds like the ones in believe/receive. There are versions of the rhyme that attempt to include this caveat.

Being unscientific, societies veil deficient idiocies, reifying their weird, counterfeit policies.

> Does anyone know why Americans do this regularly, swapping i and e especially in words of German origin?

You should see what they do to place names like Edinburgh.

It’s a good thing - at least we know it was not written by AI

It's a curious thing. Nowadays if I post online, I don't even bother anymore with fixing typos or small mistakes.

I just bought this vintage magazine on eBay. It’s too good not to.

There are a few more out there if you want to thumb-through the deal thing

What a weird coincidence; I made a "Space Truckin'" comment under a YouTube vid less than 24 hours ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWDsSDNpS8c&lc=UgyEogAS5P_Hm...

Double coincidence: it was I who posted this ten years ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9254748

Also see, but not to be confused with, Space Truckers:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0120199/

An equally great movie! :ducks:

It's up there with Waterworld and The Fifth Element, in that they're un-ironically some of my favorite films.

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