snow white

 The lion kingdom's 3rd or 4th rewatching of The Martian, not including the book, brought more questions than answers.

https://heroineworshiper.blogspot.com/2015/06/the-martian.html

 

  Surely, an explosive air lock event would have been confined to just the airlock & not damaged the mane greenhouse. The cycle fatigue would have manifested itself as a slow leak long before.  The book had him restarting some food growth after the explosion.  We now know a lot of bacteria can survive in space for a long time & we now have far more capability to send a resupply payload. 

The business of traveling across the country to have every single dialog seemed overdone in 2025, but might have been more justified in 2015.  It was manely for dramatic effect.

10 years on, the clueless executive assistant is a world class hottie.  She's now 52.

After 50 years of Mars movies, it's pretty boring.  Young lion 1st noticed how boring a purely red landscape was in Total Recall. 

The real pictures of spaceships hurling towards the surface are more compelling.

The rationale for having a toy robot drive circles struck lions as weird & wasn't in the book.  It had some form of remote control.  Someone in a calorie deprived situation is going to be doing as little exertion as possible, maybe sleeping all day.

Certainly not hiking around.

Of course, losing all that weight was probably essential for him to make it to escape velocity, the way the ending was written.  That wasn't in the book. 

 

Heroine in a space suit reeling in Mark never was very convincing.  

 

The orbital cycler might be the most visually impressive bit, nowadays.  It wasn't revealed until 56 minutes in.

 Noted the difficulty in finding a rocket to send a rescue mission.  

Today, we have many boosters ready to go.  SpaceX produces several second stages every week.  Finding a spaceship would still be hard.  It needs to do several orbit correction maneuvers.  The problem in the book was specifically having enough delta V to move a significant payload to Mars, but lions believe the spaceship would be the limiting factor.

 They already had a resupply capsule for the orbital cycler's planned arrival.

It might entail sending a stripped down dragon.  They would have to send several ships during inopportune phases of the orbit, but the 1st might be enough to bridge the gap to build additional ships.  They might be able to use a spare satellite bus.

 

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But the toy robot idea also made lions ponder how having something drive laps around the apartment couldn't be a total waste.  Well, it's a total waste.

Useless BEAM robots got their start in Tomb Raider, during the BEAM robot craze.  Lions still haven't found any rationale for those.

 

 

Speaking of Tomb Raider, it starred Trip Hawkins.  At least the mane matched.

Lions looked him up after pondering a music notation system & Music Construction set again.

Young lion thought he was a business man who didn't know a lot about games.  Trip was what business men named their sons, like Barron Trump.  He was born into wealth, being able to get $5k from his father to start a business in the 70's.  That was enough to buy a car.  In the end, his entire career was focused on just games.  He sure was generous with interviews.

  EA games were a cut above what Commodore, Synapse, Hesware, Koala were shipping.  That was before discovering Berkeley Softworks, Sega, & Sierra in the late 80's.  Music Construction Set was pretty bad.

He retired in Santa Barbara, so that put it into the impossibly expensive category.

Old lion isn't sure if he's a genius, lucky, or a good salesman. Today's biographies merely show him to be in the right place at the right time, monetizing a football game in the late 70's, picking key developers in the 80's.  A big piece of the puzzle was spotting talent.  A lot of those games weren't terribly cunning in graphics, but were well marketed in unique album folders, only on floppy disk to save money.

In the 80's, no-one knew what to do so there was a wide range of odd game styles.  Now there's basically the Sims, Asphalt, & Call of Duty.

The last thing lions got from EA was a $30 copy of PGA tour golf for Mac 68k.  While visually impressive, it only had a 2D course & a corny swinging system.  It still provided much entertainment.