Maybe we can be ecumenical and call it Canadian Warehouse Sci-Fi. LOL.

See also Killjoys, Dark Matter, Vagrant Queen, Helix, Ascension (some scenes), and I think Orphan Black would fit alongside The Expanse. Soooo many darkly lit industrial-themed loft apartments, barely disguised warehouses, and underground tunnels that (in the real world) let people avoid the weather while downtown. :-)

Doesn’t prevent a show from being good, far from it, but it’s an identifiable look.

Funnily enough, YOUR show seems to have been filmed in France, LOL. Canadian warehouses are a state of mind, I guess.

“Toronto warehouse sci-fi” was almost its own genre for a while, with The Expanse sort of being the apotheosis of the form.

I make the point about NFL quarterbacks sometimes, because there’s only 32 full-time job openings and only maybe half that many get any respect, but it applies to professional athletes in general. Imagine if most of us were subjected to constant oversight and mockery from random strangers because we might have slipped from the top 1% of our chosen profession to the top 3%, or god forbid we were only ever among the top 5%.

Now, the obscene money reduces my overall sympathy quite a bit, but I could definitely see it weighing on somebody, especially with how it generally hits them while they’re still young and dumb and status-conscious.

Well, I did it again. I clicked the “show in context” icon on Alexendrite instead of the identical one to add a link and nuked my comment. :-)

Summing it up:

1. Those poorly managed franchises occupy a cultural space in North America not unlike “sleeping giant” clubs in Europe, and the financial and other parity measures are designed to encourage fans to hope every year. Sometimes it even works.
2. The systems are different, largely arising out of differences between America in 1885 and England in 1885, but both have more than a century of passionate fan support and I find both compelling.
3. MLS is a weird hybrid, being both the perfection of the closed shop model, yet also participating in the global market for both aging stars and younger players of decent but fungible quality.

MLS and American playoff systems in general are not bad. From an interest standpoint, they simply move some end-of-season drama from the bottom of the table to the middle. I am glad they’re not the only model, though. Variety is the spice of life.

Closed-shop American leagues also make a debatable but not insane tradeoff of fewer fans getting top-flight sport in their towns, but more fans getting a legitimate bite at the apple for a championship.

Going to need you to clarify.

Yes, and the style as well! HJB really dials up the visceral but anxious disgust like only he can.

I also like this 2012 version’s uber-clinical interrogation, and the way this live action one both dials up the banal grossness of our meatness, as well as makes the aliens less relateable without losing the overall tone (I see hints of Marc Evan Jackson in it).

I got a few chapters into Master and Commander, I want to say right about the time they first headed out on the Sophie, but can’t for the life of me remember why I stopped. I don’t recall disliking it, and I liked the movie, which I gather to be kid of “impressions of the sort of stuff that happens in the books.” Maybe I’ll pick it back up.

Napoleonic high tech (for the day) warfare seems close enough to the topic for me. I cannot stress how committed “On Basilisk Station” is to translating jargon-heavy Royal Navy historical fiction into space.

Yeah, there’s no two ways about it, book 1 is Royal Navy in Space, and the Peeps are almost a drop-in replacement for (little-r) republican France. We’re not dealing with hard sci-fi here, but I did think the infodump 2/3 through that described how it got to be “Royal” was less silly than I expected, if (again) a bit on the nose.

I didn’t sense a ton of deep ideas forthcoming, but once I settled into letting the book be what it wanted to be, I enjoyed it well enough. Good airport/beach reading, and as I mentioned, you make Honor and the crew just a bit more compelling, and I think you’ve got a “brand” that could do really well in movies or TV. Master and Commander was a solid film that might have found a bigger audience if it were set on a star-cruiser.

Yeah, you’re probably right. I guess the devil is in the details with the cap that gets set, but even if most them want some cap, can’t imagine the PL owners pulling in one direction hard enough to give it much teeth, especially, as you say, with financial turmoil in Spain and Italy and only a couple of oil-money clubs in France. Throw in something fairly close to actual reasonable governance in Germany, and you start to see why this passed now.

The main issue will simply be getting outcompeted in UEFA competition by a few continental clubs who can and will outspend them. If it’s a hard cap, and it’s set high enough that the big English cups will still go far in UCL, I doubt there will be any major blowback, and it might actually be helpful for competitive balance at the top of the Premier League.

American sport has many issues of its own, but it’s always interested me how the problems and solutions go in different directions based on the early history of Association football in England and baseball in the US.

I’m not sure I entirely agree, but I am sympathetic. It really is an entire book about why one sci-fi trope is a bad idea. There’s an almost eye-rolling meta-text that he’s done with any traditional notions of space travel and heroic explorers, and that it’s time to turn our eyes and brains to earth.

Now, I think I was okay with seeing that story play out, and I do appreciate any author who can hold my attentiona during info-dumps (Hello there, Neal Stephenson) but there was certainly an element of Wagons East! in the book, but not enough John Candy and Richard Lewis.

After the Mars trilogy, I read 2312, New York 2140, and Aurora. None were bad, but I just sort of ran out of steam with ourobouros and employee collectives.