Both technically well done *and* freakin’ hilarious. When “300” came out nearly two decades ago, these parody edits would not have made a lick of sense. Now, they are far, far too familiar.
BGV EDITS
Sep 212023
Sep 202023
Specifically, deep fakes. Here’s the pinnacle.
Sep 192023
This YouTuber has a *lot* of incredibly mundane videos that are surprisingly interesting. They are largely videos shot in public places over the years… stores, malls, etc. on average days and remarkable days.
https://www.youtube.com/@vampirerobot/videos
For instance, shopping at a mall in 1984 is a fundamentally different experience than any mall I’ve seen in over a decade: there are a lot of people there.
And then there are the videos shot on unusual days:
And then there are the videos that presage what we’re going to get to live through again:
Sep 182023
It turns out that Peter Jackson filmed about 1,300 *hours* of footage for the Lord of the Rings. Seven million feet of negative is sitting in a Warner Brothers vault, not doin’ nuthin’. Granted the majority of this is alternate takes and bloopers, but almost certainty there is enough quality additional scenes there that the already massive Extended Version could be greatly further extended. Guy in the video below suggests that Warner Bros cutting Jackson loose to create six-hour miniseries from each movie for release on HBO/Max would be the way to go for the 25th anniversary of each flick, in much the same way they gave “The Justice League” back to Zack Snyder. I can’t say as that I disagree: a proper Ridiculously Extended Cut, overseen by Jackson, would be a dandy way to get over the nightmare of “the Rings of Power.”
The legalities of such things elude me. I *assume* that Warner retains all the rights to do with their stuff what they see fit, but who knows.
Sep 172023
Normally people are impressed with aircraft going higher, faster. And that’s certainly worth getting impressed about. But prepare to be impressed with aircraft going *incredibly* slow…
Someday it will be practical to 3D print structures of incredibly lightness using carbon fiber, with structures decimeters long and hair-thin, while still rigid. With skins of graphene and “rubber bands” made out of… well, I don’t know what, imagine the wondrously impractical ghostlike aircraft that will be built. With equally advanced optics and electronics, such aircraft could have cameras and transmitters. carried aloft by high altitude balloons, they could be released at the edge of space to fly for potentially days, covering hundreds or thousands of miles, their weak signals picked up by ground or space based receivers. I don’t know if cameras and transmitters will be good enough to make them useful intelligence gathering systems, but they are very unlikely to be detected by IR or radar. With their carbon constructions and extreme surface area to volume rations, when they are done they will likely degrade away to almost nothing very quickly.
Sep 102023
He returns to review “The Northman” and “Prey.” One he liked, one he hated. Agree with him or not, can’t argue that he’s not entertaining.
Sep 092023
Lots of people think we’re on the cusp of ditching fossil fuels in favor of an all-electric “renewable” and “green” world. There are of course a vast number of problems with this… when they say “all electric” they almost never mean “all nuclear,” but instead want to pave over the fields with a million acres of solar panels and fill the seas with whale-confounding wind turbines. But there are issues beyond just what method will produce the volts and amps. For instance… all the batteries will need to be filled with metals dug out of the Earth; electric motors and a billion miles of power lines will need to be processed from all the copper we can scrape up. And the problem seems to be that at current resource extraction (i.e. mining) rates, we’re nowhere near able to deliver those materials.
So it seems we have a few options:
1) Turn Earth into a giant open pit. To hell with the environment… we need to save the environment!
2) Go all-electric… and just tell people to suck it up, they’ll learn to live with less. 15-minute cities will seem like the wildest dream of raving libertarians. Personal vehicles? Gone. Traveling any sort of distance at all? Prohibitively expensive to simply prohibited. Air conditioning? A myth from the Old Ones.
3) Asteroid mining. Everything we might need is available a million times over floating out in space; the effort to retrieve it will open spaceflight to mankind in a way never before dreamed, spreading civilization and terrestrial biology to the furthest regions of the solar system.
Which will it be?
There is physically not enough material at current extraction rates to produce one generation of technology (which needs to be replaced every 20 years or so) to phase out fossil fuels. We either better start ramping up our mining efforts or drop this fantasy. pic.twitter.com/XMNngP9cc3
— Dr. Matthew M. Wielicki (@MatthewWielicki) September 9, 2023
Challenges and Bottlenecks for the Green Transition
Sep 072023
Russia’s war in Ukraine has driven home the usefulness of dropping things from quadcopters. They can carry surprising payloads a good distance and place them with some fair accuracy; in war, payloads such as grenade, mortar shells, RPG warheads are obvious and useful choices.
But then there’s this:
It’s not immediately obvious why the owner of a heating & cooling company would use a drone to drop dye packs into private and motel swimming pools. This makes the pools undesirable for swimming and costs the owners large sums to not only flush the pools but clean them. And it does not seem like his business benefits from that; if his company specialized in pool maintenance, it’d make sense. Maybe he just doesn’t like swimming pools.
The dye packs seem unlikely to be much of a health hazard… even if they are somewhat toxic, the sickly green color would dissuade people from getting in the water. But there are other things that could be easily dropped that would be much less obvious and far more dangerous. If the drone operators goal was terrorism or simple mayhem, I can think of a *lot* of things that could be dropped in a pool (or elsewhere) that would be nightmarish.
The goal of *most* crimes is not terrorism. Most criminals, I suspect, would be just as happy if their crimes went un-noticed. In those cases, drones are somewhat limited. They are useful for smuggling… crossing borders with drugs, say, or dropping drugs, phones, weapons, cash into prison yards. Most crime would seem to involve some sort of theft, and, so far, quadcopters seem of limited utility there. Given that shoplifting is not only a largely unopposed crime, in many of the worst districts it’s not even a *crime* anymore, you hardly need to make much effort to technologically innovate in the field.
Maybe there’ll be a bank robbery (or a heist movie) where the thieves get out of the bank and, instead of trying to escape with large sacks of cash, they hook them to waiting drones. The cash flies off, and now the thieves are unburdened as they attempt to make their escape.
And then there’ll be the *darker* bank heist movie: drones are used to make off with the sacks of cash. But that’s not the end: on some sort of predictable basis, subsets of that cash are released by drone over a public area. So people begin to gather in their masses to snag the bills. And then once a big enough crowd is gathered, another set of bills is dumped on them. This time, though, the bills have been soaked in smallpox or some such…
Sep 022023
Methane levels in the atmosphere seem to be rising steeply. Since methane is a much more potent “greenhouse gas” than CO2, this could, perhaps, maybe, result in the end of the ice age that we’re currently in… within a few decades. The one good thing is that methane does not have a long lifespan, getting oxidized within a few years. But that’ll only help if the methane release – which seems to be coming from African wetlands – stops. of course, if the climate suddenly gets way hotter, the African wetlands releasing methane via decomposition of dead vegetable matter might turn into desert area, resulting in the eventual end of the methane release. Which means within a dozen or so years of that the methane will have burned out and the climate can descend back into good ol’ ice age status. *Proper* ice age, with glaciers covering continents and land bridges everywhere. This will be aided by the fact that humans will have been largely wiped out at that point. Doubtless industrial civilization will have either moved off-world or simply been exterminated; and with no easy access to oil or coal anymore, anthropogenic CO2 emissions will be minimal.
Yaaaaaay.
Aug 312023
It’s well known that a lot of cops are not great people. Ill tempered, quick to anger and violence, ready to smack someone around, break rules, break laws, corrupt, willing to enforce unjust and unconstitutional laws. Why are they like this? Well, part of it is doubtless due to some of them having been not great people before they were cops, and were drawn to being a cop by the allure of power. But then there are doubtless other not great cops who started off as great people, intending to protect and serve. And then they spend years encountering the very worst of society. Murders, rapists, thieves, Socialists, the worst of the worst. This has got to grind a person down. But it seems to me that even more damaging to a cops psyche are the run of the mill scumbags they run into more commonly than TV-movie villains. People who are riding the Dunning-Kruger effect *hard,* marrying stupidity with unearned entitlement. Making every second of the interaction a misery. People like these specimens:
And then you get the lunatics, the type who are celebrated by our social betters, but who really aught to be in loonie bins:
Said it before, will say it many, many more times: we need phasers with stun settin