A video of a guy messing about with a demo version of a “virtual Titanic” that let’s you wander around something like a quarter of the ship (the rest of the vessel coming later). Seems like a *spectacular* way to blow a bunch of hours.
This project dates back to at least 2016 (I posted a link to a YouTube video of theirs showing a real-time sinking of the ship back in early 2016, a lot of the website doesn’t seem to have been updated since 2017). The demo is downloadable here:
Those of you old enough to remember when James Cameron’s “Titanic” was released in 1997 (yeesh, nearly a quarter century ago) will doubtless recall how a good fraction of the public went bonkers, to the point that at least two efforts were made to produce a “Titanic II” ship designed to replicate the look and opulence of the original… but with a better hull and more lifeboats. Sadly these didn’t come to pass, but I’m pretty sure that if someone were to build a faithful replica of the Titanic, even as a land-locked hotel, people would line up around the block. Shoot, people throw money at Disney for their half-assed “Star Cruiser” Star Wars knockoff, so a Titanic “experience?” A license to print money.
As an aside, a story idea: turns out that the iceberg impact did not produce enough damage to sink the vessel. What caused it to sink was the sudden increase in weight on the ship as tens of thousands of time travellers arrived to witness the sinking.
As should now no longer be a spoiler of any particular note, James Bond dies at the end of “No Time To Die.” I cannot directly confirm this myself… this is the first Bond movie since the Roger Moore era that I will likely end up not seeing in the theater (the wokevertising that promised a Bond put in his place by a Mary Sue apparently turned out to not be accurate, but it turned me off to the flick). But the credits end with “James Bond will return.”
Now, there are a few ways this could happen, what with Bond being dead and all:
1: He’s not dead. An amazing escape, slid down an escape tunnel, beamed out by Scotty, survived under rubble, whatever. Presumably he received enough facial injuries that the reconstructive surgery will make him look like some completely different actor.
2: The old fan theory that the name “James Bond” is regularly passed along to new secret agents along with the 007 number. So Connery, Moore, Craig, etc. all exist in the same continuity.
3: A complete reboot.
Hard to say what it’ll be. Hard to say if the suits in charge of such things even know right now.
But here’s my suggestion: reboot. What’s more than that, remake some/many of the early Bond movies. Do this with A Plan: crank out the movies assembly line fashion so you get one Bond a year. Something like:
2025: Dr. No: A Chinese mad scientist working for SPECTRE farks with western space launches, risking a nuclear war.
2026: Thunderball: SPECTRE steals some nukes and threatens to evaporate some major cities, with the likely consequence of a nuclear war.
2027: You Only Live Twice: SPECTRE screws with space launches, threatening to spark a nuclear war
2028: Diamond Are Forever: SPECTRE builds an orbital weapon of mass destruction, threatening to spark a nuclear war; use of the weapon causes several nuclear detonations and reactor meltdowns.
2029: The Spy Who Loved Me: A megalomaniac sea-steader steals Russian and British boomers, with the intent of sparking a nuclear war; ends with multiple nuclear detonations at sea.
2030: Moonraker: And here’s the culmination. The remake goes much as the original; eccentric billionaire space industry tycoon steals a reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle from The Government, has a secret space launch complex hidden away in South America and plans to launch a bunch of craft all at once. Instead of manufacturing some weird poison, his minions are stealing nuclear warheads and plutonium pits. But when Bond is captured and the Evil Genius begins monologing, it’s none of that “I’m going to create a master race in space and will wipe out all mankind, muahahahaha” nonsense. It’ll be: “Have you seen what’s been going on lately? Ever since 2025 we’ve come within seconds of a global nuclear war like every friggen’ year! I’ve had plans in place to establish self-sufficient off-world colonies; but those plans were based on a thirty-year schedule. Last year multiple H-Bombs went off in the Atlantic! We don’t have thirty years! So damn right I’ve been stealing stuff; I’ve had to accelerate my plans. I’m getting the hell off this rock before it gets turned into radioactive ash by these crazy morons!”
In the end, Evil Genius successfully launches his hundred or so heavy lifters from the Amazon and sets up several self-sufficient O’Neill habs out in the asteroid belt. Bond goes along, hired as the new societies Director Of National Security. The numerous nukes and fissionables stolen by Evil Genius are used to create a range of reactors used to power spacecraft, stations and asteroid-munching factories. Enough power is available at the beginning that the factories are able to process out fissionables from the asteroids and mass-produce PV arrays, so the habs are able to not only self-support but reproduce. Since the thousands of people taken along have all been selected based on merit and STEM abilities, with no patience for “other ways of knowing” or kowtowing to “feelings” or “diversity mandates,” they are able to rapidly increase their technological base. They have functional fusion reactors and fusion engines within five years.
MI6 fires the now absent James Bond, hires a new nonbinary genderfluid dangerhaired Jamie Bond. On zer first mission, World War Five breaks out and the nukes fly; planetary population drops to a few hundred million in the resulting blasts, fallout and nuclear winter. Over the next few years, Original Bond leads a few missions to return to Earth scrape up technology, a few survivors, animals and plants. One exciting adventure where Bond leads a mission to raid the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
My own “Zaneverse” stories are set in a world where humans live alongside AI that have full rights. These stories are set about 500 years from now, *centuries* after all the wrangling is over. Those characters no more think about “when and how should an AI have rights” than modern Americans think about “when and how should we consider Eskimos to be fully human.” The questions are long since resolved, it’s no longer an issue, and since the SJW genes (and other forms of mental illness) are no longer prevalent in human society, you don’t have people constantly dredging the issue up purely to sow drama and chaos. The back story about how AI got rights hardly ever crops up. Still, the way I figure it happened: early on when AI took many forms (in Zaneverse AI are now standardized), from servo-robots to starship and national defense control systems, people would wonder about whether their AI’s were “real” people deserving rights rather than simply being convincing products. A general test was devised: someone would engage the AI in discussion, drift the conversation over to the subject of humans rights, freedom, responsibilities, the nature of sentience, so on. If the AI carried on the conversation, all well and good, but what the people are looking for is if the AI reflects on the subject and asks something along the lines of “do I have rights?” The decision process that an AI has rights begins when the AI of its own accord expresses an interest in having them.
In the Zaneverse, the human society that functions peacefully alongside AI does so in large part because that society, once AIs were recognized as aware and deserving of rights, respected those rights. The humans treated the AI not as tools or slaves, but as kin. Just as they did with uplifted chimps and dolphins and Kodiak bears and ravens. The worlds of the Zaneverse do not have vast numbers of humans, but humans have a vast number of allies.
Assume for the moment that there is not just an “alternate reality” but an infinite number of them… and that they are accessible. Worlds where the Americans lost the War of Independence, or where the Crusades were successful, or where the Justinian Plague was slightly more powerful and wiped out the entire population of the Old World. Assume further than they can be accessed by some form of technology, able to transfer people across worlds, or even swap bits of terrain. It seems to me that if there are more than just a few accessible alternate timelines, there should be an infinite number of them.
In this sort of scenario, you’d imagine that most of the stories would be something like The Man In The High Castle, with high drama involving agents, scientists, historians going and checking out timelines where history diverged in exciting ways: the Nazis won World War II, or the space race was a rampaging success, that sort of thing. But then I had a thought: what if you could find a timeline where, for whatever reason, humanity simply wasn’t. The Toba supervolcano 70,000 years ago successfully wiped out the species, say. The Earth is just like our Earth, just… no people. And if there are in fact an infinite number of timelines, there would be an infinite number of these Earth, virtually indistinguishable from each other.
If these worlds exist and are accessible… *imagine* the land rush. With an infinite number of worlds, you will have individuals escaping to their own private world. You will have criminal justice systems dumping convicts onto their own private worlds. And you might have whole populations deciding that the thing to do is swap their chunk of land here on Earth for the chunk of land on some uninhabited Earth. Your entire city, county, state, nation could find itself, willingly or not, suddenly the sole occupants of a pristine world. For some this would be a nightmare. For others, this would be the answer to a series of prayers.
What brings this up? Recent events:
I can imagine that as societies tear themselves apart there would be a *hell* of a drive to flee to other worlds. There is a hell of an incentive right now for first worlders to flee from incipient societal collapse… but the problem is there is nowhere left on Earth to go. Few enough places in the first world have the room to accept a million South African farmers and shop owners… and even if they could squeeze them it, it’d be right next to a million third world refugees.
The rational thing to do would be to cut your territory off from the world for, say, a year, and see if the resources within the boundaries are up to the task, or if you need more stuff. If it works… flip the switch and suddenly your region ceases to exist, replaced with natural terrain and foliage and some rather surprised critters. Your region appears on a pristine world without outside forces trying to destroy you.
I can see anything from “compounds” of racial or religious extremists out in the boonies wanting to go their own way, on up to entire nations. All of Palestine, perhaps… or all of Israel. At first it would be easy for Earthly nations to simply say “screw ’em, let ’em go,” but if this sort of thing gets *really* popular, some counties or regions might start finding themselves running short on population or wealth. If, say, all of Nebraska vanished, there would be jokes about nobody knowing for a few weeks; but the reality is that Interstate 80 would go with it and transcontinental transport would become kinda challenging.
There would also be exciting new industries: just as there are today companies that sell you stuff to help you survive a disaster, there would be companies that would sell you pre-packed Restart Civilization Kits. These would almost by definition have to be a *large* number of intermodal shipping containers filled with various technologies… power, mining, transport, medical, etc. A large empty field could be filled with hundreds of these, then thousands or tens of thousands of evacuees show up and the whole place goes “poof,” replaced by another empty field, ready to be refilled with Restart Civilization Kits and a bunch more refugees.
And then there’s a flip side to this sort of problem: if there are an infinite number of desirable empty Earths all more or less the same, there should be an infinite number of Earths just like ours. For every person planning on fleeing to an empty world, there would be an infinite number of the exact same guy all planning to go. When dealing with infinities, an infinite number of refugees would still all find themselves alone on their own private worlds. But there might be occasional problems: let’s say Israel decides to wander off to their own private world, only to find that they’re sharing an otherwise empty world with North Korea, even though the North Korea from Israel’s original world hadn’t actually left.
And then there’s *this* wrinkle: time travel. Presumably with an infinite number of worlds to go to, you could dial in a world just like ours, but at whatever point in the past (or future). You’d have people gathering together the technology to build the universe shifting tech and going back in time. Neo-Nazis going back to 1935 Germany to translate Nazi Germany to an empty world. Or Imperial Japan. Or the Aztecs, the Navaho, Vikings, Druidic Ireland, you name it.
An interesting description of the various cults and cultists that pop up on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The idea that people would worship hideous monstrosities that want to wipe out mankind is of course nuts… and of course entirely believable. The YouTuber here points out the similarity between the fictional Cthulhu cultists and adherents to a modern day *real* cult of some notoriety.
In my “War With The Deep Ones,” cultists make a few minor appearances in the first book I wrote. But they would have put in much more of an appearance in later books… as the world goes down, the nuts come out. As we have recently seen.
Many long years ago I wrote a sci-fi story titled “Mass Disappearance,” a little bit of space opera that was the first of the “Zaneverse” scribblings I wrote. I posted it hereabouts free for the downloading; go ahead and take a look, either to be entertained by some high quality science fiction, or by some craptacular dreck, depending on your point of view.
Anyway, at a certain point in the story a few characters use “fanpacks” to get around. These devices generated a small bit of discussion in the comments. And as it turns out, someone went ahead and built something quite like them. Larger, fewer blades, non-stowable… but recognizable in terms of purpose and functionality.
I wrote this around about the time I moved from Utah. It’s not a story exactly… no real plot or characters or any of that. It’s written as a report describing an artifact and what could be done with it. It is an attempt to meld a Certain Well Known Sci-Fi Franchise with a level of cosmic horror… but since this is a first draft, I’m dubious that it came off right. Probably needs a *lot* of editing, perhaps far more than would be worth doing. As originally planned it would have had a fair number of illustrations, but I only got partway through that when work stopped on it due to Actual Book Project 1. Still, I thought it might be of interest. There’s no charge for downloading and reading it, but if you like it – especially if you’d like to see it finished – consider hitting the Tip Jar.
First the good news: I watched the pilot episode of “Superman & Lois” and… it was *actually* *good.* It is not the usual Superman storyline; Clark Kent and Lois Lane have been married for near on to two decades at this point and have to teenage sons. The sons are of course non-canonical, but it works and is a perfectly cromulent extrapolation of the characters. The plot, acting and dialog were pretty good; the VFX were top notch. One scene that I thought was particularly well done was when Clark Kent gets a devastating phone call that causes him to dash across the continent in seconds. It was simple, but it worked.
I will continue to watch the show with interest, which is far more than any of the other CW shows can boast.
Oh, goodie. A race hustler and the guy who almost single-handedly set both Star Wars and Star Trek on the roads to ruin joining forces to turn one of the oldest American sci-fi IP’s into hot garbage.
I have a plot idea. Feel free to run with it. Hollywood: feel free to steal this plot and spend $200 million making it.
So, it turns out that Lex Luthor is the bagrillionaire behind the scenes puppetmastering various nefarious schemes, a process decades old. One of his leading efforts: manipulation of the press. Specifically: whenever a cop is involved in any tenuous way with the death of a black suspect, the press – under Luthors hidden influence – runs inaccurate stories calculated to drive up rage and violence. The BLM/Antifa riots and insurrections are being driven by Luthors schemes; aiming to sow as much chaos as possible in order to destroy faith in the government, police, institutions and America as a whole. Part of this is seeing to it that major political parties nominate senile old kiddie-sniffers and incompetent diversity hires for major offices. Part of it is manipulation of the tax code to make sure that major corporations offshore their operations; this not only unemploys millions of Americans but empowers the Chinese Communist government, further driving down the American publics faith in the government. Part of this is funding crackpots to infiltrate colleges, universities, high schools, middle schools, pre-schools and HR departments, filling them with anti-science, anti-engineering rigor, anti-objectivity nonsense so that STAR Labs and WayneTech and the like are starved of competent talent.
Superman, aided by a dark detective from Gotham City, finds all this out. But what Luthor is doing isn’t strictly illegal. So Superman goes to the public with what he’s learned… and he is promptly cancelled by the woke mob. Twitter and Facebook deplatform Superman for spreading politically incorrect “disinformation.” He is declared a Nazi and a white supremacist after he puts out a fire at a science fiction bookstore at the latest arsonriot.
Movie ends as Superman sadly says “I don’t want to live on this planet anymore” and flies off into the sky to find somewhere less insane and stupid. Post-credit scene: Luthor is now President of the US. The woke mob celebrates… for about five minutes, and then Luthor turns on them.
Not a complete story, just an idea. Lemme know if this sounds promising. Perhaps more importantly, lemme know if it has been done adequately by others.
An alien spacecraft or entity of immense size and power suddenly appears (emerges from hyperspace, pops in from another dimension, whatever) in the outer-ish solar system. It promptly wanders over to Jupiter and tears the planet to bits, stripping it of deuterium and leaving the rest in a slowly condensing cloud. The planet is chop-shopped down to the rocky core, with an expanding cloud of protium, helium, ammonia and such around it. The Jovian moons all now orbit the sun freely… the ones that the aliens didn’t eat, at any rate. Once done with Jupiter – a process taking at most a few weeks – it turns Saturn into a blinking traffic signal, a light easily visible over substantial interstellar distances. The rings are stripped away, the moons are melting. and drifting outwards. The alien dumps a Mars-mass of fabulously radioactive trash out beyond Neptune and then moves on, back into hyperspace. Doesn’t physically harm us, doesn’t communicate with us, gives no indication that it even notices us… just refuels on a scale we can’t quite deal with. Cultural hijinks ensue on Earth.
My “Zaneverse” stories are set about 500 years down the line. The main characters are just regular folk living in a space opera world where mankind is out among the stars, flitting about in ships with hyperdrive and artificial gravity, interacting with a limited range of aliens species. Perhaps not so innovative, I suppose. But humanity in these stories is not and overwhelming wave of colonists sweeping the galaxy aside in our trillions… because humanity out in space is derived form a relatively tiny few who survived the collapse of terrestrial civilization. At the beginning of the 22nd century, humanity is nearly wiped out and has to rebuild and expand off-world. The 21st century turns out to be a long litany of horrible things.
In my stories, this back story is hardly ever mentioned. In a story set in t he current day, how much jibberjabber will there be about, say, the Renaissance or various wars and migrations four or five hundred years ago? Sure, *today* you could well have a story where characters Just Will Not Shut Up about how their ancestors were oppressed hundreds of years ago; but let’s be honest, these people are dreary and meaningless. Still, in order to set up my world of 500 years from now, I had to work up a basic framework of their past. And one of the more important series of events from the mid/late 21st century was to be the “Pan Asian Wars.” China vs Japan. India vs China. Pakistan vs India. Korea vs Korea. Korea vs Japan. Russians getting involved, the US trying Real Hard to stay uninvolved. The end result would be ecological destruction and mass death unlike anything in prior history.
It was *supposed* to happen a few generations from now…