Jan 262024
 

Styropyro takes a an off the shelf 2 kilowatt fiber laser welder/rust remover and makes it a long range laser sniper weapon. There are a  number of issues… the mount is rickety and there’s no scope, primarily. But it’s remarkably capable, burning holes relatively quickly through steel plate and cinderblocks.

 

This would seem to indicate that a refined version with a better mount, better aim and a much faster reaction time/slew rate would serve as a dandy anti-drone system, easily mounted to something like a Hummer, small truck or as an add-on to armored vehicles. If one kid out in the boonies can do this on a YouTuber budget, I’m left to wonder why the Russian military *hasn’t* done it on a large scale.

 

 Posted by at 7:41 pm
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:

 

 

 

 Posted by at 12:23 pm
Mar 092023
 

“You are who you choose to be.” “Superman.”

The question I’ve seen asked before: “why didn’t the giant simply blast the missile?” Because he chose to be Superman, and Superman isn’t a gun (let’s ignore the “heat vision” for just a second).

This guy’s channel is definitely worth watching. He also had the correct response to the end of “The Mist.” His *dogs* had the correct response there.

 Posted by at 7:07 am
Nov 292022
 

A day or two back I posted about “Established Titles.” In short… nah. I had wondered if the recent surge in interest in ET being less than entirely above-board might have some effect on any of the YouTubers who have been raking in sponsorship money from them… and lo and behold, one of the more entertaining YouTubers, “Casual Geographic,” posted this:

 

So as many of you have made me aware, a brand I’ve promoted twice has been exposed for pretty much being a scam (or at the very least, incredibly misleading). That’s obviously a massive failing on my part and on me and me alone. I can see now how the brand was meant to be intentionally misleading. For example, their website claims it’s a “fun, novelty product” but explicitly had us say things like “the first x people will receive a plot right next to mine” (which ,not gonna lie, should have been a red flag). Clearly implying that you’d be purchasing a physical plot of land, which clearly is not the case. So the two videos where I promoted them have been archived and I’m in the process of returning the money received from the partnership as well as cutting ties contractually. As soon as I can be sure I’m not in a position for the brand to come after me legally, I’ll repost them with the sponsored segments removed. I’m sorry for promoting what is essentially a grift and apologize to anyone that gave this brand money because they trusted me. Obviously it doesn’t really matter what my intentions were because either way I promoted it but I hope you all understand that I’d never willingly push a dishonest product and am genuinely sorry that I did.

 

Well done.

I don’t have much animosity towards those who were paid to promote this; the YouTube business model, much like the pre-Musk Twitter model, is seriously broken. Videos that could and should earn the makers *substantial* sums could and often did get demonitized on a whim, sometimes regularly; YouTubers who should make a good living by being entertaining and informative could find their incomes slashed due to false flagging and simple incompetence, with a heavy dose of shady politics. Thus it’s not unreasonable that they’d jump at the opportunity to sign on lucrative sponsorships, and the “buy a plot of land and be called a Lord” thing is sufficiently both weird and mundane that on first glance it probably seems fun and harmless.

If you’ve bought into Established Titles, or you “bought and named a star,” don’t feel bad. If you did so for the entertainment value, for the conversation value… then it’s worth what you feel it’s worth. If you bought in as an investment… well, that’s kinda dumb. Your financial planning is bad and you should feel bad. But speaking as a guy with a surprising number of toy spaceships and a vast number of model kits that will certainly never be finished, I’m not gonna knock someone for buying objectively useless stuff just because you want to. Where I get twitchy is when they sell it to you dishonestly.

Anyway good on Casual Geographics. I heartily recommend this feller. He talks about critters in a way that’s both informative *and* incredibly entertaining. A fair amount of nature red in tooth and claw, so be advised.

 

 

 Posted by at 2:31 am
Sep 012022
 

The “Primitive Technology” channel shows how to process iron from river sand. The level of effort and the raw materials needed in order to produce a *tiny* amount of iron are impressive, but the results show that it can be done at a very low tech level. A bit of refinement and a useful amount of workable iron could be produced on a fairly regular basis by a small family, tribe or village. Why you’d want to go to the bother *today* I’m not so sure, but maybe this sort of thing would be useful for those of a prepper mindset, or planning on colonizing new worlds or time traveling. I’m not here to judge.

A couple months back the same guy showed how to make an iron knife – admitted a bad one, but an iron knife nonetheless – from bacteria. I was *certain* that I’d posted this video, but a concentrated, detailed search of the blog for more than ten seconds did not turn it up. Shrug.

 

 

 

 Posted by at 10:23 pm
Jun 012022
 

And here it is, the dumbest thing you can say about Star Trek:

Fox News is wrong, Star Trek has always been “woke”

No, it hasn’t. Let me illustrate with a fairly famous scene:

An alien takes on the guise of Abraham Lincoln. The alien does it well enough that it seems that “Lincoln” actually thinks he’s Lincoln. Lincoln then goes on to use the term “negress,” which is not only a term describing race, but also sex. That in and of itself would be enough to set off the baying hounds of wokism… he’s “assuming her gender,” as well as using a word that was probably pretty cringey even back in the 1960’s, never mind 2022. And how does Lt. Uhura respond? By *not* being offended. By not *taking* offense, by not assuming that offense was intended. Nobody gets mad, nobody tries to police speech or teach “Lincoln” about his privilege or in any way demonstrate the sort of unhinged lunacy that defines wokism. Those characters just smiled and went on about their day. They were all about free speech.

“We’ve learned not to fear words.” Try to square that with wokism.

Also note in that clip above, Kirk points out that humans have finally learned to be delighted with what they are. Can you think of any concept more transphobic?

Honestly, that one clip above utterly refutes most of the world view of the woke. If people thought as suggested above… the woke would find no purchase and they’d be about as relevant as theosophists.

Also: Yes, the bridge of the Enterprise was multi-ethnic, certainly “progressive” for its time. But it was also *mono* cultural. Everyone spoke the same language, had the same basic values. They didn’t bow to “other ways of knowing;” they relied exclusively on objective reasoning and hard science. The only two who even had non-American accents were two white guys (Scotty and Chekov).

They all packed heat when they went someplace new and unknown. They didn’t freak out about other people packing heat. They kept and bore arms.

They worked within (and accepted) a hierarchical command structure. When the Captain ordered, you obeyed.

It was a meritocracy. You didn’t rise through the ranks based on identity politics.

They guarded borders and prevented, sometimes violently and lethally, illegal border crossings. Whether it was Romulans or Klingons trying to sneak across the Neutral Zone, or Borg trying to migrate en masse into the inner Federation… the cops showed up to shoo ’em off.

Capitalism was alive and well. Private traders and private property were not loudly touted as they would have been had Ayn Rand written the scripts… but you had asteroid prospectors like Cyrano Jones plying his trade; space yachts like the SS Aurora out there being stolen by dipshit space hippies (who, like modern wokies, abandon objective reality for mystical nonsense, and end up being injured and killed by their ignorance); con men like Harcourt Fenton Mudd trying to make their fortunes dishonestly in a system that does not seem to mind if you make a fortune *honestly.* Yes, “Next Generation” tried to portray a post-capitalist future, but that only worked insofar as they were a post scarcity society: anyone could have a desktop fusion reactor and a desktop food replicator. Even in Next Gen, average schmoes could own their own stuff, including ships and plots of land. The Ferengi were depicted as despicable capitalists… and yet, they were legally allowed to be as capitalist as they liked, so long as they didn’t cheat. *Everybody* did business with the Ferengi. Because capitalism gets stuff done.

Related: private property is sacrosanct. And more to the point, you are your own property, and nobody can tell you what to do with you (outside the bounds of following the legal orders of your superiors, of course). And “you” include artificial people like androids and sentient computer programs. You do not belong to the village or the society or the state. Anyone tries that crap and Kirk will phaser the bejeebers out of the control system.

The favorite episode of those claiming that Star Trek was “woke” back in the sixties is “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield,” which shows irrational race hatred. As if irrational race hatred and modern progressive/woke politics are somehow mutually exclusive. These people love to hate white people, white history, white culture… and they hate ’em so much that they have expanded the franchise to hating Asians because they are “white adjacent.” Wokies *want* the government and society and businesses and regular people to treat people differently based on race. Captain Kirk and company not giving a rats ass about someones race? That sort of thinking is alien to wokism.

Numerous episodes deal with time travel, and they make great efforts to not change history. There’s an entire department of the Federation devoted to making sure that history remains unchanged. How about the woke? They make every effort to change history every chance they get. Whether it’s tearing down statues or re-naming institutions or *eliminating* institutions or destroying national pride by claiming that the founders or national heroes were actually evil or that the principals upon which this or that nation were built are evil and corrupt, the woke do everything they can to re-write history, the facts be damned. Modern wokies with access to time machines would be the Department of Temporal Investigations worst nightmare.

Related: the great works of western literature, philosophy, politics and science are still highly venerated. They have not been memory holed or retconned. Scotty is proud of his Scottish heritage. Chekov is proud of Russia. Kirk is clearly enamored of America and American history and virtues.

Numerous times humans are shown to have adopted the dress, food and customs of other races (Vulcans and Romulans spring to mind). And yet… nobody screeching about “Cultural Appropriation.” Everybody makes use of whatever they find that they like, that works for them, that profits them.

Several episodes deal with insanity. How does the federation, Starfleet, the crew of the Enterprise deal with the mentally ill? They send them to high-tech looney bins which work to MAKE THEM SANE. They do not try to convince them and the people around them that their “emotional interestingness” is Stunning And Brave. They do not go along with delusions. They cure people who are bugnuts. Doctor McCoy would take one look at the blue haired weirdos who populate Twitter and Libs of TikTok and start mass injectiosn of anti-whacko meds.

And… colonies. Colonies galore. Colonialism on a galactic scale. Small colony vessels, vast colony armadas. Worlds getting terraformed to suit *our* needs.

 

Feel free to add to the list.

 Posted by at 12:32 am