The Unwanted Blog at Up-Ship.com is now the backup blog. The new *official* Unwanted Blog is here: https://unwantedblog.com
The rate of failures at the server has just become freakin’ untenable. Further backup communications at twitter.com/UnwantedBlog
New posts will continue to appear here… for as long as they can. Posts will appear at the new blog first, then here delayed a bit.
A Tweet about the Pixar movie “Coco,” which I have not seen, got me thinking (and I think re-iterating an idea I blathered about on this blog years ago but can’t be bothered to look up again).
https://x.com/cirsova/status/1945885686768230903
An interesting theology: you continue to exist in some form so long as someone remembers you, then once nobody alive remembers you, *poof* you’re gone.This is apparently the plot of “Coco,” where some kid visits Mexican Afterlife, which is a party for those whose living relatives still venerate them. While this does not seem to jibe with my understanding of Christianity, set that aside for the moment and just ponder the basic idea, that your existence in the afterlife is contingent upon people remembering you. (A lot of theologies around the world include some ancestor-veneration, seemingly implying that Great Granny’s afterlife is depending on you dropping off a banana on her shrine now and then.)
For most people throughout history, that meant that within probably 40 years of your death, you’re off to oblivion. Some people last in some form of memory for centuries, of course… Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great will last a good long while. But some people are remembered, then utterly forgotten… then remembered again. Consider Gilgamesh or any number of Pharaohs or minor functionaries mentioned on clay tablets or tomb walls or hidden texts. They were forgotten and lost for millennia, with not a single soul living on Earth knowing their name. But then their name is found and read again by archeologists. Some become world famous, known to millions: King Tut, for example. Others, like Ea-nāṣir, are known ta relative few. Are these dead souls left in some sort of limbo or stasis during the years they’re forgotten, then come back, or do they just pop back into existence?
And of course, how much does the condition of the afterlife depend on the condition of your memory? Is the afterlife a party only if people who actually knew you still remember you? Does it fade into hollowness and boredom as your memory fades? Are you left sitting motionless in an empty space if your memory consists solely of your name written on some unread wall? Imagine the grim fate awaiting us all as we wait for proton decay to erase the last memory crystals that contain our tax records, a googol years or more from now.
Buttons is about 16. While nowhere near the oldest a cat can get, it is, sad to say, old for a cat. All my prior cats made it to 10 or at best 11, so Buttons has outlasted them all. And sadder to say, he has some medical issues that, left unchecked, will end him pretty quickly. So several times a day I have to force some meds into him, a process he *really* doesn’t like, but is tolerant of. Even with the meds he gets occasional relapses; but prior to the current meds some months back he had incidents that came close to The End. So… he could have years left, or I can post bad news tomorrow. That’s just the way it is.
Abby, on the other hand, is only about 2. Young, vigorous and loves to fight, she’ll merrily throw down with Billy or Banshee, practicing the very best cat-judo moves. However, she is remarkably gentle with Buttons. Seems she knows he’s The Honored Elder and is to be treated with respect and restraint. She lets him sleep, and sleep he does… he could easily sleep 20+ hours a day.
Every now and then he feels particularly good, and engages in play. Here he is trying to bait Abby into some level of a fight. I was gratified to see that while she played with him, she did not play rough.
For about 20 years I’ve been buying aerospace documentation on ebay. For a good chunk of those I’ve crowdfunded the purchases of really expensive stuff. And by “really expensive” I’ve meant something like “hundreds of dollars for a single report.” Split the purchase price between one or two dozen people, send all of them high-rez scans, and the price can be quite affordable and everybody is happy. Huzzah.
But recently a new trend has emerged: exorbitantly high opening bids. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue: if the opening bid is stupidly high, nobody buys. the item goes unsold and often the seller will come down in price. Woo. But the recent development is buyers who are willing and able to buy, repeatedly, extremely expensive stuff. For example, a seller apparently got hold of an estate with a bunch of Republic Aviation stuff. For aerospace projects fans, there have been some fantastic items… and I’ve utterly failed to obtain any of them because the opening bids aren’t hundred,s they’re thousands… and someone else out there has really deep pockets and has been snapping them up. I tried bidding on one early document; with crowdfunders I was able to bid over $1,600 in the last few seconds, thinking I was the only bidder… but I got sniped by someone who bid several times at higher amounts. Since then I’ve watched numerous items sell for even more in the last seconds, apparently to the same buyer. I’ve repeatedly contacted the seller about buying scans, photocopies or even just complete sets of photos of the documents, but such requests have gone unanswered. So these things are *poof* gone forever.
Now, these are documents that I was unaware existed before I saw the listing, and I’ve lost no money. So objectively I’m not worse off than before… but it’s incredibly frustrating to see such things, know that at least theoretically I could have had access to them, and now they’ve gone from one black hole to another black hole.
A couple examples, reports on the Republic AP-77 design from the mid-1950’s, a tactical bomber for the USAF with clear XF-103 heritage.
And…
What can I do about it? Not a damned thing, unless I finally win the Lotto.
If I *do* win the Lotto, I’m not telling anyone. But there will be signs.
Sadly not $200,000 or 200,000 followers willing to do my bidding, but 200,000 miles on my car a few days ago. Not much of a milestone I suppose, but it’s what I got.
Yeesh, it’s been months since I’ve blog posted much of anything. Of course all my yapping is now done at Twitter (@UnwantedBlog), where I post a handful of things a day. But even with that, I write a hell of a lot less than during my blogging days. It’s a lot easier to tweet. Question: anybody care?
Rewards for April, 2025 have been released. These include:
Document: “Performance Data Report for Class VF Convoy Fighter Airplane,” Convair report from 1950. 100 pages of data (no diagrams) on what would become the XFY-1 “Pogo.”
Document: “Hard Mobile Launcher” Martin Marietta brochure on the Midgetman launcher, with some bonus Martin Marietta HML info and art
Diagram: “Parallel Tanks Missile,” Convair diagram 7-26-54, apparently an alternate design for Atlas, much more like Soviet R-7 family. Reduced to 75% of original scanned size, which is immense and system-crashing.
CAD diagram: Lockheed B-2, a stealthier proposed follow-on to the U-2.
Subscribers/Patrons for the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program not only receive a monthly collection of aerospace goodies such as these, but can also pick up back issues all the way to 2014.
aerospaceprojectsreview.com/monthly.htm
Now scanning: “Norspiel,” rules book for a wargame created at Northrop Aircraft in 1957. Not the usual sort of thing I go after, but it seems interesting. I wasn’t able to find anything online about it other than the ebay listing, so it may be new to the wargaming world. I’m not a wargamer (not since about 1987), so I’m no expert, but it seems a lot simpler than, say, Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer 40K.
This will be added to the next APR Patreon/subscriber catalog to be voted on for a monthly reward. If this sort of thing is of interest, please check out:
Everyone is nostalgic for the days of their youth and think that “those years were the best.” But I really believe a good case can be made that the 80’s and well into the 90’s were in many ways the pinnacle of our culture. Pop culture was almost undeniably at it’s zenith. We still had optimism; our culture hadn’t been tainted with the post-9/11 malaise and the recognition that a demographic tsunami and cultural collapse were inevitable. Hollywood still made entertainment that entertained and wasn’t loaded to the gills with deviant insanity. Everything *wasn’t* a struggle session forced on us by people who hated us and our civilization. And pop culture was really in a sweet spot. TV, movies and music had learned how to make just exactly awesome stuff that people loved. Things were *fun.* And I suspect that entertainment tech was perfect, in a way. If you wanted “Star Wars,” you could get “Star Wars” on a VHS tape. It wasn’t especially easy and it certainly was nowhere near as good as on a movie screen, but it was okay. And that “available, good but not great” accessibility scratched the itch but made you want to go to the movies & get the Good Stuff. To chat about it you talked face to face with friends, as social media didn’t really exist. Now it’s too easy and we’re too separated. We didn’t know how good we had it.
Today if you want to watch something, chances are you just pull it up and stream it. Any episode, the whole series, available in 4K resolution on an 85-inch high-def screen the moment you want it. And that’s great and all… but there really is something special about things being a bit more challenging than that. When a show took 22 weeks to tell a seasons worth of stories, rather than dumping 8 hours on you all at once and not to be seen again for another year or two, it spread out the joy over time. You could absorb it and process it. And, in the case of shows like Star Trek, Babylon 5, X Files and the like, argue and debate it with your friends, one episode a week.
When things are too easy, they become cheap.
This is worth noting:
Which references:
Got some stuff on eBay that might be of interest, but the auctions end in less than 24 hours:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801825475
https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801824805
https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801824768
https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801824704
https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801824661
None of the Enterprises currently have bids so they’ll probably go cheap to whoever wants them. A few other things on eBay as well.