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Nov 192016
 

According to Box Office Mojo…

Trolls: Domestic Total as of Nov. 18, 2016: $102,564,533 

Arrival: Domestic Total as of Nov. 18, 2016: $34,980,799

Ugh.

And lest you think that it’s specifically Americans who are teh dumm…

Trolls: Foreign: $129,338,668

Arrival: Foreign: $10,845,054

You know, those of us who appreciate*good* science fiction often bemoan the lack of it in theaters, compared to explodey eye candy (Dr. Strange has so far made half a billion). But when the rare smart science fiction movie comes along and performs this badly, is it any wonder that more like it aren’t made? Granted it’s only been one week, but it’s unlikely to suddenly zoom into popularity from here. So after that one week it has made $46M off of a $47M budget (dirt cheap by Hollywood standards), probably about half what is required to break even. With luck the coming weeks will see it inch towards profitability, but what with “Fantastic Beasts” stomping all over the box office, I’m not sure I’d bet on it.

FYI:

Star Trek: Beyond, budget $185M. US:$158.8M; Foreign: $184.5M, total: $343.3M. Did poorly enough that “Star Trek 4” is in doubt.

Ghostbusters 2016, budget $144M. US: $128.4M, Foreign: $100.8M, Total: $229.1M. A moderate bomb.

And to really give you a “WTF is *wrong* with you people?!?!?” vibe…

BOO! A Madea Halloween, budget $20 M, Worldwide: $72,644,026

 Posted by at 2:19 pm
Nov 192016
 

Here’s something I don’t see every day: an RV with a painting of the M-21/D-21 combo on the back:

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As the speed limit was 80 MPH, there wasn’t a whole lot of hanging aroung to try to get details, so what you see here is what I got. Perhaps the RV owner worked on the project; perhaps he/she just liked it.

Nostalgia moment: So, who else here is old and creaky enough to remember that vans are supposed to have airbrushed on their sides wizards, barbarians, warrior women in dubious armor and dragons?

 Posted by at 11:46 am
Nov 182016
 

So, the losing Presidential candidate is almost universally acknowledged as being intensely corrupt and by a large fraction of the public as having engaged in criminal practices. The winning Presidential candidate is widely acknowledged to be pretty vindictive and incapable of “letting go.” So the obvious conclusion to draw is that President Giant Middle Finger will sic the Justice Department on Angry Grandma the first chance he gets. This will set off a firestorm, with the sizable fraction of the public that actually thought that Hillary Clinton would make a good President believing that to be a banana republic sort of event. Regardless of how justified (or not) sending the Presidential Loser to prison would be would be, it would be an unfortunate precedent.

Fortunately, I have a solution. It’s simple, entirely feasible, Constitutional and will make everyone happy. On Day One, President Trump simply pardons Hillary.

This should make the lefties happy, because it ends the wrangling and doesn’t send Hillary to prison. It results in the end of the idea of the President using the power of government to punish his political enemies (well, in this one area, anyway).

Now, why would the anti-Hillary folk back this idea? It sounds like kind of a loser for the people who want to see corruption punished. But consider: you don’t get pardoned for being innocent. Having been pardoned for violating security clearance laws with the email server will be one of the first things people think about when they hear “Hillary Clinton.” And the wording of the pardon could well be made interesting; it could be a masterpiece of left-handed complimenting. Say exactly what Hillary is guilty of (“influence peddling,” “gross violation of State Department email handling rules,” “bathing in the blood of kittens,” whatever), then say she’s pardoned for it. The beauty of it is that there is no need for “due process,” and no court to appeal to… a President can pardon whoever he likes, and if the pardoned person doesn’t like it, well, that’s just too bad.

Done right, this could essentially torpedo any possibility of Hillary running again for President (not that there’s a whole lot of chance of that, anyway). Sure, it gets her out of jail time… but that was probably never going to happen anyway. She is facing the worst punishment anyway: with no prospect of being President or otherwise in a position to direct national policy, who the hell is going to shower her, Bill or Chelsea with insanely large buckets of money to give pointless speeches or monumentally vast advances for books nobody is going to buy?

 Posted by at 11:27 pm
Nov 182016
 

It’s almost like the people at Syfy want to get past the dark days when that network was best known for “ghost hunters” and rasslin’.

Robert Heinlein’s Scifi Classic Stranger in a Strange Land Is Coming to TV

No details provided.

If it is done with the same level of effort Syfy put into “Childhood’s End” and “The Expanse…” Woo! But if it’s “I Grok Sharknado,” then… boo.

How the hell Syfy is going to get the nakidity and such that this story requires onto basic cable, I’ve no idea.

Now, somebody get on to making “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”

 Posted by at 12:17 am
Nov 172016
 

I’ve read this several times, and I’ve yet to see what the actual crime is. Maybe because it’s in Canada, and their ways are strange.

Poster in East York being investigated as hate crime

You can see the complete “poster” (actually just a single sheet of standard printer paper stuck to a pole) HERE. I *defy* you to say what the crime is, beyond the act of posting political tracts.

It asks some questions, none of which pose any sort of threat. It then invites people to “join the Alt-Right,” and lists some websites, none of which I’ve ever heard of. Now, even if these websites are for organizations as racist as Stormfront, the KKK or the DNC, simply inviting people to view the sites is hardly any sort of crime. It invites no criminal act, it does not call for violence.

So, again, what’s the crime? Is it just that things have gotten so bad in Canada that opinions are illegal?

 Posted by at 11:57 pm
Nov 172016
 

Here’s another photo of the lifting body mockup I showed a month ago. Here you can see that the full display – apparently a USAF public relations item – included a more or less full length booster, presumably a Titan II. It’s not the best angle, but it *kinda* looks like this might be just the first stage of the Titan II (or a round tube resembling one) without a second stage. It’s doubtful that there was ever a plan to launch a one-man lifting body atop a single Titan II first stage; it would be distinctly suborbital, and without some deep throttling the acceleration would probably be pretty crushing.

When i last posted this, I mentioned that photos of this were shown “many times.” I wrote that because I remember seeing such photos… but once I started actually looking for them they turn out to be rather hard to find. I imagine I must’ve seen the photos in 1960’s magazines or such. Two more not terribly helpful photos are available HERE and

 Posted by at 11:40 pm
Nov 172016
 

So Raedthinn is informed that it’s time for his annual vaccination shots:

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And then Buttons is informed:

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And then Speedbump. But as he’s kind of a dimwit, he’s initially excited.

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Then he thinks about it for a bit…

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Fingers is not informed. Because unless she is captured unaware, she will run and hide most proficiently.

So then they all end up at the vet.

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These was before the shots. When the crate doors first opened, each cat tried to dash out. They were all caught, poked and prodded by the vet, then cruelly stabbed in the back of the neck with a needle. THEN they each and every one couldn’t get back into the crates fast enough.

Ootini, beeyotch!

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 Posted by at 10:00 pm
Nov 172016
 

It will, I imagine, come as almost zero surprise that I’ve long been a fan of the various “Star Trek” blueprint sets produced over the years by fans and professionals. They range from the “why did you even bother when you had to know you had neither skill nor talent” to the “I want to frame that and hang it on my wall.” In my opinion, just as a matter of aesthetics, the best ones were produced in the 70’s and early 80’s (the original Franz Joseph “Constitution Class” set, the McMaster “Klingon Book of Plans,” the Dreadnought, etc.). These were drafted by hand. The errors are in evidence, inconsistencies can be readily found, imprecisenesses here and there, a whole raft of unfortunate things that were eliminated when people started doing this sort of thing on the computer. And when vector graphics, CAD systems and 3D modeling came in and cleaned everything up, a little bit of the art seemed to go out of the enterprise. Dunno… maybe it’s just me.

So, promptly after pointing out that I prefer hand0drawn over computer aided…. here’s the beginnings of my own stab at the art form, done entirely on computer.

Something I have been working on for quite some time is a series of 2D diagrams of the “Messiah” spacecraft from Deep Impact. This is an outgrowth of the 3D CAD model of the Messiah I made for Fantastic Plastic (I gather there were some hiccups in the process, but I understand that things are back on track) a year and a half ago. This is the very definition of a “back burner” project; it’s not a secondary effort, not even a tertiary effort. There are paying gigs ahead of it. Still, going in and tapping away at it from time to time is a good way to destress from the other projects.

I’d spent a long time considering what to do with “Messiah.” Options included some sort of book/magazine/thing, or one or more large format (24X36, say) prints, or even cyanotype blueprints (I did in fact make a grand total of two *very* large Messiah blueprints, quite a while back… a year and a half, as it turns out). But I’ve decided to adopt the “Book Of General Plans” format. In this case,a  set of prints, say, 11 inches by 36, folded and in an envelope. Retro!

The Messiah would cover about half a dozen sheets, plus or minus. A lot depends on scale. The image below (purple coloring just a drawing aid, will go to black before printing) shows the 2D diagram in 1/200 scale… which is a quite large sheet. Below that you can see a rectangle, 24X36 inches, subdivided into two 11X36 strips. At 1/200, the plan view of the ship will just fit. Thus, there’d be one sheet for the top view, one for the bottom, one for the side, one for the fore/aft. There are also a number of scrap views…the Shuttle/lander in both flight and landing configuration, details of the Orion booster section, an inboard profile, others.

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Here’s a quick look at a small fraction of the illustrations created of the lander:

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Along with the diagrams there’d also be “in universe” text and data, with my best efforts to rationalize the design. In the case of Messiah… it’s powered by a wandwavy form of nuclear pulse that uses bomblets that are more akin to “nuclear hand grenades,” with explosions that are slightly oblate rather than spherical… justifying the elliptical pusher plate. The large chemical boosters are liquid systems filled with high-energy space-storable propellants… FLOX burning with a kero-boron slurry. The aft boosters look like Energia boosters; the forward boosters look like Ariane V boosters, but in both cases they are much larger than the originals. This was done because… ummm… well, they were in a hurry (so they copied what they had), and they were working in secret (so they made the boosters look like things people had seen before, so if they were photographed at a distance they could be passed off as the more mundane boosters… yeah, that’s it…).

 

I’m doing this (veeerrry slowly) because I’m just that much of a geek. Anybody else interested? If I have ’em printed off in quantity, I’m thinking of selling them for around $20 a set, on a print run of *maybe* twenty.

After Messiah, there are a number of other designs I’d like to do the same with. 10-meters USAF Orion (real design). 4,000 ton Orion Battleship (Pax Orionis). Helicarrier (Avengers). USS Ascension (from the miniseries of the same name… oy, the monkeymotions to rationalize that).

 Posted by at 8:20 pm
Nov 172016
 

This seems unlikely to me:

Merkel to be the new ‘leader of the free world’?

Though it would be interesting to see Germany step up and take on the role of sending soldiers and fighters, helicopter and bombers to the middle east. If Germany is to be the leader of the free world, they might look to doing something about that invasion from the non-free world that they’ve got going on.

Next time there’s a major hurricane, earthquake or tsunami, it’s the German Navy that shows up with nuclear powered aircraft carriers to serve as logistics bases and mobile power stations; German cargo planes show up to unload thousands of tons of relief supplies. Germany that provides the bulk of the funding for NATO and the UN and sends hundreds of thousands of troops around the world to hundreds of bases to keep the peace and try to smack down terrorists and the like.

I’m sure I’ll see that any day now.

 Posted by at 5:12 pm