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Hard to tell just how excited Raedthinn is to be photographed with Fingers…

Thirty years ago, Russia sucked because Godless Communism oppressed people who believed differently. Now that Russia has flip-flopped and welcomed religion… they still oppress people who believe differently. Witness:

Russia jails atheist blogger for hunting Pokemon in church

Ruslan Sokolovsky has been charged with “offending religious believers and inciting hatred,”after posting a YouTube video where he plays Pokemon Go in a church.

The history of Russia… yeesh. After centuries under the thumb of the Czars, the Russian people finally rise up, toss the aristocrats into vats of acid… and promptly replace them with *Communists,* who were even worse. After 70 or so years, the Russian people rise up and overthrow the Communists… and replace them with the like of Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. At first this seemed like an improvement, but if it is, it’s beginning to become less and less of one.

“The Amazing World Of Gumball.”

Yeah, that’s right, I’m endorsing a kids cartoon show. Why? Because it’s fricken’ awesome, that’s why.

Most episodes are just absurdist goofballery. But even then it’s well-produced absurdist goofballery. But sometimes, every now and then, the show steps up to tackle some seriously messed-up cosmic horror.

The short form of the show is: Gumball Waterson is a blue cat going to grade school. His mother, also a blue cat, is intelligent, caring and equipped with a nightmarish temper. Gumballs father is a well-worn stereotype… fat, lazy, stupid. And he’s a pink rabbit. Gumball’s smaller sister Anais is very intelligent, and a pink bunny. Gumballs brother Darwin started out life as the families pet goldfish, but he sprouted legs, the ability to talk, and the family just… accepted him. The rest of the town is populated by a whole range of characters animated by different means… puppets, computer generated characters, conventionally animated, etc. Many of the characters were formerly-rejected characters the creator of the show had tried to use on commercials and the like. One, Tina, is another grade school girl… and a CG Tyrannosaurus Rex. Another is a walking, talking donut… and the town cop.

While most of the episodes are really quite good humor, some of the episodes go off the rails in the best way possible. The episode “The Job,” for instance, was one of the first I saw and had me instantly hooked. The schtick is that Richard Waterson (Gumballs rabbit father) is so lazy that he cannot possibly hold down a job. So when he actually gets a job (as a pizza delivery man), it actually fractures the nature of reality. That’s cool, I suppose… but what grabbed me was that they used as the basis for many elements of the episode the well-known beloved children’s classic “The Omen.” Photos showing phantom lightning strikes was a hint, but a chorus singing a slightly modified version of “Omen’s” “Ave Satani” had me laughing my guts out once I recognized it. The boys realize that their father won’t be able to do the job, so they set about helping him delivery pizzas. Sadly, at one delivery they accidentally drop the pizza face down on the porch stairs, where it slides down leaving a trail of grease and toppings. What makes it extra-sad – and thus hilarious – is that the couple they were delivery the pizza to are themselves animated pizzas, and that pizza they were expecting was to be their child. Neat! The episode only gets more bizarre from there.

In another episode, “The Safety,” Darwin becomes a literal Safety Fascist, military uniform and all, as he imposes a terrifying Orwellian reign of control over the town in order to make sure everyone is safe.

In “The Void,” they discover that there are some people, ideas and things that are simply too boring to exist, and they’ve been shunted off into another dimension. The rest of the universe has forgotten them, erasing them from existence.

In “The Signal,” Darwin and Gumball discover at the end of the episode that they are simply fictional TV characters… and this discovery shatters their minds.

In “The Joy,” it turns out that sufficiently powerful “joy” can become a communicable disease that turns you into a mindless zombie. This sets up an effectively creepy zombie epidemic, with the hero of the piece being a character who has always been an antagonist.

The episode “The Pizza” is very much in the mode of “Atlas Shrugged.” The character Larry, who basically holds down *every* job in the town, finally gets overwhelmed with being used and abused… and he quits. in very short order the economic structure of the place collapses, Mad Maxian chaos and violence ensues – after threats of cannibalism, Gumballs mom goes bugnuts and slaughters the threatening gang. Eventually a nuclear explosion is seen going off in the background.

In the most recent episode “The Scam,” Gumball works with fellow student Carrie (an actual ghost) to convince the rest of the students that there is a Monster From Beyond, Gargaroth, who is wreaking havoc and that only Gumball and Darwin can ghostbust it (using backpack vacuum cleaners). They do this in exchange for payment in the form of the other students Halloween candy. So far, so normal. But then it turns out that Gargaroth is real… and is one of the more accurate depictions of a Shoggoth I’ve seen. Really quite nasty. Further, the only way for Carrie the ghost to enjoy eating candy is for her to possess someone else and make *them* eat; this was explored in some horrifying depth in the episode “The Ghost.”

There are other little bits of horror scattered throughout… a childs talking doll suddenly *really* talking; the same doll behaving normally but bursting into flames; characters exploding for no good reason; psychic powers manifesting and having pretty much the madness-inducing effects you’d expect such events actually would.

And the events and message of “The Lie” are best left to be watched rather than explained.

Oddly, this series, now in season 6, has never had a proper DVD/Blu Ray release. There have been a few mishmash DVDs with some random episodes, but never a single full season release.

So I’ve been hearing lately that “Uh oh, it looks like your average Obamacare customer will see their premiums go up by about 25%.” So imagine my joy upon reading the letter that arrived today alerting me to the fact that not only am I *not* average, I’m special. Super-duper special. My premiums aren’t going up by 25%. They’re going up by 63%. Of course, this being Obamacare, the government (i.e. taxpayers) pay a portion of it. So huzzah! However, the taxpayer will be paying a lower percentage of my monthly premium. So while my premium is going up by 63%, my actual payment is going up by 113% (yes, slightly more than doubling).

I imagine a whole lot of other people are going to be getting similar “Surprise! You’re boned!” letters in the next few days. Since the majority of these people will be poor to relatively poor, this would seem to bite directly into the portion of the electorate that thought most highly of Obama and Obamacare. You know, the people most likely to vote for Hillary. Having the Hillary voters suddenly getting socked with impressive new bills just *days* before the election? Might not be the best thing for the Hillary campaign. But so long as nothing else goes wrong for her, I imagine she’ll be fine…

But on the other hand, there are a whole lot of people who are just plain stupid and don’t understand what’s going on:

So I guess I better start selling off some stuff…

The idea was cool. The execution as a static display was excellent. But mobility was excessively compromised, and durability seems non-existent. Can’t fault the enthusiasm of the test subject, though.

This project is from the same feller who turned the same little girl into this uncanny-valley-between-cute-and-nightmare-fuel stick figure a few years ago:

From the excitingly-titled:

Lumbar Spine Paraspinal Muscle and Intervertebral Disc Height Changes in Astronauts After Long-Duration Spaceflight on the International Space Station

Results.

Paraspinal lean muscle mass, as indicated by the FCSA, decreased from 86% of the total PSM cross-sectional area down to 72%, immediately after the mission. Recovery of 68% of the postflight loss occurred during the next 6 weeks, still leaving a significantly lower lean muscle fractional content compared with preflight values. In contrast, lumbar IVD heights were not appreciably different at any time point.

Conclusion.

The data reveal lumbar spine PSM atrophy after long-duration spaceflight. Some FCSA recovery was seen with 46 days postflight in a terrestrial environment, but it remained incomplete compared with preflight levels.

Short form: long-term microgravity is bad for you. Solution: use some form of artificial gravity if you are in a space station or long-range spacecraft; or get there lickety-split if you’re traveling somewhere. Both are good.

I coulda swore I’d posted this video before. Shrug. Anyway, this here is a good old fashioned western with just a hint of a difference. I think the “old west” set is the same as “WestWorld.” Slightly NSFW, extremely entertaining.

Earlier this year a bunch of British Greenpeace protesters got their knickers in a twist over plans to do some fracking, so *obviously* they trespassed on a privately owned farm and set up shop. And then they got even more snippy when the farmer, for some reason annoyed to find people uninvited on his territory, decided to drive around their encampment and spray it down with liquid manure.

That being Britain and all, I imagine the farmer got in some sort of trouble with what’s referred to over there as “the law.” I put it in quotes because in one of the vids you can hear the trespassing criminals calling for the police to be called; if Britain had law, the police would have arrested the trespassers.

YouTuber Thunderf00t takes on the “WaterSeer.” If you haven’t heard of it – and I hadn’t – the idea is simple: a device that uses a wind-driven fan to blow air down a tube into a buried chamber, where the lower temperature a few meters underground is used to condense water out of the air. At first blush, this sort of thing sounds feasible… until you do the math, and it turns out to not only be infeasible, but basically impossible. What gets *really* sad is that a bunch of Berkeley (apparently) engineering students are working away on the idea, apparently without having first run the numbers to see if it’s even possible.

The WaterSeer is essentially a dehumidifier that does not plug into the wall and uses dirt as a heat sink rather than an active refrigeration unit. Now, I grew up in Illinois, which tended to be pretty humid in summer. We ran dehumidifiers to make conditions less uncomfortable, rather than for water collection. But even then the volume of water collected – using humid air (the kind of air that resulted in rainstorms, the sort of thing you generally don’t get a whole lot of in the sort of arid regions meant to be served by the WaterSeer) and a whole lot of electricity – did not match what they’re claiming here. And an active refrigeration system using a condensible gas like ammonia is a whole lot more functional than a dirt-based heat sink. The thermal conductivity of dirt is terrible. That’s why people tend to use it as an *insulator.*

Seems if you want to condense water out of air, a dehumidifier hooked up to solar panels would be the way to go. But even then I’m not sure that that would be so useful in an arid, low-humidity region. A good water filtration system and a reliable way to access local water sources would seem a better approach.

Sigh.

Maybe we need to get rid of science, decolonize out minds, and use local magicians to call down lightningbolts. Sure, what the hell.

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Below: diagram of an evolved version. Every bit as practical as the kind described above…

So the dumbass “scary clown” pranks continue. Below is a video of one such prankster, filmed by a buddy as he goes about his inane business of trying to scare people. The last person… not quite as scared as they were hoping.