Another day, another news item about how lllinois is a disaster:
Normally I’d not post a news item like this. But it gives me an opportunity to post this image:
Once again, Illinois needs to secede from Chicago. Illexit? Chicexit?
Currently scheduled for 10:45 PM Mountain time (12:45 AM Eastern). Live coverage of it *should* be available on the YouTube window below starting at 10:25 or so. This launch is sending an unmanned Dragon capsule to the ISS and, hopefully, a booster stage to a safe landing back at Cape Canaveral. The Dragon is carrying a new docking adapter that will allow automated docking of the SpaceX and Boeing capsules.
Update: Huzzah! The payload is in orbit, the first stage is resting comfortably on the landing pad.
Every now and then something pops up on eBay that is historically terribly important, and I’ve sat here and watched the auction shoot *way* past my financial means. The items get sold and disappear into a black hole. Well, no more, dagnabbit. I just scored a treasure trove of vintage Convair F2Y “Sea Dart” documents and diagrams. The final price was about $400… well beyond my means. But as there were 15 contributors, it broke down to about $24.55 per person. Each of the contributors will receive a full set of 300 dpi color or grayscale (where appropriate) scans of everything in the lot. And the actual items themselves? When I’m done scanning and checking them, they will be donated to the San Diego Air & Space Museum. This is appropriate not only because they have an archive of Convair files, they also have an F2Y sitting on a pole out front.
The crowdfunding effort was announced and made available via the Aerospace Projects Review Patreon. I fully intend to do this again; I wish I had a time machine to do it with a couple of frustrating Boeing 2707 and hypersonic auctions from a number of months ago… So if you’d like to be in on this sort of thing in the future, check out the APR Patreon.
Behold:
H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos has been remarkably influential over the decades. It is thus not surprising that if you do a Google image search for “Cthulhu” you will find a *vast* array of depictions of the terrifying Great Old One, along with various other of Lovecrafts creations. But here’s the thing: most of them fail.
There are two reasons why there have been, so far, no real efforts at making a faithful adaptation of a Cthulhu story into a big-budget movie, despite their popularity. Firstly: Lovecraft almost never described the appearance of his monsters in great detail. When he did, like the “Deep Ones” in “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” the monsters are fairly mundane… fish-people, essentially. The biggies like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth are described vaguely at best. Secondly: the monsters often don’t even put in a visible appearance; or those few characters who see them promptly go insane at the sight.
And that’s what stomps on most of the artistic depictions of Mythos Monsters: no matter how skilled and talented an artist is, painting or sculpting a vision of Cthulhu that drives the viewer insane is pretty much impossible (not to mention unwise). Critters from the Mythos are some of the best examples of things that work great in your head, but not so great visually.
So, if you GIS Cthulhu, you’ll find a myriad of sketches, paintings, sculpltures, CG renders. A lot of them are exquisitely rendered and detailed with great clarity… and are just not terrifying. “Winged Squid Guy” just doesn’t really come off as a particularly spooky vision.
But there are a few exceptions. The image I posted yesterday from “The Cthulhu Wars” with Cthulhu getting nuked is all kinds of awesome, but it’s still not *quite* there with the terrifyingness. I think what you really need to do to make a truly effective depiction of Cthulhu is to render it so that you *can’t* see Cthulhu with any clarity. The creepiness comes not from clarity but from obscuration. Here, this one is good:
“Awakening” by Russian artist Alexander Andreev. Cthulhu paying a visit to St. Petersburg; nothing good is going to happen to that town. I assume that TU-160 is going to unload a thermonuclear “howdy” onto the visitor.
And this one I think *really* nails the right way to depict a Lovecraft monster:
Here, rather than seeing Cthulhu clearly, it is depicted vaguely. If you look at the image full-rez, it’s pretty clearly a fairly quickly Photoshopped image; the artist, Bulgarian Andrey Nazarov, took a photo of a road in his native country he found on Google and added the Cthulhu figure. Since this in the Internet, enough people actually *believed* this to be an actual photo that even Snopes had to get involved. Particularly amusing/distressing are the claims that this photo was shot during a tornado outbreak… in Oklahoma. The mountains of Oklahoma. That’s madness.
The distinctly Lovecraftian movie “The Mist” was at its most effective when the monsters remained shrouded in the obscuring mist. The bugs flying around attacking people inside the grocery store? Yeah, that was bad, but it was comprehensible. The things outside just yoinking people away? Bleah!
In short… you *can’t* do cosmic horror justice. And the more detail you show, the further you get from it.
This commercial for Intermountain Healthcare has been running lately, always gives me a chuckle.
This here downright cringeworthy educational film dates from 1967. It is, of all things, a US Navy film on *dating* etiquette. A lot of it is badly dated (“Receiving lines?” Really?), and I bet a lot of it would raise hackles with the SJWs. It assumes distinct male/female roles, which might well irritate the trigglies (but then, what are the chances that a military man is going to date a triggly?), but on the whole it suggests that “consideration” is the thing to keep in mind, to “be a gentleman.”
Silly as the thing is on whole, I do wonder if a modernized version for the general population might be advisable for junior high and high school. It certainly seems like the concepts of consideration and gentlemanliness aren’t as prominent as they once were.
From the Patriots’ raid on the necromancer Joseph Curwen, to the Special Forces’ assault on Leng in 2007, this unique document reveals the secret and terrible struggle between the United States and the supernatural forces of Cthulhu. In this war, immortal cultists worship other-dimensional entities, and plot to raise an army of the dead. Incomprehensible undersea intelligences infiltrate and colonize American seaports, and alien races lurk beneath the ice of Antarctica and high in the mountains of Afghanistan. It is only through constant vigilance and violence that the earth has survived. Also included are threat reports describing the indescribable– humanity’s deadliest foes serving Cthulhu and the other Great Old Ones. Strange times are upon us, the world is changing, and even death may die– but, until then, the war continues.
I’m curious if if conceit is that the world of the Cthulhu Wars is *this* world, and that they’ve managed to keep it secret from the public all this time. But I have doubts, especially after finding this piece of art (from the illustrators Deviant Art page):
Heh.
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The same publisher also produces “Nazi Moonbase,” which looks equally goofy and entertaining.
So, Ken Ham’s Biblical theme park “Ark Encounter,” which has cost many millions of dollars to complete (much of it footed by Kentucky taxpayers), recently opened to the public. How’s it going?
Here’s the entryway at 1PM on opening day:
Sometimes things actually give me hope.
Some videos at the link. The place seems… I dunno. It’s a big structure, but it seems like a bit of a wasted effort. The “Ark” is supposedly the size of the Ark from Biblical tales; it is full of cages and boxes for all the millions of different species that the ark was supposed to carry, but they all seem to be populated with *statues* of animals rather than the real thing. Machines making animal noises rather than animals making animal noises. Now, if less than a dozen people could take care of the total animal population of the ark, you’d think the army of employees the Ark Encounter surely has would be able to *easily* keep a boat full of critters fed, watered clean.
Overall it seems like a rather barren form of entertainment for a $40 entrance fee. I wonder how long it’ll be before it goes bust, and what it’ll end up as next. I can see Trump buying it and turning it into a casino. It’s big enough, and there are certainly some wide open spaces in it *now* that could be filled with slot machines.
Because why not, I saw the new “Ghostbusters” today. General impression: I don’t really have one. It was neither good nor especially bad, just… forgettable. Pretty sure I chuckled twice.
Some overly dramatic types have been yapping about how they were thinking, based on the lackluster trailers, that “Ghostbusters” would “ruin their childhood” or some such. Kinda doubt it: in 3 or 4 months, I suspect the new version will be largely forgotten, leaving the original, far superior, “Ghostbusters” to continue to reign supreme in memory.
Because, let’s face it, RoboCop 2014 didn’t ruin RoboCop 1987. The same with Conan the Barbarian. And Total Recall. And Arthur. And Carrie, Clash of the Titans, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Flight of the Phoenix, Footloose, Fright Night, Invaders from Mars, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Karate Kid, The Land that Time Forgot, The Manchurian Candidate, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Oldboy, The Omen, Point Break, Psycho, Planet of the Apes, Poltergeist, The Poseidon Adventure, Red Dawn, Rollerball, The Stepford Wives, Straw Dogs, The Time Machine, The Wicker Man or any other other pile of remakes that made their money (or didn’t) and then largely faded from memory.
If you’ve been waiting your whole life for a music video that’s about the psychopathic computer in the game “Portal” and which features super slo-mo shots of kids taking delicious chocolate cakes to the face… huzzah! Your wait is over! “Cake Slingshot” has you covered.
This was shot in downtown Provo, Utah. I bet cleanup was a hoot.
BONUS ROUND for the SJWs: Get ready to be triggered by the lack of diversity!