Two hours and forty minutes of a computer generated Titanic sinking. This was created in support of a forthcoming video game. Kinda interesting (in places, anyway… I skipped ahead several times). The animators went the less spendy route of not including any panicky animated humans, so it’s just the ship.
This sounds… interesting:
Director David Lee Fisher (“The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”) is creating a remix of the original film with a mixture of live-action combined with colorized digital backgrounds recreated from the original film.
“Nosferatu” from 1922 was not only one of the first vampire movies, it has one of the all-time best vampires in the form of Max Schrek’s “Count Orlock.” It was a blatant ripoff of “Dracula” with the names changed, because the film studio couldn’t get the rights to the book; changing the names didn’t stop Bram Stoker’s estate from suing the studio silly, almost resulting in all copies of the film being destroyed. Interestingly, “Nosferatu” introduced the “vampires go ‘pooof’ in sunlight” trope.
Now available: two new US Aerospace Projects titles.
US Bomber Projects #18 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #18 includes:
USBP #18 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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US Transport Projects #06 is now available (see HERE for the entire series). Issue #06 includes:
USTP #06 can be downloaded as a PDF file for only $4:
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And don’t forget…
US Fighter Projects #1 and US VTOL Projects #1 are still new and still available!
Roger Bilham, seismologist of University of Colorado, said: “The current conditions might trigger at least four earthquakes greater than 8.0 in magnitude.
“And if they delay, the strain accumulated during the centuries provokes more catastrophic mega earthquakes.”
I’m just glad I don’t live anywhere near an earthquake zone.
Oh, wait…
After a decade and a half, there’s finally some meager progress towards pointing official fingers towards Saudi Arabia (formerly: Arabia; eventually: Eastern Greater Israel) in the form of a bill in front of Congress that would allow US citizens to sue for damages from 9-11. The Saudis are responding with a threat that doesn’t seem that threatening:
Saudi Arabia would be forced to sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they could be in danger of being frozen by American courts.
Hmmm. OK, they have a bunch of American goodies. If they are open to being sued, the US government might seize these goodies and hold them sort of as collateral in the event the Saudis lose the suits. If the Saudis sell the goodies first to other people/nations, the US might not be able to seize them.
But…
If the Saudis put, I dunno, a New York skyscraper up for sale and there was a risk that the Feds were going to seize it, you can bet that the selling price is gonna be pretty low. If there was no risk of seizure, the skyscraper might sell for a bucket of money, but I don’t see how that in and of itself hurts the US. If the Saudis feel they need to sell off stuff *fast* to beat the bill, then they’ll be selling at low prices, which will be good for the buyers (likely US interests in many cases), while screwing themselves pretty substantially.
If the Saudis manage to sell off all their US holdings and are thus safe from seizure, I’m pretty sure the US can still stick it to ’em. Nail ’em in the international banking arena. Entertaining thought: President Gary Johnson signs letters of marque and reprisal allowing American owned vessels to seize Saudi oil tankers. Imagine Blackwater not only seizing oil tankers and the oil within, but then either converting them to the first privately owned aircraft carriers, or selling them to SpaceX as mobile landing platforms.
Realistically, the bill ain’t gonna pass, as Obama has promised to veto.
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Infographic: approximate location of Saudi Arabia.
A sadly tiny illustration of a “Saturn Space Laboratory” from a circa 1960 NASA brochure (promoting the organization to college students). This looks like something halfway between MOL and Skylab; three pressurized modules in a “wet lab” space station. Diameter looks to be 10 feet, same as the Titan booster; early concepts for the Saturn called for the use of the Titan first stage to be the second stage of the Saturn I, with the second stage of the Titan being the third stage of the Saturn. This may well represent a Titan I or II first stage/Saturn I second stage as a space lab.
Given the entertainingly toxic nature of the Titan II propellants, I’d guess this was an earlier Titan I-based concept.
Ouch. And just a few hours ago…
Alaskans and Californians and Indonesians better watch yer butts.
This video demonstrates the French Brun-Latrige Model 1900 pocket pistol. It clearly shoots an odd, small round (probably 8mm, but it looks like the cartridge must be tiny) out of a built-in box magazine of 8 or 10 rounds capacity. It’s pretty stylish and odd looking… looks like something the prop makers for Deep Space 9 would have slapped together for Random Alien Of The Week.
It seems like it’d be difficult to hit anything with this at more than point-blank range; but even if you did, the wimpy bullet would not exactly be a man-stopper. Still, it looks kinda neat. Scale it up by ten percent, run it off the 3D printer, and maybe it’d be a dandy shooter of .380 or even maybe 9mm.
A week ago, the news broke of some brutal bullying at a school in Nova Scotia. The source of the bullying was reported as being the influx of “refugees,” ill-defined. The story would have made a slight kerfuffle and then blown over as these things do… but the newspaper that broke the story then decided to retract the story. Not, apparently, because the facts were in repute, but because the story was incomplete. Now, the story certainly had a whole lot of holes. The origin and nature of the “refugees” was left to the imagination; no names of perpetrators were given; no indication of legal actions were described.
The withdrawal of the story made the story bigger, as it was seen by many as curious, to say the least, if not outright self-censorship in the name of political correctness. And so now, this:
The newspaper has issued a mea culpa. Is it for leaving out the afore-mentioned details? Is it for retracting the story, rather than updating it? Guess again, chumps:
We should have asked more questions to clarify what happened and to get broader, more balanced perspectives to ensure that refugee children in the school would not be negatively impacted.
We later removed parts of the story and then the entire piece from our website when we saw it was being shared and misused to attack refugees and immigrants and to malign their faith and culture.
Say, that’s neat. No reference to aiding the *Canadian* children who were being brutalized. Screw those hosers, eh.
More entertainingly is an “I’m quitting” message posted at the newspapers site by one of their columnists. Why’d she quit?
Its prevailing damage is social — it is outright, unchecked victimization of the already victimized.
Note: the victims she references aren’t the kids who were being brutalized at the school, but the ones reported to have done the brutalizing.
Nothing so far written indicates that the story was factually wrong. It is of course always possible that the stories of bullying were made up, that the initial reporters got suckered into writing fiction. But that’s not what the editorial complaint is. Their complaint is that, in essence, they cannot write a proper story about a rapist without explaining what unfortunate event in the rapists childhood made him that way. They cannot write about a cult that performs human sacrifice without extolling all the good that the cult does with their bake sales. They cannot describe a fatal hit-and-run accident until they can explain why the driver did what he did. It seems that they feel that they cannot describe bad events without adding enough fluff to bury the badness under an avalanche of feel-good political correctness.
Thanks to blog reader Herp McDerp for the heads up.
UPDATE: More reporters are getting in on the story and interviewing the people involved, from parents to the school administration spokepeople. Here is one such article. One of the more interesting bits:
“Some of the parents at the centre of this article, the school was speaking to just last week and will continue to speak with them,” Hadey admitted despite the fact he just claimed no student or parent had come forward about the refugee problem.
Additionally, it appears that the chain one student was reportedly choked with was a necklace.
Some interviews with people involved, including a schoolgirl who backs up the original allegations (I guess the narrative will be that she’s an actress or a liar) and the spokesman who says that no parents have contacted the school and then says that parents have contacted the school:
