Well, that took long enough…

 art, blather, Hmm..., science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 272022
 

Looks like Sylvester Stallone finally has himself a superhero movie:

Sure, he was in “Judge Dredd” and “GotG2,” but he wasn’t superpowered in either of those. I don’t recall him having been a superhero before, though I could be wrong.

I suspect the superhero genre is going to run out of steam soon enough…it’s been done to death. Marvel has recent;y announced their spate of new TV/Movie projects, and they are a whole lot of “who the hell is that, and why should I care” characters.

Marvel also recently released the trailer for “Black Panther 2.” I was unimpressed with the first one… the effects were dodgy, the story meh, the worldbuilding bizarre. We were supposed to root for a fascistic ethnostate that was essentially a high-lech primitive civilization… they select their rulers *only* from a single family, and then using trial by combat. They have antigravity and practical energy weapons… and they charge into combat atop rhinos bearing swords and spears. One thing I would like to see from the sequel – and suspect I won’t – is the actual geopolitical fallout from the effects of the first: at the end of the movie, a sci-fi-advanced hidden civilization in central Africa is revealed to the world. They’ve been hidden for centuries behind a cloaking device and holographic projectors; now that’s over. Great, fine, wonderful. But, ummm… right now, hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans are flooding into Europe annually in the hopes of grabbing themselves a better life. What do the borders of Wakanda look like? Now, a few hundred million poverty-stricken Africans can simply *walk* to a higher-tech better life. Did Wakanda open the doors, and now their original population is a distinct minority in their own land, buried under a crush of migrants? Or did they erect walls? Did the walls/deflector shields/whatever effectively prevent invasion, or are there long rows of corpses along the border, shot down as they tried to climb in?

 

 Posted by at 12:05 pm

So much for human artists

 AARRRGH, art, Hmm..., science, science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 252022
 

Anyone who thinks that their job is safe from robots or AI is deluding themselves. A lot of people used to claim that the creative classes were safe from automation, but these “text to image” AI’s put that to the test. Is the art “good?” I dunno. But I do know that the vast bulk of commercial artwork, stuff used to advertise books or cars or beer or vacations or sammich shops, while adequate to get the job done, is hardly high art. I expect that soon the majority of this sort of art will be done by this sort of AI.This will be bad news for humans of all kinds even if the AI art is “meh.” Why? because artists gotta get paid, and churning out commercial art can do that… and now that entire cash stream may be gone. How do you go from an unknown artist to someone making bank with their paintings if there is no intervening step from “amateur” to “professional”?

My own science fiction stories? One thing that has held me back from trying to self publish is the lack of cover art. It may be that very soon I’ll simply be able to describe what I want and Google will spit out art that gets the job done. And of course, around about that time I’ll be able to feed my related stories into Google and tell it to crank out more, and suddenly I’ll go from a few thousand pages of stories about Zane and Sarah to a few billion. Hell, feed it all three seasons of “Star Trek,” and soon enough I’ll have a thousand seasons of the adventures of Kirk and Spock to pore through. Even if only one percent of one percent of that stuff is “good,” the sheer volume of the “good” AI-art will overwhelm the total productive output of mankind. The AI art will only get better, whereas humans have plateaued.

Imagen

 

 

 Posted by at 12:50 am

Huh. The Big E just might make it

 art, awesomeness, models, news, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jul 212022
 

Tomy’s 1/350 die cast USS Enterprise looked pretty likely to fail… till they dropped the number needed again. Originally 5,000 units, then 2,500, now 2,000. With three days to go, they’re now at more than 94%.

With fewer units sold, these things should become that much more valuable in the future. Imagine the barter value for guzoline or with the bullet farmer! You might be able to trade one of these for an oxen with only moderate radiation sickness. I have doubts that Lord Humongous will have much interest in them, but I bet Master Blaster will.

https://startrek.tomy.com/

Woo.

 Posted by at 4:05 pm

This is a bad era for large-scale Enterprises

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, Gah., models, news, science fiction, spacecraft, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 162022
 

It looks pretty doom-laden for the Tomy 1/350 scale die-cast Enterprise… with one week to go, they’re still at only 63% of their funding goal. If, as seems likely, this doesn’t come to pass, a bunch of potential buyers will be disappointed… but they won’t be too likely to be *angry*. This is not the case for *all* buyers of large scale Enterprises, however.

In December 2020 Eaglemoss announced their 27-inch long Enterprise D model. I posted about it HERE. This is a large and complex model kit, not a finished product. And Eaglemoss has an unusual way of releasing these things… instead of one big box with all the parts, you get a packet every two weeks with *some* parts. It’s a subscription service, you pay as you go. And the cost of the model stacks up… looks like over the length of time it takes to get all the packets, you’ll end up spending over $1700. Youch. But I’ve been watching some YouTubers as they’ve been getting the bits and gradually assembling the thing, and it looked promising (with some issues here and there).

*Looked.* Past tense.

Part Works publisher Eaglemoss goes out of business

It seems Eaglemoss is in a bad way. Due to Covid lockdowns in merry old England, their ability to do business was massacred and they are in a deep, deep hole… one it looks like they might not climb out of. They seem to be already out of business.

That’s bad.

It’s especially bad not only for their employees and stockholders, but those working away on the Enterprise D (and other subscription kits of similar scale and cost). Because the Enterprise D is distributed over *30* *months.* Which means if you started in January of 2021, you’d currently be about 18  months along… with 12 months to go on your kit. Twelve months worth of parts it seems unlikely you’ll get. You won’t be charged for those parts, of course… but you will have spent over a grand for sixty percent of an Enterprise, plus however much time you spent on a model you’re now unlikely to ever finish, display or sell.

This looks to be about the current state of the Enterprise. It’s… sad.

 

I’ve never liked getting big, expensive things via subscriptions spread out over years. This only reinforces that.

 Posted by at 10:23 pm

Hope for the big-ass Enterprise

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., models, news, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jul 052022
 

Tomy has announced two new things about their 1/350 scale die cast Enterprise:

1) The 5,000 backers needed has been reduced to 2,500 (they currently have 1061)

2) The deadline has been pushed back to July 24.

These should make it more likely that the effort will succeed, and for a few reasons. Chopping the number of needed backers in half not only makes it easier to achieve, it also makes the thing more desirable to collectors: instead of there being 5,000 of them in the world, now there will be 2,500. The secondary market in years to come will probably make the price balloon substantially. Additionally, Comic Con International in San Diego is July 22-24, and I imagine Tomy will be there. I suspect that if they have their prototype on display for the thousands of nerds with fat stacks of disposable income, they should rack up a good number of new backers. I can’t immediately dream up another reason to end the campaign on the 24th.

I still remain a little annoyed that Haslabs $300 “Hiss tank” has nearly 13,500 backers with more than a month to go. Hmmmph. At least the Haslab “Reva” (the disliked character from the Obi Wan Kennobi series) light saber looks likely to fall far short of funding. It’s $500 with 1300 of 5000 backers with six days to go. I don’t *know* why that one is failing; maybe there’s a cutoff just north of $300 that people are willing to spend these days. Or perhaps Reva is just not intriguing of a character. Or perhaps the Star Wars fans with cash are no longer in the mood to keep funding a franchise that keeps insulting them.

 Posted by at 12:34 pm
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