Cool, but bad news for trustworthy news audio in the future. A commercially available bit of software will change your voice on the fly to closely resemble any voice from an extensive list of voice actors. These actors were hired specifically for this purpose, and apparently put in two or three hours of jibbajabba to collect sufficient information on their voice and accent and such. Which means that if you have enough recordings of some other person, you can copy their voice as well. Of course it might be difficult to get enough of the *right* stuff in adequate quality, especially if the “target” doesn’t regularly plop their face in front of a microphone. But actors should probably be copyable, as should politicians and other celebrities.

So about the Time Amazon decides to reboot Fellowship of the Ring, they can have Humphrey Bogart as Frodo and John Wayne as Aragorn.

The “Fascinating Horror” YouTube channel is always worth a look. It’s a history channel; each episode discusses a disastrous historical event. A fire, a crash, a boat sinking, that sort of thing. And then…

OK, now for something completely different: insanely high speed footage (up to 40,000 fps) of vary large bubbles being popped. Cool and all visually, but there’s enough weird there that it looks like the physics could be used as the basis for visual effects showing, say, the popping of a membrane that seals a portal between worlds or dimensions. Oooh, booga booga…

“Dual” is a forthcoming movie with a simple premise; in the future if you are dying you can get a clone made to replace you (I presume there’s some memory copy-transference thingamabobber involved at some point). But if, after the clone is up and running, you turn out to *not* be dying (personally I’d expect a medical system able to make an adult clone of you with your memories and personalities would be much better at not only wiping out terminal illnesses, but being certain about who is actually terminal), then you and your clone have to fight to the death, because it would be ridiculous to have two of you running around. So, ok, the plot is that a woman gets a clone made, finds out she’s not dying, and now has one year to get ready for arena combat. She gets a trainer. The trainer sez the second smartest thing you’ll read today:

“Always use the gun if it’s an option.”

To which she replies: “I find guns to be boring and overused.”

Which is countered with the smartest thing you’ll read today: “If it’s the difference between life and death it’s ok to be boring.”

See, now *this* looks like a blast:

Well, this makes the future look that much more sunny:

AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours

In short: an AI is used to weed out theoretical medicines because of side effects. That’s great. But the people running it decided “what if we ask it to do the opposite?” and it came up with thousands of innovative new ways to kill people. The AI invented existing nerve agents… and invented some new ones that the predictive modelling says should be *more* toxic than what’s currently on hand.

That’s… greeeeeeeaaaaaaat.

Just wait until the same techniques get used to dream up neato new viruses. Those sci-fi theoretical pathogens that seek out specific genetic markers… hair color, ethnic traits, intelligence, whatever, and kill, stupefy, disable? Yeah… might not be sci-fi for long.

Hurry the frak up, Elon. Humanity might be needing self-sufficient colonies separated by distances great enough that travel times alone provide a quarantine effect real soon.

The 4K remaster of the Directors Edition of Star Trek: the Motion Picture hits Paramount Plus on April 5. Lots of people dunk on TMP, and many of the complaints are fair… but damn, that there is one pretty, pretty movie. It also has one of the best scores *ever.*

“Cosmic horror” is a genre of horror invented – or at least perfected – by author H.P. Lovecraft. Most forms of horror have the protagonists being menaced with death by knife wielding maniacs, weirdos with chainsaws, werewolves or sharks trying to eat them, vampires looking to drain their blood, aliens looking to wipe them out. Whether good or bad, that type of horror is comprehensible to the protagonist, at least after they’ve had a little while to process what’s going on. But cosmic horror is horror based on the protagonist being wholly *incapable* of understanding the threat, what’s going on, what the future holds. The alien or the maniac can be defeated in the end with a shotgun blast to the face, or a nuke to the homeworld… but the cosmic horror cannot be defeated. It might be avoided, evaded, delayed or bypassed… but the protagonist will never “win,” nor will the protagonist ever really grasp just what the hell is going on.

By definition, this one is tricky to define, trickier to pull off successfully. Fortunately (?), recent event suggested to me an easy to understand analogy for cosmic horror. Take, for example, the story of “Stepan,” a cat made somewhat famous on Instagram. Stepan seems a perfectly normal cat, in perfectly normal surroundings, with perfectly normal humans. The usual sort of photos and videos of Stepan looking cute made the Instagram account famous and popular. But it wasn’t cosmic horror.

Until very recently. Because Stepan is a *Ukrainian* cat.

Stepan the Internet-Famous Cat Escapes Ukraine, Finds Safety

The shelling of Stepan’s town of Kharkiv caused Stepans humans to pack up and unass themselves and their cat to France. Now, a war, even a bad one, is something humans can understand. A human adult can understand it quite clearly. A human child will have difficulty, perhaps, but unless the child is stupid or incapable of communication, the war can be explained to him/her. The idea that “fire bad” and “bombs bad” and “incoming rockets bad” can be impressed upon them, and rockets and bombs can be explained as to what and why they are, how they work. But to an animal? Sorry, no. Explain all you want, a cat is never going to grasp the first damn thing about a war. All the cat knows is that their life was going along pretty well, then their food-monkey-butlers started acting strange. Then they started running around, then there were loud noises and the big warm cave they live in crashed down and burned, one of the monkey-butlers burst open and stopped moving, the other started making really loud noises then ran away, now the world is rain and snow and fire and wind and loud noises and other monkey-butlers running around making loud noises and sometimes falling over and stopping, and sometimes kicking at them and what is the foul smelling black goop that spilled on my fur and why is it suddenly bright red and why does it hurt and why when I run away the red crackling pain stays right on me ow ow ow…

Yeah. To a cat, a dog, a horse, war is *never* going to make the first bit of sense. It will always remain incomprehensible chaos and madness that will pursue them into their dreams, years after normality has returned. War (or an earthquake, or a house fire, or a tornado, or a hurricane, or one of their humans suddenly going insane due to booze or meth or bad news, or…) is simply beyond an animals ability to begin to comprehend. It is the very essence of cosmic horror. The trick for an author who wants to capture cosmic horror is to do for human characters what war would do for an animal character. The idea is straightforward enough, simple to understand, like “add one extra dimension to a line, you get a square; add one extra dimension to a square, you get a cube; add one extra dimension to a cube, you get a tesseract.” But while the concept is straightforward enough, that last step can be a doozy to really pull off.

By the way, here’s Stepan while being evacuated. This is the look of someone who has peered into the abyss and come away uncomprehending, hope and joy drained from them, refilled with a new fear. This cat has seen some ᛋᚻᛁᛏ. If your human protagonist looks like this at the end of the tale, you *may* have successfully introduced them to some form of cosmic horror. On the other hand, if real-life humans or animals end up looking like this due to actions you have taken… please consider that you may be the baddie.

Well, not *exactly* the one we always wanted. Starfleet vs Star Destroyers? Nah. But the Federation being taken over by the Dark Side? Yup, we’re there, thanks to the season 4 finale of STD which saw the President of Earth portrayed by current political villain Stacey Abrams. Her claim to fame is working for “voter rights,” which in the current usage is a euphemism for getting rid of any ability to maintain election integrity. Because she apparently believes that black people cannot be bothered to get and hold onto state IDs such as drivers licenses, her platform boils down to voting should be open to anybody, no matter who, where they’re from, whether they’re alive or not, citizens of the country or even if they are cross-dimensional multiversal copies of themselves. In a Star Trek context, when it comes down to a clash between the Federation fighting for survival against the Borg, her position would be that the Borg would get to vote on whether or not the Federation citizens should be marched off to assimilation.

At this stage, STD has been such a tragic parody of Star Trek for so long that this sort of nonsense is largely being met with shrugs of “well, what, am I supposed to be surprised?” from actual Star Trek fans. Of course the fake fans who think that STD is actually good are having a field day thinking that casting Abrams is some sort of historical coup. Witness, for example, the top comment at that wretched hive of scum and villainy, gizmodo, in an article on the cameo:

“I like my Trek finales the way I like my elections — garnished with conservative tears.”

There are two takeaways from that:

The commenter actually thinks conservatives are crying about this
The commenter is happy to see cultural icons being trashed as a way to hurt the feelings of those who disagree politically with him/her/it.

That latter point is hardly something new. Fellow travelers of this sort have spent several years committing acts of cultural and *actual* vandalism as a way not to improve society, but just to hurt people they don’t like. That’s a very Dark Side philosophy.

Anyway, here’s the scene. Having not actually seen the episode, I have the sneaking suspicion that the audio here might not be precisely what was broadcast, but, hey, it works.

There are those who argue that STD is canonical with actual Star Trek, that it’s in the same universe/timeline as TOS and TNG. This despite all the tonal differences, the fundamentally different Klingorks, the technology a century in advance of what was shown before, the different *history* on display. The season 4 finale, however, provides a final nail in the coffin to the idea that STD is set in the canonical Star Trek timeline. That detail is this: Earth is geographically, geologically a different *planet* than the Earth of reality or of actual Star Trek. In STD-verse, Africa is something like 50% bigger than elsewhere, stretching from nearly the arctic to nearly the antarctic. You can’t have continents being vastly larger and not have that make major changes to the timeline, going back millions of years. One might argue that this is due to lenses and the distance at which one films a sphere; if you photograph the Earth from the ISS, Nebraska about fills the view of Earth from horizon to horizon. But as you can see here, the “camera” has pulled back to several planetary diameters away, at which point the distortions become minimal. Earth in STD is a *very* different place.

Because why not: someone has posted the 1979 disaster “epic” Meteor to YouTube. It is pretty awful on every level, but to me the worst of it is the incredibly half-assed miniature work on the spacecraft. That said, it’s entertaining in it’s awfulness. Just thing thing to MST3K.