Even in the world of Disney Star Wars:
Lucasfilm hires deepfake YouTuber who fixed Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian
Now if they could hire someone to fix the sequel trilogy…
Jul 272021
Jul 272021
This was supposed to be out a year ago, now it will (hopefully) be out for Thanksgiving. It looks pretty promising to me… this trailer makes it look slapstick-free, a straight-up drama/horror. Obviously, that’s not how it’ll end up playing out, but this approach is interesting.
Jul 222021
Almost as good as:
Jul 102021
One of the more imaginative and incredibly unlikely concept cars was the Ford Nucleon, a 1950’s idea for a nuclear powered car. Apparently this was pretty much a complete art and sales project, without much actual engineering; it was based on the notion that not only could nuclear reactors be scaled down small enough to fit in a car, they could be made not only wreck-tolerant, but that lightweight and virtually magical radiation shielding would be invented that would allow said reactor to hum away at full power mere feet from paying customers without roasting them or giving them explosive ass cancer. It was, let’s face it, wholly ridiculous… and entirely awesome.
Photos of models of the Nucleon have been available since the 1950’s, but diagrams have been lacking. An article posted online a few days ago included a few specifications for the proposed vehicle, finally nailing down some of the dimensions. And for reasons that seemed good to me (and which are probably obvious), I slapped together a quick side view. I think my side view is *reasonably* accurate based on numerous photos of the scale model Ford built and the dimensions given. What I’m not certain about is whether *Ford* truly understood their vehicle.
Here’s the side view using the 200-inch (16.7 ft) length specified by Ford, accompanied by two normal-sized humans:
The driver doesn’t even come *close* to fitting. So I scaled the Nucleon up until it seemed to look right, with the end result being that the car is now about 26 feet long:
That’s by no means a small vehicle… but then, it’s nuclear. Scaling it up by a factor of about 1.55 makes the cab big enough to fit actual full-size humans. But scaling it up that much makes the 77.4″ width (6.45 ft) into 120 inches, or ten feet. Good luck squeezing *that* onto the road; the Hummer H1, known as an uncomfortably wide vehicle, is a mere 87 inches wide.
Does anyone have any information to contradict and correct the Ford specifications? Or is it just another case of the art department kinda ignoring reality?
Jul 082021
An interesting description of the various cults and cultists that pop up on the stories of H.P. Lovecraft. The idea that people would worship hideous monstrosities that want to wipe out mankind is of course nuts… and of course entirely believable. The YouTuber here points out the similarity between the fictional Cthulhu cultists and adherents to a modern day *real* cult of some notoriety.
In my “War With The Deep Ones,” cultists make a few minor appearances in the first book I wrote. But they would have put in much more of an appearance in later books… as the world goes down, the nuts come out. As we have recently seen.
Jul 072021
I get a major kick out of the level of effort people put into digging out the smallest details in Star Wars/Star Trek/Etc. This sort of thing is possible because the original work was done in the analog age and the current investigation was done in the digital age… had this particular detail been created in the days of easy computer graphics, it likely would have gone forever unclear.
Jul 022021
I was previously only kinda “I’ll probably get around to it eventually” interested in the new Amazon movie “The Tomorrow War.” But I have now been convinced to see it sooner than later… by people who hate it.
The Tomorrow War is Chris Pratt’s ultimate salute to working-class heroism (plus aliens)
BackBack in 2017, fresh off the continued success of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise and gearing up for Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom, Chris Pratt gave a cover-story interview to Men’s Fitness magazine, and bemoaned the state of cinema about white men. “I don’t see personal stories that necessarily resonate with me, because they’re not my stories […] The voice of the average, blue-collar American isn’t necessarily represented in Hollywood,” Pratt said. That was a willfully ignorant statement back then, and it still is now.
Sold!
Jul 012021
A painting from 1979 by one David Egge, published in “Future Life” magazine, depicting a United State Space Force orbital facility.
Soooooooonnnn…….
Jun 302021
A 1980’s Boeing concept art depicting a passenger transport of 100 or so years in the future. It has a number of… interesting features including a front that opens up like an Arakeen Sandworm. The cockpit and a fair amount of space behind it hinge upwards to provide access to the sizable interior of the aircraft. The gigantic transparent canopies are certainly a remarkable feature. Even the passenger windows on the side are vast compared to the tiny human figures. The engines look somewhat small for the design, but at least they exhaust almost directly onto the vast canopy over the tail “lounge” area. Surely that’ll not pose any problems…
The full rez scan of the artwork has been made available at 300 DPI to all $4/month patrons/subscribers in the 2021-06 APR Extras folder at Dropbox. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Jun 272021
Habitable Planets With Earth-Like Biospheres May Be Much Rarer Than Thought
Short form : Earth-sized planets made out of the right amounts of the right stuff might exist in their bajillions, comfortably orbiting within their stars habitable zones. But the majority of stars out there are smaller and cooler than the sun. Normally this has the problem of tidal locking the planet tot he star, but if the planet escapes that fate (by having a moon, or orbiting a large-enough small star to avoid tidal locking) there’s another problem. Cooler stars put out a different spectrum of light. Even if the watts-per-square-meter of light is the same as on Earth, if the spectrum is wrong, photosynthesis using known systems might not work. Consequently, if life arises on a planet orbiting a red dwarf, it might not evolve adequate photosythetic systems to transform the planet, as life on Earth took a few billion years to do.
This might also mean that an Earth-like world could be located and terraformed and seeded with Earth-life… only to have the plants sicken and keel over.
Genetic modification might or might not fix this, depending on whether or not photosynthesis using redder spectrums can be made practical. Another approach: if humanity has the ability to cross the gulf between the stars, we can do lots of other stuff. This should include parking fusion reactors in orbit and using the generated power to create the biologically necessary frequencies of light. A giant UV flashlight in the sky, parked in geostationary orbit right in front of (or next to) the sun.