blather – Page 26 – The Unwanted Blog

Ah, hell. 25 years of “Trials and Tribble-ations.”

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Nov 042021

One of the best episodes of any of the Trek series aired 25 years ago today.

AAAAAAARRRRRRRRGH.

On one hand: crap, I’m ooooooold. On the other hand: this episode, which saw Our Heroes from Deep Space Nine sent back in time to the original series “The Trouble with Tribbles” episode and seamlessly slotted in using CGI tricks and well constructed sets, props and costumes, showed that the original series designs worked *perfectly* well in an era of higher resolution. And when Star Trek: Enterprise did it itself some years later, with even higher visual resolution, that cemented the fact that the Nu Trek eras determination to redesign everything was just ridiculous and, let’s face it, ugly.

Nothing STD or STP has produced has improved on this:

As a bonus: in order to produce footage that the new characters could be inserted into, vintage Trek footage was remastered digitally. The end result was so good that it help to assure that a complete remaster of the original series was created and released on Blu Ray.

Back to the Seventies

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Nov 042021

The parallels between the seventies and the current era are numerous. A shameful abandonment of allies, allowing them to be over-run by savages. A feckless and wholly incompetent President, in far over his head. A NASA in shambles, promising a New Thing but facing constant technical issues, delays and massive cost over-runs. An economy in deep trouble, with looming inflation. An energy crisis. Deep cultural and racial divisions. New York and other major cities being known more for their crime than anything else. And on and on.

So today, while out and about I stopped in a convenience store to get something to drink. Over the past few months there have been occasional shortages… sometimes they don’t have the syrup to make this or that fountain drink; or they don’t have straws, or they don’t have polypropylene cups, or they don’t have styrofoam cups. Various bits of shelf space bare from time to time. All annoying side effects of the current economic conditions brought about by the pandemic and ridiculous policies that trash the ability of American ports to do their jobs. But nothing quite screamed “the 70’s are back, baby!” to me quite like today: I got my drink, pulled out a paper-wrapped straw, and unwrapped it.. to find a *paper* straw.

I haven’t seen a paper straw in 40 or more years. I didn’t like ’em then, because they turned into a soggy mess well before you were done with them. I don’t like them any better now, because of what they represent: an admission of failure. I don’t know if these straws hold up any better than they did 40+ years ago because as soon as I got to my car I swapped it for a proper plastic straw. But I kept the thing. It’s still there, mocking me, promising to bring on stagflation and a return of lime green polyester leisure suits, wide lapels, bell bottoms, perms.

Get ready for it. it’s coming back, like it or not.

All the cool kids are doing it

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Oct 242021

In a world with people making fools of themselves and the rest of humanity on the ChiCom Tik Tok platform while at the same time raking in vast piles of cash, clearly the cool and hip thing to do would be to subscribe to the Unwanted Blog. There are no particular goodies associated with the various subscription levels, apart from the warm fuzzy feeling I’m sure you’ll get knowing that you’re supporting a goofy aerospace nerd and his cats. Plus the bonus knowledge that every dollar subscribed is one dollar less that would be needed out of an Unwanted Blog Only Fans account, and that’s something the world *really* doesn’t need. Trust me, it doesn’t bear thinkin’ about.

The drop-down menu provides for a range of monthly automatic payments.

Alec Baldwin is in a bit of trouble

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Oct 222021

Noted Social Justice maniac Alec Baldwin has killed someone:

It would hardly be the first time that an actor has shot dead someone on the set of a movie using what was supposed to be a prop gun; see the death of Brandon Lee for the most famous example. But in that case, the fault was very clearly with the ordnance folks/prop masters who failed to properly clear a firearm. Something quite like that may have happened here, with either an actual live round installed instead of a blank, or a pistol with a projectile jammed in the barrel was loaded with a blank (which is what happened to Lee). But in tis case, with the exceedingly limited info available so far, it seems that the actor himself has some culpability. Because while it might be his job to point a prop gun at another actor and pull the trigger, here he shot a director. This would *seem* to indicate that he was either careless or screwing around… or acting in a threatening manner 9given his vaunted temper…). Another possibility is that the gun was loaded with nothing but blanks, which are usually harmless at a range of more than a few yards… but deadly if fired within a few inches. And if 8that’s* the case, there’ll be some ‘splainin’ to do as to why he was pointing a gun, prop or otherwise, at a human a very short distance away.

Flashback: Engage Smug Mode

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Oct 192021

Almost four years ago I posted about a project known as “Flashback,” a vaguely-described mid 1960’s program to carry and drop a giant *something* from a B-52. What it was, exactly, was not described with any clarity, but there were enough clues that I tentatively speculated that it was a design for an American “Tsar Bomb” with a yield of fifty or more megatons. To my knowledge I was the first person to yap about it publicly. I sent what I’d found to a few atomic and aerospace researchers to see if they knew anything. At the time, they were as mystified as I was.

Today there’s less mystery. I was contacted by one of the researchers I had contacted back then, letting me know he’s writing an article to appear in a month or so in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, covering Flashback among other things. He has Found Some Stuff. In short… Flashback was a design for a 50 to 100 megaton hydrogen bomb.

Giggitty.

A modest proposal for “James Bond”

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Oct 182021

As should now no longer be a spoiler of any particular note, James Bond dies at the end of “No Time To Die.” I cannot directly confirm this myself… this is the first Bond movie since the Roger Moore era that I will likely end up not seeing in the theater (the wokevertising that promised a Bond put in his place by a Mary Sue apparently turned out to not be accurate, but it turned me off to the flick). But the credits end with “James Bond will return.”

Now, there are a few ways this could happen, what with Bond being dead and all:

1: He’s not dead. An amazing escape, slid down an escape tunnel, beamed out by Scotty, survived under rubble, whatever. Presumably he received enough facial injuries that the reconstructive surgery will make him look like some completely different actor.

2: The old fan theory that the name “James Bond” is regularly passed along to new secret agents along with the 007 number. So Connery, Moore, Craig, etc. all exist in the same continuity.

3: A complete reboot.

Hard to say what it’ll be. Hard to say if the suits in charge of such things even know right now.

But here’s my suggestion: reboot. What’s more than that, remake some/many of the early Bond movies. Do this with A Plan: crank out the movies assembly line fashion so you get one Bond a year. Something like:

2025: Dr. No: A Chinese mad scientist working for SPECTRE farks with western space launches, risking a nuclear war.

2026: Thunderball: SPECTRE steals some nukes and threatens to evaporate some major cities, with the likely consequence of a nuclear war.

2027: You Only Live Twice: SPECTRE screws with space launches, threatening to spark a nuclear war

2028: Diamond Are Forever: SPECTRE builds an orbital weapon of mass destruction, threatening to spark a nuclear war; use of the weapon causes several nuclear detonations and reactor meltdowns.

2029: The Spy Who Loved Me: A megalomaniac sea-steader steals Russian and British boomers, with the intent of sparking a nuclear war; ends with multiple nuclear detonations at sea.

2030: Moonraker: And here’s the culmination. The remake goes much as the original; eccentric billionaire space industry tycoon steals a reusable heavy-lift launch vehicle from The Government, has a secret space launch complex hidden away in South America and plans to launch a bunch of craft all at once. Instead of manufacturing some weird poison, his minions are stealing nuclear warheads and plutonium pits. But when Bond is captured and the Evil Genius begins monologing, it’s none of that “I’m going to create a master race in space and will wipe out all mankind, muahahahaha” nonsense. It’ll be: “Have you seen what’s been going on lately? Ever since 2025 we’ve come within seconds of a global nuclear war like every friggen’ year! I’ve had plans in place to establish self-sufficient off-world colonies; but those plans were based on a thirty-year schedule. Last year multiple H-Bombs went off in the Atlantic! We don’t have thirty years! So damn right I’ve been stealing stuff; I’ve had to accelerate my plans. I’m getting the hell off this rock before it gets turned into radioactive ash by these crazy morons!”

In the end, Evil Genius successfully launches his hundred or so heavy lifters from the Amazon and sets up several self-sufficient O’Neill habs out in the asteroid belt. Bond goes along, hired as the new societies Director Of National Security. The numerous nukes and fissionables stolen by Evil Genius are used to create a range of reactors used to power spacecraft, stations and asteroid-munching factories. Enough power is available at the beginning that the factories are able to process out fissionables from the asteroids and mass-produce PV arrays, so the habs are able to not only self-support but reproduce. Since the thousands of people taken along have all been selected based on merit and STEM abilities, with no patience for “other ways of knowing” or kowtowing to “feelings” or “diversity mandates,” they are able to rapidly increase their technological base. They have functional fusion reactors and fusion engines within five years.

MI6 fires the now absent James Bond, hires a new nonbinary genderfluid dangerhaired Jamie Bond. On zer first mission, World War Five breaks out and the nukes fly; planetary population drops to a few hundred million in the resulting blasts, fallout and nuclear winter. Over the next few years, Original Bond leads a few missions to return to Earth scrape up technology, a few survivors, animals and plants. One exciting adventure where Bond leads a mission to raid the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Gowron: Rock God

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Oct 102021

In 1971 the Dutch rock band “Focus” released an album that had the song “Hocus Pocus.” It gained a measure of fame due to being a bit… well, odd, to say the least, with the lead singer yodeling, among other unconventional techniques. The song did well in the charts at the time. But what will meke it last until the sun goes dark is their 1973 live version on NBC’s “Midnight Special.” They didn’t change the song much, except for one detail. The song was originally nearly 7 minutes long, but NBC only gave them about four and a half minutes. What to do? The usual approach would be to chop bits of the song out. Focus’ approach: do the song twice as fast.

It’s *bonkers.*

The lead singer is *working* here, and as a result pulls some interesting faces. He could well be Chancellor of the Klingon Empire

To compare with the original:

As with the final scene from “Blackadder,” “Hocus Pocus” was improved due to time constraints and imposed limitations.

Progressivism = Magic

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Sep 272021

The below video takes a good long while to meander around to the point, and meanders around a good bit when it gets there, but the point is fairly simple: modern progressives in the entertainment industry are pushing stories of “magic” because progressive ideology is basically indistinguishable from magic. Both systems reject cause and effect and assume that the universe will bend to your will simply because you want it to. This is part of why many on the left are opposed to logic, reason, the scientific method.

I’m not opposed to magic in fiction. But I am uncomfortable with fiction that *pushes* magic as some sort of viable world view. Hell, even in the fictional worlds where magic users are the “heroes,” they seem to inevitably be dirtbags:

1) Star Wars universe: the space wizards think *nothing* of using magic to telepathically change peoples minds, to cheat them, to outright steal from them.

2) X-Men universe: in X-Men 2, Professor X freezes a whole mall full of regular people in order to chat with some of his students. Beyond the outrage on these peoples rights to go about their day without being frakked with, who knows what damage this does to them on the neurological level. At least “Logan” pointed out that this sort of thing was, indeed, A Very Bad Thing.

3) The Harry Potter universe: the wizards are *forever* screwing with the minds, senses and memories of regular people. People suffer and die in large numbers and the magic users don’t give a damn.

And magic in fiction is generally *lazy.* Magic works without rules, or at least whatever rules it might have are arcane and mutable. The best stories are those where not only the characters but the *author* are constrained by a strict set of rules (i.e. natural laws). The author and the characters then have to *think* their way to a solution. This might be a solution that the reader can look at and go “why didn’t I think of that” as opposed to “where the hell did that come from?”

And as bad as magic can be in fiction, when it’s applied in the real world it’s simply disastrous, whether it’s psychic surgeons, astrologers or wokies railing against phantom fascists as if they were demons or dementors, with solutions as divorced from reality as a Stalinistic Five Year Plan.

When does an AI have rights?

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Sep 252021

A somewhat fluffy video discussing the concept:

My own “Zaneverse” stories are set in a world where humans live alongside AI that have full rights. These stories are set about 500 years from now, *centuries* after all the wrangling is over. Those characters no more think about “when and how should an AI have rights” than modern Americans think about “when and how should we consider Eskimos to be fully human.” The questions are long since resolved, it’s no longer an issue, and since the SJW genes (and other forms of mental illness) are no longer prevalent in human society, you don’t have people constantly dredging the issue up purely to sow drama and chaos. The back story about how AI got rights hardly ever crops up. Still, the way I figure it happened: early on when AI took many forms (in Zaneverse AI are now standardized), from servo-robots to starship and national defense control systems, people would wonder about whether their AI’s were “real” people deserving rights rather than simply being convincing products. A general test was devised: someone would engage the AI in discussion, drift the conversation over to the subject of humans rights, freedom, responsibilities, the nature of sentience, so on. If the AI carried on the conversation, all well and good, but what the people are looking for is if the AI reflects on the subject and asks something along the lines of “do I have rights?” The decision process that an AI has rights begins when the AI of its own accord expresses an interest in having them.

In the Zaneverse, the human society that functions peacefully alongside AI does so in large part because that society, once AIs were recognized as aware and deserving of rights, respected those rights. The humans treated the AI not as tools or slaves, but as kin. Just as they did with uplifted chimps and dolphins and Kodiak bears and ravens. The worlds of the Zaneverse do not have vast numbers of humans, but humans have a vast number of allies.

Strategic Air Command Museum photographic trip

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Sep 092021

Some time during the next month or so I plan on taking a trip to the Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum near Ashland, Nebraska. I have visited that museum many times over the years, but always while traveling back and forth, thus never able to spend more than an hour or so. I wanted to get there during the work on the SR-71 book so I could properly over-photograph their SR-71, but schedule, cost and a little thing called a “global pandemic” kept me home.

I still want to excessively photograph their SR-71 in order to perfect the large format print diagrams. And additionally, a potential future book (in discussion with Mortons, but nothing certain yet) would be aided by excessively over-photographing another aircraft in the SAC museum collection. I plan on taking a *lot* of photos (likely in the thousands) covering several aircraft in painful detail.

I had hoped that the release of “SR-71” would bring in increased business (the APR Patreon/Monthly Historical Documents Program, USBP’s, etc), but as has been all too common, business has actually *dropped* since the book came out. One of these days I swear I’ll figure out how every time I try my hand at advertising business actually collapses. I suspect that the truth of it will help open doorways into research in practical time travel, faster than light travel and popularity with women.

So, once again, I’m grubbing for funds to support this trip. If interested in helping out, just below there’s a drop-down menu of PayPal options, from “moral support” to “large sums.” The “Best Of” option will get those who chose it, as the title suggests, a selection of the best photos, probably over a hundred. The “All the Photos” option gives the funder just what it says, all the photos taken at the museum, including any panoramic shots I stitch together. The photos will be provided by way of a Dropbox folder or a ZIP file with all the photos.

I *may* extend the trip another day down the road to Denver to hit up the Wings Over The Rockies Museum for the same purpose, but only if there’s enough “investment.” If that happens, those who go for the full set of photos will also get the full set of photos from the WOTR Museum as well.

UPDATE: I’ve updated the draw-down PayPal menu. It didn’t have the prices on there initially.

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