“Gladiator” sequel

 art, blather, Crazy, history, Hmm...  No Responses »
Mar 192023
 

Denzel Washington Is Poised to Sign On for Gladiator Sequel

There are as yet few details. Ridley Scott is on board as director, and the character “Lucius,” a child in the first movie, is returning as an adult.

But here’s the thing: “Gladiator” ended as something of an alternate history movie. Maximum killed the emperor Commodus in the Colosseum (unlike in reality where he was assassinated by a wrestler). It was implied fairly strongly that Maximus’s desire to see Rome restored to an emperor-less republic would be adhered to. I suspect that the sequel will simply gloss over those details and restore something like Roman history, emperors and all. Commodus died in 192AD; if the sequel takes place 25 years later in 217 AD, that would mean Marcus Opellius Macrinus would be emperor. That said… it would be interesting if they decided to run with the alternate history idea, Rome restored to a Republic. Twenty five years might be too few to make major changes in Rome… but maybe not. The possibilities are endless.

As unconventional as that approach might be, it’s nothing on the “Gladiator 2” that was originally pitched. That one saw Russel Crowe’s Maximus return as the main character… a neat trick given as he’s dead and all, but the script ran with it, throwing in the Roman gods sending dead Maximus on a mission to hunt down Jehovah. I highly doubt any studio would have *ever* approved such a wacky movie, but, hey, given the rapid advanced in AI, perhaps soon it will be made anyway.

 Posted by at 11:41 pm

Disappointing Airwolf

 AARRRGH, aircraft, art, Crazy, Gah., models, science fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 192023
 

After watching these videos, I’m glad I passed on buying into the Mars Industries 1/18 scale “Airwolf” kit. There are a lot of problems with it. A *lot* of problems. There are design issues, uncured resin, quality control issues and, most shocking to me, problems with the vac-formed transparencies. The problem with *those* was that the forms were themselves 3D printed, which is fine… but the prints with their substantial layer lines were not sanded smooth. Thus the transparencies have layer lines. AAAARRRRGH.

 Posted by at 10:37 am

And it only took me four decades

 art, awesomeness, blather, books, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Hmm..., politics, science fiction, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 162023
 

At last, my collection of “Tom Swift Jr.” novels is complete. Since I’m a miser/dirt poor, I was only willing to spend a pittance for each book, but if you wait long enough pretty much everything shows up on ebay.

Woo.

 

And because why not, here’s the next shelf over:

 

 

On a related note: turns out that last year a bit of good news slipped by me un-noticed. The CW a few years ago decided to make a TV series about Tom Swift Jr… it could have been good (I mean, it’s not beyond the bounds of the physically possible), but CW decided instead to make an abomination. The series began airing on May 31, 2022. It was promptly cancelled on June 30, 2022, due to low ratings. And of course: Tom Swift had been turned from a no-nonsense STEM-focused blond blue-eyed teenager with a girlfriend into a flamboyant gay black adult. Thus assuring that the existing fanbase would be uninterested. And who among that fraction of the population for whom “flamboyant gay black man” is a draw would be interested in a crappy sci-fantasy show?

From the Wikipedia article on the series:

Lead actor Richards said of the adaptation, “The original Tom Swift was great for his time and what he represented. At the time, that was the face of young boys, All-American kids full of possibilities. But in 2021, that can look so different. It can look like someone like me—a Black guy who is chocolate, who is queer, who is all those things that we’re told aren’t the normal or the status quo.” He added, “We’re going to dive into so many sectors of identity. We’re going to talk about Blackness—and a different kind of Blackness than we’re used to seeing, which is the Black elite, the 1 percent, the billionaires. We’re also going to talk about a queer boy’s journey into becoming a queer man. Not only self-acceptance, but acceptance as a whole, having the community and people around you.”

Gosh. I wonder why it failed to grab ratings.

 Posted by at 8:44 pm

Say goodbye to South Korea

 blather, Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, Worldwreckers  No Responses »
Mar 152023
 

Apparently life is bad for women in South Korea, with a heavily patriarchal society that treats ’em like garbage. So, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of South Korean women are doing what they can to avoid the worst of it. And for some number of them, that means avoiding men entirely:

A World Without Men

The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely.

The “4B” movement is essentially the “Men Going Their Own Way” movement of South Korean women, separating themselves from any relationships with men, including family and male friends. They’re cutting their hair short (or bald) and avoiding makeup in order to be less attractive, and are either living alone or shacking up with other women. And according to the article, a lot of these women seem satisfied with this arrangement. There is, of course, the inevitable result:

In December of that year (2016), as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the lowest in the world)

The birth rate has plummeted from 1.2 to 0.78 in well under a decade. And 1.2 was *well* under replacement rate. South Korea will soon begin to run low on young people, though likely not on old people. This will mean that the burden of caring for an elderly population will fall more and more on fewer and fewer younger Koreans, likely driving some kind of an exodus… And quite possibly driving an *influx* of cheap, low-paid “migrants.” This will lead to South Korean culture being gradually replaced with some other culture. And the question will be… what is this other culture’s views on such things as women’s rights? Just as Europe celebrates gay and trans while not making their own babies and importing *vast* numbers of people from cultures that not only like to make babies but also like to throw gay people off rooftops, there will be an inevitable clash. A South Korea filled with elderly Koreans and young non-Koreans seems like a poor force to stack up against an invasion of young, armed North Koreans. All the Norks needs to do is wait and keep making babies, and the peninsula is theirs.

If you won;t make the next generation, someone else will. That might well suck… but there it is regardless.

 Posted by at 10:06 pm

*HOW* much???

 art, Crazy, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 152023
 

Nancy Meyers Netflix Movie Shut Down Over Budget Issues

Netflix was in the early stages of a rom-com. You know, the kind of movie that tends to be set in the present day, in the real world, without much need for explosions, car chases, major set pieces, whole armies of extras, Marvel-sized special effects budgets. And thus, this seems a little weird:

Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, Michael Fassbender and Owen Wilson were circling roles in the feature, budgeted at $130 million-plus.

One. Hundred. Thirty. MILLION. Dollars.

Ummm.

 

Oh, hey, apropos of nuthin’, here’s a video made almost entirely by AI. You know, for cheap. Is it good? Meh. Did it require the involvement of busloads of Hollywood deviants, freaks and weirdos? Seems not. Is it the future? Most likely.

 Posted by at 3:20 pm

This is unacceptable… but I get it

 cats, Crazy, dumbassery, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 122023
 

The very latest in breaking news from a year and a half ago:

Armed ex-soldier allegedly storms animal shelter to get cat back

An Australian former soldier broke in to an animal shelter to get his emotional support cat back. The cat had apparently been lost and someone found it and took it to the shelter, and the dude wanted his kitty. I get that. I can even get behind the idea of a soldier with PTSD being so enthusiastic about it that he breaks in after hours. But he brought a fake firearm with him and full tactical gear and ended up holding a woman hostage… and in the end, he didn’t leave with his cat. Not cool. He was sentenced to six years in prison for this.

 Posted by at 8:22 pm

Meanwhile, in “England…”

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, religion, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 122023
 

English traditions confuse me:

I guess that slots in somewhere between “Cricket” and “Blimey.”

Oh, and something to look out for in the future of a culturally enriched Britain: “Taharrush.”

Such as:

Get used to it, Brits. It’s the future you chose when you installed (or at the very least allowed) a government that took your guns and decided to replace you and your culture.

Americans: witness this. Keep it in mind when you vote.

 Posted by at 6:07 pm

Priorities!

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Mar 122023
 

So it looks like Silicon Valley Bank employed people to do fundamentally pointless time- and resource-wasting stuff. This, sad to say, is hardly unique; lots of companies devote surprising amounts of effort end employees time to things that have nothing to do with the companies business or mission. Company baseball teams, for example, have nothing to do with, say, an auto manufacturers core function; claims about “building morale/cohesion” *might* have some validity, but if the company is in dire distress, spending resources on that is a bit unwise. However, a baseball team is unlikely to be a major source of revenue drain.

DIE (Diversity, Inclusion and Equity) initiatives, however, CAN be a major drain on a company. Not only directly by consuming payroll in hiring these people, but in consuming productivity in redirecting employees to do stuff on company time. And probably more importantly, indirectly by tearing apart the fundamental cultures that promote productivity and setting employees at each others throats and by causing HR departments to drive away – or not hire in the first place – good employees due to them not filling Enough checkboxes, and retaining less qualified employees because they identify with the current politically favored victimhood groups.

So, any time, money, resources devoted to “woke” policies is of course a bad thing. But how bad it was for SVB is yet to be determined, but it looks like they were at least at the standard American major corporate level of wokist self-sabotagery.

While Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, top executive pushed ‘woke’ programs

Perhaps this will serve as a valuable lesson to other companies to avoid this sort of nonsense. I’m not optimistic, though… a century of blood driven by big-government collectivism, from the socialists to the Nazis to the Commies, has hardly stopped people from “but this time we’ll get it right.” Additionally: since the list of “conspiracy theories” being proven right seems to grow day by day, conspiracy theories that hold that failures like this are all part of some long plan to centralize power into fewer and fewer institutions seem undismissable.

 Posted by at 3:40 pm

The funny side of bank failure

 Crazy, Hmm..., news, politics  No Responses »
Mar 112023
 

Banks failing are hardly good news. But for most people, FDIC insurance *should* mean that most people shouldn’t lose a dime, though there will definitely be heartburn and inconvenience. This insurance covers up to, IIRC, $250,000 in savings, which is more than most people have. But some people have a *lot* more than that.

The Prince and Princess of Canada suddenly finding themselves utterly commoners is kinda hilarious. Oprah getting taken down a notch is kinda hilarious. She’s a billionaire ($2.5B or so), so losing half a billion seems like it won’t harm her much.

I keep seeing people say that SVB was a “woke” company with a lot of leftist policies, but I’ve not seen specifics. but I’ve not really looked, either, so I’ve no idea. It might simply be that they made generically bad business decisions. But it might also be that they backed a lot of crappy DIE investments and the like. Which would invoke a fair amount of schadenfreude, but then it’s likely a safe bet that a whole lot of *other* banks are doing the same.

 Posted by at 8:35 pm
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