I think this is one of the best videos…

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., Meh., news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 102021
 

… showing the unruly, *terrifying* Domestic Terrorist Armed Insurrectionists Storming through the Capitol building. Just watch this, especially with the wise words of Our Betters in the media describing the truly horrific sight of people calmly walking between the ropes, and *brazenly,* *wantonly* and *fascistically* waving the US flag while in a US government building. The horror!

“See stunning video of rioters inside Capitol”

Sigh.

Once more, for those too dense to figure it out: yes, anyone who broke stuff or hurt/killed people needs to have the full force of law dropped on them. But once again I defy you to compare and contrast what we see and hear here, with masses of people who seem utterly uninterested in causing damage – and it’s not like they couldn’t have, had they wanted to – with the tens of thousands who swarmed our cities all this year burning cop cars and businesses, vandalizing memorials and pulling down statues. *THOSE* people were proclaimed as everything form someone with a valid point, to outright heroes. The folks in D.C.? they got the full Sandmann treatment.

I challenge you to imagine what this place would have looked like if these Dangerous Trumpists had had the same respect for law, order, history, property that your average Mostly Peaceful Protester had. I see a looooooooot of statues there that Antifa/BLM would have loved to have toppled.

 Posted by at 6:00 pm

*Another* Terminator?!?!?!

 AARRRGH, art, blather, Meh., science fiction  No Responses »
Dec 282020
 

Paramount Reportedly Wants Next Terminator Film To Be Rated PG-13

There is no “Terminator7” as yet, no plot, director, producers, anything, just Paramount noodling over the idea. But IMO, they should do one of two things:

1: Give it up. At least until 2029.

2: Do something different.

“Dark Fate” was so *aggressively* bad that the whole franchise has a stain on it now, like finding out that your favorite politician visited Epstein Island, kicks puppies and talks in theaters. But what I would like to see, were I given the reigns and a hundred million to make a movie: I’d ditch everything post “Terminator,” even unto ignoring T2 (*note), and go straight to the Future War against Skynet. Not early in the war like “Salvation,” but the *end* of the war. I’d want two movies: the first shows the battle up to the climax. The second one shows the world *after* victory. No Terminators or Skynet, no war against the machines, just humanity picking up the pieces. A fight among survivors about just how; some want to live like Amish, some want to use Skynets tech to rebuild the cities, restore the land, live out among the stars. Perhaps have true AI, but not of the “destroy all humans” variety. End showing a few generations down the line with humans and AI getting along, colonizing Pluto, say.

What do you want to bet we’ll instead get time travelling robots and lots of CGI splosions.

 

*Note: alternative: assume T2 happened, but obviously Cyberdyne backed up their data elsewhere. The raid on the complex didn’t change the future; Judgement Day still happens, catching the Connors a little off guard, but still prepped for action.

 Posted by at 11:21 am

The trailer was SOOOOOOOOO much better

 AARRRGH, Meh., youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 272020
 

In the long, long ago (i.e. December 2019, before the ChiComs and their stooges stomped the planetary economy into the dirt), Warner Brothers released a trailer for “Wonder Woman 1984.” The trailer was, IMO, freakin’ awesome. Behold the 1980’s in glorious ExtraColor:

I praised the trailer back then for its use of a modernized version of New Orders “Blue Monday.” I stand by that.

And today I managed to squeeze in time between research, reading, writing and other tasks to actually watch the movie.

I would’ve been better served to have taken a nap. The movie was a solid lump of meh. It’s 80’s-ness is to be seriously questions; there is a scene at the beginning set in a shopping mall, but after that the only indication that it’s not set *today* is the lack of smart phones (there are, however, quite a plethora of building-sized flat screen TV’s on display in major city centers… something I can’t say as I recall being all that common prit near 40 years ago).  And there is a distinct lack of writing, characterization and, importantly, giveadamn. Hell, there’s not even an arc for the villains. There are two… and they both simply walk away at the end.

This guy pretty well sums it up:

Something I’d been expecting was a lot of Orange Man Bad. But apart from a superficial similarity in hair-appearance, it just wasn’t there. The Maxwell Lord character just didn’t have anything in common with Trump.

 

 Posted by at 9:05 pm

80’s Flashback

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, Meh., politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Dec 162020
 

In some ways the 1980’s were FREAKIN’ AWESOME. Coming out of the truly dire 1970’s, what with Viet Nam and the end of Apollo and inflation and malaise and Iran and OPEC and the environment going straight to hell and Jimmy Carter and disco, the sudden arrival of optimism and Ronald Reagan made the world seem a better place. Even though expanded spending on disastrous social welfare programs torpedoed the deficit and the Soviets were still lurking around the corner with ten thousand nukes to turn the planet into a blasted hellscape… hey, no more Carter. People were proud of the US again; Viet Nam veterans were starting to be (rather belatedly) celebrated, as was the military; the US returned to space with the Shuttle; computer technology finally broke into the home market; Hollywood started cranking out some outstanding flicks that are still beloved even unto today. The world looked like it just might have a shiny future.

But then… sigh.

Growing up as a kidling in the 70’s, I was constantly bombarded by a culture saturated in the hedonism of the 60’s and the 70’s. The hippies and yuppies and their sex, drugs and rock & roll made it look like adult life was filled with nonstop partying, that once my cohort got over the hump of adolescence, we, too, would be having nothing but fun. Those my age were not quite sure what it was all about yet, but we were sure that once we got about to high school we’d have it figured out and we’d all be having a blast.

But then… wouldn’t you know it, the boomers had to go and destroy that, too. Right abut the time that girls started to seem interesting… AIDS. AIDS freakin’ 24/7. After school specials. In-school propaganda. News reports of DOOOOOOOOOM. Want a little taste of what we had to go through? Here:

Feh.

That was clearly some religious indoctrination of some kind, but even in the statist-est of state schools we got the same message, just without the Bible-bangin’ (and sometimes with). Coupled with the Satanic Panic and the sudden rise of Stranger Danger, freakouts over D&D and rock music, it’s no wonder that Generation X turned into the generation of “meh.” It was impossible to stay panicked all the time (even with air raid drills that we all knew wouldn’t do a damn thing once Soviet nukes started falling), but the constant drumbeat of “if you try to have fun, you’ll die” did a dandy job of draining the joy out of many regular aspects of existence.

Longer version of the creepifyin’ original:

Now just imagine what todays younguns are gonna be like when they grow up, after having been burdened with the Commie Cough and being told that their whiteness is evil and that objectivity is racist and that their history should be erased.

Poor little bastards.

 Posted by at 12:40 am

Werner Herzog just lost my vote

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Meh., news, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Nov 212020
 

Documentary film maker Werner Herzog has this to say about mankind trying to become an interplanetary species:

“The thought alone is an obscenity.”

Turns out he’s one of those misanthropes who compares humanity to locusts, who thinks we need to solve all the problems Here before moving There (one wonders if he thinks hominids should have stayed in Tanzania, or if he’s upset that amphibians left the ocean), and who somehow compares Nazism and Communism (ideologies that were all about limiting human options) to interplanetary expansion (which is all about expanding options).

 

One wonders if Herzog is at the top of BidenHarris’s list of people to run NASA.

 Posted by at 1:55 pm

NASA is in good hands

 Crazy, Forward!, I'm from the government, Meh., news, politics, science, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Nov 112020
 

The Biden-Harris transition team has announced who is on the NASA agency review team. Here’s the bio for one reviewer, Dave Noble:

For the past two years, he has been consulting with national progressive groups on strategic planning, coalition building, communications, electoral engagement, and leadership development.

Prior to this work, Dave spent eight years in the Obama Administration. He was the Deputy Director and Acting Director of the Presidential Personnel Office (PPO), where among other responsibilities he oversaw teams building pipelines of diverse candidates for political appointments and teams creating leadership development programming for all 3500 administration appointees. He also helped the First Lady organize mayors committed to ending food deserts and create safer and accessible places for kids to play as part of her “Let’s Move!” campaign, and was the White House Liaison and Deputy Chief of Staff at NASA, where he led the combined federal campaign to raise charitable donations from NASA HQ employees. He served on President Obama’s campaign in 2008 as the Director of the LGBT Vote and was deployed to Michigan to help spur voter turnout.

Yep. Good hands.

 Posted by at 1:33 pm

This’ll prepare ’em for the real world

 dumbassery, Forward!, I'm from the government, Meh., news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Nov 102020
 

Richard Carranza’s grading policy aims to bar failing marks: NYC DOE memo

Euphemisms are to be used in place of “you’re failing” in the New York school system.

Good job!

Bah. I’ve said it before: a better approach would be to split the educational system apart: for student who want to learn and who can learn, educate them to the best level of attainment possible. For those who don’t want to learn, can’t learn, or are so troublesome that they are an educational detriment to the others in class… send them to farms and factories to learn trades.

 Posted by at 8:47 pm

STD shows its respect for Gene Roddenberry

 AARRRGH, art, Gah., Meh., science fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Oct 252020
 

Yikes.

So I haven’t seen any of season 3 of STD. But when they made CBS All Access free for a month a  while back I caught the first two seasons. And those two didn’t make me salivate for more. This little clip doesn’t change that. Not only is the show apparently flat out ugly (there is a place for that sort of thing… that place is “Not Star Trek”), the *characters* are ugly as well. Never mind appearance… just terrible people. And these are the *heroes.*

 Posted by at 5:36 pm
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