“It belched out a buttload of dust in our direction” seems to be the explanation. If so… no supernova for you.
The star has begun regaining its prior brightness. An examination of its surface shows no cooling, only dimming, which is best explained by some of the light being simply physically blocked.
I have watched Star Wars and Star Trek, beloved American science fiction franchises from my childhood (and in Trek’s case, before), become fouled craptacular garbage thanks to awful writing, bad intentions and unfortunate business decisions. I’ve never been much of a fan of Dr. Who; it was always just too goofy for me. Too British, perhaps. But a whole lot of other people have loved Dr. Who as much as I loved Star Trek… and boy howdy are they cheesed off at how the current crop of hacks writing and producing the show have turned it into garbage.
Not being much of a fan of the show I’m not too up on the canon. But even so I know there are a few things that are important: “Who” is not the Doctors actual name. You’re never supposed to find out what it is. And his history before the show is *supposed* to be a permanent mystery. The people he comes from, the Time Lords, are supposed to be terribly powerful, almost godlike beings.
Not anymore, it seems. Not only has the BBC seen fit to explain the backstory of the Doctor (now no longer a Time Lord), it has turned the Time Lords into merely a science experiment, and jammed in a whole lot of identity politics in the process. Ooof. And as a result, ratings have fallen through the floor:
Sunday’s episode of Doctor Who, “The Timeless Children,” saw 3.78 million viewers tune in, but what is especially troublesome for the BBC is the fact that the shows preceding Doctor Who and following both had a higher amount of viewers all in the same range.
Prior to Doctor Who saw Countryfile with 4.44 million viewers, and following Doctor Who saw Antiques Roadshow with 4.41 million.
Antiques Roadshow drew in more viewers in Britain than the season finale of Doctor Who. Which fits given the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes:
I gotta wonder. The BBC, as with Disney (Star Wars) and JJ/CBS (Star Trek): have they ever considered just, you know… not sucking?
The BBC uses the funds they extort from the British populace through the unjustifiable “TV license fee” to produce this sort of hilariously insane twaddle:
The struggles of getting a haircut as a non-binary person. pic.twitter.com/YEdYTgCFqV
— BBC The Social (@bbcthesocial) February 4, 2020
Where some ill defined… well, let’s say “person,” drones on and on about the difficulties in getting a haircut when you decide to be a weirdo. My concern over the difficulty of your fashion choices is *always* going to be minimal, but when you present yourself with large radial bearings plunged through your earlobes, my concern drops approximately to zero. And when your ulcerate over a *haircut,* the sort of thing that can be dealt with by, oh, I dunno, how about not getting one, then… yeah, bugger off, buddy.
As for the cost differential between “mens” haircuts and “womens” haircuts, you wouldn’t think that it would need to be pointed out that there tends to be a whole lot more resources and effort expended on women than men in this regard… but here we are. Most men are satisfies spending approximately two to five minutes in a barber chair, getting no more than a trim. Women seem to like not only a more involved trimming process but also the careful application of various stinkprettys, all of which take time and presumably some sort of skill.
So, strange BBC spokesentity, if the process of getting your weird haircut is too traumatic, just get a buzz cut. Or just tell the barber “trim a little off the top” and stop wasting your damn time and effort on something as fundamentally useless as the fashionability of your hair. After all: fashion and whatnot evolved as a way to attract the opposite sex so you could reproduce. And that doesn’t really seem to be in the cards, now, does it.
A couple weeks ago I made a spectacular, world-shaking post about a small RPG company that decided to insult about half of their potential customer base while also telling their base to *not* buy the product. That’s remarkable enough, but the company has not only continued to insult their potential customers, they’ve also pointed out that they fundamentally do not understand their own product.
Their game is a Cthulhu Mythos-based role playing game. One of the most important features of cosmic horror as defined and virtually invented by H. P. Lovecraft is “madness.” The universe is so vast and uncaring that if you get a good look at it, the horror of it all will likely break your tiny little brain and drive you mad or kill you outright. Madness is as fundamental to the Cthulhu Mythos as space wizards and lazer swords are to “Star Wars,” optimism and interstellar adventures are to “Star Trek” and sparkly teen vampires are to “Twilight.” So… behold:
There are no sanity rules in Fate of Cthulhu. We don't require anyone to play or perform mental illness.
(If you choose to, we have guidance on how to do it respectfully.)
Instead your PC gains Corruption, a potent, alluring slice of the Elder Gods' power.https://t.co/v0F853zsM0 pic.twitter.com/13tLqmE3wR— Evil Hat Productions (@EvilHatOfficial) January 30, 2020
“There are no sanity rules in Fate of Cthulhu. We don’t require anyone to play or perform mental illness.
(If you choose to, we have guidance on how to do it respectfully.)
Instead your PC gains Corruption, a potent, alluring slice of the Elder Gods’ power.”
What. The. Frak.
Dude. Dude. Naw, dude. If you meet one of the Great Old Ones, you don’t gain superpowers… you go bugnuts, get mutated into Class A body horror, burn to a crisp, vanish from existence. You don’t get *stronger.* That’s the whole friggen’ point: you can’t deal with this ᛋᚺᛁᛏ. It’s beyond you. Your efforts to be a badass only make Nyarlathotep chuckle.
Now, if they want a game where meeting the scary transdimensional space monsters gives you superpowers, great. Go ahead and invent that universe. Nobody will complain. But that’s not what they’re doing. Instead, they’re doing the “circle of diversity” thing of colonizing an existing property and then twisting it to suit their own ends while insulting the original fans. But what’s the *real* reason why they’re not creating their own thing, when they manifestly hate what they’re actually colonizing? Let the game designer explain:
Yes, we wanted to do something with Cthulhu because Cthulhu sells. That’s not us playing anybody. Just because we wanted to do that thing, it’s not therefore true that we could not then want to do anything else at the same time, like directly calling out HPL’s documented facts.
— deadly fredly (@fredhicks) February 3, 2020
“Yes, we wanted to do something with Cthulhu because Cthulhu sells.”
Not “we wanted to do Cthulhu because Cthulhu is awesome and a great basis as-is.” Instead… cash-grab.
After seeing Ghostbusters 2016, JJTrek, STD, Disney Star Wars… I’m a bit tired of seeing people taking over franchises and iconic cultural properties and turning them not only into talentless garbage, but garbage that is directly opposed to what the actual property actually is. This kinda makes me want to revive my “War With The Deep Ones” effort. If these anti-Lovecraftian hacks could make a mint on Kickstarter… why the frak can’t I?
Here we go again…
Short form: a trauma surgeon who was shot in the neck as a teenager became an anti-gun activist (it is not uncommon for those who have been abused to become abusers themselves). His latest activity was, it seems, to print out a clip-art “death threat,” place it on his own vehicle and then photograph it. His claim was that the “flyer” was posted on his vehicle out in public, yet the photo he took of it was clearly taken within a residential garage. He has since deleted his Tweets on the subject, and the local police have confirmed that they’ve received no complaints from the “victim.” Nor has the printout itself been turned over for analysis.
Why did he do this? Presumably to earn himself some additional Victim Status Points. Maybe he’s playing Victimhood Bingo or something.
The mainstream media ran with the “victims” Twitter claims uncritically. Why? On the one hand, many journalists want to change the world rather than simply report on it, and authoritarians love anti-gun stories because that tends top fit with their “control everybody” ideology. On the other hand, the story was nothing but a handful of Tweets, pretty much the very definition of a non-story. So perhaps it was a slow news day and they had to dream up something, *anything,* to help fill the columns. Heaven forbid that they do actual journalism rather than just breathlessly parroting the latest Jussie Smollett… investigation takes effort.
Point the first: it’ll be a bit lax on the blogging for the next little while. Got stuff to handle. Not, not coronavirus… not yet, anyway.
Point the second: color me stunned, Boeing done failed another aerospace project.
Spacedock lays out one of the clearest examples of why the latest (last?) Star Wars movie was so disappointing:
A whole lot of very different concept art was created not only for “Rise of Skywalker” but also for “The Force Awakens” that could have been *easily* modeled. Hell, there are boatload of amateur Star Wars modelers who have produced their own Star Destroyer models who could have been contacted and bought off. The fact that the art department simply took an existing and inappropriate model, photocopied it about 50% bigger and tacked on a Big Space Gun and called it a day indicates that the art department had a possibly terminal case of senioritis. they just wanted to be done with Star Wars so they could move on to something else.
I *finally* got around to seeing Rise of Skywalker this weekend. After decades of being a fan, seeing all the movies from Empire through the prequels to Clone Wars to Rogue One in the theater on Day One, Disney has managed the impossible: making me go “meh” and waiting a month to see the latest offering. In the faint chance that there’s anyone still uncertain about whether or not to go, I’ll say this: it’s not as bad as “Last Jedi.” But that is a phenomenally low bar. TLJ and Solo set expectations so low that Rise could well be the most hideously steaming pile of dung ever to have trained chimps smear across the movie screen, but it just comes across as something that a large number of skilled and talented folks worked very hard on just for a paycheck. The acting is ok, but the story is straight out of a video game and the visual effects are basically just Lucasfilm shaking their box of existing digital assets out onto the screen and saying “eh, I guess that’ll do.”
It seemed to be very much *not* an effort to wrap up a story in the best and most satisfying way possible, but instead simply an effort to nail the coffin closed and dump it in the hole so that they can get on with other things. The film makers are no doubt as sick of the property as the fans are.
Entertainingly, the long-time fans of Star Wars including old farts like myself dislike this movie a lot less than a lot of new fans, the ones who came on board with Rey-For-Pay and company. Us olds are annoyed that these movies crapped upon the legacy characters and story; the latest generation of fangirls seem upset that their preferred romantic pairings didn’t happen. As an example, take this video someone shot of the last scene. There are a number of very vocal female-type persons in the audience who *really* don’t like what’s happening:
By all accounts “The Mandalorian” is some high-quality Star Wars entertainment product, proving that good Star Wars *can* be made today. It just needs the right people helming it. People who understand and *like* the franchise.
… the dumbest movie review you’ll read all day.
I watched “1917” today. It was a fine war movie… perhaps even a great one. Technically it is an amazing achievement… the whole two hour run is made to look like one (well, two) continuous shot. Every frame is filled with beauty and/or horror. The acting and visuals are impeccable. The plot is simple and straightforward and, in its way, tells a small story: two soldiers have to go from A to B to deliver a message.
But that’s not enough for the scold who wrote the “review” for Salon linked above, who demands that every movie tell not just a story, but an ideological one. And, of course, that better ideology had damn well better be the *right* ideology. Woe betide the film that skimps on cramming Present Day into stories set a century ago.
I’m sure there are people who will defend “1917” by saying that it’s the story of individual soldiers in a greater conflict, not a political manifesto. There are three problems with that argument. First, as mentioned earlier, it is immoral to tell a story about a war without analyzing the reasons behind that war.
Cripes, it’s like saying that every Batman movie *has* to include a scene of Thomas and Martha Wayne getting plugged by a low-rent Single Source Socialist. Every movie about spaceflight has to include a discussion of whether Tsiolkovsky, Goddard or Oberth is the true founder of modern rocketry. Every Terminator movie has to have a discussion about the politics of yellowcake uranium trafficking.
So, do yourself a favor *and* cheese off some single-minded SJW fanatics and go see “1917.” It’s a good movie well told… and, to be honest, it could *easily* be re-written to make the nationalities whatever you like.
I haven’t watched Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” series. I heard season 1 was good… and I’ve heard that season 2 was a trash fire. After watching this review, I can believe it.
Basically, it seems that season 2 revolved around Venezuela being an economic basketcase run by bad people. Well… sure, because that’s the actual factual case for Venezuela. But it seems that “Jack Ryan” has decided to rewrite history and claim that Venezuela is this way because of a pseudo-right wing government… and that the heroic opposition is just a female version of the socialists who in reality trashed Venezuela in the first place.
Those of you who remember the awesomely awful action movies and TV shows of the 80’s doubtless remember Our Heros going to some Latin American craphole run by tin pot dictators. And when you’d crack open your World Book encyclopedia set, you’d find no mention of the craphole country… because Hollywood simply invented it. And that’s a fair way to go. Invent a country and you can claim anything about it you like. But when you use a *real* country and your show isn’t explicitly an alternate history show, ya gotta kinda stick to the facts. Those same 80’s action shows that featured fictional South American, Caribbean, Asian and African countries would also often send Our Heroes to places like East Germany and the Soviet Union… where Our Heroes would tangle with commies. Not Nazis or emperors or magical wizard realms, but the bad guys who were actually there. So why does “Jack Ryan” swap out the actual bad guys in Venezuela with not just fictional ones but 180-degree-off-axis bad guys? Really only one reason springs to mind as being at all realistic: the writers want to use the humanitarian disaster that is Venezuela, but they still like the ideology that produced it. You can’t show the electorate that the policies pushed by Bernie and AOC will lead to Americans being forced to eat their pets; do that, and Bad Orange Man might get re-elected!
So, yeah, I guess I can scratch “Ryan” off my “must watch” list.
