The year of lockdowns has given a lot of people time to work on personal projects. Here’s a dubious one:
The entire movie “Shrek” was mashed onto a single floppy. The way this was done was to reduce frame rate to four per second and resolution to 120×96. The audio… takes a bit of a hit.
… but damn it’s cool. A Russian machinist first makes a bolt that can take nuts with either direction of twist:
And then makes a matching nut with both directions of twist at once, so you can thread in and out using whatever direction you want:
Tolerances seem pretty loose, so the nut wobbles a lot. But for a first attempt, it’s certainly far better than I could do. But what could you actually *do* with such a thing? Those “threads” would be far more fragile than normal, since they come to sharp little points rather than sturdier ridges. And the structure is doubtless much weaker than a normally threaded nut and bolt. Still… seems like their aught to be some application that these would be perfect for.
The Chinese Communist Party wasn’t entirely accurate??? That’s unpossible!!!
Turns out New York *also* had ten times the reported infection rate.
The left wins again:
A statue depicting a slave rising from bondage that has stood since 1879 has been removed from public display because… reasons. The left wing war on history and art continues alongside their war on science and engineering.
Bah.
UPDATE: video has come in from the future showing the ultimate expression of the memory-holing of American history and iconography:
IRONY:
As I’ve made mention numerous times over the years, I am – or at least was, back when I had the time – a builder of models. As such, I watched a lot of YouTube model building videos to pick up new skills, new ways of casting parts, new ways to paint details. A lot of the videos are pretty redundant of course… you can only watch so many vids on the dot filter process using oil paints, for example. Yet there are always new things to see. It’s good to sometimes step outside your own niche. Me, I’d build mostly airplane models, spacecraft, some sci-fi and, long ago, armor. Japanese anime characters? Giant fighting robot mechs? Meh, not for me. Nevertheless, sometimes it’s worth watching videos showing someone building and painting such models. Sometimes there are interesting things to see.
Sometimes two things.
So a guy buys a Legal Thing. But he made the mistake of living in California. And he decided to obey the bizarre California law regarding that Legal Thing and register that Legal Thing with the state. What does the state do? Send a platoon of police with a warrant to tear his house apart looking for that Legal Thing. And when they find that Legal thing? They look at it, decide that it is indeed a Legal Thing, give it back and leave.
So… when the Gropey Manchurian takes over and tells everyone that they have to register their Legal Things with the government… will it actually be a good idea to do so, knowing what the government is likely to do now that they know you have that Legal Thing?
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.
This seems Constitutionally dubious:
California’s Legislature is considering a wealth tax on residents, part-year residents, and any person who spends more than 60 days inside the state’s borders in a single year. Even those who move out of state would continue to be subject to the tax for a decade … Assembly Bill 2088 proposes calculating the wealth tax based on current world-wide net worth each Dec. 31. For part-year and temporary residents, the tax would be proportionate based on their number of days in California. The annual tax would be on current net worth and therefore would include wealth earned, inherited or obtained through gifts or estates long before and long after leaving the state.
“Non-residents” who spend more than 60 days in California could be residents of Montana… or of France. Good luck taxing *them.* People who attend college in California would be on the hook annually for ten years after the graduate and flee the state. Someone who spends more than two months in a California hospital would have that benighted state pursuing them for years after.
According to the text of the bill, this would be a 0.4% tax on wealth (*ALL* wealth, not just wealth held in California) over $30,000,000. This would seem to be the sort of thing that would automatically make it so far beyond most folks as to be considered safely inoffensive,. But the fact is, once a government finds a new way to tax the really, really rich, it will then tax the regularly rich. The the almost-rich. Then the non-rich. Wherever there’s a nickle to grasp, a government – especially one as venal as the California government – will find a way to grasp at it.
What I look forward to: some scion of a Russian oligarch comes to America and spends three months sleazing around LA. Papa moneybags keels over two years later, leaving a hundred million to the kid who now lives full time in Moscow. The state of California then sends a bill for $400,000 to the guy every year for the next eight years. How do you think that would work out?
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.
