This looks like it has potential…
Mar 052020
Mar 052020
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:
Doctor Who Ratings: Over 600K Viewers Avoid Season Finale In Droves
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?
Mar 042020
Dayum, girl…
Mar 042020
“Psycho Goreman,” by the director of “The Void” (an imperfect but reasonably effective Lovecraftian cosmic horror flick made on a very low budget). As with “The Void,” the effects look entirely practical.
The lesson of this movie seems to be “gosh, maybe it’s not such a good idea to give little children the power to command bloodthirsty murder-monsters.” Who woulda guessed.
Mar 042020
This video purports to be a rather bold robbery at a drugstore in San Francisco, demonstrating the inevitable results of policies that decriminalize theft.
San Francisco’s no arrest policy has anarchic results. pic.twitter.com/3FqauPHUaM
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) March 3, 2020
Mar 032020
The one where Mike Bloomberg is asked to defend his anti-gun position while surrounding himself with armed guards packing heat that he wouldn’t allow YOU to carry (starts at about 12:46):
He trots out the usual politician-speak of babbling incoherently on tangential subjects to pad out the time and make you *think* he actually answered… but he accidentally said what he really thinks and tried to justify his position with what boils down to “I’m more important than you and thus my life is more worthy of being defended than yours, thus I get to have more rights than you do.”
Mar 032020
Pretty computer graphics of their Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft concept, which is a helicopter with a pusher prop akin to the now half-century gone AH-56 Cheyenne:
Mar 022020
This is a direct quote from Joe Biden:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by the you know, you know the thing."pic.twitter.com/A0MRpMmIWk
— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) March 2, 2020
This is a direct quote from Joe Biden:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident. All men and women created by the you know, you know the thing.”
Huh. Who knew that humanity was created by The Thing?
Mar 022020
Lourdes shrine closes healing pools as precaution against coronavirus
Wait. A place that miraculously cures illness is being closed to keep people from getting sick? It’s almost as if the people who run the place don’t have complete faith in the miraculousness of their miracles.
Wouldn’t this be a FANTASTIC opportunity to prove out the effectiveness of their “healing pools?”
Related:
Applying essential oil to anus ‘cures coronavirus’: Iranian cleric
Snerk.
There’s nothing like a worldwide media freakout over what is *probably* going to turn out to be a flash-in-the-pandemic to bring out the cranks and the crazies, selling crackpottery and woo as fake cures to assuage the fearful.
Mar 012020
This video was posted on YouTube some six-ish years ago, but remains worthy of viewing and discussion. It’s a General Dynamics film to NASA from late 1962/early 1963 discussing the study of Early Manned Interplanetary Missions (EMPIRE), NAS8-5026. It describes the future as it should have been… and as how Krafft Ehricke, the presenter of the film and one of the driving forces behind the program, saw it:
1: Manned landing on the moon by the end of the 60’s.
2: Initial manned flights to (flybys and orbits) Venus and Mars in the early 70s
3: Entire solar system explored robotically by the end of the 1980’s
4: Manned mission to Pluto by 1995
Ehricke’s view of the future of space flight from the standpoint of the mid-1960’s was previously shown HERE.
The original film included a number of bits of concept art of both manned and unmanned spacecraft. Sadly no Orion vehicles are on display (it is name-dropped), but the Mars lander/excursion module was of the kind originally proposed for Orion. This was pre-Mariner when the Martian atmosphere was *massively* over-estimated; these landers and their dinky parachutes would, with the real Martian atmosphere, have made impressive craters in the surface.
