Sunsetting panoramas

 blather, photography, Utah  No Responses »
Jun 232019
 

From time to time over the eleven years I’ve had The Unwanted Blog, I’ve posted landscape/nature/sky panoramic photosI’vetaken. But as time has gone on, interest, as expressed by comments and such, seems to have waned. Maybe because they’re the same-old, same-old. Maybe because they’re meh. Maybe because tastes change. Maybe because I should really be posting photos of nekkid women. Whatever the reason, people seem to have lost interest in that aspect of the blog (see the long string of “Panorama” posts back in April and May that went by without a single response; the most recent “pano” post to see any interaction was in November).

I should probably just pack that aspect of the blog in, send it riding off into the sunset. And so…

 Posted by at 2:07 pm

Burning the Flag

 AARRRGH, art, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., Hmm..., humor, I'm from the government, news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 222019
 

A lot of Americans think it should be illegal to burn the US flag; many believe that it already is illegal to do so. Both beliefs are wrong. It’s not illegal, nor should it be, for someone to burn their own property, assuming that there aren’t air quality or safety issues. Now if some steals *your* property and burns it, then, yes, by all means the cops should come along and lay baton to noggin until they pay restitution. But if the burner is the lawful owner? It’s theirs to do with as they please.

If you are one of those delicate snowflakes who believes that the US Constitution means doodly squat and that your feelings are so vital that they should be protected from someone burning a flag, consider this:

Three year prison sentence for people who damage EU flag, German state proposes

Do you *really* want to be just like a European Union bureaucrat? Is that *really* who you want to emulate? If so… step away from the computer and take a year or two off to re-evaluate your life. If you *are* an EU bureaucrat, take a decade or two off to re-evaluate your life.

The article also says that the proposed law will protect the EU anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” How exactly do you burn music? The best I can figure, they want to ban stuff like these:

 

And one wonders what German EU bureaucrats would make of this:

 

 

 Posted by at 11:13 pm

No, Kevin!

 blather, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., humor, My Fiction, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 222019
 

On the one hand, it’s just a funny commercial that uses humor to grab interest, though the humor has virtually nothing to do with the product. They could be selling diet soda, late-term abortions, hair care products or yellowcake uranium for all it matters.

But on the other hand… this is a cautionary tale of the importance of proper crew selection not just for Antarctic expeditions, but also for long-term spaceflight. And it’s a tale of cosmic horror, of humans struggling to survive and stay sane in a vast universe that cares nothing for them and which will exterminate them in the blink of an eye, without so much as a glance in their direction. This could be the followup to”The Thing” or “The Terror” or “At The Mountains of Madness.”

This is crew on the edge. Kevin is just the first, and he won’t be the last. Something will have to change and fast or otherwise their habitat will soon be surrounded by corpsicles. The inevitable US Air Force rescue crew will, some months later, approach the night-shrouded hab stealthily, guns drawn; the first thing they will see through their night vision goggles will be a few bodies standing naked in the snow, frozen solid with looks of mixed boredom, madness and relief on their faces. When they finally reach the hab itself, they will notice disturbing red stains painting the interior of the windows. Inside they will find a few more bodies, or at least portions of them; bits and viscera scattered around, lengths of intestine used as Christmas Tree garland. The last cryptic message will be scrawled in blood on the wall: “You made me play second base.”

The rescue team will of course be streaming video from helmet and gun mounted cameras, signals beamed to the C-130 orbiting above, then encrypted and bounced to a communications satellite, then to a facility in a nondescript office in the industrial outskirts of Denver. Grim-faced men will observe in real time and will note sadly that the rescue team themselves are already beginning to display anomalous behavior. An order is given; while the rescue team pokes around the interior of the hab, the C-130 drops a small package, no bigger than an office waste paper can, surprisingly heavy. The object will deploy a parafoil to control and slow descent; the C-130 will promptly go full throttle and head for the horizon. The package will drift downwards in a quick spiral. A few meters directly above the hab, explosive charges compress a hollow sphere of plutonium into a critical mass; the prompt X-rays will bounce off an internal shell of uranium, compressing a billet of lithium deuteride. A small second sun will bloom over the hab, vaporizing it, the rescue team and the frozen corpses… and, hopefully, the eldritch alien force lurking under the hab that those in Denver have seen in action before. Many fast calls will be made to government officials both in the US and in foreign lands; especially in Russia there will be expressions of outrage over the detonation of a hundred-plus kiloton thermonuclear device in the atmosphere. But with the uttering of a few key code words, those officials will blanche white, mutter in agreement, hang up, close their offices for the day and go home, there to either hug their confused and concerned wives and children or sit in the darkness and slowly get drunk, each to their own natural inclinations.

 

At least, that’s how *I* see this commercial…

 Posted by at 1:39 pm

AIM-260

 aircraft, Hmm..., news, projects, rockets, weapons  No Responses »
Jun 212019
 

Another missile has been recently unveiled to a degree, the Lockheed AIM-260 air-to-air missile, a replacement for the AIM-120 AMRAAM:

Air Force Developing AMRAAM Replacement to Counter China

Not much known about it as yet, other than it will have a longer range than AMRAAM and will fit in the F-22’s missile bay. Rumors abound, including the possibility that it is two-stage, or that it may be an airbreather of some kind.

It *seems* that the US is starting to crank up new weapons systems. Which, if true… ABOUT DAMN TIME. But the real test will be not just ‘weapons in development,” but “weapons in mass production and put into service.”

 Posted by at 4:54 pm

This school is inclusive, so we’re kicking you out

 Crazy, Forward!, Hmm..., politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 212019
 

The specifics on this interchange are hazy at best… it seems that a student disagreed with a teacher in Britainland (Scotland?) about just how many genders there are. And since the student went against the current received wisdom… out he goes. He was invited to keep his opinion in his own home and not share it in school.

Three cheers for small concealable video cameras. The student (High school? College?) seems reasonable enough, but it would of course be better to have had the whole exchange. Soon enough camera miniaturization, power systems and storage capability will allow regular schmoes to have 24/7 body cams running. Students with wacky teachers would be well advised to record their classes. Of course, teachers would be similarly well advised to record their days, what with colleges and universities these days being filled with overgrown toddlers.

 

 

 Posted by at 7:27 am

Reminder: Selling a bunch of stuff on ebay

 art, drawings, eBay, models, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jun 202019
 

Most stuff sold. I will, hopefully, regularly sell more stuff.

I’ve been meaning to sell a bunch of stuff for a good long while now, and I’m finally getting around to doing it.

https://www.ebay.com/usr/dynascott

This first batch is all sci-fi stuff, mostly Eaglemoss Star Trek ships (very nice little officially licensed models that come with glossy magazines that describe the vehicle and how it was designed). Also in this batch is the very last of the preliminary drafts of the Space Station V “booklet of general plans.” Everything has a pretty low starting price, so chances are good you can get them for cheap. Shipping gets a lot better the more of them you get…

“2001: A Space Odyssey” Space Station V Booklet of General Plans: blueprints

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #128 OV-165 ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #49 ECS Fortunate ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #109 Borg Queen’s ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #35 Klingon Bird Of Prey ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #70 Voth City Ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #62 Voth Research Vessel ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #3 Klingon Bird Of Prey ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #129 Tholian Starship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #106 Kazon Raider ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #53 Klingon Augments ship and magazine, new

Eaglemoss Star Trek Starship #138 USS Lantree NCC-1837 ship and magazine, new

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 7:33 pm

What are the options?

 AARRRGH, blather, Crazy, critters, Gah., Hmm..., ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 192019
 

On one hand, social media has turned out to be something of a disaster: it has allowed the dissemination of BS and bad things… Holocaust denial, Apollo hoaxers, antivaxxers, democratic socialists, Nazis, commies, antisemitism, Jihadis, third wave feminists. On the other hand, *some* effort has been made to reign that stuff in. On the gripping hand, those efforts have often been ham-fisted and politically bass-ackwards. And on whatever the frak you call the fourth hand, those effort to reign in the horribleness have resulted in a secondary cascade of really horribl things. Gentlemen, behold:

Bodies in Seats

Where we read about the truly awful lives of people who moderate the worst things Facebook vomits forth. Every time someone posts a video of, say, animal cruelty (and there are descriptions of several of such, so, watch out), some poor slob has to review it.

“They kept reposting it again and again and again,” he said, pounding the table as he spoke. “It made me so angry. I had to listen to its screams all day.”

Yeesh.

Marcus went home on his lunch break, held his dog in his arms, and cried.

Yeeeeeeeeeeeesh.

Content moderation, especially reviewing videos of the worst of humanity in action, is the sort of thing that can mess a person up.These places hire regular schmoes and put on a pretense of being a modern clean office, but from the reporting the employees and the work environment quickly turn into the Lord Of The Flies. This is obviously bad for them (and their friends, and their families, and society), but it also damages their ability to effectively do their jobs.

So, on the one hand it’s an argument for working real hard to develop AI content moderation. But that can only be done effectively with a lot of human interaction, and will almost certainly involve  lot of false negatives and false positives. On the other hand… perhaps it’s an argument to say “social media was a mistake.”

 Posted by at 10:43 am

AGM-183A ARRW test flight

 Hmm..., news, nukes, rockets, weapons, youtube  No Responses »
Jun 172019
 

The USAF is already flying bits of the AGM-183A ARRW.

Air Force conducts successful hypersonic weapon flight test

This was a “sensor only” captive carry, which presumably means something along the lines of a wholly non-functional mass/aerodynamics simulator. It doesn’t really look like the sort of thing that could get to Mach 20 with a meaningful payload.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Posted by at 10:27 pm

Impossible Trek

 blather, Forward!, history, Hmm..., politics, science fiction, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 172019
 

I’ve recently been watching (well, having it on as background noise) Star Trek: Voyager. Twenty years ago I kinda disliked the show due to a lot of the early-season writing, but as time has gone on – and as I’ve caught more and more of modern WokeTrek – the better Voyager seems. A few days ago I caught an episode that, it seemed to me, would be virtually impossible to write and air today without utterly flipping the script since it is utterly “problematic” and not at all woke. Looking back through season 4, it seems there are several episodes that have messages and outright plotlines that would cause untold online outrage among the purple-haired mental illness haircuts. There are also several other pints about the show that simply would not be allowed today:

1) Strong Female Characters: Captain Janeway, B’elanna Torres and Seven of Nine are all quality SFCs… *without* being screeching man-hating harpies. They are competent, reasonably well written (most of the time, anyway), don’t yammer on about oppression or patriarchy or whatever is outraging them today (well, except for B’elanna, but then, she’s a Klingon), and they’re all straight. The horror.

2) Seven of Nine. She was introduced for the shallowest of all possible reasons: the producers wanted to replace the character of Kes – a nothingburger of a dullsville female character – with someone who would bring adolescent male eyeballs to the show. So they brought in an unreasonable attractive actress to wear an unrealistically tight and form-fitting catsuit, complete with AHEM Borg Implants right up front, to serve as eye candy. And boy howdy did they succeed, something that would not be allowed today except – possibly – as a one-time thing in order to show just how awful men are for being interested in such things. But then… Jeri Ryan and the writers took this obvious bit of fan service and made her a damn compelling individual with an interesting personality, some substantial troubles and a lot of pathos.

3) Assimilation. No, not Borg assimilation, but aliens assimilating into the Voyager crew. Voyager, of course, does not let just anyone who wants to come aboard, come aboard and stay; the Captain picks and chooses who she allows to become a permanent resident. And those who do, assimilate. They become part of the dominant culture. They retain their own identities, of course, but they do not demand that everyone else adjust to accommodate them. And they do not demand to be catered to; but instead they all want to contribute, to earn their keep.

And then there are plot details and whole plotlines:

Season 3, Episode 24, “Displaced:” innocent aliens find themselves transported aboard Voyager, at the same time that crewmembers disappear. The migrants replace the natives, in the end completely taking over and turning the Voyager into their own property. What had seemed an innocent occurrence turns out to be a slow, subtle invasion.

Season 4, Episode 3, “Day of Honor:” The USS Voyager aids some refuges… and the moment Voyagers guard is down, the refugees come in far larger numbers demanding more resources, threatening theft and violence if they don’t get what they want. In the end, Voyager repels said refugees with force and provides a bit of aid, but only enough to get them to help themselves, away from Voyager.

Season 4, Episode 10, “Random Thoughts:” A society where wrongthink is literally a crime.

Season 4, Episode 17, “Retrospect:” Seven of Nine makes inaccurate accusations of assault against a man. As punishment is meted out without going to the bother of holding trials, the mans life and livelihood are ruined, and in the end he commits suicide. Seven of Nine goes on about her way with no punishment.

Season 4, Episode 23, “Living Witness:” Seven hundred years after the USS Voyager has gone by, an alien civilization has re-written their history to cast themselves as the innocent and in fact wholly virtuous victims of a technologically superior culture. They revel in their supposed oppression. Money quote: “It’s always about race!” Antifa/BLM riots and attacks a museum and causes substantial property damage when word gets out that someone is saying things that go against the narrative of oppression.

 

These are just a few off the top of my head. Imagine the people behind STD trying to do these things *now.*

 Posted by at 10:15 pm
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