Some scrapings off of YouTube. I’d pay real money to see a bunch of carollers actually go door-to-door trotting out these hoary old chestnuts…
Carol of the Old Ones
I saw mommy kissing Yog-Sothoth
It’s beginning to look a lot like fish-men
If I were a Deep One (this one is *really* good)
Have yourselves a scary little Solstice
Spoilers. So if you don’t want to know what happens, don’t read further.
General opinion: meh. Didn’t suck, wasn’t great. Kinda-sorta was like the original, except that the aliens are substantially more malevolent and substantially less imaginitive. Whereas in the original they come to Earth to deliver the message “Stop being aggressive or we will murder the lot of you,” this time they come bearing the message “Stop destroying the environment or we will scrape the Earth clean of all forms of life and start it over with the small menagerie of critters we’ve picked up.” They’re still assholes, just dumber.
Gort again plays a role, but instead of being a 9-foot-tall robot, it’s a 30-ish foot tall collection of hungry nanites in the shape of a robot. Gort becomes the cloud of nasties that you see consuming every damned thing in the commercials. The reason why the aliens are all pissy is because the universe has very few planets capable of supporting complex life, and humans are somehow or other killing this one (it’s never explained exactly how, but somehow Everyone Just Knows that humans are killing the Earth). Thus the aliens are here to wipe out humanity in order to save the Earth. But rather than doing something vaguely sensible like releasing an engineered plague to wipe out humans… the Gort-cloud will eat *everything* down to bedrock, and then they’ll reseed the place.
The aliens in TDTEST suffer from a common failing of Hollywood aliens: they have all kinds of advanced tech and power available to ’em, but almost no creativity whatsofriggenever. If you have the sort of abilities displayed here, you don’t wipe out the Earth. Instead, you terraform Mars and Venus and seed *them* with life. Sow self-sustaining colonies throughout the solar system up to and including the Kuiper Belt. But I guess that’s not as dramatic as a Message Movie.
In the end Klaatu (a properly cast keanu Reeves… all he has to do is stand around like a statue, which is well within Keanu’s range) decides to call off the Gort-cloud after it has eaten everything from Indiana to Maryland to Vermont… the same general area that got smacked down by Angry Trees in “The Happening.” The oft-used conceit of the alien seeing humans emote and deciding that they’re not so bad after all is employed once again.
But while the original version of TDTEST had Klaatu shut down all transportation and electrical systems for a temporary display of power near the end of the movie, in this version, he has the planetary technological infrastructure shut down right at the end, leaving humanity in a state of imminent collapse. The tech shutdown is presumed to be a permanent feature, rather than a temporary display. The purpose was to give mankind a chance to change it’s destructive ways. But what such a thing would really do is not only cause famine, plague death and mayhem on a level never before imagined outside of “Zombie Apocolypse” fiction, but also lead to the virtually complete destruction of the ecosystem. Six billion starving, freezing humans, devoid of basic machinery, will not only chop each other into rump roast, they’ll kill everything that flies, crawls, walks or swims, and burn anything even remotely flamable to stay warm. If humanity can get the technology up and running again (and one would of course certainly expect this to happen… I mean, how the hell do you permanently shut down even the concept of a diesel engine?), it’s hard to predict the future, but one thing would be certain: we’d harbor a genocial grudge against them alien mofo’s what who killed nigh on five and a half billion of us. If the aliens make the mistake of not regularly checking up on us, the next time we meet there’d be a hell of a fight.
As a followup to yestedays post, here’re the helicopter models on display at the Hiller aerospace museum, back in ’04. These two were STORC(Self-ferrying Trans Ocean Rotary-wing Crane) concepts, which were choppers with turbojets at the rotortips. On the ground, one of the rotors could be flipped so that both rotors faced the same way… turning them into wings. This would allow efficient long-distance ferry flight. At the other end, the rotor could be turned back around, restoring the vehicle into a helicopter. This procedure could not be accomplished in flight, only on the ground with the rotors stopped. On the whole this was a pretty spiffy idea, but rotor-tip turbojets tended to have problems (being squished by centrifugal force really doesn’t help a mechanism with lots of moving parts).
This coming Sunday I’ll have a little “open house” (actually, “open shed” is far more accurate), showing off my photos. I have a small number of prints made for a large number of photos, all framed and such, and ready for display. Since my workshop is both enormous and a mess, I’m blocking off the bulk of it via the tried-and-true “clothesline with a tarp” method of wallbuilding. I spent the day walking and driving around dropping off flyers to my neighbors. This will be an interesting experiment, to say the least.
Projected possible failure modes (hey, I’m an engineer):
1) Nobody shows up
2) People show up and hate the photos
3) People show up and hate the prices
4) People show up, love the photos, love the prices, and get set upon by the cats
5) Winter finally shows up and brings with it three feet of snow
6) Yellowstone goes off
7) Spontaneous proton decay
You may laugh, but with luck like mine, nothing seems impossible so long as it’s detrimental.
Before I left California in 2004, I stopped in the Hiller aerospace museum one last time and took a bunch of photos with my then-crappy digital camera. on display were a number of display models – including one full-scale mockup – of VTOL aircraft and helicopter concepts. Here are the VTOL concepts.
Fantastic Plastic has just released a model kit that I made the master parts for: the Lenticular ReEntry Vehicle. This is a 1/72 scale resin replica of a 1962 North American Aviation concept for a disk-shaped “space bomber.”
The model comes with a detailed weapons bay, four bombs and the little “shuttlepod” that was to be used to transport the bombs out of the weapons bay and either onto the outer surface of the bomber or to a separate orbiting weapons depot.
And silly, and more than a little dangerous. See the pics and videos in the first post in this thread…
One little-known aspect of relatively recent history is the murder of 6 to 10 million Ukranians (and Russians, and Khazaks) in the early 30’s by Soviet collectivists. History is replete with genocides and mass murders on horrific scales… the last century had not just the Holocaust perpetrated on European Jews by the German brand of Socialists in the early 1940’s, but also the wiping out of the Roma by that same merry band of big-government fanboys; the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides of the late ‘teens where Turks exterminated more than two million people who dared to not be members of the Religion of Peace; in Cambodia, the Commie Khmer Rouge did their damndest to reduce the population by about 1.7 million; in the late ’70’s Ehtipian Commies under Soviet-backed Mengistu Haile Mariam killed half a million or so because they might or might not have not been party faithful; in 1994, Rwandan Hutus killed about a million people in the fastest-death-rate genocide in history; then there’s Serbia, Sudan, Congo, Saddam and the Kurds… the list is extensive.
Oddly, though, all of these are better known than what is called the Holodomor. In 1932-33, between two and fourteen million Ukranians starved to death (or died of diseases related to famine). While agriculture that year was apparetnly not all that good world-wide due to bad weather, it really didn’t help that the Soviets were busy trying to appropriate all farms for the State. Ukranian farmers were understandably annoyed at having the fruits of their labor stolen by the “spread the wealth” crowd. As a result of growing nationalism in Ukraine, as well as region-wide resistance by the Russian/Ukranian/Khazak peasantry to the evils of collectivism, Stalin enacted policies that made things far, far worse. If Hollywood had any damned sense they’d make a couple epics about this. But that would annoy three groups:
1) Russians who are currently working hard to whitewash the record of Stalin. Yes, there really are such morons… sort of the equivalent of neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers, there are many in modern Russia who want Stalin to be seen as a hero, not the irredeemable monster he actually was.
2) People who think that collectivism is Good and that individualism and private property ownership is Bad. In other words, a good chunk of Hollywood…
3) Journalists. See: Walter Duranty.
Read more about the Holodomor here at the Weekly Standard. While the US staggered under the weight of the beginnings of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl years, we did not see episodes of the Army surrounding farm towns and stealing all the food. Nor did we see mass cannibalism. For those sort of evils, you really need a “spread the wealth” mentality.
A YouTube video of a local “awwww” news story…
