Pretty much this whole last week I’ve been sick. Fortunately it seems to have been merely the common cold; it doesn’t seem to be progressing towards a bout of bronchitis. Still, a common cold can take it out of you. Thursday I started improving; Friday I was well enough that I decided to go see “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

My simple review: if you liked “Mad Max” or “The Road Warrior”… get on over to the theater and see “Fury Road.” This movie is *bonkers.* It’s very clearly the product of a gloriously twisted mind and a whole lot of skill, talent and effort. It was, in a word, damned entertaining.

When I got home I decided to look up the reviews. On the whole people seem to agree. But I also noticed a degree of politicization that I didn’t actually get from the movie. People on both the left and the right are yammering on about how this is a “feminist” movie. And… I don’t get it.

The short form is this (it’s a Mad Max movie… the short form is all it takes to describe the plot): Max gets caught at the beginning of the flick, and taken to “The Citadel,” which is a lone outpost with a bunch of cancer and mutation-riddled folk, living in some sort of mucked-up new and rather unfortunate civilization. While there, the gloriously named Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), a driver of a “war rig” (basically a tanker truck with a lot of mods) takes off on a run to outlying outposts. With her are four or five other women that she has liberated; they were being used as baby factories by the tyrant of the Citadel, the incredibly creepy Immortan Joe. For reasons difficult to explain, Max gets dragged along as Joe and his band of freaks give chase to get the women back. And… there ya go. An hour and a half of chasing around the Namibian desert follows, with many spectacular car crashes.

Max is… Max. The actor may have changed, but the character is much the same; he’s not wussified in any way. Imperator Furiosa is a badass, and in their travels they encounter a band of impressively badass little old ladies. This, I gather, is the source of the “feminist” yammerings. But it seems to me that if you accept the premise of the world of Mad Max, that civilization has collapsed and the environment has gone to hell due to radioactive fallout, all of these sorts of roles seem likely. When TSHTF, it’ll be the strong preying on the weak. And thus an Immortan Joe-type will rise to power in his little corner, and the idea of using the rare healthy breeding age woman for breeding purposes will likely seem to make a whole lot of sense. It won’t be a pleasant world for womenfolk. And for those women who are outside of these little clusters of “civilization,” they will either learn how to be badass, or they’ll soon find themselves victims. This, of course, will be true for men as well.

Still… here we have an opportunity for people to politicize something that’s probably not political. And so you get stuff like THIS, where people who haven’t seen the movie pronounce it liberal propaganda, and other people who haven’t seen it decide to not see it based on those pronouncements.

And so they’ll miss out on one hell of an entertaining flick, with one terribly wacko villain.

One issue I did have with the movie: the timeframe. This movie is, I gather, a reboot rather than a sequel. But Max still mentions that he once was a cop. He’s not that old, so his time as a cop could not have been much more than a decade or so earlier, which means there was still a functional civilization a decade or so earlier. But there seem to be people middle aged and older who were born into this new and rather awful world. The evidence suggests that the fall of civilization was something that happened *generations* ago (Furiosa was kidnapped as a child, and at the time was a member of some “clan” or other; Joe has a son, Rictus Erectus, who is genetically flawed… and played by a guy who’s older than I am). So what we’re seeing aren’t people struggling to survive the Apocalypse… the Apocalypse is *over.* What we’re seeing are the civilizations arising from the ashes of the old one. And wow, these are some bugnuts civilizations. As I would pretty much expect under the circumstances.

I’ve made a number of science fictional CAD models for Fantastic Plastic. Wonderfest, an annual hobby convention in Louisville, Kentucky, is coming up at the end of the month, and Fantastic Plastic is going to set up there. A while back I thought it might be interesting to take some of the CAD models I’ve created for current and forthcoming Fantastic Plastic model kits, specifically the Helicarrier, the Prometheus and the Messiah, and create 2D layout drawings… and then make cyanotype blueprints. Further, the blueprints would be at the same scale as the kits.

The end results? A moderately sized Helicarrier blueprint, two big Prometheus sheets (one showing the craft in flight, the other showing it in landed configuration), and one enormous Messiah blueprint, a full six feet long.

I don’t know if there is a market for such things. The Prometheus and the Messiah in particular are just gigantic. Were I to really try to commercialize them, I’d probably scale them down to at least 2/3 and more likely 1/2 the current size. Still, creating them was not a minor effort… so what the heck. I’m going to make them available for a limited time. Yes, they’re pricey. But they’re also *huge.* And a pain to make. And there won’t be very many of them on the entire planet (right now, two copies each of the Helicarrier and the Messiah; a grand total of one of the Prometheus prints).

~~These will be available for a two-week period, starting now.~~ If some dark miracle occurs and I sell a hundred of them within that span, then, great! But however many, at the end of the two weeks, that’s it. All done, no more. I will total them up, and hand notate each one as numbered limited edition (“1 of 5,” or whatever, based on the order that orders come in) plus I’ll initial each one. Because why not.

F~~eel free to order as many of each as you want. Don’t forget postage… and don’t forget that with this one-time postage you can order as many *other* cyanotype prints as you like.~~

Prometheus prints:

Helicarrier:

George Zimmerman is clearly a piece of work. Trouble seems to follow him everywhere; many people – in general the same people who think he’s a murderer for shooting the guy who was bashing his head into a sidewalk – think he actively seeks out trouble. In my entirely amateur analysis, he’s got a definite problem with impulse control. But he also seems to be a magnet for trouble from *outside.*

Most recently he was involved in a “road rage incident” that resulted in the other feller shooting at him. Many people assumed that Zimmerman had flashed a gun at the other guy, who shot at him in pre-emptive self defense. In that scenario, Zimmerman would be in serious legal trouble. Well, today charges were finally fired in this incident:

Man Who Shot At George Zimmerman, Matt Apperson, Arrested – Update Three Charges – NO BAIL….

One count of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon.
One count of aggravated battery with deadly weapon.
One count of firing deadly missile into an occupied vehicle.

Zimmerman keeps finding himself in the middle of crapstorms. When the legal system looks at him, it keeps finding that he’s not legally culpable. He *really* needs to just pack up and leave Florida and move elsewhere… change his name and start over somewhere else, and just keep his head down.

Saw this on eBay:

German WWII electro-mechanical analog computer for the V2 rocket – A4 missile

The starting bid price is a bit rich for my blood… $7500. But if the photos and the scan from the Christies catalog are accurate, it does seem to be vintage V-2 hardware. Not quite sure what it did or where it did it; since there are dials that a human was apparently meant to set, it would seem to be part of the aiming system (which was little more than “go that far then flop out of the sky,” with azimuth controlled by rotating the launch pad and, IIRC, some radio guidance to get it pointed in the right direction. It *might* have gone on the missile itself, or it *might* have been part of the launch infrastructure. Shrug. This unit seems to be missing some bits, such as the rather important dials.

A bunch of photos at the auction site.

One of the great uses of science is prediction. From predicting solar eclipses to tornadoes to asteroid impacts, the ability warn of future calamities can be vitally useful. In the last generation, global warming/climate change/whatever has been top of the charts in getting people to yell at each other; many computer models have been created to simulate the *past,* but their abilities to predict the *future* have often been found to be rather lacking. I was promises. increased frequency/power hurricanes, for example, and that hasn’t really happened.

Using your science to make a prediction is always nerve wracking. If you are *wrong,* you can get in all kinds of trouble. But if you want your science to be taken seriously, you *have* to make predictions. And you have to be more-or-less correct. So, now we have this:

NASA Study Shows Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf Nearing Its Final Act

A new NASA study finds the last remaining section of Antarctica’s Larsen B Ice Shelf, which partially collapsed in 2002, is quickly weakening and likely to disintegrate completely before the end of the decade.

That’s a good sort of prediction. A fairly clear end point, within a verifiable timeframe, and conveniently near-term as such things go (compare to “Betelgeuse will go supernova sometime in the next 50,000 years.”).

Syria conflict: IS advances on ancient ruins of Palmyra

The Temple of Baal and the statuary-filled museum seem like tempting targets for these idiots.

GE went and built themselves a tiny little turbojet using a Direct Metal Laser Melting process. Not *quite* and simple as hitting “print” and then popping the engine into the test stand; very brief mention is made of some necessary post-processing including machining and polishing. Still, these little hobby-size turbojets are, as I understand it, machining nightmares; if the pricing is competitive (something I rather doubt at the moment), then perhaps we can *all* have little RC cruise missiles. Just the thing to give the FAA fits.

These Engineers 3D Printed a Mini Jet Engine, Then Took it to 33,000 RPM

Rick and Morty was one of the best things to happen to animation in recent years (Rick’s interactions with the Devil are worth the price of admission), and season two premieres in late July. Yay! But even before then, Rick and Morty will be making an appearance on the Simpsons.

At least three shout-outs to Futurama: Planet Express Ship, Slurm, Brain Slug.

A brief article on a Japanese mini-shuttle, photographed from an issue of “Space World” magazine a few months back (sadly, I didn’t catch the date of the article, but it would have been sometime in the early/mid 1980’s). This is, I believe, an early design of the “HOPE” spaceplane which was more or less Japans answer to the French Hermes spaceplane. This mini-shuttle would have been a little bigger than the Dyna Soar from twenty years earlier, but equipped not only with its own onboard rocket propulsion system but also a pair of turbojets of atmospheric propulsion.