Florida Man is back, this time facing down Hurricane Florence:
As always, the news media is stumped by why anyone would do anything fun:
He even has a GoFundMe to raise gas and coffee money to get him where he needs to go. It’s currently sitting at $902 out of the requested $150.
I have two lots of Trek books. The first is a collection of old-school books, including “Spock must Die” (the first published Trek novel), “The World of Star Trek” and “The Making of Star Trek,” two good books on the making for the original series, from back when people didn’t really write many books about the making of TV shows; “Star Trek Logs One through Five” by Alan Dean Foster, which had the stories from the Animated Series turned into literature; and “Star Treks One through Twelve,” which included original series episodes written as long stories (from when that was just about the only way people could experience Trek unless they were lucky enough that the local UHF station broadcast scratchy re-runs). All are in decent enough shape. Twenty books for… let’s call it $60 (a mere $3 per book) plus postage to be determined at buyers request.
Also: a collection of “technical stuff.” Included are twelve Eaglemoss magazines, each covering one Star Trek spacecraft (“Krenim Temporal Weapon Ship,” “Nausicaan Fighter,” “Vulcan Surak class,” Andorian Battle cruiser,” “Romulan Drone,” “Xindi Aquatic cruiser,” “Goroth’s Klingon Transport Ship,” “Baxial,” “Xindi Reptilian Ship,” “Vahklas,” “Orion Scout Ship,” “Starfleet Academy Flight Training Craft”). Each magazine provides many illustrations of the ship, an in-universe description of the ship and its history, a description of how the ship was designed and, where relevant, the phyical model was made; how it was used in what episode of which Trek series. Also included in this lot is a set of “General Plans” for the “Joshua Class Starship.” This ship class was fan produced and is thus non-canonical (or is it?), but it well produced and a fine example of the sort of plans that used to be produced back in the day (and which I’d like to produce myself). The magazines seem to have an asking price of $12 on ebay, but I’m doing $6 each, with $10 for the Joshua class, for a total of $82… let’s call it $80 plus postage.
As always, if you want one or both of these lots, either comment below or end me an email. 
First come, first served… unless someone asks for both lots within the next day or so.
It is an old, tired and incredibly played-out trope: a hurricane comes to shore so TV people from near and far go to where the weather is and film themselves standing outside, braving the fierce wind. It’s been done to death. It needs to go away.
And then there’s this:
This is hilarious! #FlorenceHurricane2018 #TheWeatherChannel pic.twitter.com/WGgUk92z0t
— Rob Stealey (@CheatMtn) September 14, 2018
I think Hurricane Florence is not turning out to be everything the doomsayers had hoped.
A few days ago I posted a video about the “canon” in various important franchises and how the current owners seem to be screwing them up. It got me thinking: Disney may own the copyright to “Star Wars.” In every legal sense, they own “Star Wars.” But from a cultural standpoint, do they really own the canon of Star Wars?
What gave Disney the right to claim “Star Wars” as their own? Well… they bought it. That’s undeniable, and conveys certain undeniable rights. But consider a hypothetical alternate timeline. One where George Lucas did not sell to the Disney corporation, but instead to some exceedingly wealthy and vain individual. The dictator of some oil-rich backwater. A Russian oligarch. A tech billionaire. Someone with billions of dollars to throw around not only buying the property, but the funds to make more movies. And this time, rather than cranking out insipid movies filled with SJW tropes, here the bagrillionaire orders not only sequels, but “special editions” that make it plain that, rather than being set long long ago in a galaxy far far away, these flick are actually somehow related not only to Earth, but to said billionaire. Either the billionaire was the founder of the Republic, or is the Chosen One, or… some damn thing, doesn’t matter exactly, but it’s transparent self-serving crap. (*see Note below) It not only busts the established canon by retconning the history and “facts” of the universe, it’s also just really, really terrible in plot, acting, execution. In that case, I suspect that most people, even people who aren’t fans of “Star Wars”would recognize these new movies as being “non-canonical,” even though they were made by the legal owner.
On the other hand, unofficial fan films have often been met with great acclaim by the wider fan community. There are a few well-done series of “episodes” of the original series of “Star Trek” that were made by fans without the funding or permission of Paramount of CBS or Viacom or whoever owns the Star Trek license that day. In a slightly altered timeline, the fan film “Axanar” could ahve been finished and stood in direct opposition to Discovery; both were set in the same approximate time in the Star Trek universe, but had fundamentally different histories, looks, technologies. In this alternate timeline, “Axanar” might have been seen as a triumph by the fans, and Discovery seen as a wretched, hollow cash grab that shat all over the existing Trek canon. In that case… what would *really* be the canon there?
In some cases, canon can be easily determined. If the creator of the property created an episode, the it should be canon. But then, Gene Roddenberry, creator of “Star Trek,” also created the Animated Series, which is considered non-canonical. He created Next Generation, and the first two seasons of that, made under his control, are nearly unwatchable. He was responsible – at least legally – for “Spocks Brain.” He wrote “Star Trek V” and invented Spocks brother… who had never been mentioned before, nor ever since. So if not only the *owner* but the *creator* can be occasionally discounted as the producer of canon… can someone who is neither creator nor owner produce something that is accepted as canon?
In my opinion, yes. If the unofficial fan fiction does not bust canon *AND* it is beloved by the community and is accepted, then I say that something created by outsiders *could* be canon. And at the same time, anything created by someone who simply bought the property is not necessarily canon. For example: Disney has, so far, created one Star Wars film, “Rogue One,” and three terribly expensive fan films.
*Note: here’s a disturbing thought. Instead of Disney, imagine Lucas sold out to a religious organization. The result being a movie starring John Travolta and Tom Cruise as new Jedi, the ghost of Darth Vader voiced by Isaac Hayes. Turns out that, yes, the Force is produced by midichlorians, but rather than being microscopic organisms, midichlorians are actually the souls of long dead aliens blown up in a volcano…
The SpaceX BFR is looking more and more like it’s straight out of 1950’s sci-fi…
SpaceX has signed the world’s first private passenger to fly around the Moon aboard our BFR launch vehicle—an important step toward enabling access for everyday people who dream of traveling to space. Find out who’s flying and why on Monday, September 17. pic.twitter.com/64z4rygYhk
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 14, 2018
Up until now, renderings of the BFR had always been sort of a lifting body. Two main iterations had been shown… the first was a cylinder with an ogival nose and three equally separated long fairings covering the landing legs. The fairings served as aerodynamic strakes, and the whole vehicle was essentially radially symmetrical. The second version had more or less the same body but with a distinct belly formed by two small wings at the rear for control and gliding and a flattened surface between the wings on the windward of “bottom” surface, faired into the main cylinder of the body. It also had two even smaller stubs on the leeward or “top” side of the fuselage. In this design, there were four landing legs contained in the wings and stubs.
The latest version goes back to the pure cylinder and back to three landing legs. However, instead of stubby strakes, it has three distinct tailfins, with the landing legs in wingtip fairings. There appear to be canards up front. There is also something odd going on around the engines. There are a dozen “flaps” surrounding the seven engines, purpose unclear. Perhaps these are meant to extend in some way to produce a single larger nozzle for vacuum performance, or perhaps they are meant to provide protection for the engines during long duration spaceflight or during entry. Presumably we’ll find out soon.
It has been reported that New York Governor Cuomo has admitted to beating a little-known actress. If this had been a Republican politician, you can bet that the press would be all over this, with articles packed with vitriol. But since Cuomo is a Democrat, there will be no “#Metoo” fallout from this. He’ll be allowed to get away with it.
So, the EU just passed just about the *dumbest* law ever: a “link tax.” In short, if you post a link to a website in the EU… ya gotta pay for it.
Exactly how these idiotic policies will be administrated will be up to the individual EU nations. But if non-EU websites start getting pestered to pay up for the mere act of linking to an article on the website of, say, a German newspaper… the the obvious solution will be to simply stop linking to EU sources. A likely result of that will be a reduction in reporting on EU news entirely, or reporting without linking or quoting sources. An obvious result of *that* will be that EU news will become a round of telephone; a report on the latest bit of cultural enrichment in, say, Paris with fifty two people killed by a Perfectly Typical Frenchman driving a stolen moving van will in short order wind up being a story about how Godzilla and Cthulhu are currently fighting over the naming rights to the new Brussels Crater.
Easier to just write Europe off. Given that Europe looks likely to pass into a new dark age within a few generations anyway, might as well get an early start on no longer reporting on what’s going on over there.
Well, this is… huh.
Wave heights to 83 ft were measured early this morning under the NE quadrant of Hurricane Florence. These enormous waves are produced by being trapped along with very strong winds moving in the same direction the storm's motion. #HurricaneFlorence https://t.co/26J6Uogt6o pic.twitter.com/mdjGD5yibg
— NHC_TAFB (@NHC_TAFB) September 12, 2018
I’d like to *see* one of these supposed giant waves. From a distance, of course.
I posted one of his vids a few days ago, but I recommend many more of them. The schtick here is that “Dicktor van Doomcock” is an old-school Evil Genius living in the center of the Earth, plotting planetary conquest… but in the meantime he’s going to review and critique movies and TV shows and culture in general. And… he’s distinctly non-PC. Not only does he employ expletives well, he has no use for SJWs and the cultural rot they represent and implement.
Initially I was a little put off by the format (goofy mask, altered voice, theatrics). But after watching a few of his vids, I find that it actually works really well. Who better than a supervillain to get angry and lose his sh!t when discussing how, say, Star Trek Discovery craps all over Star Trek, how “Solo” forgot to actually be interesting, how those who try to tear down “Iron Man” in order to build up “Black Panther” are craven nincompoops? It’s like an angry version of MST3K.
Give him a watch. There are shockingly few views on these. Gotta love a guy who has Cthulhu as a sidekick.
Trump Derangement Syndrome: cranked up to 11.
Dude shot himself in the arm with a .22 pistol. Entertainingly, he’s facing a slew of felony charges… “discharging a gun within a prohibited structure, carrying a concealed weapon without a permit and possessing a dangerous weapon on school property.”