“I have never been physically abusive in my life nor was I last night. Any accusations to the contrary are fabricated and meant to do harm to my reputation. I look forward to being fully exonerated.”
Let’s see how that works out for ya.
Seems like a terrible place, though.
Its year is 233 days long, it has a mass about three times that of Earth and a surface temperature of -274 degrees F. So, cold, dim and likely with a punishing level of gravity.
One might be tempted to suggest that in a land conquered and dominated by Marxists, Marxists don’t do so well. Maybe Marxism is just simply not a good system?
I’m pondering just how to go about self-publishing “War With The Deep Ones,” the collection of Lovecraftian tales I wrote a bit short of a year ago. It would be simplicity itself to simply upload the Word document to Amazon and publish it that way, but my prior experience with that has been… a bit disappointing. The trick as with most things is publicity, and self promotion has always been one of my lesser attributes.
A novel is by itself incredibly dull, graphically. Pages and pages of text. To give it visual appeal, it needs good cover art, something outside of my skill set. But it seems to me that a Kickstarter could be used to contract an artist to create some good cover art… and if sufficiently successful, perhaps pen & ink drawings within.
So… is this sort of thing a decent idea? And if so… what sort of “extras” would fit in here, what sort of target should be aimed at, and, not inconsequentially, how does one go about getting artists? There is a print shop not far from here that makes some high quality books, both paperback and hardback; they’re pricey, but they’re Made In The USA, which is nice. Seems to me that the basic project would aim at a paperback with cover art, with interior art if the Kickstarter gets to some high level of funding.
Any thoughts, comments, suggestions welcomed. Another stupid pointless doomed to fail idea, or might there be value here?
If you’ve ever wondered what it would look like to be on the receiving end of an ICBM-launched weapon… kinda like this:
Note that you could, from a sufficient distance, visually track the incoming warheads. They don’t look like phaser beams coming in, but they do glow fiercely from aerothermal heating. At least a few of the warheads apparently got *real* close to the intended target. Given that live warheads would have had yields measuring several hundred kilotons, that’s pretty much good enough for most purposes.
First: this is a really short (less than 2 minutes) horror flick featuring a mom, sick child and a demon (or a rough equivalent). The demon has a limitation that is common in folklore. It’s a reasonably good little short, showing someone with a *serious* problem. But there is a solution to the problem…
So, first watch the video, then click the “continue reading” to see a straightforward solution.
Now this here is just plain interesting:
Tucked away in the history of the Vietnam War is a likely associated effect of the extraordinary 4 August IP disturbance: The sudden detonation of a large number of U.S. Navy magnetic‐influence sea mines (designated as Destructors, DSTs) dropped into the coastal waters of North Vietnam only 3 months earlier (Greer, 1997). See Appendix for additional context. Tucker (2006, Chap. 15, p. 177) wrote that “… on 4 August (1972) TF‐77 aircraft reported some two dozen explosions in a minefield near Hon La over a thirty‐second time span…Ultimately the Navy concluded that the explosions had been caused by the magnetic perturbations of solar storms, the most intense in more than two decades.”
There can be only one response: man must destroy the sun.
On the same day that famed comic book creator Stan Lee died at the age of 95, this trailer for “Detective Pikachu” dropped.
Ummm.
Truly, this here is a bizarre timeline.
A combo of computer aided design and machining with low-cost Chinese labor and an expansion in the market for model kits has in recent years led to the availability of model kits the likes of which would have been simply unthinkable when I was a kid. For example: the P.1000 “Ratte.” The Ratte was one of the goofier ideas to come out of Nazi Germany, a 1000 ton tank that used two U-boat diesel engines to haul around a turret from the Tirpitz-class battleships packing two 38-cm cannon. The idea – beloved of Hitler – was clearly insane and while some doodling on the concept was done, no evidence of serious engineering has come to light. It’s the sort of idea that would not be seriously contemplated either as a weapon of war or as a commercial high production run injection molded kits.
Except…
A few years ago, the Chinese model kit company “Takom” released an injection molded kit of the Ratte in 1/144 scale. Even at that small scale the model was good sized, because the design was just that insane. I was honestly a bit shocked that someone would go to the trouble of releasing a 1/144 scale kit of the Ratte. But now there’s this:
A Ratte in 1/72 scale, in a box big enough to make a dog house out of. The company behind this, Modelcollect (another Chinese company), has a whole range of truly befuddling designs. Not only perfectly understandable models like 1/72 B-52s and B-2s and, at long last, a 1/48 A-12 Avenger II, but also a bunch of WWII German tanks redesigned as walking “mechs.” I dunno. Well, the Japanese go bughouse for model kits of ridiculous giant fighting anthropomorphic robots, so maybe the Chinese like quadrupedal King Tiger tanks. Well, there are two billion Chinese, so it doesn’t take a big market share to still end up with a big market.
Small American rocket company Rocket Lab has made their first commercial space launch of the Electron rocket from a site in New Zealand. This one – unlike SpaceX’s Falcon series, it’s fully expendable – was nicknamed “It’s Business Time” and sent several small satellites into orbit, including a prototype “drag sail” for de-orbiting defunct satellites. Total payload of the Electron is only 500 pounds, and the dollars-per-pound is likely far higher than for the Falcon 9. But little rockets like this, if they are made and launched with sufficient numbers, should provide not only cheap-enough capability but also much faster turnaround time for cube- and nano-sats.
Neat to see it launching from New Zealand. But the future of space launch can’t be from there, as New Zealand is a “nuclear free zone.” No deep space probes with RTGs, no nuclear reactors of manned missions, no nuclear engines.