Snerk:
A “hi-tech robot” shown on Russian state television has turned out to be a man in a suit.
Russia-24 praised the ersatz android during coverage of a youth forum dedicated to robotics, boasting that “Robot Boris has already learned to dance and he’s not that bad”.
Heh.
So long as you’re going to have a guy in an obvious suit, might as well make it an interesting one like this:
Think how much happier everyone would have been…
From the same collection of military vehicles that unloaded a cinematically modified Centurion tanka while back, now comes a Mil 24 Hind-D attack helicopter. As it’s missing a few bits like engines, i suspect this is a bit of a fixer-up special.
It’s unlikely that I would be able to pony up the $100,000 Buy It Now price, or that they would accept whatever “best offer” I could make. So I have to add this listing to the pile of strange suggestions that some ebay algorithm made when it decided that I needed to see this. I can *kinda* understand, since I’ve looked at other items from the same seller (such as that tank), but some of the other things ebay suggests – terribly expensive resin statues of anime girls of remarkable proportions in advanced states of unrealistic undress, for instance – remain baffling.
Currently one of the big local news story is the mystery around a couple videos that *seem* to show an arch and hoodoos – reportedly in Utah – being blown up. So far nobody has confirmed that these have actually occurred; many think that these videos are the result of computer imagery. The idea that CGI would mess with the ability to tell real news from fake has been raised before… now, here it is, front and center.
Maybe these are Utah geological features being destroyed. Maybe these are CGI. And maybe they are *Chinese* features being destroyed, and simply called Utah. Hmmm. If they are actual Utah-based crimes, then presumably this will be confirmed in relatively short order because arches and hoodoos are reasonably well known and documented. If these are Utah-based features being photo-manipulated to *appear* to be destroyed, then that, too, should soon be made clear. However, if these features are from the Gobi desert or even wholly fictional, this may remain a permanent mystery.
Note that in the video of the hoodoo being destroyed someone gives a countdown. The accent is distinctly non-American (sounds like Dracula to me…). This may indicate a foreigner in the US. or it may indicate that this occurred out of the US. or it may indicate that a voice was simply overlaid over the video. Or it may indicate a thousand other things.
… the meme economy. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is probably the most memetastic person to hit the interwebs in *years.*
(I was certain that I’d posted this before but… shrug. If so, well, here it is again. If not… enjoy.)
Back in the 80’s, our Social Betters disdained Reagan as much as they do Trump today. This of course included the comedy product manufacturers, such as those at Saturday Night Live. Reagan was regularly depicted by Phil Hartman as being jovial but dimwitted… except for one time. Once in 1986 a Secret Conservative writer at Saturday Night Live managed – somehow – to successfully get SNL to depicted Reagan as anything *but* dimwitted, and the results were pure genius.
A seismometer and an air pressure sensor on the InSight lander on Mars have *kinda* picked up the sound of wind n the red planet. These aren’t direct microphone recordings, which I’m honestly surprised wasn’t included in the sensor suite. Additionally, the sounds are just barely audible. It’s unsurprising that Mars isn’t a terribly loud place, since the air pressure there is the same as it is on Earth at about 100,000 feet, more than three times the height of Mt. Everest. Even hurricane speed winds would be weak and quiet at those conditions.
I bet there are some interesting stories behind some of these clips…
As usual, a lot of Russian dashcam vids. But it seems to have a lower percentage than you might expect… getting airborne seems to be more international pastime than just blowing through a Moscow intersection. What happens at 2:45, 8:16, 10:05 really seem like they’d make interesting tales.
“Axanar,” the fan film that got too big for its britches and attracted CBS’s attack lawyers, is back in production. Sadly, the original plan was to make a feature length film, but now it is restricted to two 15-minute episodes. Still, 30 minutes of something that actually seems like Star Trek is better than an entire season of whatever the frak STD was.
Being a spaceship nerd, I like the designs shown here. While they seem to be *heavily* influenced by ship designs from the “Kelvin Timeline,” they are configurations that actually look like they’d fit into a pre-TOS timeline.
Additionally, there are these two one-hour animated Trek “episodes.” I have not yet watched them (hey, got stuff to do), but from quick glances they look promising. Apparently animated fan films skate right on by the fifteen-minute arbitrary limit the official Trek license holders have decreed. Something to tide Trekkies over until *real* Star Trek returns on December 30 with the Season 2 premiere of “The Orville.”
A couple of interesting and gory videos out of France showing the damage that “less than lethal” weapons can do when fired from the French police into the eyes of protestors. Another shows a protestor now short one right hand; some are saying he got shot in the hand with a “rubber bullet” that blew his hand off (seems unlikely to me), other are saying he picked up what he thought was a tear gas grenade and it turned out to be something sportier like a flash-bang.
I have no idea who’s the good guy/bad guy here. For all I know, it’s Macron and the bureaucrats vs. Antifa. In which case…shrug. But I suspect that even in France if you start blowing the protestors to pieces, there just might be some fallout.