A commercial from two years ago.
Aug 242020
Aug 242020
As some may recall, a few years ago I wrote a lot of Lovecraftian short stories in a relatively short period, all in the “War With The Deep Ones” series. For those who don’t remember, I had an idea for a book – actually a series of books – that deal with the rise of eldritch horrors from the “Cthulhu Mythos,” their efforts to wipe humanity off the Earth, and mankinds attempts to fight back. As most of my projects go, this one sputtered out due to an inability to find much interest among publishers and life introducing other challenges such as a need to make money, health concerns, a major move, a need to make money, the sudden appearance of not one but two aerospace history book contracts and a need to make money.
But the events of 2020 make it clear that we really are living in a world of Lovecraftian madness. I’ve an idea for another piece to be set in the WWTDO plotline; rather than a story per se, it would be an inter-office memo attempting to explain the 20th and early 21st centuries by way of the influence of Cthulhu’s influence driving people mad. Because BEHOLD:
KENOSHA MAYHEM RAW — Marxists with assault weapons stop armored sheriff’s vehicle…
This is Lovecraft’s world; we’re just living in it.
“The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.”
Aug 242020
Now here’s an odd thing…
Part of the collection of images from the Cradle of Aviation Museum, Garden City, NY, this depicts a Republic Aviation concept circa early 1960’s for putting a scramjet vehicle atop a Titan II first stage. Presumably this is meant to be… I dunno, a space launcher? No wings are in evidence, so cruise flight and a landing seem unlikely. But it would seem a hell of a thing to throw away, so *presumably* it was meant to be recovered somehow. Perhaps it shed the entire payload-containing nosecone and came back using the blunt forward dome of the propellant tank as a heat shield, followed by a splashdown. Dunno.
Also in the collection is the “AX-92 detailed drawing.” Clearly this is an entirely serious proposal, and not at all an example of an artist screwing around for giggles.
Aug 232020
When this popped up in my YouTube recommendations, I had a brief moment of joy thinking that Professor Tosspot was back. But instead it’s another cranky old codger in the same puppet. This one, though, takes on the Current Major Issue Of The Day by way of re-editing a sickening Sesame Street video that claims to take on racism. It’s freakin’ hilarious.
FYI: The Codger met Professor Tosspot HERE.
Aug 232020
I can’t *wait* to see this animation finished:
Aug 232020
Coming to Disney+ in October, so I won’t be seeing it anytime soon. On the whole I guess it looks ok, but there is one thing that kinda jumped right out at me.
Here’s the thing. At about the 0:47 mark…
Was a Mercury-Atlas ever launched without an escape tower? Later in the trailer there are scenes of a booster exploding into a fireball in flight, and civilian observers on the ground freaking out. Being a trailer, there’s no good reason to conclude that these three shots belong together, but they kinda look like they do. And since no manned Atlas ever failed, this would seem to indicate a test launch. So maybe this depicts an unmanned test Atlas launching and then failing, with witnesses aghast? But even then, I don’t immediately recall towerless Mercuries launched by Atlases. But I’m not an expert on the Mercury program. Perhaps a dream/nightmare sequence of one of the wives? Dunno.
Other thoughts: the casting looked shockingly non-diverse. Will Disney catch hell for this? Or is the show jam-packed full of stunt casting that doesn’t appear in the trailer? Will the Mercury 7 turn out to be surprisingly populated with alphabet people (this is Disney, after all…)? Will the head of NASA be portrayed by a black woman (but then, this *isn’t* the BBC)?
Aug 222020
A Convair illustration from a magazine article in 1959 depicting a solar powered spaceship. In this case, a spherical mylar “balloon” is used as a reflector. This would be light weight, but since it would need to maintain some level of internal pressurization to continue to hold its shape, it’s unclear just how long it would work before micrometeoroids turn it into leaky Swiss cheese. Additionally, a reflective hemisphere does not have a true optical focal point, rather a focal “line,” so a lot of the sunlight this thing would capture would be lost of inefficiently used. Presumably this design uses the sunlight to boil a working fluid such as mercury; the superheated pressurized gas blows past a turbine to generate electrical power. The gas then flows through a radiator to cool off and recondense back to a fluid. But given that there are no visible radiators, perhaps the idea was to use the sunlight to directly heat a fluid such as hydrogen to an extreme temperature to be used as a propellant. If your materials are up to it and your reflector is good enough, specific impulses in the area of 800 to 1200 seconds should not be unreasonable. But even here the illustration seems lacking… if hydrogen if the fuel, where are the huge tanks? In all likelihood, this illustration was never meant to depict a solid engineering study, but was merely propaganda art.
Aug 222020
Kamala Harris is PRANKED by Russian hoaxers who pose as climate activist Greta Thunberg and her father and offer Biden’s VP pick ‘dirt’ on Trump
It’s not much as such things go, but in the transcript Harris is offered a secret recording of Trump telling climate puppet Greta Thunberg that she will never achieve her goals. Meh. Harris accepts the offer and says that her people will “work” with what she believes to be climate activists.
Ummm… didn’t we spend several *years* being informed that accepting dirt on the opposition candidate from foreign sources was terribly Naughty And Not To Be Countenanced?
Aug 212020
Deep Fake technology used to put Tom Selleck into the role of Indiana Jones. For the most part, these are nearly seamless… except for the Fordesque voice. It will soon be possible to swap out Indies in entire movies. Differences in height and physique will probably take longer to work out.
Is it a good idea? Dunno. Does it fit with the original artistic vision? Probably not. But in a world where the IP holders have turned Star Trek into STD and Star Wars into Last Jedi, such things as “artistic vision” no longer seem of relevance.
Bring on “Casablanca” starry Ron Reagan!
Aug 212020
Well, *this* is interesting. I’m not seeing the immediate practical value of the thing, other than “hey, it’s cool,” but the engineering behind it is impressive. A couple generations of further development and maybe it’ll be something useful for exploring Mars, roaming battlefields, wading through “mostly peaceful protests.”
Something it shows – that sci-fi movie mechs almost never do – is that with even a modest scaleup from human-size, the human pilot in the middle gets tossed pretty badly. The humans in “Pacific Rim” size mechs would get splattered into paste by the movement of their machines.