You hate (?) to see it:
The Auckland, New Zealand, cell of “School Strike 4 Climate” disbanded itself because they decided that they were too white.
These are high schoolers, so they can be forgiven for being incredibly stupid. For now.
Seems like this should’ve been standard from the get-go:
Hate, Pain and Discontent!
VMM-268 Red Dragons conduct training on the DWS weapons system. A belly mounted, remote controlled, mini-gun that specializes in punishing the enemy. VMM-268 leads the fleet in DWS operations with multiple aircraft outfitted with the system. #marines pic.twitter.com/d9TKdy5en1
— 1st MAW Marines (@1stMAW_Marines) June 16, 2021
What happens when you:
A) Defund the police
B) Decriminalize “small” thefts?
Let’s find out:
The Walgreens here will likely either close down or institute new security procedures, such as locking up pretty much anything worth stealing. If it was up to me, I’d recommend the former. Close the doors, box everything up, move out of town and leave behind nothing but posters showing this incident and quotes from local politicians about Proposition 47, which effectively made it legal to steal anything under $950.
The season three finale of “Final Space” just aired. This show seems to be slipping under the radar, but I’ve become quite impressed with it. In short, it’s an animated sci-fi “comedy” show starring one “Gary Goodspeed,” a somewhat standard goofy loser type who gets into legal trouble while trying to impress a woman, takign control of a military spaceship and causing a great deal of damage to a spaceport because he has no idea what he’s doing. The first season started off pretty uneven; the attempts to be funny sometimes worked, sometimes seemed like they were trying too hard. But as the series has progressed, the humor, while still there, has settled down and the focus of the show has shifted to really quite effective Lovecraftian cosmic horror.
As the show proceeds, the “drama” transitions from a somewhat stock Space Opera bad guy in the form of the “Lord Commander,” to trans-dimensional demigods called Titans that can destroy worlds at a whim, and finally to an entity that terrifies the Titans. Characters grow and characters die, and it’s emotionally affecting when they do so. The good guys fail; whole worlds die; reality itself is warped and broken. Good characters turn villainous because they’re tragically flawed, traumatized and influenced by powers beyond their reckoning. There are some neat ideas; the sci-fi is good and the animation is at times spectacular. More than once my eyebrows popped up and I muttered “damn,” watching something vast that I kinda wish I’d thought of. The show does not try to be “Futurama,” fortunately, but is its own thing. Some people have a problem with the fact that this show tries to be funny and silly… but to me the dissonance of silliness mixed with some really horrific things *works.*
The first two seasons are on HBO max, DirecTV, Adukt swim and TBS; the third is on Hulu. The first two seasons are also on Blu-Ray.
Here’s the final scene from the season 3 finale. It is a bit spoilery, of course… but try to imagine *any* other western animated series ending a season with a scene like this:
The use of music, both the score written for the series and songs from elsewhere that they’ve used, is really very well done. It’s too spoilery to give the details but one scene is heartbreaking and powerful in no small part to the use of “Enter One:”
Today’s “Danger Seeker:
A windshield decides to crack rather badly. Unless it’s a trick of the light, it *looks* like there are nodes in the failure pathways that are so hot they glow. Seems to be window heating elements arcing.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CP9O42jh0rH/
Photo at the link:
You can tell without even touching the link that this is the BBc because they insist on spelling “NASA” as “Nasa,” event though everyone else on the planet uses “NASA.” I imagine that the BbC has rules in place that they are supposed to use the preferred personal pronouns of everyone they report on, but for some reason they insist upon insulting NASA.
Bah.
And, oh, yeah, giant obsolete rocket.
So there I was yesterday, working on the computer, Buttons on a pillow next to me. As he often does, he was just laying there purring up a storm, happy to be alive and part of the team. Then suddenly, with no visible or audible prompting, he began growling and howling, raising a stink like he was *pissed.* His tail fluffed out. His eyes were wide open and dilated. This went on for seemingly forever, but probably around 15-30 seconds. Then… it stopped. Within a few seconds he was purring again… and drooling. Drooling *a* *lot,* for another quarter hour or so. Then everything went back to utterly normal.
Given how he was purring loudly at the time, I’m pretty sure he was awake when he went nuts, though he has been known to sleep-purr. But whether awake or asleep, it was *weird* to hear him pissed off. This is the first time I can recall *ever* hearing him actually angry; it’s just not his way. He is by nature a happy cat. I first thought that maybe he was in pain, something that came onto him suddenly; but poking and prodding afterwards elicited no pain response, and he has eaten and used the litter box just fine since then.
Another thought occurred: he’s around 12 years old, which is getting up there in years for a cat. Perhaps he had a senior moment… some form of dementia. A daydream of a threat, perhaps.
In any event: AAAAAAAARGH.
If I had $28 million to spend on an 11 minute flight to space… I wouldn’t. I’d save that money to fly to *orbit.* Or buy myself a SPECTRE-class lair somewhere in the mountains with a CIWS and a nuclear powerplant. But it is an undeniable social good that there are people rich enough to splurge on frippery like this; by blowing *vast* sums on adventures that us po foke could never dream of, the price of such ventures will come down due to increased investment. Those jackholes who want to limit income to $500K a year, or tax wealth out of existence, are working to make sure that trips to space, whether short joy-hops like this or emigrant flights to Mars or Ceres, never happen.
The Short PD.16 was a circa 1957 design for a twin engined turboprop cargo/passenger plane. The configuration was similar to the Fairchild C-119, and would have been, by modern standards, an unusual passenger aircraft. Slow, voluminous, with (in one configuration) a cargo hold stuffed with cars and an upper deck filled with people in *luxurious* seating by modern standards, probably deafened and rattled. Half a dozen of one…
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