What kind of father wants his son to reject masculinity? A bad one. But at least in this case this weak man bends to his childs wishes and lets his son actually be a boy. This kid has an uphill battle to reach manhood with a father who is as strong as a damp Kleenex. The kid will very likely begin to assert his own power at some point, and if his parents aren’t able to impart the manly virtue of self control, we might wind up with yet another anti-social monster.
Ghostbusters 2016 is a terrible film. Part of that is of course the toxic nature of the people responsible for it, but the film itself is crap regardless of the culture-eroding behavior of those responsible. If the universe was a good and just place, GB16 would be utterly forgotten by now… but here we are, in a world filled with famine and disease and earthquakes and Bernie Bros, so GB16 remains a blight on the ass of society. Fortunately, when it is discussed these days, it is largely discussed in terms of just how awful it is and what makes it awful. The following two-part video does a good job of breaking down the terrible decisions that led to that cinematic trainwreck. It is vastly more entertaining than the movie itself.
An eight-year-old poured gasoline onto a tennis ball, lit it on fire and threw it at the face of a six-year-old. The story is of course lean on details, but if you listen to the report, the neighbors sound like real pieces of work. The bully had apparently previously put the victim in the hospital with a physical assault resulting in a concussion, and numbers of kids reported seen playing with gasoline and setting stuff on fire.
I don’t imagine this story will get a whole lot of press. The curious thing is that if instead of the victim being a 6-year-old kid, it was a *cat,* there’d likely be more outrage; I know I’d certain be more vociferous. And it’s not because cats are necessarily more valuable than kids (though I’d argue that the worst, angriest, feralest alleycat is worth any number of the bullies in this story), but we as a species and a culture have become rather numb to terrible things being done to children, even *by* other children. Coupled with the fact that cats, dogs, possums, raccoons, whatever, are pretty much by definition “innocent” and incapable of evil… while this story demonstrates that children are perfectly capable of evil and demonstrating the validity, nay, the necessity of some sort of eugenics program.
I don’t know why YouTube decided I needed to see this, but I both rue and lament it. It is a debate (???) amongst a group of shrieking harpies young women about… well, I don’t really know. Something about how men are terrible, or something. One thing I caught was the claim that men are more emotional than women… which if that’s true for the men in *these* women’s lives… wow. Wow.
These are people who seem to get along and presumably have similar outlooks/beliefs. The way they seem wholly incapable of having a thought and not expressing it immediately at high volume would seem to explain why so many college-age people these days cannot witness someone speak political heresy without losing their minds and screaming like dollar store banshees on meth.
I can only imagine what would have happened if some guy had been invited into the room, calmly sat down and, when asked, told them “you’re wrong.”
Here’s a heck of a thing to have just lying about, a late-WWII era M1 carbine fitted with an infra-red lamp and scope. Not a “sniper” scope, but an early night vision system. Cumbersome as all get-out, but apparently it worked, much to the brief surprise of a number of Japanese soldiers who tried to infiltrate Army and Marine positions under the cover of darkness.
The third of three pieces of vintage aerospace concept art – the actual paintings, not reproductions – that I recently procured from ebay has arrived. This is a 1960’s Hughes concept for a “Hot Cycle” Rotor Wing VTOL aircraft. The prior two – a 1970’s Bell AMST concept for a four-turbojet C-130 test aircraft and a 1980 Bell concept for a hovercraft to allow fighters to launch from bombed-out runways – were just able to be scanned on my flatbed scanner. But the Hughes painting was much larger, so I digitized it via photography, resulting in a 10,878X7500 pixel (about 36X25 at 300 dpi) image. Several iterations of the image – the stitched-together final image, and a version that was fade-corrected to make it look more like the actual painting – have been uploaded to a Dropbox folder with the Bell art.
These paintings are currently framed and will be hung on my wall… for a time. At some point my plan is to donate them to a good museum. The Smithsonian NASM is the obvious default, but I’m interested in alternatives. A museum that would *want* these and would protect yet display them would be ideal.
If you happen to see other aerospace concept art on ebay that’s not going for *insane* amounts and you’d like to see it preserved… let me know. I now have four pieces (not counting things like blueprints); not a great collection by any measure, but it’s something.
I am going to continue to work on digitizing this painting. I’ve been trying to find a local flatbed scanner big enough to scan the whole thing all at once; if I can get that done, the results will also be uploaded to the Dropbox folder.
If you’d like access to the folder – and thus the high-rez images, as well as some PDF documentation I’ll be adding – here’s an opportunity to do so. These paintings were not cheap to secure, so there’s a bit of a charge ($25):
Procuring these was not cheap, but now they are saved for posterity.
If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program. Back issues are available for purchase by patrons and subscribers.
I have hopes that at least some of these – Star Wars and Star Trek – can be returned from the dead. But to do so would require both a virtually complete change in “leadership” (i.e. those who are currently in charge of the IP’s) and an adequate passage of time. They should be left to sit quietly for a few years, in which time the hatred that recent misadventures have engendered in the fandom could cool off, and better ideas could be gathered.
I remain of the opinion that what the owners of Star Trek need to do are two main things:
1) Gather all the rights back into one place, allowing *real,* and not “25% different,” Star Trek to be made.
2) Create an anthology series. But *not* one helmed by a bunch of suits. Instead, open it to the fandom. Have anything from lone writers to whole amateur production teams (“Axanar,” “Continues,” etc) give them pitches. Those that seem pretty good get funded to make a small number of episodes… one to four, say. Something that could be a series. Then make a season with up to perhaps ten wildly different stories. One set on a ship at the same time as TOS, using actual TOS designs. One set in the movie era. A Klingon or Vulcan-specific yarn. A post-Voyager show. What-the-frell-ever. If, out of those ten shows, one is a smash hit? It gets turned into a full series. If three or four of the stories are wildly popular? Then great, now you can have four series that are popular right out of the gate.
Sure, there are counter-arguments. One big one is that ten wildly different stories would require ten wildly different sets of costumes and props and actors and starship bridge sets. Granted. But: do them sequentially and repurpose as much as possible. Do as much as you reasonably can with virtual sets. Don’t go nuts with the budget; let it be known right up front that the budget for these sort of things is limited. The fandom will accept that, and perhaps embrace it: I will die on the hill that TOS 1701 is the best starship design to date, and that both DS9 and Enterprise showed that the old-school bridge – which can be rented in New York State, IIRC – still looks awesome. You don’t need STD-level production standards for these little mini-shows. Because what you’re selling isn’t the effects; nobody complains that STD or STP have crappy effects and production standards – you’re selling the concept, the characters, the plots. If just one of these lower-budget short subjects knocks the viewers socks off with characters on par with Kirk and Spock and McCoy, *then* you can lavish an effects budget on it reasonably secure in the knowledge that things should go well.
Hell, I even wrote a short story a year or so ago set on a Klingon tugboat. Is it good? Dunno. Probably not. But if those in charge of Star trek seemed like they actually cared about Star Trek again… hell yeah I’d turn it in. There’s even my odd little “Artifact L-374-Alpha” thing from… holy crap, exactly one year ago today. Weird. OK… Anyway, that would likely make a poor basis for an ongoing series, but a season-long miniseries? Maybe.
Is such a thing likely? Sadly, no. So we’ll have to live with murdered franchises for a while, being dangled before us on strings like marionette zombies.
