Hope for the big-ass Enterprise

 art, awesomeness, Hmm..., models, news, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Jul 052022
 

Tomy has announced two new things about their 1/350 scale die cast Enterprise:

1) The 5,000 backers needed has been reduced to 2,500 (they currently have 1061)

2) The deadline has been pushed back to July 24.

These should make it more likely that the effort will succeed, and for a few reasons. Chopping the number of needed backers in half not only makes it easier to achieve, it also makes the thing more desirable to collectors: instead of there being 5,000 of them in the world, now there will be 2,500. The secondary market in years to come will probably make the price balloon substantially. Additionally, Comic Con International in San Diego is July 22-24, and I imagine Tomy will be there. I suspect that if they have their prototype on display for the thousands of nerds with fat stacks of disposable income, they should rack up a good number of new backers. I can’t immediately dream up another reason to end the campaign on the 24th.

I still remain a little annoyed that Haslabs $300 “Hiss tank” has nearly 13,500 backers with more than a month to go. Hmmmph. At least the Haslab “Reva” (the disliked character from the Obi Wan Kennobi series) light saber looks likely to fall far short of funding. It’s $500 with 1300 of 5000 backers with six days to go. I don’t *know* why that one is failing; maybe there’s a cutoff just north of $300 that people are willing to spend these days. Or perhaps Reva is just not intriguing of a character. Or perhaps the Star Wars fans with cash are no longer in the mood to keep funding a franchise that keeps insulting them.

 Posted by at 12:34 pm

Weirdo

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., news, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 052022
 

So July 4 gave the media a new obsession… a mass shooting in Highland Park Illinois, just north of Chicago. Somewhat unusually, the shooter has been caught alive and uninjured, so this time they’ll at least be able to ask him why he did it. But I get the feeling that the answer will be something along the lines of God told him to do it by speaking through the neighbors dog. He’s got “crazy” written all over his face.

Inside the Sick Posts of July 4 Massacre ‘Person of Interest’

As yet there doesn’t seem to be a lot political there, just a bunch of random gibberish. He photographed himself wearing a Trump flag as a cape; he liked Biden posts. But the random gibberish comes off as someone whom the FBI and/or local cops should have been aware of. I suspect we’ll soon hear – quietly – that he was on the police radar, and that he was on psychiatric meds of some kind.

Interesting that just when the hoplophobes need to drum up fear of guns, the whackjobs come out of the woodwork to oblige.

 Posted by at 12:02 am

Repeat after me: “I don’t care.”

 blather, Crazy, Forward!, Meh., politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 042022
 

I have no idea who this weirdo is. There are far, FAR too many of them in the world, with their rampaging narcissism and LookitMeAintISpecial makeup, to even begin to catalog them. That said, what she says in the first few seconds of this clip is *fascinating:*

the most hurtful response I get when I speak about my sexuality is “I don’t care”.’

Get used to it. Because most people *don’t* care. Not just about your sexuality, but about your religion, your politics, your mental diseases, your tragic backstory… about YOU. And you trying to make every damn thing about you makes people care all the less.

I’ve said it before: there is a flaw in the human operating system that makes seeing oneself as a victim, as the oppressed, as the loser in the great game of life as a *desirable* thing. These are the people who get outraged at, say, British people proudly hang up the Union Jack and want to maintain Britishness in Britain; Americans who do not feel automatic and utter shame about America because our history was not ethical purity from the get-go; any man who is not ashamed to be a man, any woman who wants to be a feminine woman. These people *live* on feeling hated, whether they actually are or not. And a few decades ago… sure, they would have been. But when I was a kid in the 80’s that time was largely already past (with, of course, loudmouthed exceptions). My generation was raised on “everybody is ok, don’t be a dick about it.” You could not turn on an “after school special” or a “very special episode” without getting hammered with The Message.

So… they look out into the world and *don’t* see the hate surrounding them that it seems they feel the need for. So they do one or both of two things:

1) They just dream up that hate anyway, and attribute it to anything that isn’t 100% affirming and validating

2) They ramp up their own weirdness until they start pushing buttons, get pushback, and then bask in the warm glow of their oppression. See: Antifa, BLM, Drag Queen Story Time, “Pride” parades featuring things that would get an NC-17 rating, celebrating grooming.

To this kind of person, the worst thing they can hear is “I don’t hate you. I just don’t care about you. You don’t factor into my thoughts at all.”

 

 

 Posted by at 6:35 pm

Shameful!

 cats, photography  No Responses »
Jul 042022
 

As it turns out, Speedbump will willingly live down to the basest of cat cliches… he’ll sit in even a two-dimensional box.

 Posted by at 12:41 am

Variable geometry SST

 aircraft, art, history, Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon, projects  No Responses »
Jul 032022
 

A 1970’s Boeing concept for a variable geometry supersonic transport. Once the Boeing 2707 was cancelled in the wake of the oil crisis, any further work on supersonic transports focused heavily on “how do we make this more fuel efficient.” One approach was to go back to variable geometry, which had been dropped from the SST program when the 2707-200 was replaced with the 2707-300. The swing-wing of the -200 worked wonders for the low speed performance of the aircraft, but played hell with cost and weight, enough so that the -300 had a fixed modified delta wing.

The solution shown below linked a few technologies. One concept that showed promise was the “oblique wing,” as tested on the AD-1. A single-piece stricture connected to the fuselage at a single pivot point; much lighter and simpler than a traditional two-pivot swing-wing. With sufficiently rigid structures – think “carbon fiber” – the forward-swept portion could remain reasonably flat even at high speed. But this concept went one step further and linked *two* fuselages to not only a single oblique wing, but also an oblique tail. This would put the “aft” fuselage behind the shock wave shed off the nose of the “forward” fuselage, greatly reducing drag. You’d have the capacity of two SSTs for the operating cost of little more than one. Neat idea… very complex. I’m not sure if it made it much further than preliminary wind tunnel testing.

Full-rez scan uploaded to the 2022-07 APR Extras folder.

 Posted by at 4:37 pm

“Urgency is…”

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., news, politics, Worldwreckers, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 032022
 

Oregon Health Officials Delayed a Meeting Because ‘Urgency Is a White Supremacy Value’

Insert half-a-joke here about hoping that these people need an ambulance someday and find that the dispatchers and drivers share their views about the importance of “urgency.”

Less jokey: they are involved in healthcare, and they don’t think that getting things done in a timely manner is a good thing.

 Posted by at 4:03 pm

This didn’t happen on the cruise I took

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., news, ships, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 022022
 

Long ago I took a cruise to Alaska. it was a reasonably classy affair; at the very least, no drunken brawls at 5AM that required the Coast Guard to show up and escort the ship. I guess that trip just wasn’t as culturally enriched as it could have been.

 

Seems to me incidents like could actually be useful: if you’re in international waters and people start acting like uncivilized savages… the Coast Guard shows up, takes said passengers, and promptly deports them to Liberia or London or some such third world hellhole. They’ll doubtless be happier there, and we’ll doubtless be happier here.

 Posted by at 10:12 pm
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