Flying Yacht

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 282022
 

A few weeks ago I posted a link to a video about a “flying Winnebago,” helicopters converted into recreational vehicles. Those were cool. But what I’d *really* want: a PBY Catalina converted into a flying yacht, such as the “Landseaire.” These were glamorous examples of a sadly now bygone era.

The video points out that just because you’ve got buckets of money and a really cool flying yacht, there are some places you just shouldn’t go. There are places on this Earth – Arabia, Detroit, Central America, New York City – where your chances of encountering violent uncivilized barbarians is just too high to risk, and your flying yacht will end up a bullet-riddled wreck slowly corroding away over a span of decades.

It is of course far to much to hope for that production on an aircraft much like the PBY could begin again (as I asked for a short while ago). With modern design and materials, a modern PBY would be lighter and stronger, cheaper to maintain with far better fuel economy and range. But it’s about as likely as restarting the B-17 production line. Eventually 3D metal printing will advance to the point that you can print yourself a PBY kit for little more than the cost of the raw material and the energy needed to melt it all, but even then you’ll still need to assemble it. It’ll be a *long* time before industrial replicators can fab you a complete aircraft in one go.

 Posted by at 3:43 pm

The “Shinzo Heater”

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., weapons, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 272022
 

The one where Brandon Herrera tries to replicate the home-made piece of junk firearm that was used to assassinate Shinzo Abe. The result works, but would likely be fatal to the shooter. This indicates that the assassin either somehow found a way to test and perfect his design (which seems unlikely in Japan), or he thought it through better than Herrera from the get-go.

I bet this one ends up getting yeeted by YouTube, since it shows how a disarmed populace can arm itself.

UPDATE: Yeeted. One might consider it odd that an American company would ban videos that kinda-sorta a little bit show how to make things that are legal for Americans to make. Odd, that.

 Posted by at 12:24 pm

Well, that took long enough…

 art, blather, Hmm..., science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 272022
 

Looks like Sylvester Stallone finally has himself a superhero movie:

Sure, he was in “Judge Dredd” and “GotG2,” but he wasn’t superpowered in either of those. I don’t recall him having been a superhero before, though I could be wrong.

I suspect the superhero genre is going to run out of steam soon enough…it’s been done to death. Marvel has recent;y announced their spate of new TV/Movie projects, and they are a whole lot of “who the hell is that, and why should I care” characters.

Marvel also recently released the trailer for “Black Panther 2.” I was unimpressed with the first one… the effects were dodgy, the story meh, the worldbuilding bizarre. We were supposed to root for a fascistic ethnostate that was essentially a high-lech primitive civilization… they select their rulers *only* from a single family, and then using trial by combat. They have antigravity and practical energy weapons… and they charge into combat atop rhinos bearing swords and spears. One thing I would like to see from the sequel – and suspect I won’t – is the actual geopolitical fallout from the effects of the first: at the end of the movie, a sci-fi-advanced hidden civilization in central Africa is revealed to the world. They’ve been hidden for centuries behind a cloaking device and holographic projectors; now that’s over. Great, fine, wonderful. But, ummm… right now, hundreds of thousands of sub-Saharan Africans are flooding into Europe annually in the hopes of grabbing themselves a better life. What do the borders of Wakanda look like? Now, a few hundred million poverty-stricken Africans can simply *walk* to a higher-tech better life. Did Wakanda open the doors, and now their original population is a distinct minority in their own land, buried under a crush of migrants? Or did they erect walls? Did the walls/deflector shields/whatever effectively prevent invasion, or are there long rows of corpses along the border, shot down as they tried to climb in?

 

 Posted by at 12:05 pm

The only Twitter account worth keeping

 art, awesomeness, humor, paleo  No Responses »
Jul 262022
 

When the hammer falls and Twitter is finally swept from the public consciousness… one account shall remain:

 

But With Raptors. heh.

 Posted by at 10:56 am

Not the clearest description

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jul 252022
 

Chicago police: Boy, 15, fatally stabbed on CTA Red Line train part of group trying to rob rider

This part, quoting Chicago Police Chief of Detectives Brendan Deenihan:

“At that point, the person who appears to be being robbed takes out a knife, stabs that person with the gun. When that person is leaving, they placed the gun somewhere and one of the other individuals in the group that was with that individual picks up that apparent weapon.”

English teachers across the land slap their foreheads. Darwin, on the other hand, nods in satisfaction, being *reasonably* sure that the 15-year-old future murderer probably has not yet reproduced.

The rest of the article goes on to describe what a dystopian nightmare public transit is. No thank you.

 Posted by at 6:06 pm

I’m all broken up over this armed robbery

 Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, humor, news, politics, religion, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 252022
 

Honestly, there could be tears.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars of jewelry, expensive cars, gold, diamonds… and no security? Yeah, that’s thinkin’. I have to wonder if “insurance fraud” might be involved.

Not my religion, but I vaguely recall something about this “God” feller not being all that into bling. Of course, Jesus counseled against making a show out of prayer, so…

This was hardly a unique occurrence, though. Robbing preachers mid-preach seems a popular enough hobby for some.

 

 Posted by at 3:06 am

So much for human artists

 AARRRGH, art, Hmm..., science, science fiction, youtube  No Responses »
Jul 252022
 

Anyone who thinks that their job is safe from robots or AI is deluding themselves. A lot of people used to claim that the creative classes were safe from automation, but these “text to image” AI’s put that to the test. Is the art “good?” I dunno. But I do know that the vast bulk of commercial artwork, stuff used to advertise books or cars or beer or vacations or sammich shops, while adequate to get the job done, is hardly high art. I expect that soon the majority of this sort of art will be done by this sort of AI.This will be bad news for humans of all kinds even if the AI art is “meh.” Why? because artists gotta get paid, and churning out commercial art can do that… and now that entire cash stream may be gone. How do you go from an unknown artist to someone making bank with their paintings if there is no intervening step from “amateur” to “professional”?

My own science fiction stories? One thing that has held me back from trying to self publish is the lack of cover art. It may be that very soon I’ll simply be able to describe what I want and Google will spit out art that gets the job done. And of course, around about that time I’ll be able to feed my related stories into Google and tell it to crank out more, and suddenly I’ll go from a few thousand pages of stories about Zane and Sarah to a few billion. Hell, feed it all three seasons of “Star Trek,” and soon enough I’ll have a thousand seasons of the adventures of Kirk and Spock to pore through. Even if only one percent of one percent of that stuff is “good,” the sheer volume of the “good” AI-art will overwhelm the total productive output of mankind. The AI art will only get better, whereas humans have plateaued.

Imagen

 

 

 Posted by at 12:50 am
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