… but just wait until these damned things get a little smarter, wake up and become self aware. Them and those friggen’ Furbies will be the death of us all.
Jul 232023
Jul 222023
As a followup to THIS POST, I had a half-formed idea that I posted in comments OVER HERE. I’ve decided to expand upon my idea a bit.
In short, people have recognized that in Star Trek, the federation – and in particular the Humans – are essentially mad scientists. Everybody else out there got from early industrialization to spaceflight over a span of millenia, carefully and painstakingly working their way up one reasonable rational step at a time. Humans, on the other hand, said “hold my beer” and charged from “I wonder if I can use steam to do work” to “maybe if I invent a faster than light drive I’ll get to bang a lot of hot chicks” in record time. This feature of humanity has been repeatedly shown in Trek, but I don’t believe it has been really called out as such, except for the occasional throwaway line. Well… what if, instead, a series leaned into the idea? A combination not just of Star Trek, but “Eureka” and “Warehouse 13” with a huge helping of “Stargate: SG1.”
“Star Trek: Bonkers” features Captain Liam Shaw, the best new character in Trek since The Doctor and Seven of Nine, unwisely killed off (apparently) in season three of “Picard.” Here, he has been resurrected by Federation mad science, put in command of the USS Rotwang (an Emmett Brown-class “science” vessel) tasked with researching rumors of super-science and advanced weapons that can be used to defend against existential god-level threats such as V-Ger, Organians, Q-Continuum. Episodes include:
* The one where the crew capture a rogue Q and break his mind by exposing him to the most diabolical psychological weapon yet devised: “Star Trek: Discovery.”
* The one where they accidentally shut down all fusion reactions in the Large Magellanic Cloud. That means stars, too. Whoopsie.
* The one where Emperor Kahless attempts to capture the vessel for the greater glory of the Klingon Empire. Captain Shaw zaps him with the new Trans Ray; whereupon the other Klingons tear Kahless into bits and back off from Shaw and the Rotwang, not willing to risk getting struck themselves. There are, after all, fates worse than the dishonor of retreat.
* The one where an invasion fleet of Kelvans from the Andromeda galaxy is intercepted while still 100,000 light years from Federation space… and the cubic lightyear of volume enclosing the fleet is converted from a 3-dimensional space to a natural log of 9-dimensional space.
* Based upon fragmentary documentation that survived without adequate historical context from before the Third World War, the engineers on board the Rotwang create a device that rips a hole in space which leads to a warped realm of chaos and demonic entities. A few probes are sent in, they realize the place really kinda sucks, and they close it up again. “Nope,” says the lead engineer on the project, Engineering Commodore Montgomery Scott.
*Following those events, Scotty goes on a bender. While blind drunk he creates four dimensional whisky. His first thought is “It’s green,” but in actual fact it’s an indescribable color that Man has never before encountered. As an experiment, the Rotwang taunts the Q loudly over subspace radio; one shows up and threatens to snap them out of existence. they offer him a drink first… and get him blind, stinking drunk. Then they interview him, receiving billions of teraquads of new information about reality-bending, and leave him passed out at the side of a nearby neutron star. When he wakes up he doesn’t remember what happened.
* Another Planet Killer/Doomsday Machine is discovered. It’s asleep, but seems to be waking up… and unlike the one Kirk encountered, this one is virtually pristine. There’ll be no stopping it. And since it’s neutronium, there’s no landing on it or beaming into it. So what to do? The recorded memory/personality engrams of Admiral Archers pet beagle are downloaded into it. It now wants to follow the Rotwang around like a happy puppy. This is of course a problem. Until a warp drive and massive impulse engine are bolted to a sizable moon; the warp drive knocks the effective mass of the moon down almost to zilch, which the impulse engine accelerates it at tens of G’s. Enough fuel on board to last for centuries. The Planet Killer Puppy is then told “fetch!” Asteroids control systems keep track of the PKP and maintain a constant distance, and lead the PKP on a path slowly out of the galaxy. PROBLEM SOLVED FOREVER.
* The Captain holds a contest to design, build and fly a one-man craft. It’s a race: not just to build it within a short time, but to fly ten light years out and back again. Teams from as few as three to as many as a dozen work feverishly for two weeks on their craft. But the night before the scheduled launch of the five craft that are finished, Ensign Skippy, who has not been involved, sneaks a drink of Scotty’s 4D whisky. He staggers down to the torpedo bunker and modifies a Class 8 probe and, five minutes before the race time, enters it. Everyone chuckles as he drunkenly gets in and is launched… and then promptly vanishes. The other craft go out and come back in various impressively short times, but Ensign Skippy does not return. Until he shows up for duty the next day with a pounding hangover and no recollection of the day before. A search shows that the probe is back in the torpedo magazine, the modifications burned out; sensor records show that it quietly reappeared in its rack, followed by Ensign Skippy staggering away from it and back to his quarters, two minutes before it launched.
* A new threat emerges in the Gamma Quadrant. A previously unexplored dust cloud turns out to have a single star and Earth-like planet within; the culture that evolved there has never seen another star, so they were unaware of the outside universe. Upon accidental first contact with the Rotwang due to a navigational error, the locals realize that they aren’t alone and decide that all life in the universe would have to go. Their technology, based on white servant-robots, is not particularly advanced; but evidence shows that they will very quickly become a galaxy-wide threat exceeding that of the Borg. So Captain Shaw has Scotty re-open the warp gate on the planet, spilling hellish chaos onto the place. “Let’s keep this to ourselves,” Shaw says to the senior staff as they watch from a safe distance as the entire nebula folds in upon itself, sucked into an another dimension. No report is made to Starfleet.
* Years earlier, a miniature “proto-universe” was discovered at Deep Space Nine after a ship passed through the wormhole. Given that the expansion of that universe would destroy *this* universe, such things are obviously to be avoided. So the Rotwang crew decide to see what it would take to *create* a proto-universe. Purely hypothetically. Simulated only. Not at all real. Nope. Until… “Hey, hold my beer.”
Any other ideas?
Jul 222023
Researchers horrified, decry rise of ‘fascism’ as students send mocking responses to woke survey
Academic researchers condemned students’ irreverent and offensive responses to an LGBTQ survey, claiming the pushback indicates “fascist ideologues” are “living ‘inside the house’ of engineering and computer science.”
In an article for the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies, academics from Oregon State University wrote about their shock at receiving sarcasm and mockery in response to their research into undergraduate LGBTQ students studying in STEM fields. …
According to the article, when the “malicious” subjects were asked to fill out demographic data, “12 respondents (24%) indicated their gender as being related to a helicopter or aircraft” ranging from an “Apache Attack Helicopter” to a “V22 osprey.” In the section declaring one’s disabilities, responses ranged from claiming to be “illiterate” to lamenting “My country is run by communists,” or even declaring that identifying as transgender is a disability in itself due to “the inability to come to terms with biological reality.”
One respondent claimed to identify as a gift card as their gender. Under racial and ethnic identities they said, “I’m an ethnic gift card,” and for disability the answer was “I don’t have enough gift cards.”
There is hope for the future; these kids have their heads on right.
Are you questioning whether there is increased mental illness in Certain Special Groups? Maybe this bit will help you make up your mind on the subject:
The research team declared that the mockery they received “had a profound impact on morale and mental health,” particularly for one transgender researcher who was “already in therapy for anxiety and depression regarding online anti-trans rhetoric.” The paper claimed that “managing the study’s data collection caused significant personal distress, and time had to be taken off the project to heal from traumatic harm” of having to read students’ responses in the survey.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
The whole article is entertaining as hell; the “researchers” are so screwed up that they think any mockery of their views is down to “fascism.”
Jul 202023
To be released on December 5, the full series (21 disks, nearly 79 hours) will cost about $100 to $135. The filmed scenes were scanned at 4K and color corrected and such, then brought down to Blu Ray rez; the CGI scenes were upscaled with AI. I do wonder if there might be thinking that in the future there’ll be a 4K release, but that would pretty much require the CGI scenes to be completely remastered. I’d support that, but I honestly doubt there’d be a financial case to be made for it. This release doesn’t seem to include the movies beyond the pilot.
Jul 202023
A cutaway illustration of the Bell D188A VTOL strike-fighter from the late 50’s/early 60’s. This Mach 2 aircraft would have used 8 small turbojets… two lift/cruise in the tail, two vertically mounted in the forward fuselage for lift and two each in wingtip nacelles that could tilt for VTOL or horizontal thrust. Often referred to as the XF-109, it was only called that in Bell PR material.. it never officially received that designation. The artwork below was scanned years ago at the Jay Miller archives.
There is more available on the D188A in two sources I highly recommend (because I wrote them):
1: Aerospace Projects Review issue V2N4. Jam-packed with info, diagrams, artwork of this and several variants.
2: US Supersonic Bomber Projects Vol. 2, which uses the D188A as the cover image.
If you’d like the full resolution version of the cutaway artwork, it has been uploaded to the 2023-07 APR Extras Dropbox folder, available to all $4 and up Patrons/Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Jul 202023
I’ve probably mentioned bits of this before. But regardless, here is one of the few good things on Tumblr… and one of the truly great series of comments about Star Trek and humanity
Jul 182023
This article from a few years ago popped up on Twitter today:
White people’s bland food isn’t just an internet meme. It’s a centuries-long obsession
The article is pretty much what you’ll think it’s going to be. A lot of yammering about religion, history, privilege, blah, blah, blah. The usual buzz-word salad that’s all too common in any piece that can be used to denigrate white people, white culture, white anything.
But throughout all of it, an obvious point was left unmentioned. Why do a lot of people like “bland” food? Maybe… because they *like* “bland” food. I am one such. I am perfectly capable of making a satisfying meal out of little more than noodles. *Just* noodles. Or plain rice, a mashed potato, an unadorned chunk of chicken. A fine meal can be made from mixing peanut butter with oatmeal. Is it because I like “bland?” No. It’s because the flavor is perfectly satisfying. What people like the author of the linked article don’t seem to grasp is that people’s senses are on a spectrum. Women, for example, apparently see colors far more clearly than men do. Some people can hear a pin drop, and would be in physical agony to be subjected to the conversational level of the average Friday night at the local bar. Some people can’t smell much of anything and thus drown themselves in perfume; others can pick up the slightest hints of odor from across the room.
Foods that this author, and apparently many others, would find completely lacking in flavor would be a riot of taste sensation to someone else. Subjecting that person to a pile of seasoning would be to simply overload their senses for no good reason.
I am comfortable in temperatures others might find frigidly cold. I like the lights turned a little dimmer than standard; a nice sunny day is blinding. Some of this is doubtless due to random chance; some of it doubtless due to the northern European portions of my muttly breeding. And perhaps that plays into food: while spices have been present in northern Europe since forever, they were not as plentiful as elsewhere. Many of my ancestors were probably lucky to survive on simple grain, mutton, chicken, that sort of thing. Their foods were likely less “foody” than people from the Mediterranean, the Middle East, India, Africa, etc. Thus they evolved to deal with that. That was normal for them. One might wonder if that made their sense of taste sharper, more keen compared to some others.
So if you’re like me and a bowl of mac and cheese actually sounds pretty good, don’t let goons like the author of the piece shame you. Take pride in the fact that you don’t *need* to shower your food with extravagances in order to be happy and satisfied.
Jul 152023
A General Dynamics illustration showing the internal structure of the F-111 fighter-bomber. Originally scanned at the Jay Miller archive; shown here is a much-reduced-rez version.
The full-rez scan has been uploaded to the 2023-07 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for $4 and up Patreons/Subscribers.If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Disney must hate money
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Jul 152023
Photos have emerged from the next Disney live action remake of one of their classic animated films, “Snow White.” You know, the one about the Germanic princess with skin so white it looked like snow, who ended up running around with seven dwarves? Well… about all that, Disney has decided to continue the unprofitable trend of de-whitening European folk tales.
There are claims that these *aren’t* the actual “dwarves.” But given that “Snow White” is to be played by a Hispanic woman… why assume that these *aren’t* an accurate depiction? And remember, Hollywood is hardly above lying to the public’s face. Remember when Benedict Cumberbatch *wasn’t* playing Khan? Or when all the remakes and reboots of classic animated series were supposed to be faithful continuations that the existing fans would recognize, love and appreciate? Yeah… lying liars who lie have a tendency to lie.
And… it turns out that those claims of “fake” are probably themselves fake:
‘Snow White’ Set Pics Stir Anti-Woke Criticism
Asked for comment on the brouhaha, a Disney spokesperson initially told The Daily Beast “the photos are fake and not from our production” and added that the Mouse House wanted a correction from the Mail.
Hours later, however, Disney’s PR shop completely backtracked and said the photos were from the production but were not official “photos”—chalking up the earlier statement to a misunderstanding.
Dear readers, consider this: somewhere out in the multiverse there’s a version of the Disney corporation that decided to do a live action remake of “Snow White,” and decided to try their hardest to make it look like the original animated classic. And somewhere else out there is another Disney that decided to do a “Snow White” remake that was faithful to the Grimm tale as written. And somewhere further down the multiverse line is a version of Disney that decide to say “Fark it” and make a truly messed-up remake that swaps out all the “disneyfication” for hard-core “let’s make this thing like Germans a thousand years ago would have made it, with friggen’ terrifying monsters and death and horror straight out of Teutonic legends and myths and folk tales,” likely directed by del Toro with the aid of the ghosts of Lovecraft and Giger.
Any one of those is something I would have been interested in. *This* worlds Disney? Nah.
Note: the “dwarves” from Norse/Germanic folk tales weren’t just short humans. They were a different order of being entirely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_(folklore)
Anyway, Hollywood is basically on strike now, with writers and actors on the picket line. I imagine this might effect “Snow White,” as well as every other movie and TV show out there. But you know what? Who friggen’ cares. Things have gotten so slow in Hollywood that people have come to expect *years* between seasons of shows… seasons with a tiny number of episodes. long gone are the likes of *good* Star Trek series where you could expect 20+ episodes every year. now… Eight? Ten? And with many shows, the gap between seasons lasting a number of years. When did season 3 of “The Orville” end? When will season 4 start… if it ever does? And let’s face it: there are a metric fark-ton of old movies and shows available for streaming, more than enough to tide most people over for the most extended of strike. And beyond even that… YouTube and the like are loaded to the gills with lone creators who are far more entertaining than quarter-billion-dollar productions. So you go right ahead and shut down production, Hollywood. if it strangles nonsense like “Snow White,” so much the better.
How long before I’m able to say “Hey, AI, make me a four-hour faithful adaptation of ‘Snow White’ Using the production team from “The Lord Of The Rings” and starring Marylin Monroe as Snow White’?” Because that’ll be the end of Hollywood.
Jul 142023
Another instance of “this is not the dog to be afraid of.”
There are good reasons to fear Huskies: specifically, they can pierce your eardrums with the noise they can produce. But attacking you? They are not particularly aggressive, and are much more likely to be interested in *play* than fighting. Very LOUD play, of course…