In a just world, the level of trauma exhibited by my cats in the photo below would be the worst any of their species would ever experience. The “donut” on banshee is due to some environmental factor causing her to start chewing pretty enthusiastically on herself; she freaked out when a Cone Of Shame was put on her, but tolerated the soft donut pretty well and it does the job. Curiously, it also reduced her antipathy towards Buttons. This is the closest I’ve ever seen her allow him to come without complaint.
There are people who suck just about everywhere. And these people seem to love to exercise their vileness on cats… most likely because cats are not only weak and vulnerable compared to humans, they also have distinct personalities, and probably most importantly because they are loved by other humans. This means that harming the cat also harms some humans. Often, *many* humans. Somebody is getting off on this. Somebody who should be found, tried, convicted and then shoved through the nearest convenient stargate.
The news story (which took place distressing close to where I live) is beyond the “Continue Reading,” because even the headline might be a bit disturbing for those who don’t want to read about such things. Included within the body of the linked news article is a news story from a dozen years ago that set me off watching it.
There is a GoFundMe that has been set up to raise funds for a reward to find whoever’s responsible. Hopefully local security cameras caught something.
This is one of the reasons why my cats are indoor cats. The world is dangerous enough for cats without throwing in actual monsters.
A project is underway to digitally recreate the *entire* USS Enterprise, inside and out. What’s more, it’s not one static version, but shows how the sets evolved from the first pilot through the series, and includes the “refit” version from the Motion Picture and seemingly on up to Undiscovered Country (as well as the other Enterprises from NX-01 up to the J-model, the Shuttle, the aircraft carrier, the “ringship,” the Robert McCall version designed for the unmade “Planet of the titans” TV movie, the Phase II design… but *not* shown is the mutant horrible version from Woketrek, or the JJPrise). The results look pretty fricken’ awesome. Shows what can be accomplished if you actually care about the source materials (take note, hacks behind STD and STP).
How exactly regular schmoes like us will make use of the final products is not explained very well. It nevertheless looks damn impressive.I doubt that the computer models will be made accessible to the public, but if they were… you’d be able to 3D print every single version of the Enterprise bridge in whatever scale you like. You’d be able to print off each and every prop.
The actress they scanned to recreate Yeoman Colt from “The Cage” is not an exact duplicate, but she’s impressively close and immediately recognizable. Contrast with what Star Trek Discovery did to poor Colt:
Remember, the Talosians brought Colt to Pike and suggested that he mate with her because, in short, she was young and attractive. Ummmmm… Maybe that spike-faced Jem Hadar-lookin’ dame is a hottie among her kind, but that is *not* a face to attract a human male.
Sadly, actress Laurel Goodwin, who portrayed yeoman colt, died just a few months ago.
Those who have been looking at this blog for long enough may recall that, years ago, it would shut down or lock up or disappear for hours or days at a time due to outside attacks. These attacks were, until I added a bunch of security features, apparently meant to add spy/malware to the blog, to make it a money-making venture for other people. Exactly how that was supposed to work I’m not sure… but most of the attacks – as in well in excess of 90% – seemed to come from Ukraine. Ukraine has a large number of nerds with excess free time, lots of skill and a willingness to unleash it upon just about anybody. Well… now they have a valid target in the form of the Russian military.
ISIS and similar groups tried using the same idea – drones with bombs – against the US in the middle east. There, success was minimal… not because the idea wasn’t good, but because ISIS is not exactly filled with nerds. The US countered the drones with electronic warfare: our nerds were better than their nerds, which was not at all surprising. But Russian nerds seem to be absent from this fight. Or, perhaps worse, the Russian military simply took the Russian nerds away from their computers, slapped second-rate AK-47s into their hands and dumped them into trucks.
Well, this should prove an interesting tale, especially when they figure out the motive:
Attacker had an ill-defined weapon… apparently it looked like a gun, but was a knife… and apparently it could hurl the blade. “Ballistic knives” are fundamentally kinda useless weapons, only cool to those in middle school, but they’re also often illegal which seems to be the case in California. Since they are illegal in California, and since a criminal certainly would not break the law in California, it’s a mystery what the attacker actually had.
I’m 50/50 on whether the attacker was politically motivated or just bog standard bugnuts. In either case, it’s reasonable to assume that public displays of humor are likely going to decline a bit.
After the unprecedented (and I’m led to understand illegal) leak of the Supreme Court preliminary opinion on overturning Roe vs Wade, the violent insurrectionists, yearning for the glory days of 2020, are back to doing what they do: violence.
A Polish tear-gas “grenade” launcher that uses an AK action and AK blanks to propel the canisters. This seems like a horrible design… overly complex and *far* too heavy. Still, *kinda* cool.
