Dec 032021
 

I’m sure there are some very good reasons for setting off explosives in a tunnel. I’m less convinced that it would be *fun* to do so while actually *in* the tunnel. You get to experience not just the initial *BANG,* but a number of subsequent ones as the shock waves bounced back and forth from one end of the tunnel to the other, passing over you each time, each direction. Still, it’s cool and all. BONUS idea: set playback speed to 0.25 and watch the shock tube do its job, racing off into the distance *far* faster than the bolt from an Imperial blaster.

 Posted by at 12:38 pm
Dec 032021
 

I coulda *swore* I posted a link to this video *years* ago, but a cursory search did not turn it up. Maybe I didn’t mention the band name or song title, dunno. But if you want a succinct, tight little effective sci-fi story starring YoSaffBrig, “The Ghost Inside” by Broken Bells will hook you right up.

One might argue that it’s a bit heartbreaking.

 Posted by at 12:19 pm
Dec 032021
 

If only we had stargates, here’d be a dandy place to ship off murderers, rapists thieves and Communists (but then, I repeat myself):

Hot little planet as dense as iron zips around red dwarf star

GJ 367b is 31 light years away:

  • Diameter: 5,000 miles
  • Mass: 55% Earth
  • 86% iron
  • Year: 7.7 hours
  • Surface gravity: about 1.4 g’s

Sounds like a nice place, especially with this little detail:

  • Surface temperature: 2,700 F

 

 Posted by at 1:30 am
Dec 022021
 

There was a zoom call in 2020 with a number of the major players in the saga of the Kenosha Kid. And what makes the video below awesome is that one of the villains of the piece, the Commie granny-basher with the illegally concealed firearm, suffers a furniture fail on camera. Behold as Rittenhouse and his lawyer try and fail to restrain their laughter. It’s like watching Jeffrey Dahmer or Stalin slip on a banana.

 Posted by at 2:52 pm
Dec 012021
 

Guillermo del Toro Still Might Adapt Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, Only This Time He’ll Make It Weirder

This time it’s being pitched as a streaming movie, not theatrical. This would have the advantage of not having to cling to the usual Hollywood “blockbuster” formula, which ATMOM would not have done well with. With luck, it can be set in the 1930’s with a cast that makes sense, without the “need” for stunt casting, superfluous romantic sub-plots (there were *no* women in the original), and the ability to be slow and creepy and weird where it needs to be.

 Posted by at 10:25 pm
Dec 012021
 

So, Ridley Scott’s film “The Last Duel” opened in late October. So far it has raked in nearly $29 million ($11M domestic, $18M foreign)… on a budget of about $100 million. This is by any metric a disaster. It’s odd: both critics and audiences seem to like it according to Rotten Tomatoes. So why did it fail? I dunno. I haven’t seen it; I saw the trailers and they’re… ok, I guess. Didn’t really inspire me to get off my keister and into a pandemic infested theater where five cents of sugar water costs six bucks and a handful of kerploded corn is another seven.

But Ridley Scott know exactly why it failed. Those darned kids!

Ridley Scott Pins ‘The Last Duel’ Bombing on Apathetic Millennials

“I think what it boils down to — what we’ve got today [are] the audiences who were brought up on these ᚠᚢᛍᚴᛁᚿᚵ cellphones. The millennian [sic] do not ever want to be taught anything unless you’re told it on a cellphone,” Scott said.

Yeah, uh-huh.

Personally, while I don’t *know* why it failed, I would *guess* that after a year of lockdowns and panic mongering, people have kinda lost the thrill of the moviegoing experience. Yes, “No Time To Die” apparently made bank, but Ghostbusters has so far only made $118 million worldwide… another disaster, though obviously not as bad of one. Going to the movies is more of a hassle than it once was (fewer theaters, for a start) while being more expensive; if you’re going as a family or a group of friends, you could *easily* spend more for a couple hours than for a whole month of some streaming service. TV’s these days are *huge* and the resolution is greater than the human eyeball can take in; easy to have quite a number of people over to watch some movie or show, all with cheap snacks and no mask mandates or shrieking Karens. Going to the theater  was probably always going to go into decline thanks to streaming and 4k wall-sized TVs, but the Commie Cough only sped that along.

Looking at the top worldwide movies of 2021 on box Office Mojo, it looks like if Ridley Scott wants to make the big money he needs to go straight to the Chinese market. Top two grossing movies of the year were Chinese flicks, with the highest grossing being a movie about the Chinese military “volunteers” sent to fight at Chosin reservoir during the Korean War.

 Posted by at 12:55 pm