If you are a $10 and up Patron or subscriber, you should by now have received a link to this months catalogs for voting. If you haven’t, let me know. 
Oct 242021
Oct 242021
Odd there are no ducts.
Most of the short video clips on their channel have music rather than audio of the flight, but a couple do seem to include the original audio. Difficult to tell how tamped down the volume is, however. It does seem like it’d be a fun little vehicle. It’s small enough that it might be truck-transportable, which – if the range and duration are adequate, claimed to have a 20 minute flight time – could make it handy for search and rescue operations in forests and swamps and especially mountains and canyons and such. it is capable of being flown unmanned, which indicates that (again, assuming it has the endurance for it) it could be used to rescue reasonably intact individuals from the tops of burning buildings or out of canyons or off boats and the like.
It’s delivered as a half-built kit for a mere $92,000. The production run for 2022 is said to be sold out.
Oct 232021
Heh.
Oct 232021
“Boop on the snoot” is not the phrase I would have immediately dreamed up to describe “getting shot in the face with 12 gauge 00 buckshot,” but, hey, it’s catchy. Like the guy’s face. See, it caught buckshot.
What I don’t get are all the civilians milling about when the cops pour in, shouting “everybody get down.” And they just stand there like pillocks.
Oct 222021
Now it can be told, the truth about how and why the dinosaurs went extinct.
Oct 222021
Next time someone trots out “diversity is our strength” with regards to multiculturalism, keep in mind the history of truly multicultural societies such as India, Lebanon and Yugoslavia. The way to maintain peace and stability in a multicultural society is with totalitarianism, so it is safe – and wise – to assume that anyone who is promoting multiculturalism is also promoting their ability to bash you over the back of the head whenever they feel like it.
Anyone who argues against immigrants assimilating into the cultures they’ve willingly immigrated into is arguing for genocide.
Oct 222021
Below is a somewhat rambling video by a YouTuber who focuses on comic books. He makes, eventually, what I think is an interesting point. He realized that a *lot* of British authors seem fascinated with magic and wizards and sorcerers and the like, putting magic into stories in somewhat the way Americans might put guns into a story. The YouTubers hypothesis is that this is because magic is to the British “creation myth” like what guns are to the American “creation myth.” Of course, America’s creation is hardly mythical, since records keeping was fairly reliable at the time… but guns were as important tot he Revolution as Merlin was to Arthur. There are, as he also points out, distinctly American “myths” such as Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed… and as he also points out, nobody much cares. Paul Bunyan chopping down trees hardly stacks up with that time George Washington routed the entire British army with a small number of Dodge Chargers.
Of course, with changes in British educational/government policies, British “creation myths” and other cultural tales will be largely unknown to British children within decade, if not sooner.
Oct 222021
The job of an actor is to look pretty and say words scripted for them. When they say their *own* words… you get crap like this;
‘What a fool’: fellow actors criticise William Shatner’s space flight
Appearing on The Jonathan Ross Show on ITV, Collins said: “It’s amazing isn’t it? What a fool. Who wants to do that? No, absolutely not. Did you see Bill Shatner?
“He was in the air and they were turning him upside down. Let’s take care of this planet first before we start going off.”
…
Asked if he would visit space, fellow show guest [Brian] Cox replied: “No, absolutely not. I think it’s ridiculous. I remember watching [Sir Richard] Branson and Bezos going up for their 11 minutes or whatever …
“No, we do not need more spaceships. We’ve got enough crap flying around up there. We do not need any more.”
Shut up, morons.
I have zero respect for people who rake in outsized buckets of cash for playing pretend, then get pissy that other people are spending *their* buckets of cash on things they don’t like. *Especially* when those things promote the general welfare of mankind.
Oct 222021
Noted Social Justice maniac Alec Baldwin has killed someone:
It would hardly be the first time that an actor has shot dead someone on the set of a movie using what was supposed to be a prop gun; see the death of Brandon Lee for the most famous example. But in that case, the fault was very clearly with the ordnance folks/prop masters who failed to properly clear a firearm. Something quite like that may have happened here, with either an actual live round installed instead of a blank, or a pistol with a projectile jammed in the barrel was loaded with a blank (which is what happened to Lee). But in tis case, with the exceedingly limited info available so far, it seems that the actor himself has some culpability. Because while it might be his job to point a prop gun at another actor and pull the trigger, here he shot a director. This would *seem* to indicate that he was either careless or screwing around… or acting in a threatening manner 9given his vaunted temper…). Another possibility is that the gun was loaded with nothing but blanks, which are usually harmless at a range of more than a few yards… but deadly if fired within a few inches. And if 8that’s* the case, there’ll be some ‘splainin’ to do as to why he was pointing a gun, prop or otherwise, at a human a very short distance away.
Oct 212021
A pretty snazzy SIMULATED (*) 360-degree view of Mars at night as seen by the Perseverance rover is available here:
https://www.360cities.net/image/mars-at-night
Unsurprisingly, the seeing is pretty good.
*Ah, I got suckered. Drat.