Mar 272021
 

Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaay. Dad must be *so* proud.

You know… you be you, so long as you’re not hurting anyone else. But… if you’re not helping anyone, including yourself, nobody else has any obligation to do or say anything in support of your choices. If you go out of your way to not only look far outside the mainstream, but actually devote a sizable fraction of your entire existence to making a spectacle of yourself… meh.

Once again, I suspect an interesting sci-fi story could be written base don this idea that this sort of thing is the visible manifestation of an alien “worldwrecker” attack on humanity, some sort of mind controlling/distorting field that is trying to make humanity self destructive and/or non-reproductive.

 Posted by at 12:51 pm
Mar 262021
 

Our futures are secure.

A new bill would defund new ICBMs to pay for coronavirus vaccine research

This new Congress wants to not only disarm the populace but the military as well… at least as far as strategic deterrence. I’m sure the Chinese are quaking in their boots.

If there is anyone in the FBI who’s actually interested in defending the US, I’d recommend they use the list of sponsors and supporters of this bill as the basis for an investigation into foreign influence in the US government:

The Investing in Cures Before Missiles Act, offered by Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif….

The proposed legislation has amassed some early support in the House and Senate. Co-sponsors include Sens. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.; as well as Reps. Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore.; Steve Cohen, D-Tenn.; Jesus Garcia, D-Ill.; Raul M. Grijalva, D-Ariz.; Jared Huffman, D-Calif.; Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; Barbara Lee, D-Calif.; James McGovern, D-Mass.; Eleanor Holmes Norton, D-D.C.; Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.; Mark Pocan, D-Wis.; and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass.

Note that there are some of the *dumbest* members of Congress listed there.

 Posted by at 9:35 pm
Mar 262021
 

In the long, long ago, Lockheed tried to sell the F-22 to the US Navy. In order to accommodate the needs of Naval aviation, the aircraft would have had to have been massively modified… most obviously by giving the aircraft variable geometry wings like the F-14’s. Clearly the Navy didn’t go for it: the cost of the program would have been immense, as would have been the risks. The F-22 ended up being troubled enough with materials and maintenance nightmares; add to that the rigors of slamming into carrier decks, constant humidity and salt air, all the other bothersome details of operating from ships at sea; and add to THAT the fact that while the NATF (Naval Advanced Tactical Fighter)*looked* like the F-22, it would have shared very few structures in common with its Air Force cousin and would have been basically a new aircraft… it would undoubtedly have been massively expensive to a degree that even the F-35 would have been hard pressed to match.

 

The fullrez scan of the artwork has been made available at 300 DPI to all $4/month patrons/subscribers in the 2021-03 APR Extras folder at Dropbox. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.




 Posted by at 2:08 pm
Mar 252021
 

City of Oakland Mayor is branded racist for giving families of color $500 a month if they earn under $59,000 with no rules on how they spend it – but offering poor white families nothing

Doling out cash to people based on their race seems like it would slam up against “equal protection” and “nondiscrimination” laws.

Another article:

Oakland launches guaranteed pay plan for low-income people

The mayor of Oakland, California, on Tuesday announced a privately funded program that will give low-income families of color $500 per month with no rules on how they can spend it.

“Of Color” means “everyone but white people.” Or at least it used to: recently Asians have been declared  by the Woke to be white due to their “privilege” (which seems to come from rather enthusiastically embracing this thing called a “work ethic”). It should be interesting to see how Oakland goes about deciding who is sufficiently non-white, how fast the lawsuits come out, how big the army of attack lawyers will be, and how soaked the taxpayers of Oakland will end up. If I was paying property taxes in Oakland, I’d consider *not* being taxable in Oakland just as fast as possible.

 Posted by at 9:43 pm
Mar 252021
 

Lighting the candles on a birthday cake by overlighting the candles:

I assume that this was nowhere near a full thrust test, likely just a low-power ignition test. Otherwise it would have vaporized the cake and the stand it was on. And then… oy. Imagine the environmental impact statements.

 Posted by at 3:59 pm
Mar 252021
 

People are still trying to either reboot or sequelize “The Last Starfighter.” That was very much a  movie of its time; the computer generated visual effects were reasonably dazzling in their day but are woefully antiquated today, and the story and characters are monumentally wide-eyed innocents compared to today’s grotty, cynical mire of sleaze and grimdark. Making a reboot of it would almost certainly be a massive failure of “Ghostbusters” and “Total Recall” and “Star Trek Discovery” proportions. But… get the right people on board, I could get behind a sequel. And it seems that some of the right people are trying:

The Last Starfighter’s Potential Sequel Now Has a Sizzle Reel for Hollywood’s Consideration

Gary Whitta, writer of The Book of Eli and Rogue One, has been working with Last Starfighter writer Jonathan Betuel on bringing the 1984 classic back to life for years now. Today, he hopped on his Twitch stream to say the film is closer than it’s ever been to fruition. It’s “right on the one-yard line” he said, and he believes it will happen.

Well, we’ll see. The “sizzle reel” is just a collection of very, very preliminary concept art, showing generic scenes of a modestly evolved version of the Gunstar, with a few showing a return to the trailer court. This would indicate a likely return of the character of Alex… *hopefully* still played by Lance Guest and with any luck at all also including Maggie played by Catherine Mary Stewart. The modern Hollywood thing to do would be to say that those two got married, had a kid, got divorced, and now their kid has fallen to the Bad Side and is leading the Bad Guys. It would be terribly politically incorrect to show them in a healthy, happy marriage with a passel of kids – now likely with kids of their own, it having been about 40 years – leading cheerful, successful lives experiencing the wonders of the universe even if they do have to face down enemies from the stars.

Sadly, three of the stars of the movie are no longer with us. Robert Preston (“Centauri”)  and Dan O’Herlihy (“Grig”) died *years* ago. And Rob Cobb, who designed the Gunstar and the Starcar and pretty  much everything else in the movie (along with doing amazing work on “Conan the Barbarian” and “Alien” and “Aliens” and a whole bunch of other stuff) died just last year. Whoever does the production design for the sequel had best be on their game.


On vaguely related matters:

Some movies like “2001” and “Forbidden Planet” need to be left the hell alone. Tinkering with them is heresy on par with knocking down statues of Lincoln or scribbling on the Constitution. Other movies… I’d pay real money to see a Revised Version with wholly updated VFX. For example, “Firefox.” That’s a movie that could benefit substantially from having all of the aerial sequences replaced with all-new footage. It’s a reasonably good spy movie as-is, if a bit on the glacially slow side, but the scenes of the Firefox in flight… uuuugh. The full scale Firefox mockup? Spectacular. Don’t touch it. But the flying scenes could be improved, and, why not, expanded. Let’s finally see the MiG 31 Firefox in all its glory.

There are other movies that are not even remotely classics, and I say “improve the frak out of ’em.” If you have seen “Meteor” in the last couple decades, you probably noticed just how half-assed the model work was. I mean… just *awful.* Even by the standards of the late 70’s, it was just embarrassingly lazy stuff. All that could be easily replaced and improved by a film student and a laptop. Imagine what a budget of, say, half a million could do.

A case can be made for doing Special Editions of episodes of the original “Battlestar Galactica” and “Buck Rogers.”

What else?

 Posted by at 3:46 pm