Mar 162023
 

At last, my collection of “Tom Swift Jr.” novels is complete. Since I’m a miser/dirt poor, I was only willing to spend a pittance for each book, but if you wait long enough pretty much everything shows up on ebay.

Woo.

 

And because why not, here’s the next shelf over:

 

 

On a related note: turns out that last year a bit of good news slipped by me un-noticed. The CW a few years ago decided to make a TV series about Tom Swift Jr… it could have been good (I mean, it’s not beyond the bounds of the physically possible), but CW decided instead to make an abomination. The series began airing on May 31, 2022. It was promptly cancelled on June 30, 2022, due to low ratings. And of course: Tom Swift had been turned from a no-nonsense STEM-focused blond blue-eyed teenager with a girlfriend into a flamboyant gay black adult. Thus assuring that the existing fanbase would be uninterested. And who among that fraction of the population for whom “flamboyant gay black man” is a draw would be interested in a crappy sci-fantasy show?

From the Wikipedia article on the series:

Lead actor Richards said of the adaptation, “The original Tom Swift was great for his time and what he represented. At the time, that was the face of young boys, All-American kids full of possibilities. But in 2021, that can look so different. It can look like someone like me—a Black guy who is chocolate, who is queer, who is all those things that we’re told aren’t the normal or the status quo.” He added, “We’re going to dive into so many sectors of identity. We’re going to talk about Blackness—and a different kind of Blackness than we’re used to seeing, which is the Black elite, the 1 percent, the billionaires. We’re also going to talk about a queer boy’s journey into becoming a queer man. Not only self-acceptance, but acceptance as a whole, having the community and people around you.”

Gosh. I wonder why it failed to grab ratings.

 Posted by at 8:44 pm
Mar 162023
 

This video from at least 7 years ago lays out some of the reasons why the Russians may well have gotten rather adventurous of late: they are running out of Russians, but they’re not running out of routes to invade Russia. So rather than cultivate good relations with the surrounding nations or get on about the task of making more Russians, they seem to have gone the other route of trying to seize all the invasion routes while they still have a military with which to do it. As the last year of their little two-week “military operation” has shown, that hasn’t gone so well.

 

Note the “demographic pyramid” he shows here. It lays out the population of Russia by age; a growing population has a wide base of young people, but back when this video was made (circa 2015) Russias base was looking kinda weak. However, it did seem to be growing somewhat:

So how is it looking today?

Oh, dear. It looks like baby-making fell off a cliff right after this guy made his video, so instead of things maybe getting better they’ve gotten much worse.

 

“Population pyramids” are interesting things to consider. Nations like this with shrinking young uns are in serious trouble; the pyramid for South Korea looks especially dire:

China’s not looking so good:

Nor is Japan:

Iceland, in contrast, looks kinda ok:

but if you really want to see where the population of the future is coming from, you need pyramids that look like this:

Or this:

 

The nations with wide bases will have greatly increased populations, with greatly increased pressures for those populations to leave and colonize low-population regions. The dying nations will, like Russia, likely try to defend themselves with constantly diminishing human resources, or they will, like much of Europe is currently doing, simply allow themselves to be colonized and replaced, culturally, religiously, ethnically.

Gonna be an interesting century.

 Posted by at 8:30 am
Mar 162023
 

Not every idea pans out.

Virgin Orbit pauses operations for a week, furloughs nearly entire staff as it seeks funding

In a world where SpaceX is doing it’s thing, other small launcher companies had damned well better have a *really* good idea. And while dropping an expendable rocket from a 747 might have been neato-keen in the 1990’s… right now it looks kinda dumb. Sure, the ability to launch from anywhere with a big enough airport is nice… but it doesn’t seem to be enough.

 Posted by at 4:30 am
Mar 152023
 

Huh.

Surface changes observed on a Venusian volcano during the Magellan mission

In short, a volcano on Venus seemed to be active from 1990 to 1992. It could be that the mountain simply slumped, but more likely it that it blarped up some lava.

 

So if you decide to go for a hike on Venus, add “volcano” to the list of things to be careful of.

This would make Venus the third world in this solar system to have active volcanoes, after Earth and Io. But some form of geological activity is much more common, with ice geysers all over the place out among the larger moons.

 Posted by at 11:16 pm
Mar 152023
 

Apparently life is bad for women in South Korea, with a heavily patriarchal society that treats ’em like garbage. So, perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of South Korean women are doing what they can to avoid the worst of it. And for some number of them, that means avoiding men entirely:

A World Without Men

The women of South Korea’s 4B movement aren’t fighting the patriarchy — they’re leaving it behind entirely.

The “4B” movement is essentially the “Men Going Their Own Way” movement of South Korean women, separating themselves from any relationships with men, including family and male friends. They’re cutting their hair short (or bald) and avoiding makeup in order to be less attractive, and are either living alone or shacking up with other women. And according to the article, a lot of these women seem satisfied with this arrangement. There is, of course, the inevitable result:

In December of that year (2016), as Korea’s fertility rate hovered at 1.2 births per woman (it has since slid to 0.78, the lowest in the world)

The birth rate has plummeted from 1.2 to 0.78 in well under a decade. And 1.2 was *well* under replacement rate. South Korea will soon begin to run low on young people, though likely not on old people. This will mean that the burden of caring for an elderly population will fall more and more on fewer and fewer younger Koreans, likely driving some kind of an exodus… And quite possibly driving an *influx* of cheap, low-paid “migrants.” This will lead to South Korean culture being gradually replaced with some other culture. And the question will be… what is this other culture’s views on such things as women’s rights? Just as Europe celebrates gay and trans while not making their own babies and importing *vast* numbers of people from cultures that not only like to make babies but also like to throw gay people off rooftops, there will be an inevitable clash. A South Korea filled with elderly Koreans and young non-Koreans seems like a poor force to stack up against an invasion of young, armed North Koreans. All the Norks needs to do is wait and keep making babies, and the peninsula is theirs.

If you won;t make the next generation, someone else will. That might well suck… but there it is regardless.

 Posted by at 10:06 pm
Mar 152023
 

Nancy Meyers Netflix Movie Shut Down Over Budget Issues

Netflix was in the early stages of a rom-com. You know, the kind of movie that tends to be set in the present day, in the real world, without much need for explosions, car chases, major set pieces, whole armies of extras, Marvel-sized special effects budgets. And thus, this seems a little weird:

Scarlett Johansson, Penélope Cruz, Michael Fassbender and Owen Wilson were circling roles in the feature, budgeted at $130 million-plus.

One. Hundred. Thirty. MILLION. Dollars.

Ummm.

 

Oh, hey, apropos of nuthin’, here’s a video made almost entirely by AI. You know, for cheap. Is it good? Meh. Did it require the involvement of busloads of Hollywood deviants, freaks and weirdos? Seems not. Is it the future? Most likely.

 Posted by at 3:20 pm
Mar 132023
 

Wikipedia, unsurprisingly, has a list of all the Best Movie Oscar winners. For no readily apparent reason I decided to look them all up and see how many I’ve watched. Starting in the forties (because why not):

40s: 4
50s: 5
60s: 4
70s: 7
80s: 8
90s: 9
00s: 4
10s: 2
20s: 0 (out of three)

Hmmm. Seventies through the 90’s seemed to make movies I actually wanted to watch. But how about just the movies that were nominated?

40s: 16/50 (32%)
50s: 15/50 (30%)
60s: 21/50 (42%)
70s: 27/50 (54%)
80s: 27/50 (54%)
90s: 32/50 (64%)
00s: 14/55 (25.5%)
10s: 27/88 (30.7%)
20s: 2/28 (7.1%)

It’s less stark here, but again the 70s through 90s won. The outlier is the 20’s… so far it’s looking like a big pile of yawn.

One could argue that the older movies have the advantage, as I’ve had more time to watch them. But in the age of streaming, DVD, Blu Ray, 4k… any movie I *want* to watch, I can. If I haven’t by now, it’s most likely because I’ve seen the trailer or read the propaganda… and it’s just not interesting. Granted, not every movie is for everyone; I’m never going to be a big fan of “chick flicks” or artsy indie flicks about gay cowboys eating pudding any more than some people are never going to be fans of science fiction. But the fact that there seems to be a decline in movies I give a crap about might mean something to someone, I dunno.

Hell, here’s the list of nominees from the 2020’s:

Nomadland
The Father
Judas and the Black Messiah
Mank
Minari
Promising Young Woman
Sound of Metal
The Trial of the Chicago 7
CODA
Belfast
Don’t Look Up
Drive My Car
Dune
King Richard
Licorice Pizza
Nightmare Alley
The Power of the Dog
West Side Story
Everything Everywhere All at Once
All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
The Fabelmans
Tár
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

How many have you actually even *heard* of? And how many, when you look them up, look like unwatchable preachy or artsy garbage?

 Posted by at 11:13 pm
Mar 132023
 

Circa 1980 Lockheed jumped on board the “X-Wing” bandwagon. For those unfortunate enough not to have been graced to grow up in the 80’s, the X-Wing was a concept for a four-bladed helicopter where the rotors were rigid and could be stopped in flight, turning into two forward swept and two aft-swept wings (see Aerospace Projects Review issue V5N6 for a whole fat article on the concept). one of the Lockheed concepts that was publicized at the time was a one-man research/proof of concept vehicle, smaller than a Bell Cobra. I’ve got fair to middling diagrams and data on it, but what I don’t have is a designation. Which is terribly frustrating because I’m convinced that, many years ago, I *read* a designation for it, CL-something, decided “that’s interesting information, I shall surely remember where I read that for future reference,” and have never been able to find it again.

ARRRRgh.

Anyway, here’s some art of the thing.

 Posted by at 11:05 pm