Well, those were a few hours of my life I’ll never get back.
I found myself near a theater showing “Ad Astra” today, so, what the heck, I saw it. It’s profoundly awful.
Firstly, and most damningly, it’s utterly *boring.* I didn’t fall asleep, but I did check the time, sighed, closed my eyes and daydreamed. Stuff happens, but you Just Don’t Give A Rats Ass.
Secondly, it doesn’t make a lick of sense. The plot, the tech, the characters and the lack-of-science conspire to create story that comes off as gibberish.
Thirdly: the science is laughable. Just in case anyone cares about spoilers, the full rant is behind the break.
Tonight I watched the 1972 Woody Allen movie “Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex.” I think I might have seen bits and pieces of this movie a long time ago… by which I mean sometime perhaps around 1980. I have previous mentioned that I just don’t find Woody Allen funny. So once again I watched a WA movie and I looked for the humor… and I utterly failed to find it. If I was one of those “reaction” YouTubers, I suspect the image of my face as I watched the movie would be a whole lot of stone-faced boredom interspersed with occasional slight frowns.
One of the more common yet irritatingly pointless human reactions to a problem is to demand that Something Must Be Done. Sure, often there’s a problem that can be fixed and there’s a practical, wise fix available. But far too often people just demand action… any action. Even if the action would actually make the situation worse. I suspect most readers of this blog would expect that at this point I’d proceed to bringing up some brainless American leftist nonsense like gun control or speech codes. But hey, I’m broad-minded. Not every person putting forward useless ideas is an American leftie. Gentlemen, behold:
Moving away from the Space Shuttle, Rockwell looked towards the next generation of manned space vehicle. In this case, a small vehicle with about 10% the payload of the Space Shuttle. The general configuration was used by Rockwell for several small space launch vehicles at about this time, mostly military vehicles. While the payload was nowhere near the STS’s, it would- if it worked as advertised – potentially wreck the business model for the STS program by providing a far cheaper means of getting crew into space.
At the end of the last “Jurassic World” movie, the idiot-child character decided to let a bunch of dinosaurs, including carnivores, loose in northern California. One of the last scenes was a typical Spielberigan shot from a hillside, looking down on the ‘burbs; but what was looking down into the yards full of pets and children was one the Utahraptor-sized velociraptors. The implication was that humanity was about to take a beatdown for its hubris, with monsters rampaging through the population.
Small problem: in the real world it would take about fifteen minutes before every hunter within a five hundred mile radius had his truck loaded up, heading for that location. In about two days, dinosaurs would be extinct again.
Nevertheless, another Jurassic World movie is due out at some point. In the meantime, Universal has released a short flm set sometime after the dinosaurs were released. It’s amusing enough, in particular the very brief sequences during the closing credits of various incidents with the beasts out in the wild. The main story is the “only in California” kind, with people camping in the woods with full knowledge that there are giant predators roaming the region… and, being Californians, they didn’t bring the sort of firepower a sane person would. Of course, a sane person would not take their infant camping in woods full of carnivorous dinosaurs, but hey, Hollywood.
While he was not *convicted* of burglary, he has at least been open and honest about having been arrested for such. It makes you wonder if, perhaps, his psychotic and profoundly anti-American urge to disarm the public is due to him having realized at one point that he had been on a course that would have set him on a course to catching a bullet. It is not uncommon for people who have displayed near-terminal levels of bad judgement and downright stupidity to assume that everyone else is as fatally flawed as they are, and thus everyone else is is as much need of external control as they are.
The OMV survived for a number of years as a number of generally similar concepts: an unmanned vehicle designed to shove satellites around Earth orbit. Several companies proposed vehicles such as this with varying degrees of capability. Some were designed to stay in space and be refueled; others were designed to go up with the Shuttle and then come back down with it for refurb and refueling. I believe the OMV shown here was of that kind.
I get a subtle hint here that Tim Pool is not a fan of Beto O’Rourke:
Yeah, O’Rourke defeats the lie that “nobody wants to take your guns.” He is quite open about the fact that he wants to make sure that the ability to commit violence is restricted solely to the government and to the criminals; the vast majority of the citizenry is, in his view, to be rendered defenseless.
Yes, Beto is a terrible human being, an example of the worst form of power-mad wannabe tyrant that genetics and upbringing can produce. But he is also a has-been nobody, with no chance of getting the Dem nomination. Like Swalwell, he’s a little more than a jumped -up streetcorner sign-waver, desperately trying to get people to pay attention to him.
The bigger issue here is that the Democratic party and the other candidates are not denouncing him and his proposed policies. At most they are annoyed that he has produced a readily repeated sound bite that will doubtless be used by people who do *NOT* want to disarm and neuter the populace. The Dems aren’t shouting their support for the Constitution or the people’s rights. They are not calling for O’Roarke and Swalwell to be run out of the party on a rail. This is important. The likes of O’Roarke and Swalwell are *gleeful* in their desire to enact laws that they know full well are not only unConstitutional, but which will set the people against the government and *will* lead to bloodshed. The likes of O’Roarke and Swalwell and Warren and Breadline are pushing for or accepting of policies that will, for no good purpose, push the US towards another Civil War. And the likes of Swalwell have already “joked” about using weapons of mass destruction against American population centers in order to terrorize the remaining beaten populace into kowtowing to the will of a totalitarian government. As much as the media likes to scream about how Trump caters to racists via dog whistles, the Dems actually support, defend and protect the genocidal anti-Semites in their midst and the civil-warmongering democidal monsters like O’Roarke. Note not just the nonsensical fear-mongering blather that idiot-child Beto spews forth here, but also listen to the crowd: when he says “Hell yes we’re going to take your AR-15,” the crowd of Dem whackjobs in attendance goes nuts with joyful applause at the notion of a government that sweeps across the land kicking in doors and shooting homeowners, leading to the worst democide this side of the Soviet era.
When “Men In Black: International” came out, I somehow gave it a pass. It just didn’t seem interesting. Which was a shame, because the original Men In Black was a *dayumed* entertaining flick. But it was also unsurprising… the second one was “meh” and the third one I can barely recall.
This review, though, makes it plain that my lack of seeing “MIB:I” was far and away the right choice. It seems that the main character is the very definition of a Mary Sue… lazily written, perfect at everything, achieves all her goals effortlessly, everyone loves her. Ho. lee. Cap. That’s just tragic. In my “Zaneverse” stories, the main characters are involved in some amazing things, but I at least *try* to get them there honestly. And the main character is flawed to the point of being a downright ᚠᚪᛣᚳᚪᛇᛈ . He’s kinda the definition of “utterly non-special.” But the MIB:I main character seems to have been written specifically to appeal to the lowest common SJW denominator… which, given how the movie tanked at the box office, was not a good financial decision.
Perfect characters are ᚠᛣᚳᛝ boring. If I every write a story where someone is called “The Chosen One” and seems to be fulfilling the trope, expect him to get shot in the nuts with a ten-gauge by page 3.
