An interesting article on the latest advances in integrating all of the sensory apparatus. I’m assuming that, like most technology of this nature, it will be extensively and intensively porn driven.
Category Archives: Popular Culture
A Lunar Assassin
I haven’t read it, but Mike Combs has written a short story about killing JFK.
Frankenstein
An insightful essay for the 21st century, on the 200th anniversary of the first modern science-fiction novel.
Another Life
Bryan Preston isn’t impressed with the latest SF series, despite Katie Sackoff:
…in Another Life, only Sackhoff’s Niko and her AI sidekick (Samuel Anderson) are fit for this mission. The rest fill every negative millennial stereotype in the galaxy. They are whiny. They are grouchy. They scream obscenities at each other — all the time. They never fail to crack under the least amount of pressure. One is immediately mutinous. Another cannot ever think before opening their pie hole and saying things any rational adult knows they will immediately regret. Collectively, they perpetually can’t even.
But they’re sent out to save humanity anyway.
Ouch.
Motion Smoothing
…is ruining cinema.
When we rented a place down in Julian a few months ago, I noticed that the movies on the large-screen television looked like soaps. It was an interesting effect, but now I wonder if that’s what I was seeing. I haven’t noticed it on our newish LG, but I think I’ll look at the settings and experiment. Sounds like it’s good for fast-action sports, but bad for drama.
An “Anti-Space” Event
He doesn’t realize it, but “anti-space” events are really anti-humanity events. And as always, I am not impressed by people who think they are better arbiters of how other people should spend their money than those who are spending the money.
The Next Fifty Years On The Moon
An interesting essay, but it has a few problems. First…
And they repeatedly use the phrase “lunar soil.” In fact we just update Evoloterra this weekend to fix this ourselves.
Finally, we have this comment, which seems gratuitous and almost a non sequitur in the context of this article:
Chappaquiddick
Half a century later, still covering for the Kennedy’s.
The media cover up was aided by the fact that it happened during the moon landing.
[Update mid-afternoon]
Fifty years later, the media continues to whitewash Chappaqiddick.
“[The Lion of the Senate] was Kennedy’s nickname. He was like a lion, in the sense that he mated without limit and killed without remorse.”
Heh.
I disagree though, on one of his movie recommendations. There are many better documentaries of how we got to the moon than First Man, which was about Neil Armstrong, not Apollo per se. The best I’ve seen (and I saw it in IMAX at the NASM a few weeks ago) is Apollo 11. The most surprising thing about it, considering how good it is, is that it was produced by CNN. I recorded it a few days ago to watch tomorrow with friends.
The Gray Lady
Continues to diminish the achievement of Apollo 11.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Related: Apollo Shrugs.
[Late-afternoon update]
Treacher: Yeah, well, the Soviets sent women and minorities into space first.
[Friday-morning update]
More thoughts from Karol Markowicz (who was born in the Soviet Union):
Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags — but have you heard about their amazing space feminism and space intersectionality?
“Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe,” the writer, Sophie Pinkham, wrote. Her piece reads like something from an old issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda boasting of the achievements of the Soviet space program.
It’s not like this is anything new from the paper.
[Bumped]
[Update a few minutes later]
The Fiftieth Anniversary
Saturday is the landing anniversary, but today is the anniversary of the launch.
Loren Grush has an article today on how Apollo set NASA back for decades, a subject I’ve written quite a bit about.