Category: Science Fiction

Nerdgasm!!!!!!!

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Kewl!!!

I just came across a Kickstarter for a new Star Trek movie:

Axanar is the independent Star Trek film which proves that a feature-quality Star Trek film can be made on a small budget.

 (PLEASE NOTE: Kickstarter will not charge your pledge till the end of the campaign on August 31. So you have that much time to save up!)

 Our 20-minute short film, Prelude to Axanar, premiered Saturday, July 26th, 2014, at San Diego Comic Con and features Richard Hatch, Tony Todd, Kate Vernon, JG Hertzler and Gary Graham, who reprises his role of Soval from “Enterprise”. The makeup was done by Academy Award winner Kevin Haney and Star Trek veteran Brad Look and Make Up Effects Lab. Top that off with the amazing visual effects of Tobias Richter and The Light Works, and sound by Academy Award winner Frank Serafine, and the result is Prelude to Axanar: something unlike anything you have ever seen before. We have our loyal donors to thank for this!
This Kickstarter is for the full-length feature Axanar. Unlike the short film, which we shot in two days and cost $75,000, the 90-minute Axanar feature will take about 20 days and cost about $650,000. So we are breaking up our costs into discreet sections which should allow us to reach significant milestones, as we don’t expect to raise all $650,000 at once. This first Kickstarter will be for the sound stage and set construction. Anything over what we need for that will be applied to the feature production costs. Full details are below.

It should be noted that they have already raised $207,447 of their goal of $100,000 with 16 days to go, so I do not think that their funding goal is unrealistic, though I cannot see how they can do a whole feature length film for $650K.

The CGI might not be that much, what with the realitiess of Moore’s law, but I cannot see how they could do this on such a low budget.

I do not think I could even to decent set design for their whole budget.

Still, enjoy this nerd pr0n.

Your Moment of Science Fiction Awesome

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Click on the images for a larger slideshow

Rather unsurprisingly, they both involve Star Trek, the original series.

The first is a photograph of an an enciente Orion slave girl courtesy of Wil Wheaton.

The bottom two pictures are of a remote that is modeled on the original props for the Star Trek phaser:

The Phaser was created from meticulous 3D scans of the last-known TOS hero prop and is a fully functional, gesture-based universal remote control that can be used to control many home entertainment systems and other IR-controlled devices. The 1:1-scale Phaser is equipped with 10 authentic phaser firing sounds, a customizable personal lock code, tactile force-feedback, and it can store up to 36 remote commands.

I’d never thought about it before, but that pistol grip is profoundly non ergonomic.

If you were to use the phaser, it would be hard to hit the broad side of a barn.

It’s 150 bucks for the remote. The pregnant Orion slave girl: priceless.

Another Right Wing Hypocrite

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Robert Heinlein, whose life was defined by his US Navy pension, 2/3 of active duty pay, when he was medically retired for TB.

He was in the Navy because his family was politically connected, and got him into the US Naval Academy at Annapolis:

  1. So: Robert Heinlein, that great hero of libertarian culture, was the complete creation of the invisible welfare state.
  2. The invisible welfare state is like white privilege: its whole power comes from the fact it is not talked about. Not seen as welfare.
  3. To understand the American right, we have to understand the process of forgetting that allowed Heinlein to suppress memory of pension.

(Read the rest)

This is Ayn Rand, who had lung cancer from her smoking, going on Medicare all over again.

Libertarians are wrong, and they are hypocrites.

One cannot prove this, but it ‘is’ in the same sense that Mount Everest ‘is’, or that Alma Cogan ‘isn’t’.*

*From The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

If the NSA is Geeks, They are Really Bad Geeks

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All on the Taxpayer’s Dime

It turns out that the deranged mind of NSA chief General Keith Alexander has created an “Information Dominance Center” based on the bridge of the Star Ship Enterprise:

But a perhaps even more disturbing and revealing vignette into the spy chief’s mind comes from a new Foreign Policy article describing what the journal calls his “all-out, barely-legal drive to build the ultimate spy machine”. The article describes how even his NSA peers see him as a “cowboy” willing to play fast and loose with legal limits in order to construct a system of ubiquitous surveillance. But the personality driving all of this – not just Alexander’s but much of Washington’s – is perhaps best captured by this one passage, highlighted by PBS’ News Hour in a post entitled: “NSA director modeled war room after Star Trek’s Enterprise”. The room was christened as part of the “Information Dominance Center”:

“When he was running the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, Alexander brought many of his future allies down to Fort Belvoir for a tour of his base of operations, a facility known as the Information Dominance Center. It had been designed by a Hollywood set designer to mimic the bridge of the starship Enterprise from Star Trek, complete with chrome panels, computer stations, a huge TV monitor on the forward wall, and doors that made a ‘whoosh’ sound when they slid open and closed. Lawmakers and other important officials took turns sitting in a leather ‘captain’s chair’ in the center of the room and watched as Alexander, a lover of science-fiction movies, showed off his data tools on the big screen.

 “‘Everybody wanted to sit in the chair at least once to pretend he was Jean-Luc Picard,’ says a retired officer in charge of VIP visits.”

It’s not just that it’s wasteful and silly.

It’s also  that it shows a level of narcissism that should disqualify anyone who is going to be going to have anything close to his level of access to personal information.

The fact that General Alexander really appears to be really nuts should scare the hell out of all of us.

Also, it’s the wrong series.

Not only should it be the original, but it should be modeled on the one from this episode:

That is, after all, the reality of what he really wants.

Well, Duh………

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Better than ST:TNG

The Writers Guild of America has the original Star Trek series higher than they did Star Trek: The Next Generation:

The Writers Guild of America has announced the 101 best written TV shows of all time, and I would like to draw your attention to a small excerpt from the list:

33. Star Trek

 79. Star Trek: The Next Generation

I am not surprised.

In my opinion, the best written SF show around the time of ST:TNG was ALF.

Notwithstanding the fact that Jean Luc Picard might have been a better captain than James T. Kirk, particularly if I were Ensign Liebowitz of Starship Security, the characters never worked as well.

You could see Kirk being adored by the crew, while Picard was distance, intellectual, and sarcastic; the sort of commander who you would call “The Old Man”, when he wasn’t around.

Spock not wanting to move onto command worked, it was completely absurd for Riker.

And let’s not go with the “Ships Counselor”, or Wil Wheaton’s first turn in the series as the boy genius.

Geebus, it sucked.

As an aside, I am heartened that The Prisoner was on the list as well, though I would have put that at number 1.

This Does Not Promote the Progress of Science and Useful Arts

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This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.

Or how the capture of our IP regulatory process by rent seekers has f%$#ed us all:

Last night, robots shut down the live broadcast of one of science fiction’s most prestigious award ceremonies. No, you’re not reading a science fiction story. In the middle of the annual Hugo Awards event at Worldcon, which thousands of people tuned into via video streaming service Ustream, the feed cut off — just as Neil Gaiman was giving an acceptance speech for his Doctor Who script, “The Doctor’s Wife.” Where Gaiman’s face had been were the words, “Worldcon banned due to copyright infringement.” What the hell?

Jumping onto Twitter, people who had been watching the livestream began asking what was going on. How could an award ceremony have anything to do with copyright infringement?

………

And then it began to dawn on people what happened. Gaiman had just gotten an award for his Doctor Who script. Before he took the stage, the Hugo Awards showed clips from his winning episode, along with clips from some other Doctor Who episodes that had been nominated, as well as a Community episode.

………

This was, of course, absurd. First of all, the clips had been provided by the studios to be shown during the award ceremony. The Hugo Awards had explicit permission to broadcast them. But even if they hadn’t, it is absolutely fair use to broadcast clips of copyrighted material during an award ceremony. Unfortunately, the digital restriction management (DRM) robots on Ustream had not been programmed with these basic contours of copyright law.

I would also note that the use of clips in an award show used to be clearly fair use, but they had the rights anyway, but the zero tolerance of the RIAA, the MPAA, and the BBC (who do you think produces Dr. Who).

Rent seeking is always a source of inefficiency in the economy, and it should be allowed, as in the case of patent and copyright, only to the degree to which we as a society see a benefit.

The current IP regime is an impediment, not an aid to innovation and other productive work.

A Yankees Fan Throws Out the First Pitch at the Detroit Game

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Star Wars villain Darth Vader throws out the ceremonial first pitch to the Detroit Tigers’ Duane Below before the game between the Tigers and New York Yankees at Comerica Park in Detroit, Michigan (Julian H. Gonzalez / Detroit Free Press/MCT)

There are two reasons to be a Yankees fan.

The first is, as my mother did, is to live a few blocks from the stadium.

You could look down into the stadium and catch parts of the game from the roof of her parent’s apartment.

The second reason is to be deeply evil.

To have turned to the dark side, as it were.

In memory of Steve Gilliard, let me say, F%$# the F%$#ing Yankees.

BTW, naming stadia after corporations is even more evil than the New York Yankees.