Today in Journaism
Yesterday, Shanon Melero at Jezebel did a piece on the disgraceful decision to omit the iconic Chun-Li from the new Mortal Combat re-boot and inquired as to how such a travesty was allowed to happen.
19 minutes later, the layers of researchers and fact checkers who are assigned the sisyphean task of preventing Jezebel's writers from publishing moronic merde, chimed in with an answer to her inquiry.
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Obviously those layers of fact checkers and editors no longer employed by major news media (if they ever were) did not go to work for Jezabel after leaving the MSM.
Posted by: Ubu at Fri Feb 19 08:29:56 2021 (UlsdO)
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The usual suspects have leapt to Jezebel's defense, explaining that they were only pretending to be retarded.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Fri Feb 19 09:18:16 2021 (PiXy!)
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They certainly aren't helping out Donald Trump, Jr., who lambasted Texas' "Democrat" Governor Greg Abbott, over Abbott's horrible handling of Texas' energy crisis.
While I'm certainly on board with the accusation that Abbott has done a miserable job, Greg Abbott is one of the longest-tenured Republicans to ever serve at the highest levels of Texas governance.
Posted by: Ben at Sat Feb 20 14:02:23 2021 (9Wcjc)
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Yay for no 'splodies. But the current thinking is that there were in fact no lakes, more and more they're finding that everything we see on the surface of Mars can be explained by glaciers and ice flows, and there was probably never liquid water present in any significant amount.
Posted by: David at Thu Feb 18 20:53:44 2021 (aT8ji)
He was a voice in the darkness for many years. When there were no other opinions being broadcast he was there reminding people that no matter what they might see, hear and read in the media, there were other people who thought like them. We were reminded, by Rush, that each of us was not alone and or crazy, no matter how much the powers that be insisted that we were alone.
He was quite possibly the most influential radio personality in U.S. history. He jump-started conservative publishing, highlighting conservative thinkers on his program at a time when no one else would give them the time of day. His very existence was a lifeline to both the populist and intellectual right, and the megaphone he wielded broke the the information monopoly of the day, allowing voices not of the establishment to be heard, and affect change.
In his own odd, button down way, he was kind of..punk, delighting in stirring up controversy and when the scolds came for them, he'd usually turn the tables on them and raise millions for various children's charities.
I don't agree with everything he said. He talked 3 hours a day for 22 years so I'm sure there's something there to offend everybody. But he was a voice for the people that the powers that be hate. People like myself would never have emerged from the wilderness if not for him.
Through his personal hardships , his deafness, his cancer he remained, in public, upbeat until the end, providing an example as well as an inspiration.
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Mark Steyn got it in one with "Rush took politics seriously but not solemnly." Rush was an inherent optimist, and that was also why so many people followed him. IMHO, he was one of those childhood heroes that, after all these years, remained a hero.
I like to think that in Elysium, he, Andrew Breitbart, and Ronald Reagan swapping tales and laughs.
Posted by: cxt217 at Wed Feb 17 23:23:32 2021 (4i7w0)
RWBY has been a very uneven series, it started out with dreadful production values that were more than compensated for by engaging characters, an intriguing plot and the superb fight choreography of Monty Oum. The series had a lot of potential. Furthermore, it inspired tremendous goodwill as its cast and crew seemed likable and were punching so far above their weight that it was absolutely inspiring.
Mr. Oum's untimely death during the production of season three foreshadowed rough seas for the series, while the last season he worked on was by far the best until then, subsequent seasons were, despite much higher production values, not as engaging cumulating in the inept 4-episode faceplant that was the finale of season 5.
However, the subsequent seasons were, while very different, nevertheless enjoyable and the show has improved steadily; regaining much of its appeal even as Rooster Teeth has squandered much of its goodwill with the public.
Now, with season 8 the show has finally surpassed even the excellent season three, with absolutely brilliant pacing, action and storytelling. Characters develop in unexpected, yet believable ways for both good and ill and the plot has been full of genuine surprises with the action nonstop.
If you dropped the show, I recommend picking it up again, but you'll probably want to at least watch last season, as this one begins in the middle of the chaos that season ended with. Fortunately, with short seasons and 10-15 minute runtimes on most episodes, the show is a quick watch.
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Season 8? I thought there were 6. And what I thought was 6 was turned into "Season 5 part 2" on the Rooster Teeth site. Is it no longer running there?
Posted by: Mauser at Thu Feb 18 00:33:15 2021 (Ix1l6)
One of the Best Things About Science Fiction
...is how it allows one some escapist respite from any reminders of current events.
If you have not seen Babylon 5 you are wrong!
But, you are also lucky, as it is currently running on HBO MAX where it has been digitally remastered with modern monitor resolutions in mind. It really is one of the best sci-fi series ever.
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Glad to see this got a 1080p remaster. They don't seem to have worked miracles, but it looks substantially better than the version I watched most recently. (I have the DVD box set but it's packed away somewhere.)
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Wed Feb 17 09:02:11 2021 (PiXy!)
After the 9/11 attacks, he received hate mail as well as death threats and assumed his career was over,
But on a flight to Toronto one day, an airline employee gave him an unexpected upgrade to first class. When he asked for an explanation, he recalled in the 2009 interview, the employee said, "I was in Tower 2, and I walked out.”
Moreover, architects, structural engineers and other people in the know were so impressed with how long the towers stayed up after the impacts that he spent his last years advising designers of high-rise projects around the world on matters of safety and structural redundancy.
Subsequent analysis showed that the construction methods that he invented and tested in the WTC kept the towers standing far longer than if they had been built to the then current standards and saved literally thousands of lives.
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I like Carano, I don't care about her personal views or opinions, and Disney has a horrible track record at "never working for Disney again", because they never say the silent part out loud: "until we need more money".
The Mandalorian was ruined for me in the finale of Season One, when they revealed the whole thing was just another way for Dave Filoni to write his personal fanfic, including all of his alternate universe bull****.
Posted by: Ben at Sat Feb 20 14:11:12 2021 (9Wcjc)
This show has been good from its beginning 5 years ago, but this latest, abbreviated, 10 episode season moves a mile a minute as it twists, turns and shocks the audience. Throwaway world building moments from earlier in the series come out of the woodwork to surprise and astonish.
The fifth season is a 4 ring circus. Since everything in the solar system except Bobbi' and Avaserala's employment situations were, as far as the characters were concerned, going gangbusters at the end of last season, the cast goes on vacation...which is where most of them are when things go pear shaped.
The Expanse is an excellent example of fairly hard sci-fi, but beyond its realistic portrayal of space its characterizations and human drama are much better than most, more mundane series.
The characters include a fellow who has (through either abuse, injury, or genes) basically a psychopath's brain, but who WANTS to be good..so he hangs out with what he assumes to be good people...to aid him in this difficult task. This season finally explains WHY he has this seed of goodness in the vast barren desert of his soul. It's very well handled.
The only even arguably unsatisfying moment in the entire season is an obviously late edit necessitated by production realities beyond the scope of this post, but your milage may vary, and it's a spoiler.
All in all this was probably the best season of this generally excellent show thus far. FWIW I think last season, while very good, was the weakest, though in retrospect, it set this season up superbly.
If you're not watching this show, you are wrong. It's currently available in full, on Amazon Prime.
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I loved season one but was turned off by the first episode of season two.
Which come to think of it was exactly my reaction to MLP: FIM.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thu Feb 11 08:00:53 2021 (PiXy!)
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The first episode of season two starts off following the cast of a completely different show based very loosely on Starhip Troopers before returning to the story in progress. Those people get Isekaied into The Expanse a couple of episodes later.
It does give a good idea of just how different in outlook the Martians are from the rest of the system.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Thu Feb 11 15:56:55 2021 (5iiQK)
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I'm running a bit behind on The Expanse. And annoyingly, when one hoists the black flag one discoveres that they're sending nastygrams to anyone they catch on the torrents without a VPN.
Posted by: Mauser at Sun Feb 14 04:12:43 2021 (Ix1l6)
The Things One Learns From One's Comments
So I got a bizarre spam comment earlier which consisted of what appeared to be a long, obsequious biography of William Dafoe that had been Google Translated from some other language.
While I did not click on the link (obviously) a perusal of the URL indicates that the link was to a site warning that Mr. Dafoe is secretly the leader of a global conspiracy.
Saying something as spicy as this, even yesterday would get you banned from social media and perhaps loose your job or even your bank account.
Now the conspiracy theory is a virtue signal.
Why in God's name would Time publish this?
I can think of four reasons.
1: TIME is a principled publication seeking unfettered truth and published this bombshell out of a sense of civic responsibility.
2: The editors at TIME have lost the plot and decided that the Q-Anon idiots should not be allowed to have all the fun.
3: They are gloating and rubbing our faces in our helplessness to further demoralize us.
4: They aim to incite people on the right to act out of desperation and despair, as the degenerate fuckwits did at the Capitol last month, because they need a better Horst Wessel moment.
That last is kind of outre' but one wonders, given the tensions in the country, and the assumption that the editorial staff at TIME are not blithering idiots, if that isn't at least possible in current year.
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Heck, Chris Hayes on January 12 began pulling the curtain away when he tweeted about the "43,000 votes" that "materialized in the right place." Scott Adams was one of the those people who noted it at the time.
Posted by: cxt217 at Fri Feb 5 19:47:03 2021 (4i7w0)
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Remember, these are people who believe that the NRA and the 'gun manufacturing lobby' create all of the desire for second amendment rights.
Theory domestic says that these people are top down cultists, and think neutralizing leadership prevents bottom up organization from being able to respond.
They think that they hold an unassailable fortress, and that the peasants would not dare rebel.
Theory foreign says "read some Chinese webnovels. One of the personality types that sought power after Mao was Jinping's flavor of sadist. This type very much cannot enjoy victory before they have rubbed it in the face of the loser. If we really are temporarily living in a satrapy, expect to have your face rubbed in it some more."
It is incorrect to conclude that nothing can be done.
It is incorrect to conclude that they can only get a bloody flag to wave if they provoke actual right wingers.
The level of premeditation and covert action that now seems apparent suggests that the FBI could have killed some guy, put his corpse with the bomb, and blown it up on Christmas.
They have no clue what they are doing. If my conspiracy theory
suspicions are correct, they are in fact certain to screw things up.
Giving them time to alienate people with these bizarre acts of insanity makes it more likely that regime opponents can win the civil war with a coalition that can bring a measure of lasting peace. Or even a peaceful transition out of the regime, because these actions seem to convey a lack of confidence.
The thing you can do is be a little bit more cautious about accepting official information, especially that which comes with suspicious timing.
It's naive to accept at face value the assertions Nancy Pelosi issues
wrt to an event whose details clearly make the case that she could have
let people into the building to turn Trump's protest to her own ends.
She has been moving to capitalize on it in the exact way she would if
she had been involved with malice. This theory might be false if she does not purge the house during and after the impeachment.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Fri Feb 5 22:02:55 2021 (6y7dz)
In fact, this was initially studied as an alternate history study by the British Interplanetary Society of what COULD have been developed given a more robust space program from the mid-'90s on.
The ship design is pretty interesting, with a layout similar to the Eagles from Space 1999. That is is because the nuclear engines can't really be throttled, and landing in one's own radioactive dust cloud is not a spaceflight best practice.
The landing engines are at 90 degrees to the main engines and the ship is designed to carry cargo in the manner of a flying crane.
"Tell them about the engine! The engine!"
'Kayy...
The SCORPION nuclear rockets are similar to the old NERVA rockets but use integral arc-jets in the nozzles to accelerate the exhaust to insane velocities. This gives both good thrust AND a very high exhaust velocity. It's not quite a torch ship but it combines the best traits of arc-jets and ion drives with nuclear thermal rockets.
But wait.
There's more!
Once a nuclear, thermal rocket is lit off, it becomes deadly to any unshielded people within about 100 miles. There is a shadow shield that protects the crew quarters of a nuclear ship, but operating around space stations, or even in lunar orbit passing over a settlement is problematic.
This reactor design has enough thrust to allow for a shield that completely surrounds the engine, and the fuel rods can be retracted into a sort of safe when the engine is not thrusting. this allows the rocket 360 degree safety when the main engine is disconnected, allowing it to dock at space stations or land on moons near settlements without worry.
Because the control rods, once activated, will be hot (thermally as well as radioactively) a liquid cooler and radiators will be required. This has the happy side effect of using the waste heat of even the inactive main engine to power a generator or thermocouple, allowing for enough auxiliary power to support an active cooling system for the propellant and any conceivable hotel load.
Finally, the ship does have artificial gravity, but without the engineering malpractice involved with a rotating pressure seal.
This is a really interesting design particularly when one remembers that it was designed with more modest lift capabilities than we now have in prospect in the form of Musk and Bezos's new large rockets.
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So is this thing nuclear thermal or nuclear electric? The limitations on Isp in either case is the temperature you can operate at with hydrogen. Hydrogen for the low molecular mass - ve ~ sqrt(k*T/m) where m is the average mass of your molecule or atom.
(Don't have time to read the paper right now, but skimming - it looks like an arcjet.)
Posted by: MadRocketSci at Wed Feb 3 10:10:19 2021 (hRoyQ)
So is this thing nuclear thermal or nuclear electric?
Yes!
It's an NTR rocket that has its propellant accelerated by an arcjet giving it a performance in the same ball-park as the theoretical performance of a gas core nuclear rocket that somehow doesn't instantly become space Chernobyl.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Feb 3 10:26:41 2021 (5iiQK)
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It belatedly occurs to me that we maybe ought not to continue referring to Nuclear Thermal Rockets as NTRs because....
Well...just because.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Wed Feb 3 10:33:21 2021 (5iiQK)
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