Brickmuppet Blog 2.0

January 10, 2021

Responding to the Purging of Parler

I was saddened to learn that MeWe wasn't Pixy's social media outlet, but I've signed up for it anyway.

I do not like microblogging, but it's good to have some other alternatives to Twitter, now that Parler is gone and Gab is the junior Bostonian Baptist Anti-Fun League circa 1947.

I'm also on Pawoo, but honestly haven't posted there since Dec 7th. Maybe some of you can post Fediverse and other alternatives in the comments.

UPDATE: While I was typing on MeWe about my curry....I burned my curry.

Gah!

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1 I don't know how much longer it'll last but as of 11:30PM Sunday (Central) parler.com is still up.

Posted by: Rick C at Mon Jan 11 00:34:10 2021 (eqaFC)

2 And now it's gone.

Posted by: bouff at Mon Jan 11 03:12:39 2021 (pJ2Io)

3 Meanwhile, Fediverse is continuing on ticking.
Also, guys? Don't use your real name on Mewe unless it's real in your other identities. For one thing, I cannot tell who the heck you are!

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Mon Jan 11 14:43:07 2021 (LZ7Bg)

4 Yeah, the Fediverse isn't entirely immune to this sort of crap, but it's a lot more resistant. We should never have abandoned Usenet.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Mon Jan 11 22:12:39 2021 (PiXy!)

5 ALERT: Someone is planning a false flag event this weekend. Either the 16th, 17th, or 19th at state capitols and DC (the date of the supposed patriot event varies). Poorly designed posters have been mailed out to conservatives and conservative groups. The FBI is in on it, since they are now making noises about "uncovering the plot". (Sources, the Blaze, ABC, etc..)

The president is being held incommunicado, and our normal modes of communication are recording the event are being shut down. This is (other than the sheer hell of it) so that we cannot shine a light on what really happens this weekend.

The posters call for armed men to show up at the capitols for a march. This is a TRAP. Unfortunately, with a few million pissed off people, it's almost inevitable that enough idiots will show to give them their set-piece Tienanmen square massacre. If by some miracle, everyone stays home, I'm sure antifa, or Hollywood CGI will fill in.

What is planned next is a brutal crackdown on America in "response" to inaugurate the new regime. The capitol hill protest didn't do what they want, so this is plan B. These liars will now make up reality to suit them, so that they have some bloody shirt to wave giving them moral authority for the rest of the evil they plan.

Hope I'm just paranoid, but we'll find out this weekend.

Posted by: anonymous at Tue Jan 12 07:43:24 2021 (LL2wD)

6 Yeah, I've seen the flyers being circulated. The communist iconography couldn't be any more blatant if they had photoshopped Che's face onto the Statue of Liberty.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Jan 12 09:40:18 2021 (PiXy!)

7 Do ya'll have any of these flyers? Has anyone contacted authorities to warn them?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Tue Jan 12 14:07:49 2021 (5iiQK)

8 I've only seen them on Twitter. They're obviously fake, but I don't know what the level of fakery is. A real photo of a fake flyer? A fake photo of nonexistent flyer? A real photo of a real flyer for a fake protest?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tue Jan 12 23:03:07 2021 (PiXy!)

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January 09, 2021

Pixy Misa or Nostradamus?

I worry about what might happen to Hololive with American Big Tech gone batshit insane. They're as apolitical as you can get, but that's probably not going to be enough.

ANSWER: It's Pixy obviously. He's generally right. Nostradamus by contrast, was full of crap.

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Meanwhile: At Alpha Centauri

This story actually transpired a couple of weeks ago but I have been waiting for the inevitable debunking. Now one of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes is here to inform us how that went...

"The debunking is not going quite as smoothly as expected".

Oh dear.

Allow me to explain...

A few weeks ago, radio astronomers detected an odd radio signal that seemed to come from from the nearby Alpha Centauri system, the 3 closest stars to Earth.

That's bloody coincidental, so while the press was being their usual calm selves, the scientists did what they always do when they hear an 'extraterrestrial signal', they set about trying to figure out what Earth radio signal they had mistakenly picked up.

Well, weeks later there have been some developments...sort of.

Basically all known terrestrial radio signals have been eliminated as being this.

As I understand it, the signal hasn't changed much in bearing (relative to the sun), which one would expect if it to do if it were being broadcast from inside the solar system. Moreover, this turns out not to be a particularly weak signal by the standards of radio astronomy, quite the opposite in fact, and after adjusting their readings and analyzing their parallax, they've narrowed it down to coming from the direction of Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf that is the closest of the three stars in Alpha Centauri and the closest star to Earth.

The chances of the first SETI success involving the closest star in the sky is....well, the odds of THAT seem dubious.

However, this signal is strange, and is stubbornly defying debunkery. An inability to, as of yet, debunk something that is vanishingly unlikely is NOT the same as confirmation. However, this has slipped out of the realm of press hype and into the realm of 'interesting'.

There's a good overview of this conundrum here:

Interestingly, the signal doesn't appear to be data...it's a monotone signal, like a dial tone...or a beacon.

Proxima is now known to have at least 2 planets and an asteroid/dust belt.

One of the planets, (Proxima Centauri B) is in the theoretical habitable zone from the star. However that habitable zone is very close to the star. Proxima's a small star, a tad bigger than Jupiter (though much more massive) and it's not a calm star like ours. It flares quite spectacularly. In fact it has flares that are bigger than those spewed out by our sun.

Any planet in the "habitable zone" of this dinky little star is going to get bombarded by star farts, and would require a massive atmosphere similar to Venus, and/or a terribly strong magnetic field to keep its atmosphere from being stripped away.

Note too that "habitable zone" is a bit of a provincial and vague term. Venus, Earth and Mars are in our sun's habitable zone, but only one of them is habitable by humans.

The planet in that system which has gotten the most attention is the aforementioned Proxima Centauri B, in part because it is in the habitable zone and in part because it was discovered first. It has a mass somewhere between 1.7 and 1.6 times that of Earth and an estimated surface gravity, according to Wikipedia of between .95 and 1.1 g. It's a bit bigger and somewhat more massive than Earth. Assuming it has an atmosphere, it's probably colder than Earth...but that's a big assumption, because it's so close to its star that its getting blasted by solar wind and radiation, that, in the absence of a strong magnetic field would have stripped away the atmosphere long ago and sterilized the husk.

We have some experience with the magnetic fields of roughly Earth-size rocky planets, having no less than four of them in the general vicinity. Only one of them, has a useful magnetic field. Mars has one that only extends above the planetary surface in the tropics. Venus has a weak magnetosphere caused by the impact of solar wind on its upper atmosphere, Mercury, which is about the size of the moon (but as massive as Mars) has a very weak field, and Earth has about the second strongest magnetic field in the solar system after Jupiter. Earth's anomalously strong field is actually on par with the other gas giants like Saturn. It is hypothesized that this is due to tidal forces coming from the moon and the fact that Earth still spins on its axis fairly quickly.

As we noted a while back, any planet orbiting as close to its star as Proxima b is likely to be tidally locked, that is, it's likely to orbit once per rotation (like the moon is to Earth). However, In the embedded video there is speculation that it might be in resonance, perhaps with the other, recently discovered, planet (Proxima Centauri C) much as Mercury is in resonance with Jupiter. It is unclear if this is based on models or wishful thinking, but this would at least mean that it would have a day/night cycle. However, even generously granting that possibility, it likely still does not rotate fast enough to generate a sufficient magnetic field to protect it. There is also a data artifact noted in passing on page 8 of this paper that opens the remote possibility that the planet might have a moon (how that could possibly work so close to the star is unclear). There is a video discussion of this planet and the solar system in general here.

The study confirming Proxima b also indicated there might be another, smaller planet with an orbital period of 5.15 days (Noted on page 7 of the previous paper) but Proxima d is, as yet, unconfirmed.

The only other planet confirmed to be in the system in the system, Proxima Centauri C is either a small ice giant (would that be an ice orc?) , or a big rocky world. It is quite frigid and fairly far from the star, being outboard of what appears to be a dust or asteroid belt. This is all based on inferences from the wobble and red-shift of the star, but, recently astronomers were actually able to take a direct picture of Proxima C. While this dark frigid world elicits little interest from those looking for life signs, the ability to directly take a picture of a planet in another solar system is cool indeed. So what does this boring thing look like?

It appears to be far larger and brighter than its apparent mass would suggest.

Yes the bigger planet in the system we are "getting signals from" is 'glowy', way bigger than it should be, and appears to be vastly less dense than a planet.

Wow.

One possibility is that this planet has a massive ring system, that, like those of Saturn and Chariklo, is coated in highly reflective ice.

Uncredited NASA artist's conception of Proxima-C via

For reasons of propriety, we will, of course, dismiss out of hand the notion that Proxima C is an alien megastructure.

"Science Babe" is actually Rio Futaba as imagined by Uname.

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1 Damnit, I was hoping that it might be the real life equivalent of Ellis from 2300AD - a habitable planet orbiting around a red dwarf that is oddly not tide-locked, and where Americans can move to without being trapped in a high tech security state.

Posted by: cxt217 at Sat Jan 9 12:46:59 2021 (4i7w0)

2 So if they've been listening all this time, what happened 8.8 years ago that prompted their "head up" dial tone?

Posted by: Clayton Barnett at Sat Jan 9 13:30:53 2021 (QMNdN)

3 At the time, I suggested over at another website that the signal is a homing beacon from kids annoyed that Santa hasn't visited.

Posted by: Wonderduck at Sat Jan 9 16:52:35 2021 (Bkp4m)

So if they've been listening all this time, what happened 8.8 years ago that prompted their "head up" dial tone?

Radio astronomers are generally looking for interesting astronomical phenomena (phenomenae?) They point their radio telescopes at interesting things and Alpha Centauri consists of basic bitch versions of G,K, and M class stars, which are themselves basic bitch versions of stars.

Also, SETI does not have a lot of funding in comparison to other aspects of astronomy which get billions of dollars to spend on space origamis. SETI is full of serious researchers, but I get the impression that it is mostly professional astronomers who are basically pursuing their hobby. Not a lot of grants come to those who find nothing year after year and I imagine that the research doesn't generate a lot of peer-reviewed research.

" Having reviewed Professor Skippy's analysis suggesting that he'd heard nothing, we have concluded that, in fact, he heard nothing."

Also, Radio Astronomy and SETI in particular listen to a small chunk of the sky at any given time and since Radio Astronomy was a thing there has always been a LOT of radio signals to filter out. A lot of the work with SETI and RA in general is just trying to eliminate all the Top 40 and CB broadcasts. That takes time.

Finally, I suspect it is a matter of geography. Most radio telescopes are in the northern hemisphere. The constellation Centarus, despite being named by the Greeks, is now only visible from the southern hemisphere year round and south of Florida in the Summer.

So there was a star system, that was not interesting except because of its location, that wasn't really viewable with the best equipment, and a signal that was hard to filter out from the background noise and sounds like a dial-tone or radio test.
It's still probably nothing, but given how odd the signal is, whatever it is should at least be amusing.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Jan 9 17:32:19 2021 (5iiQK)

5 @CXT217

Mars, some asteroid, or Callisto would be a better bet.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sat Jan 9 17:35:54 2021 (5iiQK)

6 Mars, some asteroid, or Callisto would be a better bet.

Unless terraforming technology gets a LOT better, I rather a place that is both far away and whose residents will not be immediately vulnerable due to their life support systems being destroyed by planetary bombardment (a la what happened to Hochbaden in the 2300AD setting - yes, I have been reading old gaming modules.).

Posted by: cxt217 at Sun Jan 10 14:47:29 2021 (4i7w0)

7 Terraforming is outre' tech to be sure, but FAR less so than traveling 4.6 light years. In contrast to the Hochbaden scenario you mention, most any space settlements aside from Spaceports are going to be buried, either in asteroids or underground, presenting any attackers with the thorny issues the Earth faced in Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Hochbaden was, IIRC, a Bavarian vanity project with the pressurized habitats all exposed for reasons of artistic whimsy, and big open windows the size of football fields to facilitate tourism. In 2300, most other closed-ecosystem colonies were much more sound architecturally.
Even assuming that orbital bombardment is not a consideration, and frankly its not high on the list of realistic design concerns, mitigation of radiation and meteors is going to require subterranean placement of most habitable areas, with periscopes bringing light in for farming.
Sunlight looses the bandwidths necessary for terrestrial photosynthesis past the Trojans, so, Jupiter is probably a hard limit on how far out we could go in the absence of fusion power. Jupiter is also the extreme limit of practical solar power (see Juno).

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at Sun Jan 10 17:48:09 2021 (5iiQK)

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January 08, 2021

Short Vacation

Image is, sadly, not representative of where I went.

Art by Don Davis

more...

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January 07, 2021

On The Importance of not Becoming the Monsters One is Fighting

First let me say that I condemn and disavow those who stupidly decided yesterday to get in touch with their inner Antifatard and charge the Capitol building.

This was stupid.

This was foul.

This was wrong.

The purpose of the exercise is to oppose the left, not BE the left.

These idiots are jus as bad as Antifa, BLM and all the other thugs we suffered from last year.

And that is an important component of trying to understand how we got here.

( Note to the linguistically impaired: Understanding is not endorsing, or defending. These actions are indefensible.)

For some time people have had the following explained to them in the most sanctimonious and arrogant way possible.

And anyone who disagreed was called everything but a child of God.

None of this excuses the vile shit that went down at the Capitol yesterday, but it does put it into context.

I and many other conservatives are denouncing these fuckwits in exactly the same way we denounced the riots of last summer... and while it's good to FINALLY have a bipartisan denunciation of political violence, in stark contrast to the previous situation, if AOC and her co-religionists can't disavow their previous statements in favor of insurrectionists, they only make the problem worse.

Because the message that the riots, and the election sent is that only those who violently protest will be taken seriously.

Trump is a carnival barker and a narcisist. But Trump did not do this. He sure as fuck could have chosen his words better, but he did not start this riot. The rioters are people, with agency, and they chose to be little shits.

Furthermore, the left has spent a year normalizing political violence.

This does not excuse the vile actions that took place yesterday. It makes them even more reprehensible, because those stupid actions served to malign the hundreds of thousands of protestors who were there to peacefully protest and it deprives the public at large of any hope that either side denounces violence.

I have seen it noted on other blogs that this wasn't any different from the many times that lefty loons broke into the Capitol during hearings, votes or state of the union speeches except that the capitol police did not shoot any of those protestors to death....

Outside the Supreme Court 2018

...which almost seems like a fair point until you realize that our side is the one that is supposed to stand against this darkness. Another fact frequently noted is that aside from the broken windows, this was a remarkably sedate riot, with little looting or burning, and while that is, indeed true, the riot was still a damned RIOT. Furthermore, the sacred nature of the venue rather negates that argument.

There is one big caveat however.

This is not a defense of this indefensible action but a fact and a warning.

If riots are the rules by which the political game is to be played going forward, both sides are eventually going to follow those rules. The only thing that had kept conservatives from responding in kind ( Instead famously leaving protest areas cleaner than when they showed up) was a faith that the system could work for them, the bourgeoisie values that were the key to their standard of living and a sense of civics. All of these have been under constant attack, especially in schools to the point that the younger generations are starting to see those cultural checks as indicators of gullibility.

This is a dangerous place we are in, and if the nation goes over the precipice, a fair amount of the blood spilled will be on the hands of those who acted so stupidly yesterday. And on those who have unimaginable cultural influence and have so normalized this sort of behavior when it was their allies doing it.

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January 05, 2021

I can't tell you how gratifying it is...

...to be told that my blog inspires "great memotipasi" by so much of my readership.

"...the hell?"

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January 04, 2021

THIS is How it's Done

I don't think I can RUN this game on my Mac.

I'm probably going to buy it anyway.

Click here for Supah Size.

It's well past time someone replied to the scolds this way.

Thank you Top Hat.

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January 03, 2021

Well,

...it appears that The Chieftain has finally done an analysis of all the tanks.

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January 01, 2021

Happy 2021

Rejoice as 2021 puts her predecessor in her place!

Art by ç´”ã†ãƒ¼ã‚‹(Junwool?)

Hopefully, the year that various Asian cultures refer to as the year of the Ox will be better than the year of the plague rat.

May the new year bring all of you prosperity, happiness, and above all, good health.

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December 31, 2020

Going into 2021

...I note that thanks to GranBlue Fantasy, Ox-girls are not nearly as hard to find as they ought to be.

Art by Shiao

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2020 in Review

For a more comprehensive overview, you can do much worse than going here.

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December 29, 2020

On the Solarwinds Hack

InRange TV is a fireams channel, and a pretty good one. However, the channels proprietor, Karl Kasarda works in IT security and is involved to some extent in the hacking community.

He's decided to go off format in this instance to clear up what he sees as some misreporting on the recently disclosed IT breach that has been in the news of late.

Watch on Bitchute.

I'm curious as to what the IT experts here think.

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A Solution to the Gawr-Gura Conundrum

Gawr-Gura is an English language V-Tuber associated with Hololive. Gawr-Gura is a little unusual in a manner distinct from her just being little and unusual. She embraces the conceit of many female V-Tubers being some variety of fantasy trope animal girl, but instead of being a catgirl, foxgirl or bunny-girl, she's half-carcharadon, you know, a great white shark.

There's lore, I'm sure.

While other demi-human damsels have cute animal ears coming out of their heads Gawr-Gura's hybrid nature is denoted by an art-deco hoodie and a shark tail.

Now, if you're anything like me, you're looking at that and wondering how she goes to the bathroom.

"Whatever setbacks I have had in my life, I can at least always be secure in the knowledge that I am not anything like you."

Anyway, Hololive is a Japanese company, and over there, a few Gundam toilets notwithstanding, they have lots of squat toilets, so, problem solved.

The toilet in the maison I lodged at for a month in Nerima; better suited to shark-girls than honkey-boys. .

See? There's one less thing to worry about now.

You're welcome.

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Today's Lesson for Engineers is 'Sand in the Gears'

A couple of Danish Architects have developed a tent for use on Luna and/or Mars. LUNARK is a very interesting concept that folds up into a compact package that is covered in solar panels, and, using cutting edge origami technology, expands 560 percent to become an airtight habitat with an algae based air recycling system!

The two Nordic nerds recently went LARPING around northern Greenland and set up their airtight tent on a volcanic outcropping that is very close in temperature and terrain to the temperate zones on Mars. They then set it up, sealed the thing, and because they are awesome and take their design they entered and exited thru the airlock and went outside in self contained breathing apparatus. They also did a fair number of actual experiments relating to the project.

The two month experiment was a success which encountered no major issues except for the polar bear which is a matter of limited concern on the moon or Mars. The success of the air recycling system is quite a feat.

However, I have 2 concerns.

The airlock appears to be the toilet/shower, which makes sense, and is an inspired solution on one level as the airlock needs to be a decontamination station. However, this could lead to issues if one is outside, running low on air, while someone is in the airlock having a disagreement with their algae burgers.

The other concern is more integral, so much so that I think I should ask one of the Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes for a second opinion before I use the deep width and breadth of insight that a history degree gives someone commenting on architectural and engineering matters...

"Oh God, what Moon dust will do to that."

YES! All those expanding joints look like they are inherently exposed to dust. This is not an issue on the Greenland icecap, but lunar dust is ubiquitous, abrasive and electrically charged, Martian dust is less abrasive but it is also ubiquitous and corrosive and we've seen on Earth what can happen to relatively sealed mechanisms like firearms actions when exposed to sand, even good ones.

Maybe put the whole thing in a big bag?

Despite being called a 'tent' by the Daily Mail, this thing is not man-portable. It weighs 1738 kilos (3400 pounds) (which is a remarkable achievement for a habitat capable of sustaining 2 people with food water and air for 2 months). 1738 kilos translates roughly to 290 kilos on the Moon and 660 kilos on Mars. This is more of a camper.

None of this is to detract from the skill and verve of the inventors. It's a prototype, they are testing it in the field and braving polar bears to do it.

So Kudos to SAGA Space Architects! Any bugs can be worked out and as fundamental an issue as the dust problem seems to be, there are probably mitigation measures that can be taken...like a big bag. We've seen with Elon Musk's cornucopia of 'splodies that the way to get to space is to test things to destruction and find out what needs to be fixed. They are doing that with this and have done their math so well that they haven't had a failure yet.

This is a pretty awesome achievement.

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Citations for Civilizations End

Rod Dreher has an article current events, current trends, and future prospects that is eye opening and a bit scary. Unless you are very easily offended, I urge you to read the whole thing.

Dreher is a good and insightful writer, but he's a doctrinare conservative and a bit of a stick-in the-mud generally opposed to any whimsy on principle, so it is quite unexpected that he allowed a Naruto reference in his addenda.

Surely the end times are upon us.

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December 27, 2020

Oh Thank Goodness

It's just a crazy mad bomber.

Nothing to worry about.

Seriously, there was speculation on both sides of the political divide that whoever set off the massive explosion in Nashville was motivated by politics. The theories have included, but not been limited to, Trump voters, Bernie Bros, BLM, Antifa, Anti Government Militias on the Libertarian Right, Anti Government Militias on the Anarchist Left, people upset at AT&T, or a false flag operation by one of the above to frame another of the above, and all of the aforementioned scenarios were presented as a long stride down the dark path towards civil war.

Hence, the lack of coverage here* as there was not merely a lack of knowledge, but the actual opposite of knowledge. The information beyond the facts of the blast itself actually went into in the negative as the day progressed.

NOW THERE'S A LEAD.

And we fully acknowledge that said lead might itself might be bullshit**, but it appears the police have a suspect.

And to everyone's relief that suspect appears to be/have been a 5-G whack job ; somebody who believes that 5-G celltowers are spreading COVID-19.

This bit of Cray-Cray is far outside the realm of politics, and more importantly, seems, while very fringe, to be bi-partisan, nay, international stupidity.

So, on this one issue, we can all come together in a brief moment of national unity, the likes of which is normally reserved for furries.

*Well, that and the outage.

** As has happened before

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