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Year of Commercial Crew

"Liftoff! The rise of Starliner and a new era of human spaceflight!"
—Josh Barrett, Boeing launch commentator

"I’d say we’re in the 85-90% range of our test objectives."
—Jim Chilton, senior vice president of Boeing’s Space and Launch Division

This is why Boeing is so terrible: They can't even acknowledge their failures and address them. Starliner isn't a new era of anything, and didn't make it to the station. If there had been crew on board, they'd sit in orbit, possibly for days depending on how far off orbit they are and the ground weather, then risk reentry for no purpose, and the station wouldn't get resupplied. Best case is nobody dies but the mission's still a failure.

And for this they're taking $300M? And a couple billion wasted on SLS which may never fly. This is just pork. Politicians giving money to a company, who cares if anything works. Everyone involved is committing fraud.

I think NASA should cancel all of Boeing's contracts. Let them try to qualify again, submit bids like anyone else, without political bullshit. Maybe Blue Origin or Virgin Galactic can launch better and faster.

SpaceX has been supplying the ISS since checks Falcon launches 2012-05-22. They were supposed to get Crew Dragon to the ISS in 2015, but didn't finish it until 2019-03-02 with flight 69 (nice), and still aren't crew-rated until an abort test next year; but they're taking half as much per flight and are far less likely to blow up or fail.

Roscosmos are still the only ones capable of getting a crew safely to and from orbit. Foust's article doesn't go into how Roscosmos is run by thieves and plunderers while trash overflows, but they don't seem like they'll be long for the world Solar System.

What I'm Watching: Nightflyers

I'm much more a fan of George R.R. Martin's SF than his fantasy/"English history for C-average history students" aka "A Song of Ice and Fire". "Nightflyers" is a good novella, but it has maybe an hour or two of content, so the show at 10 hours is ridiculously expanded and bears only the slightest resemblance to the story.

Royd Eris in the book is enfeebled, a pasty white slug in an acceleration couch, has no immune system, has never touched a living Human, has no crew, and runs the ship by advanced automation. In the show, he becomes Roy, big black dude, and while he hides in his deck for a while, he's fit and strong and can totally come out and fuck the passengers when he wants. I had a theory about how they reconciled this, which was later revealed to be (mostly?) correct. I would have preferred the original cameras & holograms version.

In the show there's an angry mob of crew and a bald Picardian asshole XO so you can get reactions, and as victims.

The big reveal of the book was the force on the captain's side of the ship, and the horrible logic of how you survive it. In the show, that's introduced early and it doesn't have any of the original powers, personality, or origin. It's the least of your problems.

Telepathy and telekinesis are big drivers of the book, and while there's a telepath on the show, he's irrelevant, a walkie-talkie would be just as useful but they don't seem to have any. The second teep was changed in the show, probably so they could film more psychic sex scenes. Later they talk about "teke" as some kind of magical psychic powerup energy, not "telekinesis".

In the book, Humans have FTL and know (and have warred with) many alien races, thousands of years after leaving Earth, the volcryn are a legend of a slow-moving STL fleet in the void between the stars, where no FTL race goes; a mystery but not Humanity's one big chance. In the show, Humans have only recently reached space and have STL, and the volcryn are the only hope of getting FTL before using up the Solar System or some such nonsense.

So, as opposite as you can get.

First few episodes are setup and world-building, and here it's pretty good. It's Actual Science Fiction (that is, fiction about science, and not contradicting reality) in most parts. The ship looks pretty good, a big spinning ring with habitat pods on the ends, and the "ship" in the middle. Gravity is never really addressed; they have artificial gravity in the book, so I don't know why there's a ring here. We rarely see any pod interior except the "terraform" pod with a forest and bees, and a cargo pod full of crates and the telepath's shipping container.

Halfway thru, something goes very wrong with the writers.

S1E6, the show introduces a derelict ship, and this suddenly becomes a terrible episode of Space:1999. I'll just say this: Human cloning requires a food source. You can't make food from nothing by jerking guys off and cloning people; it's so fucking stupid. At least in Rick & Morty's Froopyland (S3E9, "The ABC's of Beth") there's an entire world of biological matter, and breeding hybrid babies just makes edible food out of them.

S1E7, the telepath wanders around being a plaything for the crew, who again shouldn't exist. The cyberneticist has her fantasy world of a 1950s diner shattered by a little black girl being there. Karl goes more crazy about his dead daughter.

S1E8 is the terrible Michael Crichton bio-horror ep with bad mushrooms. The show's really coming apart, no semblance of main story arc, just disconnected events.

S1E9 finally remembers the mission exists, the telepath makes contact with the volcryn in a way that greatly contradicts the book, the annoying xenobiologist goes crazy and there are deaths, but not the ones of the book.

S1E10 has everyone else go crazy, "Mom"/cyberneticist gets dumbass Picard to sabotage the drives which we know only genetic superwoman can fix, Karl goes out to meet the volcryn/hallucination of his dead daughter. Show comes to a confusing, incomplete end.

Happily this mess has been cancelled.

If they'd kept the tone of E1-E5 and just finished up the original volcryn story, "Mom" killing almost everyone, and genetic superwoman and what's left of Royd flying off forever, this could've been salvaged. I don't know what happened to the writers at S1E6, but that should never have happened.

★★★☆☆ at the start, ★☆☆☆☆ by the end.

What I'm Watching: The Dunwich Horror

I found a cheap Bluray two-pack of The Dunwich Horror (1970), and Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971), great classic weird horror movies. I'll see Murders later.

The Dunwich Horror looks great, that vibrant '70s color, sets with disorienting angles and weird lighting. Sound's not fantastic, music has a few repeated stingers but not a long soundtrack. Long stretches are silent, waiting for someone to speak.

Dean Stockwell's a charming but weird motherfucker at any time, but here as Wilbur Whateley (the presentable Whateley brother) he was at his peak. He's smooth but kind of square, with raving weirdo shit a millimeter beneath the surface. Just perfect casting and acting for the role. I don't care for his corduroy jacket style, but it was the '70s.

Sandra Dee as the naïve Nancy is certainly vapid enough, but maybe a little plump and matronly at 28 to be a college girl. She wears maybe the weirdest slit overcoat/cape thing I've ever seen, not explicable even by the '70s. Later when she's drugged out and just writhing around in a nightgown, there's no "acting" but she's a useful prop, and her vag doubles as a bookrest. The film does not pass the Bechdel Test, either with her or her girlfriend.

Ed Begley as Professor Armitage, mortal enemy of the Whateleys, uncomprehending owner of the Necronomicon, is as stuffy, closed-minded, and foolish as he should be. What I don't know is what kind of lecture he could possibly give; he doesn't understand the Mythos, and the book would destroy all of his precious Christian delusions.

It's an age-old story, boy looks for the Necronomicon, meets girl, seduces girl, steals Necronomicon, summons Yog-Sothoth with girl as sacrifice.

Unfortunately there's a very long stretch of no Wilbur and Nancy, just Armitage questioning people in his slow, "let me put it like this" "you may find this hard to believe" fussing around, with equally old, doddering fools who waste a scene filling a pipe. The girlfriend who wanders around is pointless. Unbearable and most of his scenes should have been cut completely.

The "good Christian folk" of Dunwich are the same bigoted, murderous mob that killed Wilbur's great-grandfather; justified perhaps but no less loathesome. They really do make you sympathize with Wilbur's desire to bring back the Old Ones and replace Humanity.

The Old Ones here are not Cthulhu and kin, but mere body-painted pagans who dance and orgy in the meadows, but Yog-Sothoth and the other Whateley brother are Lovecraftian enough. Most scenes of him are just weird camera angles, light & sound effects, and a wind machine, but a couple good shots of the being.

And then the shittiest rap battle in history ends with the sanctimonious idiots winning. But there is another…

There's a lot of room for improvement, and the middle stretch is dull, but it's a good film that's also a good Lovecraft adaptation, rarest of things.

★★★★☆

Apple's Bug Bounty

Yo I'm'a be a bounty hunter like Boba Fett when he was still cool, yo!

"It sounds like you don’t get paid until (and unless) Apple fixes the bug."

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Radar.

HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!

Oh, you're never getting paid.

Apple Music Replay

I don't at all like that it's buried in the beta webapp. But it works, once you get thru Apple's aggressively defensive login system (which, sure, it protects all my stuff; be defensive).

So clearly it only tracks Apple Music playtime; I mostly use my local music library. Anything here is stuff I don't own, or on an Apple playlist. And the two extremes: '80s pop music, and '90s industrial/metal. I don't understand some of these, why are there 5 plays of Rammstein's DEUTSCHLAND but nothing else off that album? I much prefer Engel.

replay2019-songs

replay2019-artists

The Far Side: Cow Tools as a Web Service

Remember back in the 1980s (technically, 1979-1995), for those of you alive then, The Far Side was the best comic in newspapers. Uh, see, they printed blogs and Florida Man stories on paper… Uh, cut down the Amazon rain forest and pulped the wood, rolled it into sheets, dyed it white, and put ink on it. Well, not everyone had computers, OK? No, their phones didn't have displays, either. Sometimes didn't even have buttons, just a rotary dial you kids can't operate. I'm getting off topic.

So. After 25 years of fucking around, Gary's finally got someone to make him a website and publish his comics, a few every day. Here's the thing: It sucks. There's no RSS feed. Little indiction of when a comic was first printed; the year is shown in copyright, but some were probably held over months or years from when first copyrighted to when they were printed. And most ridiculously, it hammers the Disqus server, which I have blocked by both /etc/hosts and Ghostery, so the page just fills up the console complaining, and eventually crashes; happily Safari sandboxes pages now, but in the old days this would've crashed the browser. The page source is 2000 lines, and a bunch of loaded libraries, most of which are there for loading & showing ads. I don't see ads, because they're all loaded at runtime and I block everything, but I assume it's just a wall of popups and autoplay video for the handful of suckers who don't have blockers yet.

Oh, and there's an attempt to stop people from right-clicking & saving images, but you can just drag the image out in Safari, or screenshot it on any computer. Idiots who don't understand how computers work shouldn't try making "security" choices like that.

The whole thing competently written would just be an RSS feed in the header, a banner, a single on-server static image ad, a cartoon, and forward/back buttons. Less than 20 lines, take a programmer an afternoon to write it including a script to generate each day's cartoon and update the RSS XML file.

So now it sits in my "daily bookmarks folder" which I don't hit every day, of shitty sites I have to open manually, look at, then close because they're garbage sites written by garbage people.

What I'm Reading: Stargate (1976), by Stephen Robinett

The "Gate" could open the way to distant galaxies—
or destroy the whole Universe…!

Saw the cover in a tumblr SF feed, and the title and summary caught my eye.

Despite the year, it's a pretty current story of corporate engineering management. The engineer, Robert Collins (a newbie in way over his skill level), and the company "lawyer"/gun thug/investigator Scarlyn Smith (basically Mike from Breaking Bad), try to figure out why the former chief engineer Norton was vanished from his funeral and turns up in pieces throughout LA. Collins manages to spare time from playing detective to do his job and build the Gate…

Spoiler discussion hereafter.

So the "one fictional science idea" of this book is a matter transporter. Originally somewhat short-ranged, but it allows you to build: Instant teleports across the world, or up to orbit (how conservation of motion is handled is not addressed; jumping to a space station moving 100x faster than the surface should plaster your bits on the wall), or to make a drone ship move FTL by transporting itself forward over and over (apparently biology can't handle the slight deviations in many ports, but electrically-driven starships can).

The Gate is just a giant transporter, with a reach measured in thousands of light years. In its first operational test it targets Tau Ceti, 12 light years away, and rips an asteroid-sized chunk of matter from a planet, including plant life. There's a few sentences about Collins having moral qualms about this. The villain's plan is rather more ambitious, but insane.

Even with just the "normal" application, this is a horrific device. Interstellar war? Just tear the enemy's planet apart from the comfort of your own orbit. You can use it to instantly travel across the Galaxy, or… the plot has another application for it.

There's an adage from Larry Niven's Known Space series, the efficiency of a star drive is directly proportional to its value as a weapon; there meaning that fusion drives, laser sail launchers, and interstellar laser comms make weapons as good as any main cannon. But this is far beyond that. Instant travel means you can kill a planet or a solar system instantly.

Not a particularly well-written or interesting book as literature, but piecing together the dangers of this thing, especially from the crazy scientist who shouts about "the crab!", gives it more value.

★★★½☆

Godzilla Shows Again and Again

Considered while watching Godzilla Final Wars again:

The Godzilla Cinematic Universe is massively more high-quality science fiction/space fantasy than Star Wars, Marvel, and DC combined.

Sure, there's a few stinkers across 65 years like the Roland Emmerich movie GINO, Son of Godzilla, All Monsters Attack, and arguably Godzilla 2014, not every film has a great plot or fights. But by and large, they're respectable work.

If I'm going to show someone just three Godzilla films, they'd be Godzilla (1954), GMK: Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack (2001), and Godzilla Final Wars (2004); alternately for the last Destroy All Monsters (1968), similar basic movie but more serious, less awesome.

"One who depends on power will be destroyed by it."
—Xilian leader, Godzilla Final Wars

Tokusatsu is better than CGI, but Gen Orobuchi's Godzilla anime, Final Wars (a mix of Tokusatsu and CGI), & Godzilla: King of the Monsters show you can animate good Godzilla movies.

Compare to Star Wars: Two and a half good movies in the original trilogy, nearly a dozen garbage films since, a bunch of bad cartoons. Marvel: Maybe 5 good movies (Iron Man, Thor, Avengers, Deadpool, Guardians of the Galaxy) and a bunch of recycled junk sequels. DC: The Dark Knight, Wonder Woman somewhat?, rest is Zack Snyderism at its worst.

What's the moral of Star Wars, post-original-Trilogy? "This is pod-racing!" or "kill your father and burn anything you should respect" or some shit. What's the moral of Marvel & DC? Punch "bad guys" and they'll be back next week; a lot of civilians die as collateral damage.

The moral of Godzilla, the truth you should've learned, is always that nature is bigger than mankind, that war brings only misery, that science without forethought and sacrifice brings only monsters.