Listening to an installment of the Xanadu Cinema Pleasure Dome podcast recently, I was intrigued enough by one host’s excitement about this movie to spend a couple of hours with it over the weekend.
I’m still not sure what exactly in the world I watched.
Hundreds of Beavers is an absolute fever dream of a comedy, I know that much.
(more…)I certainly wasn’t expecting to cross paths with a frog on the way home this afternoon.
Little critter was just minding its business, hanging out on the sidewalk along the very, very busy 185th Street. I almost didn’t notice it in time to stop and take some pictures. As it is, I had to use the digital zoom on my phone to get anything decent. The moment I crept a bit closer to try for a shot with better detail, sproing! Off they went, back under the bramble and toward the creek.
Absolutely the highlight of my day, I tell you what.
But what if the moon really was made of cheese?
That’s an absurd premise, indeed. When you stop to think about it, though, most of the “what if” ideas that launch us into science fiction stories are absurd. We’re probably never getting to travel to whatever point in the past or future we want to at the press of a button. We’re probably not going to hurtle through interplanetary space at speeds above that achieved by photons of light. And so on. While many “what if” stories dig into the technical mechanics of the thing, they usually also shine a light on what people would (or at least might) do when faced with this new element in society. What might time travel or FTL space travel do to “us”? Oh, and make sure to include some actual-science-y stuff because those nerdy details are fun to speculate about, of course.
But what if we threw out any need to dig into the high-tech gee-whiz of it all and replaced that aspect with… well, Cheez Whiz?
What we’re left with is the human angle, and that’s what this novel is all about.
(more…)A couple months ago I noted some shows that had caught my interest. Now that the season’s almost complete I have some additional thoughts to jot down about a few of them.
The news is mostly good. But only mostly.
(more…)To be clear: There are videos on YouTube which can show you how to do this, but I don’t like scrolling back and forth through a video to tease out the details of a process. If you’re like me in that regard, here’s a tutorial for making a single-track train spiral structure in Satisfactory.
Note that you can (and should) play around with materials and other design elements. Maybe you want sign-based lighting on yours? Sweet, go for it!
Let’s get started.
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