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Geostorm
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 1008
Now, I mean, really, how to review this? I knew damn well what I was getting into, wanted something stupid and sat down and watched something stupid.
So no complaining. Instead I'm going to go on about the rabbit hole of fucking "Facebook Watch", which is collection of clips of highly-pitched squeaky voiced actors in largely B movies - clips with titles like "You don't bully this man/'s kid, wife, brother, sister..." etc. Dumb highlight reels from dumb movies, but - if you edit it right you can take a two-minute clip of any film and make it appear interesting. Clint Eastwood AND Burt Reynolds in a cop-buddy movie? I have to see THAT!
So, wasting time on Facebook and I find this disaster movie clip - it opens with UN people in blue vests coming upon a flash-frozen Afghan village - where the occupants have been frozen solid where they stand - a man breaks an arm off of one and recoils in horror. Cut to a giant tidal wave bearing down on a crowded beach that freezes midway while the beachgoers flee in terror - only to be frozen as well. More scenes like this. And the clip is framed with all this Vietnamese writing so I'm curious - a good foreign disaster/apocalyptic film, why not, and I begin to search for it. Start with the comments, only - they're all in Vietnamese, so on Bumblefuck Laptop I'm trying to get a title from google translate only it takes forever and 2.5 million comments is roughly 2.499.999 more comments than my cruddy memory will hold, but I'm getting there, I'm a proper internet sleuth...
The question - in Vietnamese - that prompts the comments - is "What would you do if the end of the world..." or something like that, and all the comments translate to something like "I would cuddle my family/dog" or "Humanity deserves this for the way we've treated mother earth" and all sorts of other dross. A lot of dross. So I keep scrolling, and I find a few possible titles like "Mega-Earth-Storm", and search for that, to no avail, and then again "Magnetic-Earth-Catastrophe" and I search that, nothing, and I keep searching and finding dumb-ass end of the world movies but not this one...
The rarity of this foreign cinematic gem is making it all the more precious, god-damn I need to see it!!!
By this point it's obvious my curiosity has gotten the better of me, I know damn well from the clip it's a dumb-ass movie, but I want to know what it is Goddamnit!!!!
Eventually - some 45 minutes later - I find it. Not a dumb-ass foreign disaster film, but a perfectly dumb ass American one that somehow I'd never heard of. For good reason.
But - 45 minutes in I'm doubling down on my stupidity and now I have to watch it. And - I can assure you - absolutely no plot twists or surprises. Blessedly vacuous.
I really have to quit Facebook...
The Luminiferous Aether
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1355
Largely (but - not necessarily "Entirely") disproven by the Michelson-Morley experiment, the Luminiferous Aether was postulated to be the medium that permeated space and allowed electromagnetic waves and light to propagate across a vacuum.
Now - while we of course reject the earlier theories that - for example - the stars and planets are candles or lights hung up in crystalline spheres - we might have been I think a little hasty getting rid of this one. Call it intuition.
Links:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelson%E2%80%93Morley_experiment
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminiferous_aether
While light can explain it's propagation by being both a particle and a wave - and electro-magnetic waves are explained away using "fields", it does seem that we have replaced the Aether with the term "Space", invented dark matter and a variety of other constants and equations to explain away - never satisfactorily - our relation to both space and neighboring celestial bodies. While the theory of relativity has held up for this long - the presence of an Aether, or medium - which slowed it down, or capped it's speed, would go a long ways towards overcoming it. Certainly the abundance of other planets, stars, celestial bodies in general suggests there must be some reasonable means for us to communicate - or traverse the voids - to them. Accepting the speed of light as an upper bound to the speed of our travels is not a particularly attractive option.
Anyways, the things that get me thinking far too early and never with enough coffee...
Lichess.org
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 1107
Now at the point where I have to actually start thinking if I'm going to continue playing - continuing at the level I'm at is too painful - so, searching around for another chess site on which to begin honing my skills.
And I found this: Lichess.org
Free, open source (not that I need that), and - a bonus, whereas chess.com frequently crashes my browser, or becomes unresponsive or takes far too long to make a move - this site works clean and quick. Note that this is not necessarily a flaw in the site - my laptop crashes on many sites - usually a result of too many embedded ads or media, videos, etc. - long overdue for a "better laptop" - but it does help to play something in real-time so I can assess quickly how and where I'm fucking up.
Now to get better...
The Flat Earth Wikipedia
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: WTF
- Hits: 1323
Contrary to expectations, it's not nearly as big as the other Wikipedia, but makes for a fine thought-pairing with Conservapedia.
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