COTTON THISTLE CLEARANCE
Random musings from the noggin' of Knolltrey (Best viewed on a monitor running Mozilla Firefox, with a brain running on a case of Grolsh...)
Saturday, 22 March 2008
The Stag at Eve had Drunk his Fill... Mood: sad
Shane's been drinking tonight, and that has a way of making a person pine for stuff...
...in my case, I'm pining for the northern part of the non-emerald isle...
I took that picture a couple years back from the Eastern shore of the Northern section of Loch Lomond (got that? good). Them's the Arrochar Alps in the background. Left to right are The Cobbler, Ben Ime and, last but not least, the might Ben Vorlich (...not the tallest, but thanks to Scott... ah, well: long story...)
At least, I THINK those are them. I'm pretty sure about Vorlich, anyway...
And there's nothing to do downtown, anyway... Mood: caffeinated Topic: Entertaining Insights
I'm checking out the stats on the hypothetical new Al Burj building they're semi-planning to put up in Dubai at some undetermined date.
The specs are all horseshit, I must say. They want it twice as big as Taipei 101, for one thing, and that entails 228 floors and a first-to-last-floor height just above 850 meters (I won't go into spires or antannae. Hey, developers: nobody f**king cares....)
It's already planning to be downgraded: there's no feasible way to cobble together such a structure, and this kind of sophomoric bravado really towers over anything I've ever seen...
...sorry...
Anyway: the thing won't be half-as-tall as expected, likely, but I thought I'd do a little experiment: given that this place was SLATED to be the tallest building in the world, I thought I'd do a little hypothetical side-by-side with TYPERS' own Distelspitze Tower, seat of the Allied Military and headquarters of the Superior Joint Command:
Yeesh...
This is one of those reality-laced moments where I get to savor some bitter herbs: this is indicative of how far I sometimes overshoot. Let's assume Distelspitze is exactly 700 floors (I'd envision that some floors would have VERY high ceilings, so this number is again on the low-side, but let's not muddy the waters...)
a tower that tall would be, at a minimum, THREE TIMES as big as this Al Burj nonsense in its planning stage. Its height, again a minimum, would be around 2550 meters or, for the rest of us Americans, 1.58 miles. That means that an executive anywhere in the upper third of the building could effectively join the mile-high club just by nailing his secretary from the comfort of his own office (gotta admit: that would be a GREAT pick-up line!) A base-jumper would experience 43 seconds of free-fall (factoring in terminal velocity... I think...). Actually that's not right: roadkill would experience that time of free-fall: a base jumper could wait a little under 26 seconds before even deploying their chute and reach a safe landing (provided the prevaling winds haven't smacked 'em back into the tower's side... that's one way to ruin a Friday afternoon board meeting you booked in the good conference room with the window...)
I'm not finished, yet: given modern flexible skyscraper frames (designed to ride-out mother nature, not withstand her and get broken in two for its trouble): if Distelspitze were rocked by a particularly windy day (as one might often have in a place like Spindlespire Ridge) and, as a consequence, it listed to and fro at an angle of one single degree at its base, the occupants of the very top floor would rock back and forth in the air a distance of 89.25 meters, side-to-side-to-side.
That's one rollercoaster I wouldn't pay the price of admission for...
EDIT: On later consideration, I recall that Chenine Chovert lives on the 250th floor of her superskyscraper in Nash Ultima, so if the Al Burj actually does get built to order (Which it won't...) we'll already be well on our way to the civilian-version of the superskyscraper as I describe it.
700 floors in still WAAAAAAAAAAAY futuristic... but maybe possible, given where we are, now...
And you gotta admit: Ainsworth would have a really killer view, if not for all the clouds in Spindlespire...
I don't know what else to say, really. I was gonna give this post a day to mull it over, but the news makes me depressed. Really depressed. And that's just the way it is, so I can't be eloquent and sagacious about it.
He was a scientific researcher, an author, and a speculative futurist. And now he's gone over the eternal falls: beyond the confines of special relativity, the limits of light, or even the scope of mathmatical singularities.
Not all journeys into the infinite aether require Monoliths, after all...
I suppose I can make myself feel better by getting angry about something...
Well, not angry, really... just creeped out.
You see... there's this site out there, somewhere... and it contains...
...it has...
...eeegh...
...R-Type porn.
Yeah: you read that right.
Now, to be fair, not all the images are actually pornographic, but I ain't linkin' to the damned thing because a) it creeps me out and b) we're talking loli and shota stuff, here. Not the worst the 'net has to offer by any means, but still...
eeegh.....
So how do you make R-Type porn, you might ask? Well... think of it like... if a bunch of underage girls wore spaceship-model suits for Halloween...
eeegh......
You should've seen how the Platonic Love turned out....
UGH: never mind: just never mind. I'm gonna go throw up for awhile. Then I'm going to church....
Seein' red Mood: cheeky Topic: Scientific Progress...
Not that I'm getting into a lazy habit of simply posting links to pages that everyone already knows about, mind you, but I hadn't checked out the AVGN's page in some time, and lo to my surprise, he went and reviewed the Virtual Boy, of all things...
Talk about a disaster. I picked up my Virtual Boy system a year and a half after the thing's launch at an Electronics Botique: it came with all the games in the above review, minus Nester's bowling, and it set me back a grand total of $25, every-bloody-thing included.
To this day I feel it was one of the worst investment choices I've ever made.
Now I will say this for that idiotic system: Warioland is still one of the best sidescrollers I've ever played on any console system. But Rolfe's point is valid: why the hell was it on Virtual Boy, huh?
Scientific Progress gets a major eye-strain headache and stumbles off to lie down...
Just a cropped rehash of the 'Quint giving the finger' pic, this time with some ocular coloration (don't worry: I'm quickly getting tired of this little trick and I think this is the last you'll see of it).
Also, on that tangent: the answer is that nobody died at the end of 'Filial Affection'; stop asking.
The chapter 'Evolution' is... evolving, anyway. I've still gotta 'parse' the dialogue a bit.
Dog Days of Spring Mood: lazy Now Playing: "Margaritaville" by Jimmy Buffett Topic: General
I'm on vacation for the week. Spring Break, and all of that...
The internet here costs $10 for 24-hour access, so I don't have to tell you that updates'll be sparse. With a copy of Heinlein in one hand and a Mai Tai in the other, though, I won't really care.
It's a 'working' vacation only in the fact that I plan to knock out some TYPERS. How much depends on the local climate.
And on the strength of the bartenders' Mai Tais...
Yeah, yeah: I know. The idea itself is less than original, and all it would take is a trained monkey on their development team to suggest such a thing.
But the fact remains, boy-o's: this trained monkey already beat you to it.
And, for the record, a brain-computer-interface won't "read a pilot's neurons"; that'd be like scanning a blank piece of paper. It reads the electrical impulses from those neurons.
Yeah, I'm nitpicky: what can I say?
Coincidences aside, I'll know if something's really up if the North American release of "Command" has a ship named Chaste Gazer in it.
...now arriving at Gate #1... Mood: quizzical Topic: Entertaining Insights
Y'know, I don't care what anybody says: I really liked the original Stargate film.
Critics at the time were blatantly hostile to the whole damned thing. Roger Ebert, in particular, was inexplicably merciless in his review. Granted he's a member of the elitist 'film-as-high-art' movement and, to them, science fiction in and of itself is an abomination.
But, then again, Ebert is the kind of guy that gives a lukewarm review to The Godfather II and, after no doubt hearing from fans about the insult, went on to overcompensate with a glowing review of Part III.
...I'm only assuming that it was peer-pressure, and not the fact that Roger Ebert actually thought that Part III is the better film, but who knows? Eh: at least Ebert's a little better than that psuedo-intellectual wanker Vincent Canby, who went as far as to believe that almost ANYTHING the public could possibly be interested in was pure drivel, unfit for his own God-like intelligence and knowledge.
But I digress:
Flesh and blood people did make this a profitable movie, after all, and while it was no blockbuster and it had some major problems (read: Kurt Russell...) I don't know what else anyone could want out of an intergalactic alien-confict science fiction film.
Actually I know the answer to that: the critics simply wanted it to not be an intergalactic alien-confict science fiction film.
...'Cause that kind of thing could never, ever possibly be considered 'art'.
Well: here's what Quint has to say about that line of reasoning:
(I know, I know: that's what 20 minutes' work gets you. He looks like a friggin' teenager...)
The point is that the science fiction genre does produce its share of really bad movies, but I wish that critics were a little more ready to admit it when something good comes of it.
Vincent Canby never would do that. Right now he's sitting on a cloud watching a Woody Allen comedy, smiling at the fact that he's one of the chosen few who're smart enough to 'appreciate' the magnitude of that artwork...
Heck: the spread of the Stargate television franchise proved the critics wrong, anyway. I never dove into the thing with cultish desire, but I generally enjoyed about half of SG-1's run, mostly because of McGuyver, naturally. And then Atlantis... eee... Atlantis: now that's poorly-written and derivative.
Maybe the critics should focus some energy on that one; get things right for a change?
This is a 'TYPERS' post, so if you're not interested in that, be advised...
Alright: today, for the first time EVER, I've finally figured out what the f**k 'Mister Grey-Hair' / 'M.A.' / 'Ainsworth' is really after in the books!
Don't get me wrong: I always had the codger's origins down, and his ultimate motives, too, but as far as the TRUE outlook on his actions (ie: taking a seat on the all-powerful Superior Joint Command and coordinating the Antipathy Project), these remained elusive to me.
I'm not making any sense, I know. What I mean is this: what did Ainsworth actually WANT to be born from the Antipathy Project? Did he want the same result that his underlings ASSUMED was the goal of the project, or something else?
In other words: Did 'M.A.' actually forsee the development of the 'Novanjo' forms of the Raiden-Hybrid pilots? And did he actually WANT that to happen?
Anyway, my point is that I've answered that question in my own mind, and that's important. Not so much to the chapters now at hand, since I don't see Ainsworth appearing again in person for quite some time, but I need to know the answer to that question personally before the grand finale of the series; even if I don't explicitly explain the man's motives in writing I need to understand them MYSELF to make the proper epilogue....
....look: it's analogous to J.J. Abram's explanation of the Cloverfield Monster: he and his staff wrote a detailed story about the thing's origin and mental state, and NONE of it made it into the film, and yet it is integral to the film-making throughout.
Speaking of Cloverfield: I think that movie is the one real reason that my previous chapter, 'Filial Affection', ended the way it did. I originally intended to describe (in brutal and graphic detail) the 'Czech Hedgehog's' rampage through Base-10, up to and including it's/Justin's incapacitation and capture. As it stands now all that's gonna be covered in very brief, nondescriptive conversation between Samantha and the base Doctor in the coming chapter.
The reason for this is simple: when I saw Cloverfield I thought it was a great little monster movie (and innovative, too!) but there was one weakness I saw in it: they showed the monster WAY too much. Even when I was watching it I kept thinking one thing: a mysterious monster is MUCH more scary, and effective, when it REMAINS mysterious and, mostly, unseen.
And when I was finishing up that chapter, I couldn't help but take that advice to heart...
sad
Aaaaaahhhh....
caffeinated
down
cheeky
silly
lazy
incredulous
quizzical
celebratory