kontextmaschine:

Arrakis is changing hands! It’s a desert planet, and House Harkonnen used to own it but just now the Emperor gave it to House Atreides! It’s a fucking terrible place to live but Spice comes from there and Spice is some hot shit!

Paul Atreides is a kid. He is the Brandon Stark of this series. He’s the heir of House Atreides and he is coming in on a starship. Starships work because Navigators, who are dudes who’ve done a ton of Spice, Spice here being LSD, can fold space with their minds. They turn in to giant octopuses in tanks though, supported by anti-gravity. Most things hover.

We’re down on the planet and things are cool. Paul is taught by a Space Nun, his mom used to be a Space Nun. He trains in knife-duelling with the head of the family guard, Duncan. There are shields and you’ve got to go real slow to get through them, so it’s all misdirection.

Baron Harkonnen really wants the planet back, also he’s a fat dude into little boys.

People have lasers but if you ever fire a laser at a shield they both blow up like a nuke. Paul and his dad go watch a mining expedition, flying in an ornithopter, which is a helicopter that flaps its wings like a bird. There’s a big sandcrawler that digs up the spice and the problems is that worms always attack. Worms are giant things that live under the sand and have gullets full of diamond teeth, and they will swallow harvesters right up.

There are scout ornithopters and they spot wormsign - a worm under the surface heading for the harvester. This is radioed in, Duke Atreides says ok let’s pull the harvester out, his foreman says no the worm’ll take a while let’s harvest as much and make as much money as we can, eventually the Duke insists and the rescue ornithopter pulls all the mining crew out just as the worm opens his giant mouth below them. Duke Atreides is A Good Leader.

The head Space Nun gives Paul a test, it’s like “stick your hand in this box and it’ll feel like the worst thing possible, if you take your hand out I’ll kill you with my poisoned ring.” Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total annihilation. Paul doesn’t pull his hand out and she’s like “well done, chosen one”.

The Atreides live on a rocky shield, one of the few parts of the world that isn’t sand to the bottom and the worms can’t get to. One of the Duke’s aides is a Mentat, who are the Maesters of this series, but also a bit psychic. Someone tried to hide an assassin robot in Paul’s bed, but he outsmarted it and his mother comforted him.

THE HARKONNEN ATTACK and Paul’s parents die, Duncan hauls him out through a secret passage, flee the castle and blow it up by time-delay aiming a laser cannon at its shield. They flee into the desert.

They meet the Fremen, the native tribe of the planet. The Fremen wear rubber stilsuits that recycle fluids and keep them hydrated. The Fremen take Paul in. The Fremen’s eyes are all blue pupils in blue irises, “blue within blue”, because they do so much Spice. The Fremen call worms Makers. Worms are attracted to sonic patterns and Fremen walk without rhythm so they won’t attract the worm, or they put down thumpers to draw worms away.

There’re some tribal things, Paul goes native and becomes Maud'Dib, The Mouse,Chosen One of the Fremen. He gets engaged to a tribal girl. Paul wins a deadly duel and wins a crysnife, a super-sharp knife made out of worm tooth. The Fremen ride worms by calling them with a thumper and then digging hooks into their segmented skin. You can pull back the segments and the worms will roll it away from the sand to protect the membranes, that’s how you steer them.

The Space Nun shows up and lets on that he’s part of a centuries-long breeding program to meld the masculine and the feminine, and there’s another deadly test for him. Worms turn into the Water of Life as part of their metamorphosis, then this blows up into a Spice geyser to spread the seed. The Fremen have a tiny Maker that they drown underwater to create the Water of Death. The Water of Death will make women trip out and command the universe, but kill men. Paul takes the Water of Death and survives by transmuting it to the Water of Life with his mind.

Space Nun says well done, but Paul wasn’t even supposed to be the Chosen One, rather the chosen one’s father. He has a kid with his girl, and then neglects them for years to go get high on Spice. Spice can show you multiple pathways to the future. Of the ones Paul can see, most of them have him leading a jihad on behalf of the Fremen and most of them he fails. Eventually he finds the right timeline.

Paul attacks the Harkonnen in their base, riding a fleet of worms up towards the stone shield wall and jumping them over. He kills some dudes and then threatens to drop the Water of Death into the Water of Life, which will kill all the worms in the world and destroy the Spice economy forever. Somehow, he wins.

THE END

And then there are sequels that are even more ‘70s. Which is a high standard!

Professional Golfers Off The Top Of My Head

• Phil Mickleson
• Jack Nicklaus
• Vijay Singh
• Nick Faldo
• Gary Player
• Tiger Woods
• John Daly
• Arnold Palmer

kontextmaschine:

Oh as long as I’m doing crazy badass hypothetical prep and talking about flying as one of my former lives:

If you’re crashing in trees, maybe because of takeoff issues, aim the plane between two of them wider than the fuselage but narrower than the wingspan, try to take the impact on the wings, rip them and their fuel tanks away, and get out of it with broken bones

Its impossible to find because it’s 2021 and the Internet is terrible now, but there’s this bit from The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s account of the US postwar Golden Age test pilots, and these were guys who were continually narrating their flights to base over the radio, and Wolfe was talking about the community (this was also basically where “swinging” comes from, a tight-knit community to the point of recreationally fucking each others’ wives) coming together to listen to the records of their compatriots’ fatal last flights and what the test pilot community respected most and the piloting community in the late magazine-mediated era still respected was the guys who never broke down or cried for their mothers, they were pragmatically evaluating and pursuing their outs all the way until impact

alexanderrm:

kontextmaschine:

methotrex8:

randomslasher:

theindestructiblelittlemy:

is it just me or is NASA weirdly aggressive in their article about black holes?

can a black hole destroy the earth?

no, you idiot.

black holes aren’t planet gluttons, you bitch.

and the earth isn’t some weak-ass planet that would just fall in to a black hole like a sucker.

and that dumbass sun that we’ve got isn’t big enough to make a black hole like other stars.

you fool.

This reads like an exhausted doctor explaining that no, you fucking moron, vaccines do not cause autism. 

This reminds me of David Brin’s Earth, where they create and accidentally drop a small black hole into the center of the earth where it just orbits the core sucking up matter but not changing the planet’s overall mass in a way noticeable at the surface

That one actually would destroy the earth eventually though if it was large enough to start sucking rather than evaporate immediately.

There’s a couple other SF stories with the same premise (A Hole in Space by Larry Niven and one I’ve heard about on the moon) where the black hole bounces around sucking up mass for months or years and eventually the outer layers of the planet collapse downwards since the material below them is no longer supporting them; those ones got it right. You wouldn’t notice it at the surface at first though.

I think before it got that far they made a new one calculated to eventually eject more mass than it took in, dropped it in too, and used it as a lens to fire gravitational waves at the first one and knock it past orbit

But not before this woman used gravitational waves set to the resonant frequency of the human body focused through the hole to depopulate whole swaths of earth and also there was an AI that was a dragon made of stars that you communicated with using microphones pressed against your throat so you subvocalized to it?

Off the Top of My Head: Neon Genesis Evangelion

Shinji Ikari, a slight, younger high school boy, is standing at a phone booth, calling the woman who is supposed to pick him up, Misato Katsuragi.

She shows up in a blue sports car. She is a late-20s approachably-effortful woman who is also an officer with NERV. She is driving Shinji to their base in Tokyo-2.

Sea levels have risen and much of the old world is underwater. NERV HQ is in an underground “geofront” cave under Tokyo-2

Shinji’s father, Gendo Ikari, is the operational leader of NERV, he has a sideburned chinstrap beard and tinted glasses.

NERV exists to fight attacking “Angels”, which come from what caused the sea-level devastation in the first place, “First Impact”

…gotcha

Off the Top of My Head: The Giver

The kids and the Kid are ready for their lifetime role assignments! Some of them get middling stuff, or laborers. A bunch of girls are laborers but they birth two kids each and get pampered first.

The Kid is gifted so he’s going to be the new Giver, who bears and transmits community knowledge! So he apprentices with the current, old one

Whose role involves to… weigh the babies when one of the girls has twins, then throw the lighter one down a garbage chute?

And they’re both like “oh woe, this sounds like The Holocaust, which I remember from Lois Lowry’s last award-bait YA novel, Number the Stars”

And like, The Kid toboggans down a slope to escape and I just realized this was the same ending as Calvin and Hobbes?

remembering some SF short story where some software boy genius was dying of cancer so he wrote an AI to figure things out and resurrect him only then he annihilated his body in a car crash so the still-operative AI decided the best way to proceed was remake him

which it tried by fooming to the point it had the ability to get into people’s brains so they wandered away in a fugue to gather and reenact his memories until they hit on the right way to be him

and this was a global phenomenon, and people felt awkward that in the beginning they thought it was a zombie plague and shot them, but it was sort of internalized as shameful to “give in” to this?

anyone know what I’m talking about?

Off The Top Of My Head: Battle Royale

A bus full of Japanese high school students on a school trip is gassed going through a tunnel and passes out

When they come to on an island, gym teacher Beat Takeshi, with help from a genki video announcer, fills them in: thanks to the BR act, they will all be given random weapons and told to kill each other until only one remains. As time progresses, sections of the map will be blocked off and if students remain there the explosive collar around their necks will explode.

Beat Takeshi shoots a kid dead, establishing the stakes.

Kids leave at staggered times, grabbing their weapon drops. Some, like an Uzi, are useful. Some, like one of those Japanese folded-paper whacking fans, less so.

Some kids kill each other. At one point a girl arrives to a lighthouse with other girls. It looks peaceful and welcoming, but this scene is about how teenage girls maintain fiercely Machiavellian social lives underneath the facade and a poisoning turns into a showdown that leaves everyone dead.

More kids kill each other. One particularly cold and calculating kid works his way up from an initial weapon of a pot lid.

More kids kill each other. One girl is particularly chilling and vicious.

A M/F couple hang themselves together from a tree at the edge of a cliff.

Like 4 kids, including a M/F couple and a veteran of a previous run (who might have been that cold and calculating one) kill Beat Takeshi and escape

The End

Off The Top of My Head: Snow Crash

Hiro Protagonist is a half-Japanese drifter, living in a storage facility and working shit jobs in a dystopian neoliberal projection of SoCal circa 1990. However he’s skilled with a katana and respected in Basically VR Second Life As An Equatorial Street.

Also, there’s some punk skateboarder chick, a Camp of the Saints flotilla that stands in for the 80s latino immigrant wave, and Basically Lobo With A Nuke

…

…in the end, it turns out it was an informational virus from ancient Sumer or something. I have no memory what “it” was.

Also there’s a gatling gun called Reason and I think the skateboarder chick knocks out Lobo with a syringe in her vagina at one point.

Okay, I’m starting to see why a movie never worked out.

isaacsapphire:

kontextmaschine:

argumate:

gyppa:

no way

I feel the absolute units have crossed some kind of threshold

I remember this early-1990s SF novel that was like the leftists tried to solve global warming and sent us into the glacial age it had been saving us from

and there was a space station in orbit but the greenie bureaucrats resented it, but it could recharge its stores by sending this atmosphere-skipper craft down to scoop nitrogen

but then something broke and in order to maintain future-orientation they had to connect with some groundbound SF fans who rehabbed a museum rocket to rendezvou them in orbit for replacement

and in the last scene as the rocket took off the harpy head bureaucrat demanded a gun from her aide to shoot it down

but he (who still had the spark of future somewhere in him) made sure to tediously clear the weapon and eject the mag first, ‘elf & safety

(this whole sequence I suspect was influenced by Wings of Honneamise)

Anyway, the SF fans, clearly audience stand-ins to be flattered, at one point the orbiteers suggested they were maximizing their volume:area ratio for icefield heat retention by being so spherically fat

That was the same era as the story that became Children of Men, “oh no what if antinatalism”, and this one story I remember where the careerist scientress visits to condescend to the mommy track sister she stole her breakthrough ideas from only to learn that the real cure to the AIDS-alike she has was “having a kid before 30”

The early 90s: more reactionary than you remember!

(plus all the Kim Stanley Robinson “okay science and pacifism and postcapitalism but still, we fuck 9th graders in public baths)

Why not say Fallen Angels? It’s apparently in the Baen Free Library too, so available to any readers who might wish to read.

ah that’s what I was thinking of

Of the Top of My Head Review: The Turner Diaries

I read this in like middle school as a .txt file downloaded off a Hotline server. After the Oklahoma City bombing, Newsweek and some other magazines (the then-news authorities) had mentioned it as important and I took their word for it.

It was terrible.

And I’m not talking like morally, I’m not a ponce like that. And not even the wooden writing and characterization, though they were far below the standard for bottom-of-the-barrel published pulp or even Star Trek slash that it was contemporary with.

I’m talking like I cannot remember a single character (the protagonist was male, and there’s a girl) or more than 3 moments from this novel

At some point early on people are hiding their guns inside the walls of their houses because the federal government is sending around gangs of black gangbangers to confiscate them, that’s one

The second moment really gets to the problem with the book though. Because the second moment is the Day of the Rope and it makes clear the author had no clue what he was doing with this work

The Day of the Rope, when the good white Americans realize their power, rise up, and hang the internal traitors from lampposts, is clearly the emotional heart, the payoff of the whole work.

And it’s like 3 pages long, at most, set in California without any established characters while the main cast are in another state entirely.

And then it’s like he realizes that whoops, my plot arc never intersected with the climax, and the falling action is like “and yeah sure then he flies a nuclear bomb into the Pentagon”

(I did remember that the one example hung during DotR was a white woman who dated black guys. That sense of “white women betrayed us white men in favor of stylish minorities” was definitely a bigger thing than people care to remember last time around. The professional class version was the prosecutor and his wife in Bonfire of the Vanities, him seething at her fashionably concerned for the animals he has to repress in order to enable civilization.

That and the Al Bundy/Clark Griswold “I suffer and do my best to serve as patriarch but you don’t hold up your end and the culture takes your side you ingrates”)

Arrakis is changing hands! It’s a desert planet, and House Harkonnen used to own it but just now the Emperor gave it to House Atreides! It’s a fucking terrible place to live but Spice comes from there and Spice is some hot shit!

Paul Atreides is a kid. He is the Brandon Stark of this series. He’s the heir of House Atreides and he is coming in on a starship. Starships work because Navigators, who are dudes who’ve done a ton of Spice, Spice here being LSD, can fold space with their minds. They turn in to giant octopuses in tanks though, supported by anti-gravity. Most things hover.

We’re down on the planet and things are cool. Paul is taught by a Space Nun, his mom used to be a Space Nun. He trains in knife-duelling with the head of the family guard, Duncan. There are shields and you’ve got to go real slow to get through them, so it’s all misdirection.

Baron Harkonnen really wants the planet back, also he’s a fat dude into little boys.

People have lasers but if you ever fire a laser at a shield they both blow up like a nuke. Paul and his dad go watch a mining expedition, flying in an ornithopter, which is a helicopter that flaps its wings like a bird. There’s a big sandcrawler that digs up the spice and the problems is that worms always attack. Worms are giant things that live under the sand and have gullets full of diamond teeth, and they will swallow harvesters right up.

There are scout ornithopters and they spot wormsign - a worm under the surface heading for the harvester. This is radioed in, Duke Atreides says ok let’s pull the harvester out, his foreman says no the worm’ll take a while let’s harvest as much and make as much money as we can, eventually the Duke insists and the rescue ornithopter pulls all the mining crew out just as the worm opens his giant mouth below them. Duke Atreides is A Good Leader.

The head Space Nun gives Paul a test, it’s like “stick your hand in this box and it’ll feel like the worst thing possible, if you take your hand out I’ll kill you with my poisoned ring.” Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total annihilation. Paul doesn’t pull his hand out and she’s like “well done, chosen one”.

The Atreides live on a rocky shield, one of the few parts of the world that isn’t sand to the bottom and the worms can’t get to. One of the Duke’s aides is a Mentat, who are the Maesters of this series, but also a bit psychic. Someone tried to hide an assassin robot in Paul’s bed, but he outsmarted it and his mother comforted him.

THE HARKONNEN ATTACK and Paul’s parents die, Duncan hauls him out through a secret passage, flee the castle and blow it up by time-delay aiming a laser cannon at its shield. They flee into the desert.

They meet the Fremen, the native tribe of the planet. The Fremen wear rubber stilsuits that recycle fluids and keep them hydrated. The Fremen take Paul in. The Fremen’s eyes are all blue pupils in blue irises, “blue within blue”, because they do so much Spice. The Fremen call worms Makers. Worms are attracted to sonic patterns and Fremen walk without rhythm so they won’t attract the worm, or they put down thumpers to draw worms away.

There’re some tribal things, Paul goes native and becomes Maud'Dib, The Mouse,Chosen One of the Fremen. He gets engaged to a tribal girl. Paul wins a deadly duel and wins a crysnife, a super-sharp knife made out of worm tooth. The Fremen ride worms by calling them with a thumper and then digging hooks into their segmented skin. You can pull back the segments and the worms will roll it away from the sand to protect the membranes, that’s how you steer them.

The Space Nun shows up and lets on that he’s part of a centuries-long breeding program to meld the masculine and the feminine, and there’s another deadly test for him. Worms turn into the Water of Life as part of their metamorphosis, then this blows up into a Spice geyser to spread the seed. The Fremen have a tiny Maker that they drown underwater to create the Water of Death. The Water of Death will make women trip out and command the universe, but kill men. Paul takes the Water of Death and survives by transmuting it to the Water of Life with his mind.

Space Nun says well done, but Paul wasn’t even supposed to be the Chosen One, rather the chosen one’s father. He has a kid with his girl, and then neglects them for years to go get high on Spice. Spice can show you multiple pathways to the future. Of the ones Paul can see, most of them have him leading a jihad on behalf of the Fremen and most of them he fails. Eventually he finds the right timeline.

Paul attacks the Harkonnen in their base, riding a fleet of worms up towards the stone shield wall and jumping them over. He kills some dudes and then threatens to drop the Water of Death into the Water of Life, which will kill all the worms in the world and destroy the Spice economy forever. Somehow, he wins.

THE END

And then there are sequels that are even more ‘70s. Which is a high standard!

Okay we start out with this architecture student, Roark, in a meeting with like the dean of architecture school? He’s getting kicked out for being too awesome, and coming up with original ideas instead of rehashing romanticism. He says goodbye to this other student - not a total twerp, but not as cool.

Notatwerp graduates, and gets a job as a drafter at a firm. He works his way up and starts dating this chick, meanwhile Roark’s become a construction worker. One day the chick goes to a site he’s drilling at and he forces himself on her, and she’s like “okay that was awesome” and starts seeing him on the side.

Meanwhile there’s a prissy newspaper columnist? Or maybe that was Atlas Shrugs.

There’s a competition to design apartments for workers, and Roark works up this plan for a really sweet-looking building with units that would be awesome to live in, they even have balconies.

Wait! First, Notatwerp gets a commission to design a church and goes to Roark for help, Roark designs this thing with like, subterranean entrances that gives people the total opposite impression of a greater glory, it makes them feel exalted about humanity and themselves. It’s awesome but people don’t appreciate it because they suck.

Meanwhile, the chick totally loves Roark so she stops seeing him and gets engaged to Notatwerp and totally rubs this in Roark’s face every chance she gets ‘cause it’ll make him more awesome.

So then Roark’s apartments win the competition, only when they build it the funders (maybe the priss is on the board?) change it to make it cheaper and more conventional, in particular they take out the balconies 'cause what do workers need balconies for?

And Roark’s like “NO, you are NOT going to make my idea suck” and before anyone moves in he rigs the building with dynamite, and it blows up behind him as he walks towards the camera. And the chick’s like “oh Roark, you so sexy!”

THE END

(Only that was like 800 fucking pages, 'cause it was written on written on amphetamine and not edited. I can see why Ayn Rand books don’t make good movies. 'course, I can see why publishers would reject the book in the first place, but joke’s on them so…)