On the Passing Scene V

Oh what a surprise more random thoughts.

• So I realized that, quite by accident, I have a Take That to Firefly in my book. The head of the aliens' psionics school is a member of the Blue Hand clan. I think I originally meant it as sorta like the O'Neill clan (the Red Hand of Erin); I hadn't seen Firefly at that point.
  
  You can bet, he'd never try and combine "telepath" and "brainwashed supersoldier", or let senators with classified knowledge tour facilities full of psions, and if he was going to assassinate people, he'd do it inconspicuously. He'd also never take any wooden nickels or eat things he finds on the ground, though, so he's obviously not a Firefly villain.


• Macademy Wasshoi is pretty damn funny, though I could've done without the hard-gay angel. Disturbing. Nevertheless, Goth Loli archangel Gabriel for the win. And how the staff-lady says she must be a Dark Lord, because she lives at the bottom of a dungeon and, since she lacks a bull's head, she can't be a minotaur? Awesome.
  
  Also, the dog-eared maid girl is a barghest. Wowie. That's up there with my folklore nerd-ness.


• There's a hilarious clip of one of Fox News' producers being "ambushed" by a guy from the left-wing blog Think Progress...and he proceeds to lecture the dude on the proper way to do an ambush interview. Whatever your opinions on Fox News, that was pretty damn epic. My dad compared it to "That's not a knife, this is a knife"; my own comparison was, imagine an aged martial arts master who gets jumped by ninjas, and, while throwing them around, keeps shouting things like "No, your hips should be lower! Your guard is full of holes! Stop watching my hands and watch me!"
  
  Still, though, come to think of it, Fox News employs the inventor of the ambush interview, Geraldo Rivera. Seems he's set up a dojo.


• So it irked me, for some reason, that this one art page I saw had a 3d model of a rocket ship, and the artist said it was "retro", "like think the 40s or 50s". Uh, no, it's not. A rocket shaped like that isn't "retro" any more than a plane whose wings provide lift is "retro"; it's just realistic.
  
  I realized, Star Wars and especially Star Trek are to blame; Roddenberry actually forbade his ship designers to make the Enterprise look like a rocket-ship. But the Enterprise's mass isn't balanced, and its layout is bizarre. The ships in Star Wars, at least, are just misapplying naval tropes to the wrong environment; Star Trek's design principles are only comprehensible if you assume they knew space has different rules, but then ignored what those different rules are.
  
  Plus, coming up with nonsensoleum teleportation booths just because you're not imaginative enough to create stock landing and takeoff sequences for a lander, certainly didn't do SF any favors. Seriously, any tokusatsu show worth its salt could've done it!


• Remember the Châmelot-Delvigne revolver I mentioned before? Yeah, turns out, its cartridge was kinda crap, only on par with .25 ACP. Apparently a new, stronger loading was introduced around 1890 (only a few years before the gun was replaced as a service revolver), but even that was only a quarter as strong as the .44-40 used by the Smith & Wesson No. 3, and a little over a third as strong as the Colt Peacemaker's .45.
  
  Still, though, even a weak round can be deadly; a lot of military rounds are actually underpowered by many civilian standards (though the main standard of civilian rifles is taking large game like elk, so that's probably not a fair comparison).


• So another example of the insane graphics Reach has (other than that every leaf of the junipers and maple trees is rendered), is the Covenant barriers. You know, those purple things, I think there's usually three or four of them, that they lay down to provide cover?
  
  Go and damage one. Once the shiny purple paint comes off, do you know what it looks like? It looks like the reentry shielding on the Apollo 12, that's what it looks like. Look. It makes sense that a Covenant military device would be designed to dissipate large amounts of heat, though.