Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
Burnt out, over the hill autistic IT nerd and longtime SSC lurker
User ID: 3219
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
10hr ago
But the non-Musk US spaceflight program seems to be non-controversially a dumpster fire, a complete clownshow, a world-historical money-shredding operation, grifter central.
This has been the case ever since the US committed to the space shuttle program before the vast majority* of Mottizens was even born. I once read a great series of posts (which a cursory internet search isn't turning up, alas) that criticized the space shuttle program in detail and backed it up with period documentation. It was pretty clear that while there were many who were enthusiastic about a shuttle for the wow! factor, from a simple physical and engineering standpoint it never made sense. Irrespective of the built-in limitations of gravity, space shuttle backers nevertheless pushed, and got, the largest version of the shuttle possible to the Nixon administration, thus wedding NASA to spending the majority of its budget on an ultra-high cost, ultra-low utility space plane. The choice is especially egregious since NASA's budget cuts in the 70s meant that committing to the space shuttle necessarily meant building out expensive new launch capability for the shuttle and abandoning the existing Apollo/Saturn V, which ironically could lift significantly more weight into space than the shuttle ever could. That the US continues to waste billions on launch tech based upon the shuttle's known to be inferior lift capability five decades after its inception and a decade plus after its official retirement, all while SpaceX has already achieved much better results at a fraction of the cost is just... chef's kiss.
NASA and the established spaceflight players like Lockheed or Boeing should be ruthlessly purged IMO, how can you get away with stealing all this money? Find the decisionmakers and bankrupt them, jail them, teach them a lesson. Take a lesson from China's purges, you can't just have important national capabilities turned into slush funds for lazy cabals of contractors and bureaucrats.
You'd think so, but in fact the US has demonstrated that it can and will pursue dodgy technology with only marginally better potential than existing tech, if at all, and do so over and over again. What's especially impressive are the ridiculously wasteful patronage programs "cost saving" programs that are so bad that we vow never to do them again... until generational memory decays enough to begin a fresh round of graft at the expense of the US taxpayer. Where's William Proxmire when we need him?
*ISTR at least one Mottizen claiming to be a Baby Boomer
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
1d ago
All of this was in the novel as well, it's just that the movie was... less than the sum of its parts.
Well put! I have a real soft spot for the movie, which is to say that I think it was quite well done while I also agree that it doesn't really hang together on the whole. In isolation, I love the actors involved and their performances, I love Linklater's vision, I think the animation brings an incredible level of surrealism to the movie, the script hews closely to the book in the best possible way... and yet. It's hard to connect to Bob/"Fred" as a protagonist. The drug fueled ranting and general chaos and insanity is a little too on the nose; it quickly becomes grating. And as good as the climax is, the resolution just feels superficial to me.
Maybe the script could have been better. Maybe the performances could have been tweaked just enough to make the difference. Probably the animation in particular hurt more than it helped, particularly with the emotional beats. Perhaps a different treatment would have done the trick. Regardless, I don't feel the need or desire to see it again.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
3d ago
Right? How many decades old is the joke about the FBI being the only thing keeping the KKK afloat?
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
5d ago
I found a few links purporting to lead to articles on the FISA court's condemnation of the FBI over the Page warrant, but they are all dead.
Speaking as someone who followed that whole episode closely enough that I once knew the details of why footnote 389 in the IG report meant that the FBI had been lying about when they opened their various investigations against their various targets, my memory of this says that the FISA court, being involved in signing on to an obviously false FISA warrant, played the IG report straight and sent it back to DoJ. The upshot of that was that Brandon Von Grack was removed as a prosecutor from the Flynn case, a new DoJ attorney was appointed, and what do you know, suddenly pretty much every single piece of evidence that Flynn's defense alleged existed and had been seeking, and that the DoJ denied existing, was produced and the DoJ was motioning to dismiss the case. The judge denied the motion, defense sought a writ of mandamus, appeals initially granted the writ but then convened a full panel, which allowed the judge to continue the trial, etc. etc.
Oh, and Kevin Clinesmith, the guy who falsified the CIA's answer that Page was an asset, was fined $100 for his crime.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
7d ago
I really liked the Skiff suite when it was around and after they got bought out and closed up shop, the next closest provider that suited my needs was mailbox.org.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
Dunno, I haven't read the insect series so I can't really compare the two. All I can say is that it's serviceable enough, and it's kept my interest through the first three books now, and on a premise that I wasn't so sure would do it at all to start, but then again, it's not a hard thing to get my interest and keep it.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
Ah, yeah, I tend to buy the books as they come out and not read the serials online. I'll get a little more specific then.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
8d ago
Okay, so I finished it yesterday and I see what you're talking about. The cliffhanger ending was frustrating to me, as they usually are. Like, ending the book at a pause in the major battle scene? Really?! But worse than that, it was getting obvious by the 2/3-3/4 mark of the book that there was nowhere near enough book left to resolve the vast majority of the new plot threads, let alone get back to some of the old ones, so yeah, as a standalone book, it's not so good, at least not in the sense that it's all buildup with no climax or resolution. Of course, the entire genre and pretty much most web serials can be guilty of this even when converted into a book, but still, a climax and conclusion to at least some of the plot seems to me to be a feature of the better written ones.
November 19th isn't too long to wait, so at least there's that.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
9d ago
The closest equivalent to that man that I've personally heard is Mister Trump, which I'd agree is not the same thing.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
9d ago
Sounds like an epic case of grifting and laziness on behalf of trad aerospace companies. Then again, I'm not really a space guy so there may well be more to it.
You've got the right of it. There's more, sure, but "more" really just boils down to the meta-boondoggle that was the space shuttle, the latest fruit of which is another iteration of graft boondoggle that is the SLS and its shuttle-derived solid rocket boosters and engines. If anything, calling that epic grifting sells it a little short, I think!
Still a cheap date over here so no worries on my end even though
ETA: I'll be interested to see if expies of either Huginn or myself exist in the book...
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
13d ago
Doh, I'm actually only a few chapters in, but it's certainly an odd beginning. I'll reply here in detail later this week when I've finished it!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
13d ago
12 Miles Below VI: The Icon of Stars by Mark Arrows.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
14d ago
IME the book was even freakier than the movie and I'd be most interested to read your thoughts after you finish reading it!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
14d ago
It kind of blows my mind that people can't get it from text alone.
Same, although TBF I'm old enough that my teenage years largely predate the world wide web, so there's definitely a generational component to that for me. The dirty stories and smutty books had all kinds of good stuff that could push a lot more of my developing buttons than the stock "three flavors of provocatively posed naked young ladies" that made up the majority of pornography back when Shelbyville was called Morganville and you couldn't get a white onion because of the war and all you could get was those big yellow ones.
Totally understandable. For me, I think the reason that I love Lost Highway so much is that so many of the themes and archetypes that it plays with and explores connect with me on a personal level. I could wax poetic about it, and still might if you're interested, but for now I'll just say that I think your first post put the finger directly on the beating heart of the movie: the characters of Renee and Alice, and more specifically, how they drove Fred and Pete each to their respective extremes.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
16d ago
As you can probably tell, Lost Highway is my favorite David Lynch film, although TBF I've really never given Mulholland Drive its due and I really need to see it again and on the big screen before I'll feel like I've done that. Anyway, a nearby theater did a David Lynch Retrospective after his death earlier this year and I took the opportunity to see Lost Highway again on the big screen. Like you, I hadn't seen it in decades, and despite agreeing with just about everything you say, the entire movie just clicked for me from start to finish. Each and every scene, and in fact each and every beat of the movie felt sublime, flowing inexorably into the next one and the next one, ultimately building to its intense climax and conclusion. It's like I had that same spellbound feeling that you did when Patricia Arquette was onscreen except I experienced it for the entire movie. I left the theater that night feeling like I had fully grokked the film itself for the first time, almost three decades after initially seeing it in the theater. That being the case, I'd quibble a bit about whether or not Lynch pulled off what he wanted to pull of in Lost Highway, because I think he did, and say instead that the issues that you point out are all genuine and ultimately make it much less accessible than a lot of his other work.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
20d ago
Many people with this condition incorrectly label themselves with a bunch of other stuff that may or may not be real but generally doesn't apply to them.
Just chiming in to note that I've personally heard mental health professionals admit to incorrectly diagnosing borderlines as well, ostensibly so that they could receive mental health services that explicitly excluded borderlines from eligibility in their guidelines. I strongly suspect that several percentage points of bipolars are misdiagnosed borderlines.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
21d ago
Interesting. After discovering that One Battle After Another was based on Vineland, I've wanted to read it to get a feel for the source material, all the more so since I made my way through Gravity's Rainbow and well remember the sense of,"what in the actual fuck did I just read," stupefied awe that I felt afterwards. I kinda want to read it both less and more at the same time after that description!
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
22d ago
Working Class (SC Marva Collins Book 2) by Nathan Lowell.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
23d ago
I grew up in the Los Angeles area during the best time to grow up there (I might make a top level post about this some time) and it is essentially unrecognizable.
Please do, I would love to read that!
Those hopped-up search engines with extra steps can have my chef's kiss and my em dashes when they pry them from my cold, dead fingers.
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