Daydream Notes

I made this kit a few years ago now; but only now have taken its picture. It's Tamiya's I-400 kit. The I-400/I-401 are fairly famous (I mean I saw a comprehensive documentary on them out of PBS), so I'll skip the info dump this time.  Just for context, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) had some exceptionally large submarines, as the expected combat zone was the entirety of the Pacific Ocean. The Japanese warmed up to the aircraft-carrying subs for a few reasons. First, some of their submarine classes were large simply because they were built for trans-pacific operations. Second, for those finding things in the Pacific reasons, the idea of scout aircraft was seen as sensible, regardless of what job the submarine was assigned to. The Japanese were also really good at submarines, and really good at aircraft carriers, so making it practical came much easier. Finally, the Japanese were also the people who made floatplane versions of their fighters to operate air cover in ...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMfpFcMY96Q Opening. You may laugh at the crest of the air force, the title over a flying white-and-shiny aluminum B-52 , and the music intro choice. So this film is assuring SAC crews that their combat mission folders are strictly the best, and you should always follow them to the letter. 1:38 - IBM COMPUTERS, being used by somebody who's possibly the only non-white person in the film. Thinking about it, they don't really describe what these computers are doing aside from "assess variables." These computers are fed by punch cards and has an output of blinking lights, toggle switches everywhere 2:14 - the first of what we will call really lovely colour footage of period aircraft 2:38 - the first canned sunshine 2:48 - mushroom cloud as photographed from a Canberra 3:15 - YOUR combat mission planners! 3:52 - A officer uses a slide-rule 4:20 - Animated interlude starts I should say the use of music here is amazing. A t...

But: https://archive.ph/Q8K1W quote: A new report paints Canada’s military police leadership as shutting down complaints, ignoring parliamentary-mandated civilian oversight and bungling investigations to the point where a criminal convicted of attempted murder almost went free. The report by the Military Police Complaints Commission, a civilian watchdog created by Parliament, outlines a deteriorating situation in which the office of the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal has been resisting independent oversight. “The situation escalated from resistance to outright refusal to respect the oversight regime mandated by Parliament,” commission chairperson Tammy Tremblay wrote in her annual report released Tuesday. At times the office of the Canadian Forces Provost Marshal, or CFPM, has shut down complaints into police actions before they could be heard, the MPCC report noted. The CFPM has also refused to provide information needed for the commission to carry out its oversight f...

Due to extremely unpleasant life events, lately I've been into...emotionally sterile movies? And somehow this has lead me to seeing a few 1970s disaster movies. (Also movies Bruce Willis was in during the 1990s, but anyway---) Good news is that I've discovered that there are good ones. The one that popularized the genre and codified a few things about it, Airport (1970) isn't bad , but it is pretty unspectacular. I think established a few things about the genre: 1) large cast of established actors, 2) buncha little interconnected stories following groups of same, 3) an attempt to open a window into the day to day of concerned groups, like the people who operate airports, or a cruise ship, 4) a disaster to drive drama. Airport was also fairly cheap, but made 12x that at the box office. I suspect this is the other thing: 5) they were super easy to adapt to TV, which by that point for Airport was pure profit. The framing disaster in Airport is not quite on, ...