Daydream Notes

So sometime in May I discovered that Hasbro had posted the entirety of the original run of GI Joe. I've known for a very long time people need different sorts of TV for different moods, and when I need something that causes no stress and demands no effort: for some, that's some reality soap, and rock on if it is, but for me, one of those shows is the original GI Joe. Having watched the whole run, I think it's one of the funniest TV shows of the 1980s; but I also came away with a respect for it that I didn't have before. You may ask what is going on here, and the answer to that is 'Tuesday'. I think the show's makers did a good job; most episodes are completely insane. Given the source material and the constraints of children's TV programming, (not the least of which is 'making things intelligible to small children) I'm convinced "insane" was the correct approach - 'insane' is preferable to 'boring', every time. This he...

 So there's this elderly silicon valley billionaire who got most of his money by making an MMORPG that is notWorld of Warcraft. He dies, and that's awkward, because he's the closest to a protagonist we're gonna get.  His executors, who are west-coast silicon valley millionaires, we'll name Nissan and Toyota, discover that the dead billionaire (let's call him Chevy) did something unfortunate with his will, putting a bunch of language in it saying he's to have some cryofreeze process done to his remains in the hopes of immortality. At this point in the novel there is a lot of detail of the legal issues, but this is a mislead that is basically wasting the reader's time, as they are irreverent. What is relevant is that an another silicon valley billionaire, Elmo, has learned about this and via fuckery gets the brain of Chevy to digitize. Elmo is going to be this novel's antagonist, but he's going to be a dumb, shitty one. Elmo also wants...

[er, that is the late 1990s documentary series The Cold War ] Some kind soul a long time ago posted this: a documentary series, produced by CNN and made by the same production staff of ITV's landmark series The World At War . The last month or two I've finally got around to watching it, while working on a bitch bastard whore of a model. (It's that 1/350 Zeppelin Takom released last year. It's been death by photoetch.) TL;DR: It's a great series and I learned a lot Slightly longer: Can you believe that a series that is 26 episodes long and fifty something minutes long each, and it still feels like stuff is left out? That's more the material than any flaw in the series itself - telling the story of the Cold War is like telling the story of the Napoleonic era in history: shit's gonna get left out. That's pretty much the only substantive criticism I can make, though. The series was made in the late 1990s, and the biases it has are that of th...

When writing the post on the V-2/A4, I fell down the rabbit hole learning how the A4's guidance system worked. I couldn't really work it into that post, as it was already way too long, so I present those details here, both because the details I learned are pretty cool,  and also to back up a claim I made: that the guidance system was a hard limit on the Third Reich's missile ambitions. While in theory later missiles could have been developed with the A4's motor, the guidance system would have to be completely redone, an development project that it's difficult to imagine the historical Third Reich ever finishing.   The Obvious, Stated I know quoting the dictionary is a hoary old cliche, so let me just say my research made me reflect on the phrase "guidance system". Before I started, I assumed a kind of black box that did the guidance thing. But once I got into it, I realized that "system" implies a bunch of mechanisms doing guidance: working, but...