Pat @Pat@qoto.org

@admitsWrongIfProven

I guess there was a bit of "Question Authority" in there, but it was just a joke, and maybe to get people to think about relying too much on experts.

@admitsWrongIfProven

>"So you captured where we are, do you have a direction we could go? Asking because i do not ^^"

I don't understand. This was just a joke about the fallacy of "Appealing to authority". (I cited a reference to an authority on logic.)

@admitsWrongIfProven

>"you ok?"

I'm fine. Thank you for asking.

How are you?

@admitsWrongIfProven

>"Do you know the band "Ton steine scherben"? I get some similar vibes..."

No, never heard of them.

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #film #movie #FirstContact #contact #alien #aliens #future #space #SpaceShip #EZ4 #PeaceGas #Garr #Dillon #Truffaut #Dreyfuss #Spielberg

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

When this film came out, its depiction of the aliens seemed very realistic, and it has held up pretty well considering it was released nearly a half-century ago. Most of the special effects (by Douglas Trumbull) still seem real, and the dialogue and narrative still seem plausible. The acting performances and score are world class.

This film marked a change in the depiction of aliens in science fiction. Ever since the broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938, aliens who came to Earth were almost always shown as aggressive and as conquerors or colonizers. This film, released shortly after the Vietnam War had ended, was different.

As with nearly all films of the time, this 1977 film had significant racial bias in the composition of the cast, so you’ll need to keep that in mind as you watch it. I saw only one black character in the film, a flight controller who had just a few lines in one scene. (Nearly all of Spielberg’s films have racial bias, even those produced well into the 21st century.)

In terms of production quality and story, this is one of the best science fiction films ever made and if you haven’t seen it yet, make a point of seeing this one.

@AmberWavesofFlame

Give them two weeks of basic training that consists of 90% of pumping them full of propaganda that the enemy are evil non-humans who are raping their women and killing babies, then hand them a machine gun. What do you think is going to happen?

@icedquinn

if you fall,
I will catch you.

@mc

Here's a cool WP article on the moon in science fiction...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_in_science_fiction

@mc

Yeah, Jules Verne is the most influential and just about everything after him was derivative of his work.

I have a vague memory of From the Earth to the Moon (film), about there being some kind of device that compensated for the tremendous G-forces -- some kind of centrifugal device or suspended-animation camber or something like that. I'll try to find the film and watch it again.

Also, I just (re)discovered Franz Lang's Woman in the Moon (1929) which is just incredible. I can't believe all the technical details he put into that film. It even demonstrates zero-G, which was rare even for films made as late as the 1950s.

#transparency #fedi #meta

I just cleaned up my timeline and muted a bunch accounts for a variety of reasons:

- spamming a bunch of links to twitter content
- tooting excessive, irrelevant, auto-biographical episodic content
- non-interaction, non-responsive (probably bots)
- accounts with 90%+ toots that are just boosts (bots?)
- a bunch of toots of food without CWs
- other bot cues (very high following/followers on new accounts, etc.)
- certain non-English accounts that Google's translator can't handle
- inaccurate/misleading COVID-19 info

To really appreciate what this film is about, you need to understand the explosive technical innovation that was happening at the time. Most of the contemporary audience for this film had seen the following in their lifetimes…

- rapid transition from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles

- moving pictures - the first movie theaters were built, silent films and then talkies

- invention and commercialization of the airplane

- beginning of the installation of refrigerators in homes (prior to this people relied on ice delivery or just used canning techniques to preserve food)

- electrification of most homes happened during this time

- introduction of the disk phonograph and widespread availability of gramophone players

- rapid adoption of radio – the first broadcast station went on the air in 1919, by the early thirties most homes had a radio

- rapid adoption of the telephone – at the turn of the century only about one percent of households had phones, by the time this film was released most homes had them.

- the first liquid-fueled rocket was launched

Most of these inventions were highly disruptive and even though people enjoyed these new devices, society had a difficult time absorbing the change, which was likely a major contributor to the two world wars. (The main antagonist in this film is a neoluddite.)

@MikeGale

Anyone dumb enough to use a password manager almost deserves it.

Here’s a pic of the giant ballistic cannon used to shoot people to the moon in the film. Fritz Lang's German scifi pic Woman in the Moon (1929), used multi-stage rockets to send people to the moon, but apparently Wells didn’t know about that film, or he thought people could withstand 20,000 Gs.

This cannon looks exactly like a gun barrel pointing straight up, complete with an iron front sight on the barrel.😂

Besides the war, Wells’ story predicted biological warfare, a zombie apocalypse, sleeping gas used for crowd control (deadly gas was used in WWII, but harmless “Peace Gas” as he called it was not yet a thing), very large aircraft, spaceflight to the moon (Ok, Jules Verne did that story 65 years earlier and Georges Méliès did a film on that when Wells wrote The First Men In the Moon in 1901), men and women wearing the same clothing, sky trams, people movers, glass elevators, a long twenty-year war (Afghanistan) ...

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #film #movie #warlords #aeroplane #spaceflight #WWII #future #culottes #kulaks #War #moon #PeaceGas #BiologicalWarfare #pompous

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Things to Come (1936)

H. G. Wells wrote The Shape of Things to Come in 1933 when he predicted WWII and many other events and inventions that would come true. He even predicted that men would wear culotte miniskirts and shave their legs. (Actually, predicting WWII wasn’t that extraordinary of a feat, everybody saw it coming.)

This big-budget British-made adaptation is one of the classics of science fiction. The story covers the future from 1940 to 2036. I think it comes across as pompous and bombastic, but apparently audiences at the time liked it.

This film is available for free download and is in the public domain, even though the Supreme Court says it isn't.

I’ll include more in this thread under a spoiler warning…

- - -
(Note: This gif clip is silent, but the film is a talkie.)

@tanweerdar@mstdn.social

https://qoto.org/@Pat/109557209914113910

#SmallPoems #Poetry #MastoPrompt #bandage

Let’s make more people sick
so we can sell more medicine.

Let’s start another war
so we can sell more weapons.

Let’s cause more crime
so we can hire more lawyers
and build more prisons.

Let’s cut ourselves
because the bandage is pretty.

Let’s kill ourselves
to feed the worms.

#SmallPoems #Poetry #MastoPrompt #bandage
#sardonic

@icedquinn

>"might get two more caffienes and do more work ..."

>"...i'm sorta actually doing a few lines tonight"

Fallacy (informal) -

Appeal to authority (argument from authority, argumentum ad verecundiam) - an assertion is incorrectly assumed true because of the position or authority of the person asserting it.*

* Per Walton, Douglas (2008). Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. ISBN .

#satire #dry #humor #irony

@peterdrake

Space invades had a learning curve of about 30 seconds...