Pat @Pat@qoto.org

@volkris

Are judges who take millions of dollars in bribes “independent”?

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Space-Men (1957)
(aka, Assignment: Outer Space)

This is an Italian-made sci-fi by Antonio Margheriti, who was a very prolific filmmaker. He was able to produce a lot of low-budget films very quickly, including this one which was his first film. I think most of the voice actors (who dubbed the English version) were actually pretty good in this film given the material. And there was a ton of special effects in this one, too.

This film seems to have a lot more science fact errors in it then the typical 50s science fiction film. I’ve put a few in this unauthorized trailer –- convert hydrogen into oxygen to make air; going to Globular Cluster M12 in a chemical rocket, rocket engines at “full RPM”; and of course lots of sounds in space. At one point they are at Mars and they get a call from HQ saying, “Hey, while your out there, stop by Venus, too.” (paraphrased)

I think the title of this film, “Space-Men” comes from a line in the movie about a woman who is on the spaceship (I’ve included it in the trailer). The English-dubbed version of the film that was released in the US had the title, “Assignment: Outer Space”.

For a low budget film, they really put a lot of effort into the props and special effects and sets. Actually, some of the sets are pretty well designed and the special effects were not bad for a low-budget 50s sci-fi. (It was actually shot in 1960, but it’s basically a 50s sci-fi.)

If you've never seen an Italian sci-fi this one’s a classic.

#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #50s #Italy #rocket #blastoff #M12 #solarsystem #RPM #neohydrozine #dubbed

Accessible video description:
Old faded color film; A guy in a control tower talking about a space mission to the Globular Cluster M12, then a rocket blasts off with the movie’s opening title, Assignment: Outer Space and shows the surface of a planet and it shows the rocket again and it shows a guy in zero-g trying to maneuver and it shows some people in space near a space ship and then it shows the guy in a spacesuit floating through the void of space and a hose being hooked up to the back of a rocket that is floating in space then a guy playing around with a bunch of oscilloscopes and other guys floating around through space and a fiery meteor, not a meteorite, goes buzzing by; then some guy in a cockpit says he doesn't know what's going on; then another guy wants to commit suicide by jumping off of the spaceship and he jumps out and it shows a fake dummy falling down to the surface of Mars as the guy screams when he’s falling in space; and some other guys talk about going down to get the guy and they go down and pick him up and he's still alive for some reason; and then back to the guy who is in zero-g pretending to be floating around he's actually walking on the ground but he's moving very slowly and acting like he's floating but it actually looks pretty real considering; then the guy and some other people are standing around talking about some destructive thing; then there's a rocket that's trying to land at “full RPMs” (closed captioning says “four RPMs”) and the rocket lands but it tips over a little bit, 9 degrees and it sounds like a tree falling; then a man and a woman are talking about going 90,000 mph; then a guy's talking about the next solar system revolution; then a woman in a cockpit wearing a helmet says that they're very close now; then a man is talking to a woman who's in some sort of laboratory with plants that are turning hydrogen into oxygen; then a guy in a spaceship is talking about the Earth turning into boiling mud; then several astronauts in a cockpit and a guy’s talking about 16 gammas when he meant to say 16 G's; then there's an atomic spaceship with chemical exhaust coming out the back of it; then a bad actor talking about crashing into a Mars satellite; then a guy in a cockpit with a woman, the guys says nobody knows what they're talking about; then a man walks into a room and it shows him looking at a person's legs under a table but you can’t see the person and the person walks out and turns out that it's a woman astronaut, which apparently is shocking in 1950s; then a man is coming out of a suspended hibernation tank in a spaceship, cut to an o-scope and cut back to the guy standing up very slowly out of his hibernation tank; then it shows a rocket separating from its first stage and then the second stage separating from it and the surface of some planet; then a guy in a spacesuit is floating through space very slowly with fake stars in the background and all of the stars are blinking dim and bright synchronously; fade to black.

@freemo

Well, no wonder. Look at what he's been feeding it.

@fisunov

This thread explains how that can be...

https://qoto.org/@Pat/110526950046160847

@stux

He must have been feeding it toxic food.

@freemo

...and you didn't even need to use AI. 😆

@LouisIngenthron

It's not an either-or decision. Governments are not acting, so we need to do everything we can.

Also, meat is murder.

@stux

man mount

@stux

>'Like the function "kill all children" to kill the head task and underlying but the name has stick for so long :flan_laugh:

>'I even remember some Qanon sillies putting up screenshots from Linux and Windows with: "OOooHHOO youu SEE! theres the words "kill and children" so they must be evil"'

Wait until those homophobes find out what you need to type to view the manual page for the drive mount command in Linux.

#linux #shell #LGBT

@medigoth

This is actually pretty easy to resolve. Just set the kid down at a desk and tell them to write something.

It will be clear if they actually wrote it or not.

In fact, they should do this periodically for all of the students just to make sure they are on track.

@bonifartius

Us old folks use it all the time. 😆

#FuckTheTreadmill

@iron_bug

@tshirtman

I believe the shots from a third plane showing her transferring from plane to plane, and the shot of her changing the tire were actual footage of the event as it unfolded.

Other shots, like her strapping on the tire on the ground, were most likely shot later and edited into the actual footage of the event.

@stux

@peterdrake

As a dyslexic, I wish I had a nickel for every time I typed "file.cvs". I usually have to stop and think about what the CSV abbreviation stands for to figure it out. (or just type it wrong and get error message) 🙂

(FYI, CVS = Consumer Value Stores)

***** Spoiler *****

The Twilight Zone: The Brain Center at Whipple's (1964)

In this Twilight Zone episode the manager who is firing everybody thought that his job was safe but in the end he got laid off too, and replaced with Robby the Robot. 🤖

This is similar to what's going on right now as AI is starting to do the work of jobs that people had assumed were safe; actors, writers, musicians, programmers, artists; so the backlash from this most recent change is going to be broad. Hang on…

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

The Twilight Zone: The Brain Center at Whipple's (1964)

Several Twilight Zone episodes dealt with machines coming to life or taking over or messing things up. In this one the protagonist is a heartless company president who lays off a bunch of workers at his factory and replaces them with computers.

During the late 50s and early 60s there was a Liddite surge in response to computers that had begun to replace mechanical and electromechanical tabulating machines. The old tabulating machines required a lot of manual labor to operate and maintain them. The new computers were replacing a lot of workers, so some people were upset about it. (Of course all those jobs working with the tabulating machines would never have existed if those machines hadn't replaced the human computers and tabulators who did the calculating in the 19th century.)

Computers began to ship in larger quantities in the early 60s because they started to use transistors which reduced the costs significantly compared to the vacuum tube models.

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, I highly recommend a revisit of this episode with its timely narrative.

Accessible video description:

A man is watching a film with a company president talking about how a new computer is going to save the company a lot of money, the company president is a bald-headed guy with glasses wearing a suit, he is writing on a chalkboard, the man watching the film is sitting near the projector; then the guy who was in the film is now talking to the man who was viewing the film and asking him for his critique; cut to a guy who picks up a metal bar and starts hitting a computer causing sparks to fly and the bald-headed man grabs a gun and shoots at the guy hitting the computer; then a guy in a lab coat talks to the president about how bad it is now that nobody is working at the company and how empty it is and then the guy in the lab coat walks out; cut to the end title Twilight Zone.

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#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #management #labor #strike #computer #IBM #IBM1401 #severance #RobbyRobot #robot #luddite #neoluddite

(fair use clips from the episode)

@nullifidian @bonifartius @trinsec @mc

A quote from the wp article cited by @freemo …

“About half of all known bacteria have at least one flagellum, indicating that rotation may in fact be the most common form of locomotion in living systems…”