Pat @Pat@qoto.org

#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.)

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.)

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

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

#EchoChamber #words #ignorance #BigIgnorantMicrophones

In case you’ve been stuck in an echo chamber, here’s a vocabulary lesson…

woke (adj.) - aware of racism and other injustices; anti-racist

anti-woke (adj.) - racist

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Hope this clears things up.

#people #puppies #kittens #revolution #populism #DogsOfMastodon

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The Senior Center is having a square dance to raise awareness of the COVID-19 pandemic.

(public domain image per wikimedia commons, Mtmusicfestsqdance.png)

#revolution

I support the revolution.

(Please boost)

#particle #matter #quantum #physics
#ThisIsWhatDemocracyLooksLike
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Which is your favorite lepton?

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Don't forget to get your bivalent booster vaccine before the holidays. And remember, it works better if you take it in the ass.

(no hashtags this time)

#johnmastodon

Is John Mastodon related to Galt Mastodon?

#shrug
#ItsPronouncedAyn

**** Spoiler: answer to the riddle ****

Please see the riddle in a previous toot in this thread…

The answer to the riddle is in this paragraph. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. This is the definition of birds. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.

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"People trapped inside little bodies, who have wings instead of arms, but they can fly."

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Fuck YouTube.

Anybody know of a PeerTube instance (or any other video site) that actually works, has no heavy-handed algorithms and has enough content so that a search will bring up a least a few high quality videos on a topic?

(and doesn't require registration or have an unbearable portion of advertising)

#satire #fusion #energy #nuclear #plant #NIF #LLNL #DOE

NIF, the facility that just produced the first positive-gain fusion reaction, was completed in 2009 at a cost of about $4.2B. It costs about $300M/year to run. So total cost to date is about $8.1B. The experiment that produced the fusion reaction had a net gain of about 1.1MJ energy.

That works out to about $19.44B per kilowatthour.

They plan to reduce the cost per kWh before they go into production. 😂

Quote from Wikipedia article on TAPPIST-1...

"...the probability of TRAPPIST-1e – the planet most likely to harbour life – to be actually inhabited is considerably less than that of Earth."

Since Earth's probability of being inhabited is 100%, this almost makes sense.

I reposted this with a clip that has better video. The subtitles on the clip are in Spanish, but there's too much to easily transcribe it to English. Sorry.