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"There is a sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting the U.S. populace, which is extremely unethical and immoral."

This statement doesn't seem extraordinary. I can imagine that there is some foreign government or entity somewhere who is probably doing this.

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"Well, naturally, when you recover something that's either landed or crashed, sometimes you encounter dead pilots and, believe it or not, as fantastical as that sounds, it's true."

That statement sounds 100% true to me.

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It's still rough out there. Please remember to wear your respirator.

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Virginia Caroline Rappe died at the young age of 30 under suspicious circumstances. Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was falsely accused of her death in a widely publicized Hollywood scandal, but was later completely exonerated by a jury. Had she not died at such a young age, today she would be 131 years old.

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= A statement that is logically or literally true (or partly true), but seems to imply something that isn’t true or is just plain weird. (for rhetoric, logic or propaganda studies… or just for fun)

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

The Adjustment Bureau (2011)

This is one of the better-made films that I've seen in a while. The acting in this film is world class starring Matt Damon and Emily Blunt in the lead roles, with Anthony Mackie in the primary supporting role. John Slattery gives a good supporting performance as one the antagonists and character actor Terence Stamp delivers a stunning performance as the evil guy. The writing is very good with regard to the characters and dialogue and there's great chemistry between Damon and Blunt as the romantic couple. Overall it's very well made.

There are not a lot of technology devices shown in this film. In fact almost all of them are shown in this unauthorized trailer attached this toot. One of the issues that people might have with this film is that the technology that is demonstrated in the movie is done in a manner that makes it look like it's magic or supernatural because there aren't devices that are associated with it. (kind of hard to explain without spoilers)

In any case this film requires a little bit more suspension of disbelief than your typical scifi just because of the mode in which it's done.

I highly recommend this one.

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accessible video description:
fade in Emily Blunt's character as a ballet dancer with Matt Damon's character watching her, Terence Stamp’s character walks up and makes a comment to Damon about Blunt, then Damon and Blunt are on a bus flirting, the bus pulls up to a stop and Damon spill some coffee on Blunt's lap, cut to Damon walking into an office where some of the people are frozen in place, there are men in helmets with devices that are scanning the people who are frozen in place, the men look startled by Damon, there's a man in a suit, John Slattery, who orders others to grab Damon, cut to Damon walking through a medium-sized crowd of people to give a speech as a candidate for Senator with the Brooklyn bridge in the background, then Anthony Mackey is sitting in a very large opulent library looking pensive as music plays, he gets up to leave and walks through the large library, then cut to Damon and Mackey talking in a bar, Damon is wearing a baseball cap, Mackey is wearing a suit, then a woman bartender asks them if they need something, then Mackey's character says that they can’t talk there, and to meet him later and he leaves, then Damon and Mackey meet on a boat in the harbor, cut to Damon and Blunt dancing in a large crowded dance club with flashing lights, then cut to two men in suits looking at a book that is displaying animated graphics and looks very high tech, they are talking about inflection points, then Damon and Blunt walk out of a subway onto a city street as tense music plays, they are moving quickly then a quick cut to men in suits busting open a door, then cut back to Damon and Blunt running through the city, Blunt stops running and looks visibly confused and distressed Damon convinces her to keep running, so they continue running and almost get hit by a car but continue running, then fade out and fade in to the movie title The Adjustment Bureau, in a gold typeface.
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**** Content warning: flashing lights ****

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@freemo

I have a user interface suggestion for Mastodon.

Currently, the little box where you enter your toot text is on the left side of the screen. This means that the information from that little box goes into your left eye (mostly) and is transferred to the right hemisphere of your brain. The problem is that for most people language processing is in the left hemisphere, which means all that information has to cross the corpus callosum to get to the left side of the brain to get processed. For someone like me with dyslexia that really screws things up and causes me to drop words and makes it very difficult to use.

So my suggestion is to put the little box on the right hand side of the screen or in the middle, or give the user an option as to placement and size of that little box.

That's my suggestion.

(Sometimes I write stuff in a separate window using a word processor and then copy it over to the little box, but that is kind of tedious, especially for short, quick toots.)

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Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts is an avid history buff. He studied history at Harvard and probably would have been a history professor if he had not chosen law as a profession.

Here he gives a brief, careful analysis of the US Civil War.

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In case you're wondering, Congress choose #4. They just decided to cut food for poor people; and they kept politician's salaries, bombs, and tax loopholes for the rich.

Put nobody ever pays attention and we're more than a year from the next election so voters will forget by then and those fuckers will get re-elected again.

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Pat

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956)

The title of this film is very misleading. It makes it sound like a low-budget 50s scifi, but this is actually a very well made movie. I think it's on par with The Day the Earth Stood Still (1952), except this film had a lot more special effects. They used a combination of stop action and other practical effects as well as post processing techniques.

The guy who did the special effects on this film, Ray Harryhauser, invented a technique called Dynamation, a special type of stop action effect. He went on to work on the 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1956) which is probably one of the most well-known stop action/live action films of the era. But this film uses a wide variety of techniques as well as stop action.

The writing and acting are also top-notch. The actors weren't big stars but they were accomplished character actors. It has a fully developed plot and the dialogue was well written. Also, they got a lot of the science facts right on this one, at least more than usual for a Hollywood scifi. They even tried to explain special relativity, incorrectly of course, but they tried.

I highly recommend this film to anyone who likes old science fiction movies.

It’s just unfortunate that they gave this film such a cheap-sounding name. They even released it as a double-feature with The Werewolf. (I guess film marketing has improved since then as well as special effects. 😆 )
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accessible image description:

an ugly movie poster with orange and white headlines, muted colors, with images of flying saucers that are shooting rays to the ground and robot creatures walking around, the large headlines say flying saucers attack! warning! take cover! earth vs the flying saucers, small headlines say flying saucers invade our planet: washington, london, paris, moscow, take cover!, a smaller inset image of a man and woman looking scared and holding each other.

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Congress and Biden just came to an agreement on the budget. They had to make cuts in order to come to an agreement.

If you were in charge, which would you cut?

7 people · Jun 06, 2023, 01:08
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In a previous Retro SciFi of the Week for the movie Her (qoto.org/@Pat/1103178061704529) I mentioned a technique that pro-racist Hollywood uses to marginalize black people. That technique is to only show black people at the beginning (or end) of a film, which is what that film did.

Well in this film, On The Beach, they did it too. There is only one black actor in the movie, an extra, who appears in the beginning of the film on the submarine, but he is not shown in the movie again (even though he is a member of the submarine crew!) This situation is quite different, however, from the movie Her because in the 1950s black people were almost always excluded from mainstream Hollywood movies. Intentionally excluding black people in movies in the 21st century is not acceptable.

In that other review for Her I guessed that that technique of only putting black people at the beginning of a movie was used at least since the 1980s, but here is evidence that it started much earlier -- at least since 1959.

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The release of this film was widely covered by the media at the time.

Here's a video of how WABC-TV covered the story...

youtube.com/watch?v=aG-e52yAxf

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

The Day After (1983)

Last week the Retro SciFi Film of the Week was On the Beach (1959), a film about nuclear war. This is another film about nuclear war, but this one is much more realistic. Whereas On the Beach showed no dead bodies, injuries, or destruction at all, this film shows in graphic detail just how horrific nuclear war is.

Each of the films are propaganda films, designed to influence public opinion, but with On The Beach the purpose appears to have been to keep the arms race going, and is told from the perspective of the military. The Day After appears to want to eliminate nuclear weapons, and explicitly says it wants to avert nuclear war.

The special effects and the overall quality are astonishing considering that it's a made-for-TV movie created in the early 80s. It was a really big deal when this movie was released. Some sources say it's the most watched TV movie ever. It was highly promoted and it had a huge impact on society.

It follows the same basic formula as any other disaster movie -- the first half of the film is character development and shows people doing ordinary things and then in the second half of the movie all hell breaks loose.

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(fair use video clips)

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accessible video description:

content warning - graphic descriptions of death and injury

A male TV announcer announcing political events as a gray-haired man and a woman watch; then another man and a woman arguing in their home, the man is wearing an Air Force uniform; then men in a barber shop discuss the situation; then cut to a crow in a wheat field flying away; then cut to a scene inside a silo bunker where Air Force personnel are going through a sequence to launch nuclear missiles, pushing buttons and turning keys; then missiles blasting off as ordinary people watch; then on a highway a nuclear bomb detonates in the distance, the gray haired man is in his car and lies down to shield himself from the thermal radiation and blast; an orange mushroom cloud raises into the air; scenes of fire; people frantically running; then another detonation with two mushroom clouds in the distance; then people are being vaporized by thermal radiation with their skeletons briefly appearing as they are vaporized; then fade to a quiet scene with the gray-haired man slowly walking down the street with destruction everywhere and flakes of fallout beginning to fall; then a Geiger counter and a man talking about the fallout coming; then two people dressed in scrubs, one holding a flashlight the other tending to a serious facial burn on a patient; then a farmer walks out into his field and sees his horse dead on the ground; then a night scene and a man is talking about his radiation injuries; then a boy with radiation injuries talks to a doctor, and a nurse gestures with her head that the boy likely will not survive; then back to the man talking about his radiation injuries and asks what can be done; then people gathering dead bodies from a field using horse-drawn carts; then people listen to the president talking on the radio as the screen shows scenes of despair; then cut to a scene of people burying bodies in a mass grave; then the gray-haired man looking exhausted, now with facial burns and patches of hair missing from his head talks to another doctor, then they hug. Fade Out.

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The Agronomic Revolution happened about 538 million years ago.

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= A statement that is logically or literally true (or partly true), but seems to imply something that isn’t true or is just plain weird. (for rhetoric, logic or propaganda studies… or just for fun)

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FYI...

This is a SOCIAL media platform. If you toot stuff here, expect to have people respond to what to toot and want to engage in discussion...

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Just muted @gricka for failing to respond to multiple inquires.

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Spoilers: On the Beach 

*****Spoilers: On the Beach*****

What I don't understand about this movie is why everyone was acting like nothing happened. I understand that some people might be in denial about the end of the world, but I think at least some of them would be expressing dread.

If they had five months before the radiation got there, wouldn’t they at least maybe dig a shelter or something? Maybe start storing up food?

Instead they put all of their effort into manufacturing and distributing those pills. I don't think people would act that way.

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Spoilers: On the Beach, Twilight Zone, Patsplaining 

***** Spoilers *****

On the Beach and Twilight Zone...

The acting in this film, On the Beach (1959), was superb. Everyone gave great performances, with this dialogue that was very difficult. Fred Astaire, whom I didn't include in the trailer, was known for his dancing but in this film confirmed his acting talent. He was one of the greatest dancers on the big screen, perhaps second only to Ginger Rogers, who could dance as well as Fred Astaire, except backwards and in high heels.

Ironically, all of the actors in the film have died except for Donna Anderson, who played Mary Holmes (the one who got hit with the towel on the beach). She's the sole survivor.

In the film, which takes place after World War III, it's presumed that everybody is dead from radiation poisoning except for the people who live in Australia, and that there's intense radiation fallout in the upper atmosphere that is circling the globe and slowly making its way to the southern hemisphere to eventually wipe out all of humanity.

In actuality, fallout in the upper atmosphere from thermonuclear weapons would have a short half-life and within five months would not likely be producing enough radiation to cause acute radiation poisoning, although it would increase the cancer rate. However, a salted thermonuclear weapon could be produced with fallout that has a longer half-life. In this story I think it was a cobalt bomb, but such weapons have not ever been produced.

I mentioned that this was the first major film about nuclear armageddon but there was a Twilight Zone episode about a nuclear apocalypse that came out just one month before this film was released. That Twilight Zone episode was titled “Time Enough at Last”. It’s a very well-known episode about a bookworm who works at a bank and ends up accidentally surviving World War III while seeking solitude during his lunch break in the bank vault. That Twilight Zone episode starred Burgess Meredith.

Several other TZ episodes had themes about nuclear annihilation.

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

On the Beach (1959)

Just a happy-go-lucky nuclear Armageddon film…

Three years before the Cuban Missile Crisis and about a decade and a half after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, this film presented its story about the aftermath of global nuclear war. There were a couple of other movies made earlier in the 50s about nuclear war, and of course all those goofy scifi’s about giant insects, but this was the first major film. It starred Gregory Peck, Eva Gardner, Anthony Hopkins, and Fred Astaire, who were all big movie stars at the time. It was kind of a big deal when it came out.

News coverage of the bombings of Japan were highly censored as to the most gruesome parts of the bombings. Film and photographs produced immediately after the bombings by the United States Strategic Bombing Survey were classified until the late 60s, so although people had heard about radiation burns and radiation sickness, most people had not seen any graphic images.

The US didn't want people to understand just how horrible those bombings were, but they wanted to inform people about the possibility of all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union, which, with certain types of thermonuclear weapons, had the potential to kill most or all of the world’s population.

The result was this film, On the Beach (1959) which showed no dead bodies at all, it showed no destruction, no burned and leveled buildings, nothing. There's only one guy in the film who was shown to be sick in the entire movie and he was smiling or flirting with the nurse throughout the 45 seconds that he was on the screen. Everyone was almost always shown with smiling faces and having fun and the score was upbeat or silly most of time.

I think if you changed about a half dozen lines in the film, removed five minutes of the guy walking around in a hazmat suit, and adjusted a minute or two of score, people would think it was a romantic drama.

Contrast this with the TV movie The Day After (1983), which was released 24 years later, which showed shocking graphic images of just how horrible nuclear war could be.

The clips from the film that I’ve attached to this toot show just a few of the many upbeat scenes from the film. All the characters in the film knew from the beginning that a nuclear war had happened and that the deadly radiation was heading to where they were in Australia, but they just acted happy and didn’t appear to care at all. Very weird.

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(fair use video clips)
Sorry, I messed up the aspect ratio on this video and cut off a little bit on the bottom.
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accessible video description:

Video opens with a submarine in the ocean with a number on the side that says 623, then a man in a lighthouse makes a phone call as a radio announcer talks about the nuclear war, then it shows a man and a woman on a bed talking, then it shows two military guys talking about a country club, then people on a beach where a man flicks a woman in the butt with a towel, then it shows Peck and Gardner talking and smiling, then sailors ogling at a pretty woman (Gardner) as she walks near their ship, then people dancing, then Peck and Gardner walking as she talks, then a bucolic scene of a horse in a field as the horse does a trick for a sugar cube, then a guy pretending to be sick lying in bed smiling and flirting with the male nurse with Peck and Dr. King giving him false hope, finally the closing title over an image of the same submarine moving on the surface of the ocean.

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Did you know that a respirator helps with allergies?

If you wear your respirator when you are around pollen or pet dander, you most likely won't get your allergy symptoms.

Also, a properly worn respirator, like a N95 mask, prevents infection and spread of disease from all variants of the flu, as well as COVID-19.

Take care out there.

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