Pat @Pat@qoto.org

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

THX 1138 (1971)

Starting out as a student project, this film was George Lucas's first. Apparently Warner Brothers thought it was good enough and decided to back it. Francis Ford Coppola who was already seeing a lot of success by that time also joined the project to help produce.

The film didn’t get many rave reviews when it was first released, but when Lucas went on to make Star Wars just six years later, THX 1138 enjoyed a significant bump in its esteem.

One of the features of the dystopian world depicted in this film is a drug to suppress everyone’s emotions. This is an idea loosely borrowed from A Brave New World, except in Huxley’s story the controlling drug is a happy pill not an emotion-suppression pill. This same idea of a society with suppressed emotions has been used from time to time in science fiction, more recently by the film Equals (2015).

It’s been released in several different cuts (some parts of the original release were censored by Warner Bros). Generally, I’d say the longer cuts are probably closer Lucas’ vision.

There was a director's cut released in 2004 by Lucas himself which is a true director's cut, however if you watch that one you'll be looking at his vision in 2004, and may not be what he would have done 1971 as director’s cut.

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#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #bald #dystopia #the70s #youth #emotion #drugs #equals #BraveNewWorld

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I guy with zero followers just boosted my toot...

Oh well, it's the thought that counts.

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Just a security reminder to developers...

If you *require* uppercase letters in passwords, or require numbers and special characters, you are making your passwords LESS secure because it reduces the possible number of combinations of passwords. (E.g., it eliminates combinations that are all lowercase.)

It also pisses off your users.

Also, those little indicators that show you how secure your new password is as you type it into the field, the ones that says poor, good, etc. as you enter each character? That feature makes a system less secure, because there are many more lines of code needed to examine those characters as they are typed, which means more chance for leaks of the password.

Just suggest to the user that passwords should be at least X characters long and not be too easy to guess, and leave it at that. Give users a break.

#security #passwords #UX #UI

I feel sad for the people who died in that Titan sub.

I wonder if the other companies will be resuming tours. If they do, I wonder if they will tour the wreckage of the Titan submersible as well as the Titanic.

That seems morbid to me, but then the whole idea of touring the Titanic wreckage seems morbid.

#Titan #Titanic #submersible

Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

Cocoon (1985)

Here's another first contact science fiction film. This one’s directed by Ron Howard. Many of the characters in this film are elderly people, who are played by long time veteran actors including Don Amiche who won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role in this film.

The actors who played the elderly people in this film we're all born very early in the 20th century with the exception Wilfred Brimley who often played characters who were older than he was. Brimley began his career as a stuntman and later as a character actor, but I'm not sure if he did his own stunts in this film or not.

One nice aspect of this film is that it has an original plot formed from elements of previous films, it's not a typical first-contact-with-aliens type of film. The special effects were well done also.

Young people may not have heard of this one and it could easily get lost in the backlist of a film catalog, so if you've never heard of this film you should check it out.

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#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #ET #extraterrestrial #firstcontact #youth #old #pool #aliens #Atlantis

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(I apologize for the Trump toot, but this one is a real gem)

Where does Trump stand on the Second Amendment and on the government trying to take away people's guns?

(make sure as many maga folks as possible hear this)

#2A #guns #firearms #rights #freedom #maga

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Happy Juneteenth!

To a lot of people the emancipation of the slaves at the end of the Civil War seems like it happened a long time ago, but there are many people alive today (myself included) who are old enough to have met someone who was emancipated at the end of the Civil War.

It wasn't really that long ago.

#Juneteenth #emancipation #CivilWar #history #BlackHistory #celebrate

spoiler - explaining the joke...

*** spoiler ***
I don't mean to make fun of Carol, or of people from New Hampshire, but really, there's no "R" in "media".

(meteor outlets)

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NASA needs to launch a project to investigate the sources of these meteors.

(punchline is at the end of the video)

#NASA #space #word #planet #meteorite #cspan #telescope #joke

(meteor image CC-BT-3.0, Navicore; cspan clip fair use)

* "were", not "we're"

There's a huge plot hole in this episode. The whole point of the thing is that the word "serve" has two different meanings in English but the aliens don't speak English. So in their language the same word wouldn't have the two different meanings, so the whole point of the plot twist doesn't make any sense. Also they are using cryptographers to try to decode the alien language which is stupid because the aliens wouldn't use cryptography to write their book, it would just be encoded in their language, not encrypted.

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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…

The Twilight Zone, To Serve Man (1962)

A lot of people rate this episode as one of their favorite Twilight Zone episodes. It's about a first contact with an alien species that comes to Earth. I recently found out that this was based on a short story of the same name written by Damon Knight a dozen years earlier and it pretty much follows very closely to that story, accept in the short story the aliens are humanoid pigs while in the Twilight Zone episode they're just tall, 350-pound humanoids called Kanimits.

The Kanimits don’t talk like humans, they use a voice synthesizer. They promise the people of Earth that they will share their advanced technology with humans for the betterment of humanity. But people are skeptical and they give the alien representative a lie detector test which the alien passes.

This episode is highly recommended.

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Accessible video description:

a black and white video of one of the aliens who is seated with wires hooked up to him taking a lie detector test, the alien is dressed in a white robe and has a large, bald head with dark circles under his eyes, two humans are in the room operating the equipment which shows the needles of the chart recorder on a polygraph machine.

(fair use clip from the episode in which the alien demonstrates how to pass a polygraph test.)

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#science #fiction #ScienceFiction #SciFi #FTW #sfftw #film #movie #ET #extraterrestrial #firstcontact #epicurian #UN #crypto #LostInTranslation #TruthBeTold

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Wouldn't it be ironic if COVID-19 was actually 100% fatal and that these initial infections during the first few years of the pandemic we're just the infection phase of a virus that goes into a dormant stage for about a decade, only to re-emerge and kill every single person who got infected?

Wouldn't that be ironic?

#COVID19 #respirators #N95 #pandemic #irony #vax #masks #CDC

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For those of you who are not familiar with the story discussed in this thread, here's a link...

https://thehill.com/opinion/4038159-stunning-ufo-crash-retrieval-allegations-deemed-credible-urgent/

#TruthBeTold #craft #weaselalien

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#TruthBeTold

All of these quotes that I have just tooted out under the hashtag #weaselalien were the exact quotes that that guy, David Grusch and others have said that the media have picked up on and assumed meant that space aliens had landed on earth and that the government had taken their spaceship and are hiding it somewhere and not telling anybody about it.

All of those quotes are innocuous, they're just carefully worded and placed together to make everyone believe that they're talking about space aliens.

That's right, this guy, David Grusch, and the media are doing a big Truth-Be-Told on the whole country! 😂

#craft
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#TruthBeTold = 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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#TruthBeTold

The International Space Station and other space vehicles were assembled in space, so we are already making space vehicles in space.

Here's another quote...

... he had briefed Defence Department officials, regarding objects from "off-world vehicles not made on this Earth."

#craft #weaselalien

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#TruthBeTold

It would be foolish to assume that the US Defense Department does not have plans for capturing enemy satellites and analyzing them or to use them in some manner to our own advantage.

Here's another quote...

... he knew of a secret government program "involving the analysis and exploitation of materials recovered from off-world craft."

#craft #weaselalien

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#TruthBeTold

The Joro spider (Trichonephila clavata), is a large species of spider from Japan that has come to the US. They have exceptionally strong silk and create unusual webs.

Small, young Jobo spiders may use ballooning to disperse themselves. Ballooning is when a spider releases a long strand or strands of web to catch the wind and float away for long distances. The spiders are little pilots flying their vehicles. It would be incorrect parlance to call those spacecraft.

This exotic spider silk and the ballooning have been studied for a variety of applications.

It is likely that the US Defense Dept. has studied this for possible military applications, such as for dispersal of listening devices or for use in quickly extricating soldiers from a battlefield.

As part of this research, scientists would need to recover those little spider crafts to study them.

Here's another quote...

"These are retrieving non-human origin technical vehicles, call it spacecraft if you will, it’s probably not the right parlance, but no-kidding, non-human exotic origin vehicles that have either landed or crashed."

#craft #weaselalien

#TruthBeTold

"My personal belief is that there is very compelling evidence that we may not be alone."

This quote was made in reference to the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

An overwhelming majority of scientists believe this. There is nothing extraordinary about this statement.

#craft #weaselalien