Mitch's Blog

Watch the weird cinematic rabbit hole that is Blade Runner: The Lost Cut - Adi Robertson at The Verge

“Blade Runner: The Lost Cut” is a 20-minute fan film that splices Blade Runner with

… other films that star Blade Runner cast members, plus more films starring those films’ co-stars, resulting in a masterfully edited cinematic rabbit hole where Rick Deckard is hunting down a cast of replicants including Gene Hackman (via The Conversation, one of Harrison Ford’s first films), Steve Martin (via The Jerk, which stars M. Emmet Walsh, who plays Deckard’s boss Bryant), and John Belushi (via The Blues Brothers, which features Ford’s Star Wars co-star Carrie Fisher).

Getting on lunchtime here so I think I’ll be watching this while I eat.

Rodney Dangerfield is cooler than you are

The coronavirus pandemic is heightening the need for “Right to Repair” – eliminating laws that make it illegal to fix the machines you own.

Cory Doctorow writes about two instances: A researcher has released a proof-of-concept for a hack that allows a relatively inexpensive CPAP machine to function somewhat like a ventilator.

Also, several state treasurers have demanded ventilator manufacturers release documentation so hospitals can maintain their equipment during a crisis.

Also on Cory’s Pluralistic.net today:

• One guy is in charge of oversight for $2.2T in stimulus. He’s got no staff and he communicates by Twitter. He formerly worked for Elizabeth Warren so we can be optimistic he’s both honest AND competent – but nobody is that honest and that competent.
• Universities want to install mandatory, undetectable spyware on students' computers.

And more.

(How) American Collapse Resembles Soviet Collapse: Six Ways America’s Collapse is Eerily Like the Soviet Union’s Last Days - umair haque

This article seems more timely now than it was a year ago when it was published.

American collapse is not preordained – we have free will, both as individuals and as a society. But every day Trump remains President and the Republicans remain in power, it’s a day closer .

The Democrats are better. But on a national level they’re still not good. Just not as bad.

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I did not love the Deadwood movie, but I loved Al Swearengen’s final line. [YouTube]

‘That Thing You Do’ cast plans reunion fundraiser for coronavirus relief [USAToday]

The Wonders, the fictional group at the center of the 1996 movie “That Thing You Do,” will reunite on Friday for a community watch party of the film to benefit the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund….

Funds raised through the watch party will aid musicians and touring professionals who are out of work because of the coronavirus.

The watch party also will pay tribute to Adam Schlesinger, The Fountains of Wayne musician who died recently of complications of COVID-19. Schlesinger wrote and composed “That Thing You Do,” the song that launched the fictional band ― initially and confusingly called the One-ders ― to brief stardom in the film, set in 1964.

I love this movie. I need to see it again.

Bloomberg News Killed Investigation, Fired Reporter, Then Sought To Silence His Wife [David Folkenfilk/NPR]

“ … Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.”

Bloomberg was concerned about being locked out of the lucrative Chinese market.

Not a good look, Michael.

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Today on Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic:

• Amazon fires tech workers for warehouse worker solidarity.

• Southern states are in for the worst coronavirus misery. Poor healthcare and social services contribute to the problem, and the burden will be borne more heavily by PoCs, who are more likely to have chronic untreated health conditions, no savings to allow them to take time off, and no healthcare – which is of course why Republicans are OK with it.

Also:

• “… if billionaires need you to go back to work to keep their fortunes intact, then it follows that your work – not theirs – is responsible for those fortunes to begin with.”

• And Cory’s doing a charity reading for #podapalooze, reading an hour of his novel “Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town” – one of my favorite of his novels. It’s is about a man’s quest to build a mesh Wi-Fi network in Toronto. The man’s father is a mountain, his mother is a washing machine, one of is brothers is a zombie, another is a set of nesting dolls, and his girlfriend has wings.

Via @JohnPhilbin

I’ve always thought that fundamentalists support Trump because they’re idiots who choose to believe he repented from his philandering, lying and other sins. Or as a calculation – Trump himself is an unrepentant sinner, but he appoints conservative judges and supports conservative policies.

Here’s an alternate theory – Trump’s fundie supporters see him as being just like them.

Welcome to the Trumpocalypse [Bob Moser/Rolling Stone]

Maybe the administration would take a bit more care with the coronavirus pandemic if it weren’t loaded with folks who are looking forward to the end of the world…

Trump gets these people and their brutal, zero-sum view of the world — and vice-versa. For starters, the universe is divided neatly into friends, who must constantly prove they’re really friends, and mortal enemies, who must be trampled. Also, of course, the truth that he knows, like the truth they know, is the only truth, even if it’s often subject to revision. And just as the world is out to get them, it’s out to get him. What’s often painted as a marriage of convenience between Trump and the religious right is far closer to a pure love match. When Pence fixes those doe eyes upon his president, he isn’t just kissing up; he means it."

These fundies believe the end times are here, the Rapture is coming, and any day now they’ll be transported bodily to heaven.

… before things start to get really ugly on the earth, with God-sent wars and plagues far worse than COVID-19, they’ll be wafted up to heaven en masse, to live in eternal peace, bliss, and moral superiority while everyone else — including lesser Christians — suffers years’ worth of unspeakably gruesome torments prior to the final, earth-destroying battle between Warrior Jesus and Satan at Armageddon, and the Final Judgment in which Jews and others who refuse to convert are condemned to eternal torture in hell."

Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo really believe in this toxic bullshit. Or they claim to, which is the same from a policy and political perspective. Trump probably does too – this worldview casts him as literally having been chosen by God.

This does not look comfortable to me but Minnie seems to love it. I think it’s because the concrete is absorbs the sun. I patted her two minutes later; she was a very warm dog. 📷

We watched episode one of “World on Fire,” a big-budget British miniseries about England during World War II, focused, so far as I can see, entirely on regular people, not great generals or statesmen, drawn from all social classes.

Two cast members I recognize: Sean Bean is a shell-shocked World War I veteran, father of a brave young woman and an insolent, obnoxious teen-age boy. It’s a very different role from the last thing we saw him in, the swashbuckling Richard Sharpe adventure stories, set in the Napoleonic Wars 200 years ago, that aired mainly in the 1990s, with two sequels in the mid-2000s. Bean is also famous as Eddard Stark on Game of Thrones, and for a role in the Lord of the Rings movies. We only saw the first LoTR movie and I, at least, was so bored by that that I didn’t bother with any of the others and have nearly forgotten it. This is a very different role than I’ve ever seen Bean in; he’s previously always seemed to be some variation of the dashing warrior, sometimes a hero, sometimes a villain but still basically the same guy. In this he’s a working-class father, psychologically scarred by his own war experience, and now a committed pacifist. He moves stiffly and his clothes are cheap but neat, fitting my image of a certain type of respectable working class British man. And yet in his own way he’s as strong and courageous as Richard Sharpe or Eddard Stark.

The other actor I recognize is Helen Hunt, playing an American journalist in Berlin and Poland as the Nazis begin their march across Europe. The series is set in 1939; HItler is rolling into Poland and still proclaiming that he is only interested in peace; Helen Hunt’s character is a radio journalist, trying to warn the world that Hitler is lying. She’s strong and tough as nails. Also a different role for Hunt than I’ve seen her in; she was a movie and TV star in the 90s, in “Twister,” “As Good as It Gets,” “Mad About You,” and a flawed but interesting movie called “Pay it Forward.” She was gorgeous, and could do sexy and also smart and she was a good actress too. The most recent thing I can remember seeing her in was the HBO miniseries “Empire Falls” in 2005, where she was still recognizably the same actress she was earlier in her career. I loved “Mad About You” and have been bummed that the new miniseries is only available to Spectrum cable subscribers – I’d gladly have paid for it on Apple TV, Amazon Prime or whatever, or even signed up for a new subscription service for the duration, but Spectrum is not available where we are and anyway I will not go through the hassle of switching Internet providers just to watch ONE TV series.

In “World on Fire,” Helen Hunt plays a woman who would have been described at that time as “handsome,” rather than beautiful or sexy. It’s a more limited performance than Bean’s, with a narrower range and more conventional, but Hunt is still very good. Her character is tough, brave and smart, the very ideal of what a journalist of any gender should be.

The series is DARK. I went into it with some vague idea that it might be a period piece like “Downton Abbey,” a fun melodrama that would have some sad moments but that would remain safely inside the TV. But “World on Fire” is, at least so far, a bleak and scary story. The Nazis were some of the biggest monsters history has produced, and in 1939-40 they appeared to be an unstoppable force, rolling effortlessly over Europe and leaving a trail of dead and broken bodies behind them. It must have been a terrifying time to be alive, and the series captures that perfectly.

Although it also occurs to me that the Nazis' sin was that they treated Europe the way that Europe and America treated Africa and Asia. So maybe the Nazis were not so uniquea after all.

I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of this one.

John Scalzi talks about how he did a “reboot” of the classic H. Beam Piper novel “Little Fuzzy." Same story with many of the same characters, Scalzi just wrote his own version of it

“Little Fuzzy” (both the 1962 version by H. Beam Piper and Scalzi’s version in 2010) is the story about a prospector on another planet who finds a race of cute, furry childlike aliens (I think the Ewoks in Star Wars were lifted from Piper’s Fuzzies). The prospector takes it on himself to fight a legal battle to get the Fuzzies declared as people – the equivalent of humans – with all the rights attached thereto. Both the Scalzi and Piper novels are terrific, although the Piper, at least, is problematic because it echoes the White Man’s Burden justification for racism, which lives on in American exceptionalism today, the premise that other races are like children and white people are like their parents, with a responsibility to guide those childlike brown-skinned people into adulthood. Which is a load of crap.

Still, I re-read the Piper Little Fuzzy relatively recently, and I quite enjoyed it; the aliens in that novel really ARE like children. And the Scalzi novel was very good too.

One of my three unpublished novels is a reboot, in its own way, of one of my favorite series of novels, the Cities in Flight series by James Blish. Written in the 1940s-50s, Blish’s premise is the invention in the early 21st Century of a device called a “spindizzy,” which combines a faster-than-light starship drive, artificial gravity, and a force field that can hold in air and keep out radiation. Whole cities on Earth are put in spindizzy globes and flung into space; “gone Okie,” in the jargon of the stories. The hero of the series is John Amalfi, Mayor of New York, New York, which is now a trading ship flying between the stars, with a bridge on top of the Empire State Building. Like all the Okie citizens, Amalfi has had immortality treatments, so he’s hundreds of years old. The series is great fun! But also badly dated, and not one I’d necessarily recommend to new readers today.

In my reboot of the series, I did not make the setting New York or any terrestrial city, both for copyright purposes and because then I’d have to do research and stuff. Instead, I made up a city, Nighthawk, built into an asteroid and converted into a starship. In my story, Nighthawk has fallen on hard times, trapped in orbit around a planet, and the hero is somebody from the bowels of the city, an honest street cop on a corrupt force. I had fun writing it.