Prince Eli

Space, art, and robots

[herowyn]

5 0    Y E A R S    A G O

[closetocanada]

Happy Moon Landing Day! ❤️👩‍🚀🌛

[marthajefferson]

Anniversary of APOLLO 11 MOON LANDING

On July 20, 1969, 109 hours and 42 minutes after launch, Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin entered the lunar lander ‘Eagle’, made a final check, and the Eagle undocked from the lunar orbiter ‘Columbia’, where the third member of the crew Michael Collins, stayed in orbit around the moon. Partially manually piloted by Armstrong, the Eagle landed 0 degrees, 41 minutes, 15 seconds north moon latitude and 23 degrees, 26 minutes east moon longitude. Armstrong stepped out, and Aldrin followed 20 minutes later: human beings stepped on the moon for the first time. The two men spent 21 hours and 26 minutes on its surface. One of the astounding aspects of the mission was the seeming simplicity of the technology used to get man to the moon. According to Oliver Gassmann, professor of Technology Management, the mobile phone in your pocket has one million times more memory than the Apollo 11’s computer. Same about the procesor: the latest phones typically have more than 100,000 times the processing power of the computer that landed man on the moon 50 years ago.

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.” –Neil Armstrong

(gifs from the documentary Chasing The Moon, 2019)

[unidentifiedspoon]

network effect.png

[penny-anna]

okay, for those interested, here is a full timeline of how we got to Count Binface:

1977: Star Wars is released, featuring, of course, Darth Vader

(Pictured: Darth Vader)

1984: Director Todd Durham releases his Star Wars parody movie, Hyperspace, featuring Darth Vader inspired villain Lord Buckethead.

(Pictured: Hyperspace poster featuring two Jawa-esque aliens flying through space in a shopping trolley.)

1987: Hyperspace is released on video in the UK, under the new title Gremloids.

(Pictured: Gremloids cover in the style of the original Star Wars poster, featuring Lord Buckethead.)

To promote the film, Mike Lee, the owner of the distributing company, ran for parliament as Lord Buckethead. He ran in Margaret Thatcher's constituency, Finchley, in order to get on TV. Lord Buckethead was representing the Gremloids party.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with Margaret Thatcher.)

1992: Gremloids is re-released. Lord Buckethead rides again, this time against prime minister John Major in Huntingdon. (Here's a fun fact about Huntingdon: I was born there! :D) 87/92 Buckethead seems to have leaned pretty hard into the space supervillain thing, with campaign promises including 'demolish Birmingham to build a spaceport'.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with John Major. Other notable candidates include Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party.)

2017: comedian Jon Harvey, having recently watched Gremloids and learned of Lord Buckethead's candidacy for parliament, decides it's a great bit. He runs against Theresa May in Maidenhead. 2017 Buckethead seems to have a wackier and also more political approach, with campaign promises ranging from nonsense like 'nationalise Adele' to gesturing at actually sensible policies with stuff like 'lower the voting age to 16 and restrict voting after age 80'.

He also made an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. As with his previous incarnation, he was a member of the Gremloids party.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead dabbing on stage with Theresa May.)

2018: Director Todd Durham asserts his legal ownership of Lord Buckethead. Jon Harvey opted not to go to court over Buckethead and handed over the reins. Todd Durham extended an invitation to anyone who wanted to be the 'authorised' Lord Buckethead.

(Pictured: the new Lord Buckethead.)

2019: Lord Buckethead, now played by journalist David Hughes, stood against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. He ran for the Monster Raving Loony Party, the UK's pre-existing gag candidate party. He ran with a similarly silly manifesto as the 2017 incarnation, but with a bit less of a political edge. His promises included 'All doorways to be increased by 1 foot (30 cm) in height' and 'Nigel Farage to be sold for parts'.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead and Count Binface square up.)

Meanwhile, Jon Harvey in his new persona Count Binface, also ran against Boris Johnson. Buckethead and Binface face off! Binface ran as an independent with a manifesto once again blending silly and semi-serious promises such as 'nationalising model railways' and 'giving £1 trillion a week to the NHS'. This was also I believe the debut of his promise to 'move the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a more sensible position'.

(Pictured: Count Binface presenting the offending hand dryer, inconveniently close to both the sink and the urinals.)

He has a point.

2021: Count Binface runs for the position of Mayor of London for the first time, with promises such as 'London to join the European Union'. He notably finished ahead of far right party UKIP.

2023: Count Binface runs in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election following Boris Johnson's resignation. He once again gets more votes than UKIP.

May 2024: Count Binface once again runs to be Mayor of London, debuting his now iconic 'build at least one affordable house' promise. Notably, he finished ahead of far right party Britain First.

(Pictured: Count Binface with Rishi Sunak. Also pictured: Monster Raving Loony Party candidate Sir Archibald Stanton with a ventriloquist's dummy.)

July 2024: Count Binface stands in the general election, running in Richmond and Northallerton against prime minister Rishi Sunak. He debuts his promise to cap the price of 99p flakes at 99p. This is his most successful election to date with 308 votes.

(Pictured: Count Binface with Andy Burnham. Also pictured: independent candidate Robert Pownell, dressed as a fox for his own reasons.)

June 2026: Count Binface stands in the Makerfield by-election against Andy Burnham, (recently) former Mayor of Manchester running for parliament with the intention of standing in the Labour Party leadership contest.

(Pictured: Count Binface on BBC's Newsnight.)

July 2026 (this week): Count Binface announces his intention to run against Nigel Farage in the upcoming Clacton by-election. He is briefly the only other candidate in the race and by the time other candidates announce themselves the narrative of 'Nigel Farage vs Count Binface' has already bedded in. And then it was now, and then I don't know what happened.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

For clarity's sake, Robert Pownall is dressed as a fox because he's an anti-fox hunting campaigner, and also he will be standing in the Farage Vs Binface election. So that's fun

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

a thing that was so interesting about the vampires in Sinners is genuinely what huge losers they are. get bit and immediately start talking like the most annoying youth pastor you know.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

which is a really cool choice because it emphasizes how deeply Off they are. there are obviously the big tells in their behavior, like Bo not reacting to a man getting mauled five feet away or Cornbread getting weird at the door, but the way they speak is also really off with the cadence of the movie the audience has gotten accustomed to. the characters are friends, family, they know each other enough to make jokes, trade barbs, argue, swear. they talk in an informal, natural way with each other. one bite later and it's "excuse me my brothers and sisters in the one race, the human race, won't you pretty please let me come inside to rejoice in your company 🥺"

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the kkkouple that remmick turns first are a really effective storytelling shorthand. we know basically nothing about them pre-vampening except that they're trigger happy racists, so when you see them turn up all smiles at a Black juke joint parroting everything remmick says you immediately get a pretty solid grasp of what getting bit does to a motherfucker

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

obviously I'm arriving to this party really late and I've already seen almost every bit of this movie dissected down to the minutia, but I've not seen anyone talk about klanwife's line about how the vampires are "starting a new klan, built on love." crazy good line, made me figuratively need to take a seat. really cuts right to the heart of the dissonance between what mr. o'vampire says he believes and the nightmare bullshit that he's actually doing.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I keep thinking about the big vampire group song because it's like. god this scene is good. it circles back to my point about remmick being a loser, because getting a couple dozen new vampire thralls and using them to do an elaborately choreographed song and dance is peak loser shit.

but it's also horrifying, absolutely horrifying, for the living characters who are looking on because a.) they're watching their dead family and friends and neighbors, most of whom are covered in blood and visibly injured, get danced around like puppets and b.) it's the first time the characters are really getting a taste of the hivemind bullshit the audience has already been clued in on and c.) sure, they're just dancing for now, but they're realizing just how many hungry vampires are waiting outside to kill them at the first opportunity and take Sammie. so that's a nightmare for them.

so you could read that as a deliberate intimidation tactic on remmick's part, trying to overwhelm the survivors into giving up, but then you're like, okay, maybe in his mind this is a display of how good it is to be a vampire. isn't it good? doesn't it look fun? look how much fun we're having! you could come have fun too if you want! just let me in :3 I don't think that's impossible, that he'd be totally oblivious to how he comes across. the newly-turned vampires seem pretty bad at faking their interpersonal skills; all memory of how to act human beyond the most superficial level seems to really go out the window pretty immediately. remmick seems a little cannier than that, since we see him try to play on people's emotions more than once--appealing to the kkkouple's fear of the Choctaw to gain their shelter when he realizes they're klan, trying to lower Mary's guard by sympathizing with her over her dead mother, pressuring Grace by threatening her daughter. obviously some of those efforts are more successful than others, but he at least seems to have an ability to read the room that other vampires lack.

but it's also not a stretch at all to think he might sincerely be that clueless, because that whole song and dance number is remmick's whole thesis statement, which is that when he says he believes in "equality" he means that he'll kill anyone and turn them into one of his tools regardless of who they are. like sure, whatever, I'm willing to believe that he does sincerely find the klan objectionable, but he's also just packed full of shit. his version of equality is one where everyone's equal under him, acting out his own culture and history for his pleasure. thinks he's not racist because he doesn't care that Sammie's Black but still wants to take away everything that makes Sammie an individual and just keep the musical talent to perform a crude facsimile of being Irish.

and this is getting so long but that scene of all the vampires dancing in step in the dark, cold and washed out, is contrasted so well with the earlier scene inside the juke where everyone is warmly lit, revolving around Sammie but not beholden to him, dancing in their own styles side by side with spirits of the past and future blending different styles and cultures. that scene is such a gorgeous visualization of musical traditions persisting through time and place, connecting people across generations, growing and changing fluidly as people take inspiration from the past, while all of remmick's songs show people being very forcibly trapped in the past, unable to grow or move on. when he encounters something beautiful in the present all he can think to do is own it, destroy it, bend it into the shape of history. pathetic!

[tturningbacks]

I cannot ship grace with anyone because the thought of a non partnering aroace person living a long fantastic and fulfilling life that doesn't ever involve being romantically involved with anyone and being happy about that is so great and I hope my future is the same. aroace non partnering grace forever. with rocky and adrian and all his eridian friends and family

[puncertainty]

<3

[rylandgraces]

Project Hail Mary — 2026, dir. Phil Lord & Chris Miller

[galacticsabc]

Go! Rocky, Go!

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Sometimes I think about the fact that Rocky was out there alone for 46 years and then Grace shows up and just… fuckin solves the problem that's been plaguing two entire species in, what? A matter of weeks??

And like yeah, obviously there's more to it than that. They're a team, a Grace alone would have probably died trying to get the samples from Adrian. Or, tbh, might have never got out of his original Mental Breakdown phase and just gone fully crazy.

But from Rocky's perspective, this has to feel insane. Like we talk a lot about Grace feeling inferior to Rocky, but there's no way that Rocky wouldn't have a similar (or worse) complex about Grace.

And this isn't getting into the fact that (from Rocky's perspective) the moment he leaves Grace, everything goes to hell again. Goes to hell again because, as he later finds out, Grace bred the taumoeba in xenonite breeder tanks that Rocky designed.

Do we think he wondered, on the way back to Erid, whether things would have been fixed 46 years ago if it had been one of the Blip-A scientists who survived, and he'd just succumbed to the radiation?

Do we think Grace had to reassure him, over and over, that it was if anything Grace's fault for not foreseeing that the taumoeba would adapt to the xenonite, and that there was no way that Rocky could have designed the tanks better?

Do we think he felt like an imposter when they got back to Erid and were both hailed as saviours, because it was Grace who had done the science, Grace who had made the sacrifices, while all Rocky did was wait for him to get there?

[fashion-runways]

ROBERT WUN Couture Fall/Winter 2027 pls help me get out of debt donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways or dinahlance-shop.fourthwall.com

[spectros]

fidelity using ai to make a podcast short on how people dont trust ai is peak corporate bullshit

[batmanego]

im having feelings about the uffington white horse again

[batmanego]

so essentially there’s this cool horse drawn into the hills in england made out of chalk and it’s like 3,000 years old.

people carved trenches 3,000 years ago and filled them with chalk in the shape of a horse but what’s interesting is that if you fail to maintain the horse by adding new chalk regularly, it will disappear. for 3,000 years, we’ve been filling in chalk in this horse so it doesn’t disappear.

we’ll never know what the purpose of the horse was originally. we’ll never know if it had ritual or spiritual significance or if it was just art. but we do know that people maintained it then, and, even though the meaning of the horse has long been lost to time, we continue to maintain it now.

the people who made this horse are long dead, but they live through us still, don’t you think?

[batmanego]

couldn’t agree more we’re best friends now

[specialagentartemis]

anyway who wants to hear about how Preservation’s economy is a scaled-up LETS

[specialagentartemis]

To follow up on this:

Murderbot describes Preservation as using a “complicated barter system.” The funniest (to me) interpretation of this is just that they use cash and MB has never seen actual for real physical paper/metal cash before (what is currency but complicated barter?). However it’s fun to flex the cultural worldbuilding imagination and say, what if the Preservation economy is structured as a LETS, which is also, conceptually, sort of, a complicated barter system.

LETS stands for Local Exchange Trading System and has been implemented in a few places in recent decades. At its core it’s a different mode of conceptualizing debt.

Basically, the way we treat money now is as a commodity: it is zero-sum Stuff that we hoard and accumulate. You earn it and then you spend it. It’s based on the logic of scarcity. A LETS treats the idea of money as more like debt: you create more by borrowing it from a conceptual pool. You spend it, and then you earn it. It’s based on the logic of abundance.

To my understanding, you “borrow” a certain number of Green Dollars (the LETS monetary system discussed in the specific example I attended a lecture on) from the central tracking system. You can use that to pay for whatever good or service you want. Then, you are obligated to do that many “Green Dollars” worth of goods or services for that person (or someone else, depending) at some point to balance the ledger.

You can’t be denied a “loan” if you’re in the red; that’s not how it works. You declare that you’re using X amount of Green Dollars, there’s no application/denial system. BUT if you have a history of not putting it back into the community, people can stop doing business with you. It’s an economy based on reciprocity and reputation.

Essentially, spending money is not so much spending money, it’s making a promise to put this much value back into the community at some point in the future.

It has only ever been implemented on fairly small and local scales, and usually as a supplement to the “regular” economy; I think to make it work on a planetary scale, there would need to be a central governmental “bank” keeping track (election to the oversight of which is probably a critically important job) as well as designated government-run “sinks” where people can pay to get stuff like food and health care without being expected to return an equivalent amount because what they need is far more than what they can return.

You can get rich by providing a good or service everyone wants, but the currency you’re rich in is basically a promise to pay you back in some form, and then the things that people do for you. People can transfer Green Dollar debt too: if X does a service for Y, then Y does a service for Z, Y can agree to accept the repayment via Z doing a service for X if X has something Z wants more than Y does. The goal is to create networks of inter-reliance where debt is not a bad thing but rather a representation of what we owe to each other and to society.

Local communities may act more like gift economies where “everything comes out in the wash” anyway, and direct trade of items or services can sometimes be expedient, but the LETS and its central bank tracking people’s yet-unpaid debts and repayments is the primary planetary economic system. There are a bunch of committees around this.

Unrelatedly to the LETS thing I imagine Preservation having a “service tax” akin to jury duty where every once in a while you are called up to spend the day washing dishes at the communal free food court or something. Also a looooot of industrial scale food production is done by ag-bots. Also it’s extremely common and kind of culturally expected that most people grow some food themselves, whether it’s a window-box of herbs or a fruit tree they tend or a vegetable garden. Also also surplus food is stored in the government-owned cryo-pods that the Pressy colonists were in—if they can keep a human alive in cryo stasis for 200 years they can keep fruit and vegetables fresh for as long as needed, so if a food crisis ever comes up the government has a stockpile. I think these are important ways that labor and goods get distributed also.

The system is complicated! Centralized government that makes sure everyone gets what they need AND creates a system where people can get what they want from each other AND making sure inability to repay debt doesn’t prevent people from getting what they need AND community-oriented reciprocity economy AND making “accumulation of monetary wealth” not really a possible thing AND making sure no individual or private group can corner the market on an important good AND making sure doctors and farmers and politicians get adequately compensated for the work they do AND making it possible to be an artist or academic who doesn’t do anything “practical” but still can dedicate their life to it and get what they need AND ensuring disabled people who can’t meaningfully “pay back” for what they need to live… it’s a system with lots of places to prod it, but a LETS structure rather than a cash economy feels more in keeping with the philosophy and values of Preservation. And Murderbot from the outside sees it and has no language to articulate what it’s seeing besides “complicated barter system” because it sure is complicated!

[mordecaitherunaway]

I saw the TV glow, too.

[chuwenjie]

So stoked to share the official trailer for the Avatar Aang movie, now releasing JULY 25th on Paramount+!!

I’m so proud of our crew and honored to have been a part of this.. for everyone who has waited to watch the official release in order to support the artists and animators, I just want to say thank you so much, from the bottom of my heart - it truly means so much!!

[chuwenjie]

Official stills from the crew of the Avatar Aang movie, releasing July 25th on Paramount+!!