This Would Have Been Longer But For Reasons It Is Not*

Once before I posted a segment from an old Disney cartoon involving some rather wild speculation on what life on Mars might be like.

This is a piece from the same old cartoon. WARNING: Extremely silly. (It's really quite the waggish parody.)



Of course, I saw it because I was looking at a new posting of the other one, which is one of my favorite pieces of animation of all time, because said new posting was at much higher quality than the one I'd seen before.



That is seriously friggin' beautiful.

*In all seriousness I could probably babble for fifteen paragraphs about how much I love the fantastical speculative "biology" of the "scary version" of Life on Mars. But I don't have the time at the moment.

-Signing off.

That More Recent War of the Worlds

Yes, that wild, inaccurate update to the original, from the halcyon year of 1953!



When I first became aware of this movie years ago, I was disappointed at the lack of tripods. The tripods are, after all, the iconic machines of the original novels; you can't just leave that out!

Watching it for the first time recently (thanks, Kroger's, for your weird and eclectic selection of not-very-current DVDs), I discovered something that delighted me:

These "flying machines" are actually nothing of the gosh-darned sort-they're actually tripods on invisible legs of electromagnetic force!

That is fantastic.

(My sister was really weirded out by the religious presentation of the ending, but after having watched the film adaptation of The Ox-Bow Incident and that awful sci-fi movie from the same general era that a bunch of people like, I wasn't surprised. Now, I was a bit bothered by just how darned invincible they were, since the original story involved multiple Martian war machines being destroyed... Even if the early shield flicker was sort of neat.)

-Signing off.

You're Welcome For The Mental Image

From a chapter of Children of the Lens, the last of E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman novels (context is that it's an excerpt of a story one of the protagonists is writing):

"Qadgop the Mercotan slithered flatly around the afterbulge of the tranship. One claw dug into the meters-thick armor of pure neutronium, then another. Its terrible xmex-like nout locked on. Its zymolosely polydactile tongue crunched out, crashed down, rasped across. Slurp! Slurp! At each abrasive stroke the groove in the tranship's plating deepened and Qadgop leered more fiercely. Fools! Did they think that the airlessness of absolute space, the heatlessness of absolute zero, the yieldlessness of absolute neutronium, could stop QADGOP THE MERCOTAN? And the stowaway, that human wench Cynthia, cowering in helpless terror just beyond this thin and fragile wall..."

...Is it just me, or does this feel like it's basically building towards tentacle fic?

-Signing off.

I Can't Believe I Don't Seem To Have A Post Titled "EXTERMINATE"

I can't really say I'm a Doctor Who fan, but I'm definitely a Dalek fan.



The best part of this clip is that, while the Daleks technically did bring in reinforcements later, it wasn't because they needed them against the Cybermen, it was just part of some sort of other master plan they had; they easily could have killed five million Cybermen with four Daleks, and possibly just with one (as the boasting Dalek leader suggests).

And, of course, there's the fact that Daleks are the same goofy salt-and-pepper shakers as they've always been in appearance, while the Cybermen felt the need to update their looks over and over and over again. (Though I can't say I care for older Cybermen designs; the new "Iron Man-esque" designs are probably my favorite.)

-Signing off.

Super Spaceship Wars

Funnily enough, it could be argued that the visual format used by Super Robot Wars games is better suited to ship battles; although the following video isn't especially graphically sophisticated, it still amuses me a fair bit.



Why? Because one of the "attacks" in the video (which is not from an actual game but a mockup of one, using designs and characters from the anime Legend of the Galactic Heroes, which I hear is very good but not licensed for English distribution) is based on a one-time event where a character destroyed an orbital defense network by ordering engines attached to a bunch of comets and bombarding them from a distance, and presenting one-time special events as a regular attack is something that is extremely common in Super Robot Wars games. Whoever did this video knows their stuff.

-Signing off.

Nitpick Alert (Actually, I Talked About This Once)

Serious flaw with this video's reasoning:



If it were possible to be immortal, you'd probably need extremely good healing as a prerequisite. If your healing processes weren't excellent, eventually you'd shrivel up into an arthritic, forgetful, blind little mess of a human being, and forget being worried about losing all your limbs and eyes to random injuries.

It's kind of what tends to happen already to people that all the regular suspects fail to kill off, to some degree anyway. Disintegration by nearly invisible attrition. (Gee, that's not morbid at all, is it?)

(I wrote a post over here about the subject once, actually.)

-Signing off.

It's Apparently "R 'ha" With A Space (The Space Is Important When Searching Your History)

Okay, the plot for this is simple (albeit interesting), but for something animated by one dude?



This is amazing. I particularly love the character designs (the alien and the robot).

-Signing off.

Game Reviews: Dead Metal

Dead Metal is a spaceship shooter game based on the Bubble Tanks 3 engine. (Bubble Tanks 2 is mentioned here.)

You move around a spaceship with the "WASD" keys (or a custom arrangement) and aim your ship's weapons with the mouse, and click hold down the left mouse key to fire your primary weapon. (There is no point to doing anything but hold down the fire key for the primary weapon, because most of the primary weapons have a sufficient fire rate that there's not really any strategic purpose for timing.) There may be extra weapons fired by hitting the space bar. Other than that, the only things to learn are individual ship features.

The character you sort of play as is one of the meanest-looking female characters I've ever seen anywhere, and her dialogue in game is sufficiently vicious to match.

She makes cracks comparing her enemies to four week old kittens, five year old children, and her great grandmother, and her enemies are found wanting in all of these comparisons. (She also makes at least one vaguely sexual remark.)

When you hear that the game is based on the Bubble Tanks 3 engine, you might wonder about the graphics. They're pretty nice, and don't involve bubbles.

The orange ship there is the most powerful and expensive ship you can use, though it's a tad disappointing because you can see the maximum potential of a ship looking at a few of the others, and this one falls short of that. Still, it's pretty nice. I'd recommend skipping over a lot of the ships, as the most effective strategy is darting around and spraying fire in whatever direction the most enemies are in, and some ships are slower-firing or shorter-ranged. My favorite ships are the Bullet Storm, the AI 3100, and the Demo Man because they fit into this strategy well (the Bullet Storm is notably more effective than two ships that cost nearly twice what it does, for instance), and the Demo Man will hold you over until you can afford the Crusher, the most expensive ship.

Dying will happen rather frequently, especially in stages with the purple ships, which belong to the Chosen, who can inflict status effects on your ship. It's not too big a deal until such time as you've topped out your ship purchases, as then there's no possibility of getting better weapons. Still, the difficulty level isn't too extreme, and I've managed to unlock all the levels, even though I haven't finished all of them.

This is a pretty fun game if you like "arrow and mouse" shooters or any kind of top-down shooters, so you should probably give it a shot.

-Signing off.

Happy Stay Up Too Late Day

So here we have an entertaining little short film about the perils of space travel, and it just happens to be probably technically set on New Year's Eve.



(It might be a little easier to watch on its proper page rather than embedded, because this is rather smaller than its intended viewing size.)

Of course, there's one thing about this that's incredibly unrealistic: Spaceships don't do that "sinking/drifting" thing.

(What, you think that the coffee machine was unrealistic? I found it perfectly plausible.)

See you next year.

-Signing off.

Pretty Sure There Was A Lot More Than That, Too

So how can you overwhelm my capacity for listing off nerdy things?

Well, you could be the predecessor to Studio Gainax and make an animation like this one, which followed an animation I've previously mentioned.



While I was able to follow just about everything in the previous video and name it off without looking stuff up, this one is just too much. Xenomorphs? Chibi-esque anime Yoda? Doctor Nazo? One of the mutants from Metaluna?



(Yes, it's in there somewhere, in one of the massive character crowds. You have to be sharp-eyed.)

I'd meant to talk about this before now, but I don't really have much to say except 1) "Holy Pop Culture References, Batman!" and 2) I love the quality of animation. It's got little to do with how the gal in the bunny suit looks, no matter how distracting she's trying to be-those buildings blowing up? The explosive verdant growth? The big energy blasts? Yeah, I enjoy watching that kind of stuff, especially when it's just so darned sharp.

-Signing off.

Yet More Proof I Will Watch Certain Characters Doing Virtually Anything

A Dalek chilling and taking a puff on his favorite type of cigar after running into some stairs.



Yes, that is all.

-Signing off.

I Wouldn't Want To Ride That: Moon Unit Edition

In the vein of this older post, I've decided that every now and again I'll mock vehicles designed by people who are, well, in need of learning how to design vehicles.

I present you Mattel's "Uni-Tread and Space Bubble."



Do you see how bad that poor guy in the Bubble is getting rocked around? Granted, a full-scale version would probably have better balance through weighting, but still...

Also, I wouldn't ride in a vehicle that only separated me from hard vacuum with a plastic bubble, but maybe that's just me...

-Signing off.

(Surprisingly Old) POP CULTURE STORM

This clip is rather famous/infamous among anime fans for being one of the first productions of a group who would later go on to form Gainax (famous for Gurren Lagann and some other stuff, most notably the super-grim [and in my own opinion, kinda gross for reasons unrelated to sexual content] Evangelion). This was a totally amateur production that they more or less made in their homes for a convention. It is also the nerdiest thing I've seen in ages. (Well, actually, I've seen nerdier recently, but it's related to this and comes later. Yes, I'll go into it.)



I totally lost it when the Star Destroyer, Martian flying machines, and TIE Fighters showed up, and I hadn't been doing too well before that. (And I mean that in the positive sense.)

What really gets me is that I recognize almost everything that got referenced specifically. (Ultraman's Science Patrol, Starship Troopers [the armored suit that chases the little girl is actually the official Japanese design for the powered suit, but it actually made its animation debut here], that ugly monster is probably another Ultraman reference, the signal the suit gives when it gets wrecked looks generically familiar, then comes Godzilla, Ultraman villain Baltan seijin, King Ghidorah, Gamera, a "maser tank," the aforementioned Star Destroyer, Martian flying machines from the old War of the Worlds film, TIE Fighters, a Gundam that mysteriously transforms into the Ideon, the, erm, Atragon/it has some other name too, if I recall, I'm pretty sure that's a Tolmekian airship, the Space Battleship Yamato, and the Starship Enterprise. I promise I did not Google or use other reference materials at all for the entire time I was working on this post.)

If you're wondering what the heck is with the spaceship shaped like a vegetable at the end, this was created for a convention called "Daicon," and there's a type of radish called a "daikon" radish. Or something like that. (That's the closest you're getting to actual logic.)

-Signing off.

Two Unrelated Videos

1: I can't really say I'm a Doctor Who fan by virtue of not having seen anything more than a few clips and such, but I do love the Daleks for their amusement value. So this trailer is pretty great.



2: One of the best scenes from the underrated (though undeniably incredibly campy) live-action Super Mario Brothers movie is when somebody gets turned into a monkey chimpanzee.



Also, I love the Goomba with the actual dinosaur head. That is hilarious.

-Signing off.

Would You Like Some Cheese With That Ham?

I've played a few different space combat simulators (the obvious Star Wars ones, though less of those than one might expect, and especially Star Crusader, which I played through two or three times before the only computer that I could play it on died forever). I've also played demos for a few more. The demo I remember best was the demo for Tachyon: The Fringe, a game that sounds like it ought to be part of a series, but isn't.

The main thing I remember was that it had flexible gameplay, a super-slick control scheme, and ship customization that actually was pretty fun.

It being a demo, I didn't get to see the best part, this scene from some part of the game or another:



"I WILL NOT TURN OVER THE PRETTY CEILING! IT IS MINE NOW! MINE, MINE, MINE!" (It has to be all in capitals, because dang is he loud!)

Apparently, that's the only voicework that guy ever did. Kinda sad, because that was pretty great.

-Signing off.

RELAXINATE

Found this a while ago, forgot about it, remembered it again.



If this is what Daleks find "relaxing," I think it might explain a thing or two about them.

-Signing off.

I'll Refrain From Hand Related Puns

So I randomly found this clip from a cheesy Star Wars ripoff of some sort.



What's funniest about this for me, at least, is the space station, which I don't think anyone else looking at the clip even noticed.

It's a frikkin' hand, and its fingers appear to move.

That is obviously very ridiculous, but it's also awesome.

-Signing off.

I'll Pretty Much Vote Dinosaur Every Time

I'm not going to lie: These are some awesome dinosaurs (and giant lizard thing).



I don't really mind the old-fashioned, inaccurate dinosaurs, and to be honest, in terms of accuracy issues, these things are pretty much not problematic beyond the tail on the theropod (the theropod does take the unbalanced stance some of the time, but when it's actually walking its posture is much more correct-the issue is that tail, which hangs low and is too flexible, a thing newer movies and sources get wrong with alarming frequency). (I hesitate to call it a Tyrannosaurus, rex or otherwise, because not only is it a stupid movie monster, but because this clip is from "Planet of Dinosaurs," which apparently had some crazy convergent evolution going on, and even if the species was physically indistinguishable from T. rex, it's pretty unlikely scientists would be willing to describe it as the same species.)

What makes it is the music, though.

Those people, though? All annoying idiots whose gruesome deaths by mauling wouldn't inspire the slightest twinge of sympathy in me.

I mean, I don't have context, but what the heck? You're all sitting around in the open, with no lookouts and some of you aren't keeping track of your weapons! (Although I think I've seen another clip from this movie, and it looks like their weapons are... pretty useless.)

-Signing off.

This Is Cool Yet Flawed (So I Don't Actually Have a Problem With It)

I'm of two minds on this short film. (Note: There's a character who swears quite a bit, in case that sort of thing bothers you.)



The first part of me thinks it's a really cool little film (especially with the maker's note that it had essentially no budget), and I'd totally love to see the rest of RL7's story.

The other part basically thinks that there couldn't possibly be a stupider way to check for malfunctions in a robot, especially an insanely dangerous one with organic brain components apparently harvested from a hapless victim.

Not that this actually makes it less enjoyable, it just strikes me as the stupidest idea ever.

-Signing off.

Dude, Where's My Robot Manservant?

It's just as well that the retro futures they told us were coming never happened. Case in point:

Imagine if kids had robots that they could order to carry them around. Makes the health problems that we see now look pretty mild, huh?

(Image from The Young Children's Encyclopedia Britannica, specifically the "robots" article. Pretty soon here I'll dig up some images from the "future" article, which are also pretty awesome. These are wonderful old books, especially for kids, and I remember them fondly from my childhood.)

-Signing off.