Yep.
Friday’s post was my second (hopefully annual) April Fools post. I do need to work on my ideas though, because the best April Fool is the one that you could believe as being absolutely true. It gets its own legs and people run with the seed that’s been planted. This one was the kind of spur of the moment inspiration that comes from random brain cells being hit by cosmic rays. Yep. The weird ones.
The same lovely person has given me an idea for next year’s which will take some activity from me over this one as I make notes to prepare for it. Not saying what it is ! Hmm. Come to think of it, that idea probably has potential to be short story or book material. Especially if I make notes over a whole year.
I did want to explain the various references from Friday … That’s something I’ll do and I will usually be so subtle about the references that no one actually gets them. Oops !
People looking from the sky or hits being registered without a country of origin. I have 2 ways of seeing who is visiting, one is our dear fiend Google and the other is statcounter. Statcounter gives a lot of info, which is why I have the stats hidden behind a password. But statcounter gets it wrong, if I look at this blog from my laptop, statcounter will claim I am 50 miles away in Cheltenham. Google gives very little info and it is aggregated together so it is tough to pull out individual visits.
Sometimes hits come in where Google can’t identify the point of origin. Hence people looking at me from the sky, or cloud. (There’s actually a name reference too there and it’s about the person who sparked the idea for the whole post !)
The orientation centre was a bridge, to start the narrative part of the post. But the simulacrum is an idea from an old film called The Last Starfighter, where an arcade game machine expert was whisked away to fight a war and a pretender left in his place. You could say that The Last Starfighter inspired a lot of the content.
Cybo Homo Arcturan Variant – ah ha ! Death to CHAVs ! In this case Cybernetic Bipeds (Homo as in sapiens or neanderthal) from Arcturus who are strange. Yes. I was kinda struggling to come up with words for the acronym.
I do hope you remember where the quote “Never give up, never surrender!” came from. Same film as Grabthar and his hammer by which you shall be avenged. It’s a work of genius called Galaxy Quest which I definitely have to watch again. It shares a fair bit with the April Fool actually, as it involves people being brought from Earth to fight an alien race’s war.
Federation and replicated food is from … you hopefully guessed it … Star Trek. I wonder what replicated food would taste like, can’t possibly be more than the sum of its parts effectively 3d printed into munchies.
The 1812 buggy robot is from Farscape and is a DRD (Diagnostic Repair Droid). The one in the pic is one renamed 1812 by the central character, John Crichton, due to circumstances between season 3 and 4. It’s a cracking series, it had me from the opening scenes to its shocking conclusion at the end of series 4. Yes. I too shouted at the telly “You can’t end it like that !”. Yep. Shocked. And that doesn’t happen too often with me and telly (ok, BSG season 1 conclusion did it too).
In the opening scenes to Farscape, our human astronaut is brought on board a ship. A living ship. Full of strange alien life forms. Help me. Listen please. Is there anyone out there who can help me ? Oops. Caught in that intro again. It was a great start to every episode. Anyway, when he was brought on board, the aliens were talking in their own languages and speaking forms which we wouldn’t even recognise as language. A DRD jabs Crichton and injects translator microbes, which instantly solves the common scifi trope of “Why does everyone speak in English ?”
Farscape had a lot going for it.
Spaceship and the gif come from the Lego Movie, which was an absolute classic. Hopefully the forthcoming Lego Batman movie (trailered before Batman vs Superman !) will approach its level of classicness. “Everything is awesome if you’re part of a team” comes from the Lego movie too.
Pilot engineer is all me. Although I will admit that the stormtrooper joke comes from a series of films, of which number 7 I am looking forward to watching again the day it comes out on bluray.
When I got to Cogs, I was starting to get a little silly. I wanted a pet to have with us. Robot dogs didn’t really make sense, although Rabbit was a good microcharacter in the original Battlestar Galactica.
Medical technology and the limbs ? Oh – not many will get this one … It’s from a game series called Dead Space, where the key mechanic is that it is easier to kill the bad guys by blowing their limbs off rather than the usual game thing of shooting them many times. It’s a horror game which I have no intention of playing but I did enjoy watching the HeyChrissa streams. The Marker in Dead Space is an alien thing that turns people into strange vicious beasts and an onrunning theme is that the Marker wants us to be whole again. (Yep, you have to play the game to really get that one and I wouldn’t recommend it).
Man machine interface through a direct neural interface – this is something I think would be essential when you get past a certain level of technology. A normal interface panel would not cover the information required and the depth of field in space where your view would need to be many kilometers ahead, not just 100s of metres. And a direct neural interface would speed up control immeasurably and should reduce error from fumbly fingers as well.
Yep. Direct neural interface is the way of the future.
FIF Iceangel – oh that one took a little effort to get a chuckle in at the end. I was pondering finding something for Trixabelle too but that’s an acronym too far.
I was glad to get one tribute in to a dearly missed actor who left us this year, a shame I couldn’t leave more tributes !