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	Archive through October 28, 2025	25		12/08 04:18pm

Nest can only do that if they have a sample from the producing reactor. They did it in that book only because it was a US made bomb.

By Burt Quaid (Burt) on Tuesday, October 28, 2025 - 04:31 pm: Edit

Is it safe to assume they have samples from most of the world’s reactors and therefore can narrow the search area down?

Burt

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Tuesday, October 28, 2025 - 09:05 pm: Edit

I would think that the Russians and Chinese and Iranians and North Koreans would prefer you did not have sample of their reactor material.

That said, I suspect that the NSA reads enough mail to identify the guilty within a day or two.

My response as president for Iran and North Korea and probably China is going to be to go to the back page of the book for that country, and select the most overwhelming and brutal attack plan I can find. I am not going to play games here, I'm going to put somebody out of the country business. I am confident that I can sink every Chinese missile sub before it launches and nail every ICBM launcher before it gets them ready to fire. (That may not be true any more; I am thinking of the days they had 12 silos and now they seem to have 400.) So I should escape further loss. I might comment that in the case of China it's going to be WARPLAN MAXIMUM plus the Three Gorges Dam. When that wall of water comes down that valley, China loses a billion people and over half of its capacity to produce anything. I will be the greatest war criminal in history but who says I cannot aspire to greatness?

Russia is another question. They have the most ICBMs, and have decades of planning for retaliation. They simply have too many silos that are too far from the coast for me to get them all with one sweep.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Monday, December 08, 2025 - 09:51 am: Edit

Paramount just launched a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery at $30 a share (about $108 billion in total), in the wake of last week's deal by Netflix to buy WB/D for $83 billion.

It will be interesting to see how this all shakes out.

By Gregory S Flusche (Vandar) on Monday, December 08, 2025 - 04:18 pm: Edit

And they have that kind of money to throw around...

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Monday, December 08, 2025 - 04:53 pm: Edit

Mind, it also is subject to federal approval...and Pres. Trump publicly blasted Paramount today. So who knows?

By Tom Lusco (Tlusco) on Tuesday, December 09, 2025 - 09:27 am: Edit

Its all messy and terrible for the average consumer. The Paramount bid is backed by Kushner and a trio of middle-eastern entities. The hostile takeover is for the whole of WB, whereas the Netflix bid was smaller scoped. I've seen discussion that the effective hostile bid values WB significantly lower.

Whatever way this goes, we get one less company producing content, and we've already had so much consolidation we are in danger of a serious loss of perspective.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, January 02, 2026 - 11:05 pm: Edit

TIME TUNNEL 2002
An unaired pilot for a reboot of Time Tunnel which wasn't bought. Worth a watch, free on YouTube.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, January 02, 2026 - 11:11 pm: Edit

DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS
Free on YouTube, 1954 British science fiction.
Regarded as one of the worst alien invasion movies of all time, but fun to watch in it's own way.
At a remote English pub in the middle of a dark and stormy night, a curious collection of people are assembled: an escaped murderer, the woman innkeeper, her alcoholic husband, the young barmaid in love with the murderer, a famous physicist who came to investigate a meteor the crashed nearby, a reporter also there to investigate the meteor, a gorgeous woman who is just there to fall in love with someone and drive the plot forward. Then a flying saucer lands a few yards away and the lady from Mars announces that she's there to enslave Earth. Her laughable robot starts zapping stuff to make the point. Can this bunch of misfits save Earth?

By Steve Stewart (Stevestewart) on Monday, January 05, 2026 - 07:31 am: Edit

I didn't know they were filming in my local....

By Paul Howard (Raven) on Monday, January 05, 2026 - 11:03 am: Edit

"Regarded as one of the worst alien invasion movies of all time"

Dare I take the bait and watch it?

Is that the fil that bad (Sharknado for example .... the first one anyway), it's actually pretty good - or just bad and spending 2 hours in a Dentist Chair would have been more fun (Cloverfield for example - I just did just not get the film)??

Making the worst Alien Invasion Film must be nearly impossible - making the best far easier!!

By Jack Bohn (Jackbohn) on Wednesday, January 28, 2026 - 10:03 am: Edit

I don't know if anyone else watches the YouTuber Lindybeige, but his recent video, "On Holiday in a Country at War" is about his trip to the far west of Ukraine at the end of last year. He has a strange sense of humor, even allowing for his being British, but it's also a surprisingly touching video.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, March 02, 2026 - 03:29 am: Edit

NIGHTSTALKER
I happened to find the original first Nightstalker movie on YouTube and Leanna and I watched it to break up a lazy Sunday afternoon. We both thought that it might be a good thing to reboot Nightstalker. Consider what could be done with modern CGI/AI and what modern CSI capabilities would do with it.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Monday, March 02, 2026 - 03:37 am: Edit

BROKENWOOD MYSTERIES
This is a New Zealand crime series on ACORN and it's really good.

A very senior cop is sent to a small town (Brokenwood) because the detective office there is too inexperienced to handle a murder. The Inspector solves the case and decides to stay there, even though that means taking a pay cut and demotion to Senior Sergeant. He wants a quieter life for his final decade of police work. But Alas, Brokenwood (like Midsomer in the UK) this small town becomes the center of an unprecedented wave of murders.

Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Shepherd and his able assistant Detective Constable Kristin Simms tackle tedious and mysterious cases of "how they heck did the killer pull this off".

A clever aspect of the show that is not seen in Midsomer Murders is the continual use of the same characters from previous episodes, as well as some of the same venues. The guy known as Frodo, who appears in a continuing series of failed businesses, then eventually opens a coffee truck. One actress is briefly married to a series of murder victims. The local pastor and mayor recur, but the most important of these is the town’s busybody senior citizen. The Russian medical examiner is an interesting character and part of a actually real incident in which an entrepreneur brought a dozen Russian women to New Zealand to find husbands, then went broke without actually finding any of them.

An interesting backdrop to the cases is the Maori natives who owned New Zealand before the Brits showed up with that "Only Christian kings can claim land" concept and took over. The Māori form a "minority" who are at the same time fitting in and finding the Brits impossibly clueless about their culture. (It reminds me of Dark Winds, which is about Navajo tribal police.) Occasionally a case pivots around some unfortunate Brit-Maori conflict from a century earlier, but usually you don't even notice which ones are Maoris and which are Brit-Decenders.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, March 08, 2026 - 06:44 pm: Edit

EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS
This 1956 classic is free on YouTube.

Flying saucers were real, documented, seen repeatedly, and extremely dangerous. The US was launching its first satellites, and the aliens thought this was a bad idea they could not abide. Ray Harryhausen produced a great movie without CGI. The tone is serious, almost documentary, setting the stage for later films such as Independence Day.

Humans must seek a weapon to put a stop to the flying saucers while the saucers are wrecking one city after another. This presages President Reagan’s famous speech to the UN.

The never asked question is just how the Aliens have such superb intelligence about what humans are doing. The movie answers this with St Elmo’s Fire, which turns out not to be static electricity but alien spy drones, and the first version of Alien abduction. The larger question is just why the aliens are enforcing their angry version of the prime directive. This is also answered, and it’s not because of nuclear tests. The governments of Earth seem to have little interest in surrendering to the saucers.

Everyone should take a couple of hours to watch this moment of cinematic and cultural history.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, March 15, 2026 - 11:12 pm: Edit

WAR MACHINE
On Netflix.
A group of Army troops on a training mission run into a robot that starts killing them. Here’s a thought, US military training doesn’t involve people getting killed on purpose. The troops realize the need to get clear and call home, but in war, the simplest things become impossibly complicated.

Excellent movie, one of the best, worth a watch.

By Steve Stewart (Stevestewart) on Monday, March 16, 2026 - 09:43 am: Edit

I also enjoyed it, particularly as I remember doing a number of "go to the downed aircraft and destroy it / recover the black box" type of exercise during my RAF Initial Officer Training. Alan Ritchson is very good in it - really enjoy his portrayal of REACHER in that series, and as the mad Swedish chap in "The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare". He's also in the second Hunger Games movie, but not quite as bulked up in that.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Friday, March 20, 2026 - 04:34 pm: Edit

Duplicate.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Sunday, March 22, 2026 - 10:04 am: Edit

AD ASTRA (2019)

For all intents and purposes, this is Apocalypse Now (1979) meets The Black Hole (1979) (heck, there's even a "never get off the boat" moment, with the angry tiger replaced by an angry baboon). If that's your thing, go for it; otherwise, not so much.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, March 22, 2026 - 12:43 pm: Edit

I went on one of those blow up the plane recover the pilot exercises in 1971. Being scheduled to go into the engineers I was head of the demolition team. After I blew the plane, the mission leader told me to separate and exfiltrate my team independently while he took the other nine guys to get the pilot. I got back, the main team was wiped out. The mission leader was criticized for detaching my team and told that my team, following the main team, could have gotten him out of the ambush. Good memories.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Tuesday, March 24, 2026 - 01:50 pm: Edit

As a note, Season 5 of For All Mankind starts this Friday.