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Spider-Man Far From Home: Venice, burying forests, and microphone proliferation

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VPNs

MJ’s VPN advice. VPN advertising on YouTube.

Venice

How to build a whole city on mud. Transplanting alder forests from on some ground to under some other ground. Hard clay is worse than bedrock. Measuring a sinking city’s rate of subsidence with space-based radar and GPS. Climate change sure isn’t helping any. What value should we place on artifacts of human civilization? Losing UNESCO world heritage sites. The MOSE project. Climate change and rising sea levels. What will the world do?

VFX

Advanced holography with drones! Photoreal real-time rendering. LED walls. Projection mapping. Lasers in your eyes.

Smart glasses

Inward and outward-facing smart glass technologies. Wearable ubiquity. Evolution of “smart glasses” from Google Glass to Echo Frames. Magic Leap? Bone conduction and having discrete interactions with your personal assistant.

Spider-Man Far From Home: iTunes | Amazon
This Video Is Sponsored By ███ VPN by Tom Scott: YouTube
Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse: particle colliders, art, and magnetic monopolies w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi

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Thor Dark World: Finnish-ish, amphetamines, and weaponized gravity

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Background

Looking back after the culmination of all these threads in Endgame. Queen Amidala’s midichlorian magical umbrella.

Language

Thor knowing All-Tongue, emitting pheromones, and doing the bee dance. The difficutly of universal language or language understanding. Finnishish conlanging. The cultural and linguistic juxtaposition between Scandinavia and Finland.

Alignment of worlds

Astrology is bunkum nonsense gobbledegook. The miniscule and generally unimportant effects when bodies in space are “in alignment.”

“Magic”

Our difficulties with magical realism. Asgardian “Smagic.” Apparent technology levels and technology so advanced it looks like magic. Bringing swords and shields to a lasergun fight.

Battle stimulation

Dosing for war. Uppers are very popular. The Finnish soldier who was the “first documented case of a soldier over overdosing on methamphetamines during combat.”

Black holes etc

“Gravity grenades.” The possibility of man-made miniature black holes.

Vikings

“Viking burials” but not like you thought. Tumuli/barrows/kurgans. Horned helmets.

Links

Thor The Dark World: iTunes | Amazon
Guardians of the Galaxy: Decipher SciFi
Guardians of the Galaxy 2: Decipher SciFi
Avengers Infinity War: Decipher SciFi
Black Panther: Decipher SciFi
Avengers Endgame: Decipher SciFi

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The Mandalorian: modern mythology, space toilets, and hairy rhinos

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Western

The best genre of Star Wars media? Brandishing yourself. Old west forced sack removal.

“Real filmmaking”

Werner Herzog’s surprising(?) praise. “Real filmmaking” in the wake of the prequel trilogies. Wooden green-screen acting vs sweet puppets and actual human beings. Unreal Engine LED walls and volumetric projection and camera tracking.

Our new mythology

Star Wars as our new shared cultural mythology the world over. Concern about disney’s stewardship and the private ownership of our cultural heritage. Streamboat Willie entering The Commons.

Mandalorians

Some past famous Mandalorians, this particular Mandalorian, and martial prowess. Mandalorian history and why the Mandalorians are the only ones who figured out how to fight the space wizards for some reason?

Poop!

Pooping space. Weightless waste elimination can be tricky. Floating turds.

Freezing in carbonite

Cryostasis. Cryopreservation. Avoiding ice crystals. Replacing blood with “antifreeze”

Robo slavery

Taking the most depressing angle on droid consciousness and freedom (or lack thereof). And then to make it worse: DRM!

Baby Yoda

Extra-long postnatal development. Big brains and incomplete gestation. Cuteness. Animatronics.

Hairy rhinos!

Elasmotherium. Whooly rhinos. Hiary…. eggs? Historical rhinos. Rhino evolution. Balut.

The Mandalorian: Disney+
Star Wars Meta: How to Star Wars, machete order, and the best Star Wars fan edit: Decipher SciFi
Star Wars: the death star, planet science, and appreciating the original Star Wars trilogy: Decipher SciFi
The Last Jedi: FTL ramming, salt geology, and real green milk: Decipher SciFi

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Venom: comets, Von Neumann goo, and the alien brown note

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Decontamination protocols

NASA’s irl de-contamination measures. Private space industry without apparent government oversight.

Comets

Some of the oldest things in our solar system and maybe the oldest things that we can reach. Leftovers from early solar system formation. The possibility of finding the precursors of life. Delineating between comets and asteroids. Fuzzy definitions. “Extinct” comets. Scales & tails.

Von Neumann Goo

Sending out of infected ice-balls and hoping someone notices. Like a tree! Just send your reproductive material everywhere and who cares who it lands on or gives allergies to.

Evil Jeff Bezos

Thinly-written villains. Narcissism. Poorly designed humans and “saving” humanity.

Sound

And magnets! The frequencies in which MRI machines are loudest, and the way that doesn’t line up with Venom’s sonic sensitivities. Resonance frequencies and alien “brown notes.”

Symbiosis

Christopher’s surprise learning the distinction between the category of biological interactions that is symbiosis and its subcategories.

  • parasitism
  • commensalism
  • mutualism (Venom, but perhaps not his compatriots)

Venom: iTunes | Amazon
Bronson: iTunes | Amazon
Locke: iTunes | Amazon
Peaky Blinders: iTunes | Amazon | Netflix
Warrior: iTunes | Amazon
The Dark Knight Rises: iTunes | Amazon

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Terminator Dark Fate: surprises, developing humanity, and CORAL puns w/ Joe Ruppel

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Hey so we covered the entirety of the Terminator series in the past few months and it was really fun!

Meta

Hooray! Another legit good Terminator sequel! Nutso revenue requirements. Linda Hamilton and Arnold physique maintenance. Arnold appreciation as always.

Opener

No spoilers but wow what a way to begin. CG face replacements. Terminator battle plans. More alternate timelines.

Human upgrades

Grace. Imposing! “Design” considerations. Relying on human tissues. Comparing and contrasting with the Terminator Salvation’s Sam Worthingtonbot. Bio-aumentation. More than muscle! Nervous system response shortcuts.

Robots taking our jobs

Robot literally taking the guy’s job this time. Learning to work with the robots. Extended robot anxieties throughout the history of the Terminator franchise. Robots surveilling and monitoring our jobs and making it easy for Terminators to find us.

Terminators, revisited

New Terminator! The Rev-9 taking the best bits of previous no-longer-canon sequels. Infiltrating and cracking wise.

Legion

Synet rebranded. AI built on human data and maybe no matter which platform becomes sentient it will come to similar conclusions and methods. Cyberwarfare platforms.

Humanity

Becoming human. Understanding humanity. What happens to a Terminator after their mission is complete? Post-mission Terminators getting creative.

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Men in Black International: Eiffel, backfilling memory, space hacking

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Eiffel

LPT: you can get pommes frites in Europe. Could Eiffel have been an agent? The history of the Eiffel tower. The Eiffel Tower’s science history. Cosmic rays. Wireless telepraphy (radio). Outliving its intended lifespan.

Aliens

Which government agency should you be applying to in order to research alien stuff? Remembering the MiB is an NGO.

Space tracking

Increasing ability to track nearby space objects. Tracking objects in our solar system’s plane. The difficulty of tracking interstellar objects. Being a good space neighbor. Confirmed tracked interstellar objects. Failing to pronounce “ʻOumuamua.”

justin: dude
Danzig lives next door to me in l.a.
down the street
and he is the worst neighbor ever

justin: so he has this huge pile of bricks in his front yard
and the house looks like an evil pixar house
so anyway, his neighbor was like, “dude, danzig your bringing property values down with these bricks in your yard.”
and danzig was pissed
so anyway, back and forth with his neighbor and danzig
and finally one day
i see danzig outside
in his front yard
and he’s hurling bricks into this drumpster and he’s screaming, “HERE I AM MOTHERFUCKER, JUST CLEANING UP MY FUCKING BRICKS BITCH!”
Just super loud
to no one in particular
for two hours
it was amazing
like, i couldn’t even think about other things
because it was so amazing

me: oh my god
this is amazing

justin: dude
it blew my mind
because it was danzig as just a really poor homeowner

Space security

Hacking satellites! Actually totally possible and has happened. Air Force satellites at DEFCON. DDoS in space. The possibilities for catastrophy in hacking things in space. The many ways an attacker could damage or destroy our space telescopes.

Stars!

Blue giants! They’re rather large, and luminous. And hot. Capturing star energy. Kardashev scales.

Memory

The tendency of our minds to backfill missing information. Using neuralizers without providing a cover story is probably actually good enough, really.

Links

Men in Black: human gestation, stimulants, and Earth as backwater w/ Liam ginty: Decipher SciFi
Isaac Arthur: YouTube

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Star Trek Voyager: water, galactic scales, and coffee replicators

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Setup

Cross-galaxy teleportation macguffins. The Delta quadrant. Where are the Borg!?

Species

The Kazon, aka less-good, less-organized Klingons. Were Klingons racist? Or the Ferengi? Or the Kazons?

Water

The availability of water in star systems. Exoplanet surveys and water-rich gas giants.

Voyager

Yay Janeway! Comparing with the original actress. Imagining a Star Trek/Too Many Cooks crossover.

Replicators and teleporters

The most incredible Star Trek technology of all. Teleporter failure rates: very low, or actually 100%?

Scales

Galaxy Scale. “Quandrants” actually refer to “quarters of the galaxy” which blew Christopher’s mind slightly (like this guy). And here is a map. Putting speed limits on the universe.

Links

The Orville: iTunes | Amazon | Hulu

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Godzilla King of the Monsters: acoustic wildlife tracking and moth superiority

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Titans

Awaking dormant giant monsters from within the Earth. Bio-acoustic signatures. Giant balloons! Tracking elephants by sound.

Pre-civilization civilizations

The Silurian hypothesis thought experiment, especially as part of our Atlantis coverage. The increasing disappearability of the details of civilization as they raise their technological level.

Moths

Moths: way better than butterflies! Echolocation defense mechanisms. Corresponding bat appreciation in our A Quiet Place episode. Echolocation signal jamming vs. aural camouflage. Giant moths and dedication to reproduction so complete that they will never once eat as an adult and devote all of their stored energy to reproduction. How we harvest silk from moths.

Creature combos

Pterosaur-bird monster Rhodan. Inane pedantry. Pterasaurs vs dinosaurs! Freedom at the cutting creative edge of paleontological art.

Links

Deep Learning With The Elephants by Planet Money: NPR.org
Godzilla: postwar Japan, science, and regrets w/ Miles Greb: Decipher SciFi

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Terminator Genisys: surprise anthologies & time travel spaghetti w/ Joe Ruppel

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The curse of the Terminator

Why do all these production companies go under after making these always-profitable Terminator movies?

VFX

Twelve months to make a fake Arnold.

Time travel

Time travel but, like, way more confusing. And possibly nonsensical. Five movie in and we FINALLY we see a time machine. Operation Cronos. Trying to count timelines and getting very confused because they broke everything.

Skynet

Skynet in the government shadows vs Silicon Valley public launch. UbiquityOS. Engineering to let the AI our of the box. The dawn of “apps” and how it was important. “”Genisys does what Nintendon’t.” Skynet takeoff scenario, altered yet again.

Terminators

A review of the T-3000 and T-5000. Doctor Who. Bio-nanite replacement. Ship of Biorobo Theseus: is the T-3000 still the same person as it was?

Kyle Reese

Old Nikes! Scrappy Kyle vs jacked Kyle. David vs Goliath.

Who wants to go do my mom

– John Connor

Arnold

build_time_machine.bat . Time traveling at 1x speed. Various messy strategies for re-encasing your robot arm in flesh.

Mortal Kombat 11 Kombat Pack – Official Terminator T-800 Gameplay Trailer: YouTube
Scientist Man Explains Terminator: Genisys by Red Letter Media: Youtube

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