Moe Lane's Blog, page 686
September 12, 2021
Patreon Microfiction: ‘Ghosts.’
‘Ghosts’ is, I guess, a bit grim. I mean, what happens if you implode? It doesn’t sound entirely pleasant, imploding.
Patreon!
Tweet of the Day, This Tweet Is Slightly Too Coarse To Embed edition.
But God, it’s such a metaphor. Metaphor for what? I dunno, whatever you like. I count at least three and I’m not even trying very hard.
September 11, 2021
As was probably obvious…
…I took it easy, today. I didn’t want to contribute to the trying day that a lot of people ended up having, and it never hurts to show some empathy. I can go back to the usual round of things tomorrow.
If you could use a little peacefulness, still:
Book of the Week: How To Lie With Statistics.
This is Darrell Huff’s classic How To Lie With Statistics, not the auto-generated knockoff sales leecher that I almost linked to as a joke. I was real tempted, too. But I overcame my darker impulses. That’s been kind of the theme today, really.
September 10, 2021
I knew Christopher Nolan was working on an Oppenheimer biopic…
…but I didn’t realize he was shopping it around: “Normally, Nolan would have just worked with Warner Bros. on this, but he clearly wasn’t happy with how WarnerMedia is handling the release of their films by debuting them on HBO Max and theaters simultaneously. So, now he’s looking at other studio options.” He’s not the only director unhappy about simultaneous release, either, and who can blame them? Aside from everything else, it makes it harder to figure out who gets what money.
Relatedly: Disney’s going to release the rest of its 2021 slate in theaters only. Which is good! Now, if they’d only grow up and pay Scarlett Johansson a sufficient amount of forgive-us money for screwing up the BLACK WIDOW release.
You have two weeks to acquire enough money…
…to get in on the Australian auction of some of the vehicles from MAD MAX: FURY ROAD. I’m looking at the Doof Wagon, myself. It just suits my idiom, if you know what I mean?
Via Fark.
Moe Lane
PS: If I happen not to acquire the money in time, and somebody else happens to pick it up during the sale, let me assure you: I am not too proud to accept it as a gift.
I have my floor location at Fright Reads!
I have no idea if this is good, or not. It’s in the middle, at least.
Check me out (Flying Koala Publishing) at the @frightreads Book Festival on October 2nd! https://t.co/rMYX8zZsG6 https://t.co/PiDn18Z1A1 pic.twitter.com/BaXzFuX7bA
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) September 11, 2021
Item Seed: The Montclair Footage.
The Montclair Footage
Description: three movie cans, each containing one reel of 35mm nitrate film, black and white, no sound. Each can has a faded label with “SPACE DOOM HENDERSON 1932” written on it; they were apparently from a set of five (the canisters are numbered 1, 2, and 4). The film was clearly professionally preserved, and kept under conditions designed to limit its degradation: most of the footage remains usable. Every physical detail of the cans and film is compatible with them being from the 1930s.
The reels themselves show various outdoor scenes (each reel holds twelve minutes of footage):
Reel one is a wide, establishing shot of an odd-looking city of concrete and brick overlooking a river. Powered boats and antique airplanes can be seen, but the city itself remains unidentified throughout the continuous shot.Reel two (from the same camera and angle) also shows the city. At three minutes, two seconds, there is a flash of light — and then the unmistakable appearance of a mushroom cloud over the city. The following shock wave rattles the camera, but does not topple it. The detonation is compatible with a Hiroshima-style atomic bomb.Reel three was either filmed on different cameras, or else one camera was put on a truck bed and moved around. The footage is not continuous, instead being a series of static panoramic shots of devastated buildings and human casualties. The people look vaguely European, but the signs are in no known language (and, again, there is no sound) and there is no indication where these scenes were shot. The images of the dead and injured are graphic, and consistent with the effects of surviving a nuclear blast.The Montclair Footage was discovered in an auction sale earlier this year: the previous owner was a reclusive and obsessive collector of old filmstock. Where she got the Footage from is anybody’s guess: while she meticulously documented her ongoing film preservation projects, information on the acquisition of those films is conspicuously absent (larceny was likely involved, somehow). The earliest date in the files associated with the Montclair Footage is 1985, so the films are at least that old.
Presumably the Montclair Footage is a fake, but it’s a very good one. The film buff who was going through all the footage to assess it is also a historian specializing in the American nuclear program, so she knows perfectly well what an A-Bomb blast looks like — and its effects on human tissue. She even has a security clearance that let her look at classified tests, and none of them match up with the footage here, either. One phone call later, and the Montclair Footage was passed along to the appropriate shadow government agency.
And They ended up scratching their heads, too: this footage is simply not compatible with any atomic bomb test, ever. It looks real, and it feels real, but it really can’t be real. But neither is it an obvious or even unobvious fake: the film could be possibly faked today (although that’s not guaranteed), but the FX state of the art in the mid 1980s simply wasn’t up to the challenge. Unless that date’s part of the fake, too. But if it’s a well-constructed practical joke, what’s the payoff?
And… there was a movie project back in the early 1930s called “Space Doom.” The director (Gunther Henderson) had been somewhat prominent in the silent movie era, only to lose funding when talking pictures became the industry standard. Space Doom might have still been produced, except that a fire in 1932 wrecked Henderson’s studio. After that, he just… disappears from the records.
Get used to that a lot, by the way. Investigating the silent film era is an exercise in exasperating frustration. Nobody kept any records, the narrators are nigh-universally unreliable, and elderly nitrate film has a tendency to catch on fire, and sometimes explode. So, have fun figuring out if this is really documentary evidence of a nuclear bomb, detonated ten years early! Or, alternatively, what in God’s name was so important that it required a fake like this to be made. That’s worth checking out, too.
Tweet of the Day, I Hope He At Least TRIES To Do This edition.
Not that it will happen. Then again, what’s the harm in applying for the relevant permits? The worst they can do is say no.
When Chris Nolan blows up a real atom bomb for his Robert Oppenheimer epic. pic.twitter.com/3kcxCsUoxc
— Burhan Khalid (@RequiemNocturn) September 9, 2021
