paulsspaceshippictures

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There's a woman at my workplace, "Mel". She's intersex ( total androgen insensitivity syndrome ). One morning in a Comms meeting she decided to share. "I'm intersex". And one of the other women said, "You're into WHAT!??"

- anyway. She's also Pagan. And one day the TU rep found a series of coins laid out on the steps leading to the office. And the rep came to me because he thought a customer might be trying to intimidate us with a curse (we've had weird symbols written on cards and posted through the door before, so not as unlikely as it sounds. Also, this is Wales.)

So to keep the rep happy I decided to investigate. And I decided Mel was best qualified to help ( a bit of religious discrimination by me - she's Pagan, not Wiccan. My bad.)

And Mel suggested we follow the trail of coins. So off we went, like Mulder and Scully (maybe more like Shaggy and Scooby Doo). Followed the trail of coins. Kept finding more. Up the steps, through the corridor, across the Service Delivery area...

To my desk. I had a hole in my pocket.

[paulsspaceshippictures]

first frame is an old CG render - the rest is AI slop. I had to press "rerun" dozens of times before getting an iteration I liked. Is pressing "rerun" art? It's still amazing how quickly this technology has progressed.

[paulsspaceshippictures]

Not that anyone's asked, but my two favourite kinds of nuclear bomb: the UK's chicken-powered Blue Peacock...

...and Project Orion's nuclear pulse units .

Pretty much sums up the difference between the UK and the US. God save the King!

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Took a CGI still, animated it with Kling AI.

[paulsspaceshippictures]

My new theory about 2001: A Space Odyssey.

So the Discovery is often compared to a spermatozoon, right?

I think that's wrong. I think the spermatozoon is Heywood Floyd (sorry, Heywood).

When we first meet him he's aboard the phallic Pan Am Orion space clipper (I know that's not exactly how these things work but bear with me).

The Orion docks with Space Station V. I'm too coy to spell this bit out.

Floyd travels to the ovum-shaped Aries lunar shuttle.

The Aries/fertilised ovum migrates the the Moon/womb. The Moon is associated with the reproductive cycle in a lot of cultures, right?

The Aries/ovum implants itself in the Tycho docking bay/uterus.

In this theory, the Discovery is the developing fetus. Heywood is aboard, as a recorded message about the true nature of Discovery's mission (ie, the father's DNA I guess). The Stargate sequence is the traumatic process of birth , and the Starchild is a newborn, not a fetus.

Anyway that's my theory. Sorry if it's a bit... laboured.

[paulsspaceshippictures]

Sound, in space. Spaceships with wings, that bank and swoop. Visible laser beams. People who walk around on asteroids with no pressure suits, just oxygen masks. Darth Vader's cape whipping in the wind as he watches Leia's blockade runner get away at the end of Rogue One.

Clearly there IS air in space in the Star Wars galaxy.

Don't know how, maybe there's something like Larry Niven's Smoke Ring going on.

[paulsspaceshippictures]

Dug out my old copy of The Mote In God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1974).

Timeline's slipped a bit, and it's the United States and the Russian Federation, now.

Hope we still get the Alderson Drive before the Great Patriotic Wars in our timeline.

[paulsspaceshippictures]

[paulsspaceshippictures]

[paulsspaceshippictures]

You know how that line in Neuromancer, "the sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" is misinterpreted by younger generations of readers?

I was talking with a colleague about cutting "unnecessary" jobs, and mentioned The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, and the  Golgafrinchams sending all their planet's telephone sanitation operatives out into space, and then entire Golgafrincham race dying out from a plague spread by unsanitary phones. But of course Douglas Adams was thinking about public call boxes. Everyone used to use public phones. No-one uses them now. The old red Post Office Sir Gilbert Scott-designed telephone boxes are smashed to pieces now, or sometimes used as community libraries. Everyone has mobiles. So like the Neuromancer line, that Hitchhiker's joke doesn't make sense now.