Category: Sci-Friday

If you’re into solarpunk, you’ll want to watch this fascinating TED talk. Bjarke Ingel is using solarpunk and future architecture to show us how we’ll get to the beautiful future we’re dreaming about. Whether consciously, or unconsciously, Ingel encapsulates solarpunk concepts in this tour of his team’s projects. First, look at a waste-to-energy power plant that doubles as an alpine ski slope, and then check out the LEGO Home of the Brick in Denmark. Finally, look at the floating, sustainable cities adapted to climate change:

Yes. Y-E.S. YES! Can’t tell you how many times I’ve longed for discussions about simple, rational design without all the weird virtue signaling of other green tech presentations. But wait, it gets better. Check out Ingel’s projects on his website. Binge-read about the MANY DIFFERENT DIRECTIONS he’s looking into for ideas about the future; from Mars to seabed mining. Absolutely brilliant and I’m here for all of it.

So much coolness to explore when it comes to solarpunk and future architecture: take advantage of it! After you’re done with Ingel’s website, please feel welcomed to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend.

Welcome back to Sci-Friday. Regular readers of the blog know how much I love Back to the Future and Robert Zemeckis in general. But there’s something else you’ll learn in this Back to the Future gag reel featuring outtakes from Michael J. Fox, Lea Thompson, and Christopher Lloyd. Watch it and see if you pick up on it, too:

Did you catch it? How much fun they were having? There’s a certain energy to film productions; each set is different. A happy crew makes a better movie, period. From the laughs and reactions you hear off-camera, the cast and crew of Back to the Future were having fun. Actual fun, joy. There’s an important lesson there.

It’s true, making movies is a blend of art and commerce, just like writing books. The connection of art and joy are something psychologists study in detail and you can hear some of those insights in this podcast.

So watch these Back to the Future outtakes and remember this: When you’re making stuff, do it happy. But at the end of the day, it’s supposed to be fun. Be joyful in your work, play loud music, yell at your screen! Do something that makes you happy, even if people think you’re nuts. That joy, that energy? It’s going to make better art. I hope you enjoy this Sci-Friday and dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

Panic in Year Zero is scifi with a jazz soundtrack, a classic tale with yesteryear stars, and a masterclass in indie filmmaking. A special treat for Sci-Friday, one of the greatest post-apocalyptic movies you’ve never seen. You’ll want to watch Panic in Year Zero for a lot of reasons: 1) It’s Scifi 2) It features Jean “Lina Lamont from ‘Singin’ in the Rain'” Hagen and Frankie Avalon and 3) the house from ‘My Three Sons.’ Panic in Year Zero wrote the book on ‘post-apocalyptic scifi’ storytelling, inspiring hundreds of movies up to and including Cloverfield. Now you can watch it on Archive.org for free:

The key to enjoying any ‘B’ movie is to set your expectations low. If you can do that, you’ll enjoy Panic in Year Zero, which one of the first movies of its kind and deserves a lot of credit for deep storytelling on minimal budget. The cinematography and dialogue is pretty decent for the period, too. Thanks to BoingBoing for the tip – enjoy this campy scifi classic to kick off your weekend. I hope you enjoy this Sci-Friday and dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

Love Star Trek? Love Monty Python? Enjoy this Monty Python Star Trek Mashup as the “The Knights of the Round Table” from Holy Grail is performed by Star Trek: TOS:

Everyone has their own reasons for loving Star Trek and Monty Python. For one, both franchises can be appreciated on their own merits, and satirized without losing any of their charm. Monty Python and Star Trek are also alike in that they examine social rules and concepts that defy logical explanation. If you grew up understanding that the world is an arbitrary place with no patience for non-conformists, Monty Python and Star Trek provided safe harbors for reflection and introspection.

Both franchises are alike in one other way – they’re smart. Star Trek combined ‘smart’ with ‘adventure,’ while Monty Python combined ‘smart’ with ‘funny.’ Star Wars in many ways is smart, but it doesn’t assume the level of knowledge that both Star Trek and Monty Python expect of their audiences. It’s made them cultural icons and emotional lodestones for the nerd/geek communities for nearly six decades, and it’s why we’re excited to see William Shatner blast off on a Blue Origin rocket next week.

So, for Sci-Friday #128 please enjoy this Monty Python Star Trek Mashup. I hope you enjoy this Sci-Friday and dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

Enjoy this Top Gun Star Wars Mash-up and other fun scifi stuff for Sci-Friday. Watching this reminded me of many hours soaking in some of those 80s classics with my butt parked in a sagging, dusty movie theater seat. Music and movies are cultural communication devices that we use to express ourselves.

Fun fact about ‘Highway to the Danger Zone.’ Even though it was sung by Kenny Loggins, it was written by Giorgio Moroder and oddly enough, his car mechanic. Tom Whitlock started writing songs at 15, and after some false starts he moved to California in 1983 to advance his music career.

When Jerry Bruckheimer reached out to Moroder for a song on Top Gun, his usual lyrical collaborators (Keith Forsey and Pete Bellote) weren’t around. Whitlock was still in the neighborhood, running errands and sleeping on the floor. His previous songwriting experience made him a natural for this pop classic. With the lyrics in place, Moroder and Bruckheimer called around to see who could sing the track and Kenny Loggins’ name came up. The rest is history.

One thing I took from the video is how music videos are mostly about editing. Jackson McKay took footage from seven different Star Wars’ movies (Episodes 4-9 and Rogue One) and cut action pieces together to create sequences and lets your brain fill in the blanks. Nice work!  I hope you enjoy this Sci-Friday and dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

We made it through the week! Time for more fun scifi stuff – today we’ll pay tribute to an undersung hero of Star Wars: All Hail Gonk! Gonk droids, according to StarWars.Fandom were GNK power droids, an Industrial Automaton knockoff of the successful EG-6 power droid. The GNK power droid derives its name from the “gonk” sound it makes in Episode IV. The droid was originally called simply a “power droid,” but a newsgroup posting in 1993[5] led to the now-official name becoming quickly popular.

That’s the lore, but here’s the reality. Gonk was nothing more than two storage bins and some human legs hidden by dryer vent hose. The costume is so low-tech that you can build a Gonk with materials lying around the house. In real life, Gonk was played by two actors. Rusty Goffe is an English actor who played several characters in A New Hope, including Kabe, a Jawa, and a gonk droid. Before Star Wars, he was an Oompa Loompa in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. After Star Wars, he appeared as a Dwarf in Flash Gordon. He also later worked with George Lucas on the 1988 film Willow, in which he had an uncredited role as a Nelwyn villager.

Gonk’s other actor was Jack Purvis, the only actor to be credited in all three of the original Star Wars films as a different character each time: In Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), he played the Chief Jawa; in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980), he played Chief Ugnaught; and in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983), he played Teebo. When he wasn’t acting in Star Wars movies, Purvis was in movies like Willow, Labyrinth, and Brazil.

I hope you enjoy this Sci-Friday and dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!