Decipher SciFi

Spaaaaace Clouds in space…? Microsoft Azure Space and Azure Orbital. Making space cheaper and more accessible with satcomm as a service. VR The new Oculus Quest. Past predictions. Pulling the VR market in the direction of affordability? Pandemic winter VR. Hating Facebook while embracing their VR product. Getting better at not getting sick. Experiences of unreality. Conferencing Virtual chewing noises. Missing irl conference-going. It’s like a vacation for adult nerds! Food Food...

AI everything Creating a thinking, feeling artificial intelligence to do really important things for humanity like… sorting through your e-mail. N-dimensional AI chess. Rapid takeoff scenarios. Personal Assistants Natural language processing developments. The rise of proactive digital personal assistants. Predictive local, personal information. Digital relationship Virtual aural closeness. Presence and audio AR. Developments in form factor, interface, and functionality. Understanding the...

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Forgetability The valley of forgetability (The Core) between science-respecting sci-fi (e.g. Arrival) and totally bonkers nonsense (e.g. Jupiter Ascending). Space shuttle Landing the “flying brick.” Bird navigation Magnetite beaks. The possibility of quantum eyeball magnetic navigation HUDs. Corvid appreciation. Why birds don’t all fly into our windows and our eyeballs. Pacemakers Keeping your heart on-rhythm. Not as immediate a death sentence as portrayed. Earth’s outer core The absurd...

Clouds in episode image from “Storm Clouds” by Albert Bierstadt/The White House Historical Association CC-O @ Wikipedia Waffles Belgian Waffle formula Tasty waffles! Stank waffles! With lots of syrup! Solving food problems with casseroles. Gravy! VR Marveling at the Oculus Quest two 25% price drop from the last generation. Hating Facebook. Realizing the separateness of AR and VR development, even within companies working on both at the same time (Facebook). Can/will AR and VR converge and...

Happy 5-year anniversary whoooooo 🥳🎉 Subluminal interstellar travel Accelerating for half of the ride, and braking for the other half. The advantage of avoiding squishy human cargo for high acceleration. The difference between the Alucard and the Alcubierre drive technologies (hint: a miserable pile of secrets). Special floaty physics, magnets on your feet, and fake karate. Exoplanets Exploring the growing options for Earth-like life in the solar-system. Kepler 22b. Where did the...

“Banana” image used in featured image with our brains by nicubunu CC-0 Josh, recently Made a strong showing on the recent Saving Private Ryan episode over at LSG Media. Real human stuff in between the dick and fart jokes. Teledildonics Tales of coupled internet-connected sex toys are way up! Hooray for free and open source teledildonics at buttplug.io. Nuclear things Making long-lived diamond nuclear batteries from spent nuclear fuel. The banana equivalent dose of radiation. The trouble...

Production Costly! The costs of vising the wreck twelve times for research and footage, not to mention the cost of the film production overall. The extreme profitability of this film and James Cameron in general. Classism First, second, and third class on the same ship. Titans of industry. Runaway capitalism. The class divide and point of view before The Great War. The modern “royalty” by virtue of their wealth. Technology The pace of technological development in industries, especially...

Fawkes mask in post image Multipainkiller Studio CC-BY Prosthetics Proactive prostheses in our future? Recognizing that we routinely do this with major joints, and with for a full cyberpunk limb-improvement future. Big brother etc Machine learning facial recognition. Fawkes machine learning facial image “cloaking.” The possible value of poisoned data sets. Placing individual bricks in the wall that is our ability be private and protect our data. Google correlating diarrhea. Emulation...

Fear of mutation Our recent X-Men. Irl post-war nuclear anxieties. More mutant panic and more mutant supremacy bad guys. Irradiating Earth Not enough to make superpowers, but we sure did irradiate a lot. The clear mark of human civilization in the geological record. Past discussions of the Silurian Hypothesis. Neanderthal interactions 2010 Neanderthal DNA news and the possibility of this informing the film. Extincting things more by accident than on purpose in pre-agricultural times....

3D tracking Removing the manual work of 3d tracking in video production. CamTrackAR. Smartphone camera software processing innovations. Making creative tools more widely available. Grousing about Adobe’s overwhelming market-share and user-hostile subscription model. Hoping for a shift. Weather AI Dark Sky, the honestly best of all weather apps, was bought by Apple and have shut down their Android app. It is a sad day. Open government weather data APIs enabling innovation. Machine learning...

Comic book movies X-Men as the dawn of comic book blockbuster cinema. The un-comicbook-ness of previous Marvel adaptations like Blade and Punisher. X-Men as the gateway drug to the language of comic book storytelling. Perfect casting Patrick Steward and Huge Jackedman. Superhero physique Belgian Blue musclecow Roby GFDL Blockbuster budgets and making getting swole your full-time job. Kumail Nanjiani and Rob Mcelhenney being honest. Muscle cows and muscle dogs Look, it’s not that hard....

Hacking The reality of most hacking: social engineering. Hackers vs Sneakers. The 90s as the best period for hacking in fiction, back when people understood even less how computers worked. A review of Hacking in media. Free Software Free as in speech, free as in beer, etc. Freedom-respecting social network alternatives and the dream of critical mass. Mastodon. How the USGS uses Twitter data to track earthquakes. The impossibility of competing with YouTube. Appreciating Free software and...

Cashing in Sanic. 8-bit nostalgia. Remember the Mario movie? Imagining other possible Genesis-era ports. Chris is eagerly awaiting the film adaptation of Pigskin Footbrawl. Console wars Sega licensing sports for title recognizability. Sega finding a mascot in Sonic and dominating the console space, momentarily. Sega does what Nintendon’t Sonic Unused Sega mascot candidates, including extra-mustachey Teddy Roosevelt! Sonic character design history. Consistency in appearance and attitude...

Millhouse isolation Enabled introversion. Social anxiety and human avoidance: online ordering abd contactless food delivery. Masks Hoping for normalization of mask-wearing to confine your illness ot yourself. The popularization of medical masks for the lay population in China around the “Manchurian plague.” Masks failing to combat person-recognition (or probably even facial recognition 😥). Viking grooming That one time we did a viking episode with The other Lee. Our best historical...

Tulsa Massacre The Black Wall Street Massacre. Detecting buried remains with ground-penetrating radar. Ozymandias Doing splodey blue-balls on a city vs dropping a squid. “Saving” humanity. Narcissism. Super-genius space-prison escape plans. Spaceships vs submarines. Catapults, trebuchets, and escape velocity. Dr Manhattan Ol’ bluey. Creating life. Exploring the universe when you can be everywhere and everywhen at once. How and why would anyone want to blue themselves this way? The Dr...

Computing Not the sweet and sour delicious dessert, but the computing devices. Kodi, Smart Mirrors, retro arcade machines, and low-power cheap servers in the closet. Apple moving to ARM. The next generation of game consoles. SSDs. Raspberry Pi4 model B Michael Henzler / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 4.0 YouTube Chapter-markers. Auto-generated subtitles and “free” transcription. Memeseeks The sad story of The Memeseeks Box. Learning how to frame what may be your “failures.” The original...

Self-driving cars Garbage in/garbage out with ML training. Whether or not you allow the user to protect the driver at the expense of the pedestrian, those deicisions are still being made. The advantage of rolling blacked-out rooms on the commute. Hacking autonomous vehicles. Economics Job competition in “knowledge work” when people live functionally infinitely and tirelessly on electricity. Loopholes for the wealthy. Brain scanning Electrical mapping of the brain. Desctructive neural...

Fitness Standing desks are great and all, but the real flexibility innovation is not sitting in a car for hours every day. Inventing the “standing car.” Hip adductors like steel bands. Gaming Just Dance.Video game bodily control abstractions. DDR. GTA V. Video game scale and budget madness. GTA 2 demo nostalgia with co-bff Joe. John Carmack Polymath went from game engines to cars to actual rockets to VR to AGI, and we wish him great luck on that last one. Doom nostalgia. Dragon mission...

Deep water drilling It’s expensive! And if oil is ever expensive enough to justify the cost of drilling in Challenger Deep then by golly you start investing in alternative power instead. Semi-submersible deep-water drilling platforms. Drillships. We drill kinda deep in the ocean but like, not actually deep. Record drill depths and the vast gulf from there to the Mariana Trench. The ocean: scarier than space Gravity meets Aliens. Pressures and temperatures that are more deadly than getting...