Latest Blog Entries

• → “Imperium” from Petroff Games, Steam

  This popped up in my Steam recommendations and I got really excited. It looked great at first glance. I want a classic, fun-to-play space 4X game like that so much. Then I maximised the trailer and noticed all the assets, SFX and music are pure AI slop. Especially the ChatGPT art style really turned me off this. To the point of making it unplayable for me, I think. What a shame. I want a game like that, but I am adamant about supporting human creation, not that kind of ugly slop.

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• Amelia Earhart Overshadowed Better Female Pilots than Herself

  Lost in the glare of Earhart’s posthumous elevation to aviation sainthood are the other women pilots of aviation’s golden age who, as much as Earhart, defied the era’s systemic misogyny to prove a woman’s place was in the cockpit. Forgotten is how Earhart substituted courage for competence to achieve fame, and missing is an appreciation of the unique socioeconomic environment that made it possible.

  — Ric Gillespie, One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy

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• The Futility of Arguing with a Female in a Dark-Brown Mood

  Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood. He shrugged, and left her.

  — Isaac Asimov, Foundation and Empire

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• → The Final Episode, No Agenda

  No Agenda has officially come to an end with episode 1916. A sad day for everyone who enjoys podcasts and is in favour of people thinking for themselves. But after JCD’s passing, it was inevitable.

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• While the Propellers Knotted like Pretzels

  In 1937, Time magazine had this to say about Amelia Earhart crashing her plane on the second leg of her world-circling flight. The press really hit different back then.

  For Earhart and Putnam, the crash in Hawaii was a public relations disaster. The March 29 issue of Time magazine drew on the title of a popular Eugene O’Neill play for a piece titled “Mourning Becomes Electra.” After pointing out that several people had flown around the world on commercial airlines, the article said, “Last week Aviatrix Amelia Earhart Putnam took off from Oakland ‘to establish the feasibility of circling the globe by commercial air travel.’ … With her as navigators she took three men, but not her publicity-wise husband, who stayed at Oakland to sell her autographs at $6 each.” Time’s description of the accident was no less sarcastic: “Down the long concrete runway of Luke Field the ship shot at 60 m.p.h. Suddenly the left tire blew out. Lurching, the plane crumpled its landing gear, careened 1,000 feet on its bottom in a spray of sparks while the propellers knotted like pretzels. With sirens screaming, ambulances dashed to the wreck just as Flyer Amelia stepped out white-faced. Said she, ‘Something must have gone wrong.’

  — From the book One More Good Flight: The Amelia Earhart Tragedy by Ric Gillespie, U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2024

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