Category: Guest Contributors

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 10FEB2026 – The Lunar Option

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And now he should change his name to D. D. Harriman. I’ve also always felt the Moon was a better choice. Mostly because with basic chemical rockets, it’s 3-5 days away and there are LOTS of windows to reach it. Mars is 140+ days, and that window is only roughly every two years. If you have a small initial Mars colony, no matter how many ships you have and the Stuff hits the fan, you’re on your own for on average 18 months away from outside help. With Luna its 3-5 days depending on lunar phase and you may be able just to lifeboat back to earth orbit.

Looking the 140 day or so timeline is like the early Europe to American colonies distance from Europe and America had air and food and water. And yet we still had Roanoke and lost 1/2 of Plimouth Colony the first year. Luna lets you learn in a slightly harsher environment with at least some safety net. Mars really has to wait until there are constant thrust engines (be they Nuclear Thermal, Fission/fusion pulsed or straight up fusion) so we can have .01 or .1 g constant and not have to use Hohmann (minimal energy) orbits and have 14 or 4 day transits to Mars/ Nearly every thing Elon (pardon me Delos) had planned for Mars is useful on the moon and can be further refined for future Mars work.

Also, if we’re going to do this, it should be done as G*d, Von Braun and Arthur C. Clarke intended with an orbital station to fuel lunar Starship-like beasts and send them on to the moon. We need the infrastructure. Maybe not immediately but once we try to start moving large quantities back and forth. the division of labor would help.

Bad Bunny Review

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Tyler over at the Portly Politico has bravely watched the Super Bowl Halftime in order that others could be spared the horror.  If you follow the link back you’ll find out what he thought.

I applaud his courage but I would not copy it.  Leaving organized sports in the rearview mirror was a wise move for me.  My stomach lining has benefitted magnificently from the decision.

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 23JAN2026 – Often Unreliable

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I think the fondness for first person (often unreliable) or third person limited viewpoint comes from a fundamental aspect of modernist philosophy. That aspect is that in modernist thought there is NO absolute truth. There’s my truth and your truth and (heaven help us) Kamala Harris’s truth. The Omniscient narrator belies this point, for that story, their narrative is the truth. They deny that such can exist in support of their raging relativism. I think the second issue is the types of “stories” they write. Plot is limited or irrelevant, the characters aren’t characters but more archetypes or mouthpieces for their viewpoints. They view the whole purpose of literature to essentially be propaganda. The more traditional is that we are telling a story. There is probably meaning there but in general rarely is allegory the prime purpose. Not to say this doesn’t happen, e.g. Starship Troopers is a polemic on Duty, but honestly, it is also a hell of a good story. Thirdly, the modern literature folks are oddly like what the Puritans were alleged to be. They’re afraid someone might be having fun somewhere and they must prevent that at all costs.

 

Guest Contributor – Tregonsee – 19JAN2026 – Star Trek Decline

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I’m an old line Star Trek fan. I remember it live on TV when I was a kid. I was young enough that when it went to Friday night at 10pm in the third season I had to get a bedtime dispensation. Luckily, it was Friday night so leniency prevailed. I then watched them repeatedly out of WPIX from NYC who ran them twice a day 5 days a week

Recently we’ve been watching Enterprise Honestly, it is pretty good (although I think they abused the T’pol character and being first officer/XO gets her compared with Spock)
Strange New World was also not half bad although it plays havoc with continuity and characters from Star Trek and Next Generation. I tried Discovery and Picard and disliked both. Lower Decks is a gem and cleverly makes many things from the original animated series, particularly the Caitian and Kzinti species canon. It always feels like the best of the humorous original Trek (e,g, A Piece of the Action) episodes. I was hoping for a Horta crew member but no such luck.

You say they spent $100 million on the Starfleet Academy series? Well they probably gotten a better return if they had taken that to Vegas and bet it on roulette or simply just burned it. Other than Strange New Worlds and Lower Decks the Modern Treks haven’t gotten much attention with occasional exceptions (Picard’s Ending). The recent movies (Kelvan time line) varied from meh to worth watching at home (and #4 apparently justifiably gone into permanent development hell).

Like Disney with Star Wars they seem to have gone out of their way to find a producer that dislikes the original material. This never works well as seen by Kathleen Kennedy wrecking the Star Wars movies and then moving on to wreck the Acolyte when the TV side had been showing her up. Honestly there are a WHOLE bunch of Scifi properties that could be acquired and developed for say 20 million each. that’s five of them and I bet 2-3 succeed at some level maybe even take off. Thats not something that this 90120 in space series is going to do. Who was the target? Young teens? Are you even going to get them to watch something based on a 60 year old premise? 20-30 something affluent women (the Karen/AWFL Demographic, I want that watching my show)?They’re busy picking on various folks Throwing it into the weird far future of Discovery which had pretty dismal numbers just baffles me. I can tell you the target demographic ISN’T me.

Tom’s World – 13JAN2026 – Sony Photo Fails

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Tom | Flickr

TomD

The A7IV Sony camera is glitching again, at least to the extent of displaying the “not compatible with camera” message that started the whole thing. I’m pretty sure Sony originated the whole thing in an effort to stop the aftermarket purchase of 2nd party batteries. After all, Sony wants close to $90 for a NP FZ100 battery whereas you can get a compatible battery on Amazon with a charger (which sony does not give you) for $24. I’ll just bet that my glitch originates from a piece of Sony 2nd party battery detection software gone astray.
In the “Adding coals to Newcastle” department, my E mount 90mm f2.8 macro has totally failed. It makes a horrible mechanical razzing noise along with a coarse vibration and, of course, does not function. I sent it to a Sony “authorized” repair center who just received and inspected the camera and concluded that it needs a “4th group assembly”, $576. I’ve had the lens for a number of years but macro represents <5% of my shooting, so it has only maybe 2000-4000 snaps in its lifespan, a small fraction of what I shot with its A mount 100mm macro predecessor. When I called them about it, the Indian sounding service rep assured me the problem will not reoccur because it is/was a common problem with recent Sony lenses and that particular magnetic focusing mechanism is common to a lot of lenses and has since gone through total redesign. Do you know what Sony lenses cost?
In my history with Minolta/Sony cameras/lenses over a number of decades, my previous defect-failure rate is 0.00%
it may be just me but  doesn’t that constitute a tacit admission on Sony’s part that the commonly failing mechanism should have been a recall/warranty  issue. Sounds like grounds for a class action.
Oh yeah, and on top, when you attempt to prepay for the repair, the Sony Authorized Service Center wants a tip and makes it quite hard to pay the invoice without paying one. And they haven’t done s*** for me so far save irritating me.

ArthurinCali Wants to Discuss American-Balkanization

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Now this is a topic near and dear to my heart.  In my soon to be released novel “The Sniper,” I do a thorough job of smashing up the Union but that’s fiction.  Arthur’s talking fact.

Pondering the Idea of American Balkanization

I think we all have our theories about how this country could and maybe should split up.  And by the same token there are lots of theories about changes to the Constitution that would allow greater regional freedom without the necessity of busting up the USA.

Check it out.