Just Playing Around

I turned up the color and contrast and did a few other things with this image and now it looks like it belongs on a cheaply printed poster for some cosmic disaster-type sci-fi movie.  Titled The Day Atlas Still Shrugged.

Science Fiction Mannequins

I photographed a bunch of mannequins left abandoned in a store gone out of business. While editing the image I just happened to emphasize certain details reflected in the show window glass, and it all came out looking like a shot from some cyberpunk dystopian movie.  Ghost in the Shell, anyone?

The Sun Going Nova

That won't happen for a very long time (hopefully), but the SF fan in me can't help but imagine how that might look to ground-dwellers on Earth.

New Wallpapers

While watching the classic silent film Metropolis online I got the bright idea to take some screenshots and make wallpapers for the computer.

This particular edition of the movie has been remastered and colorized, hence the somewhat unnatural and exaggerated color, but I liked it that way -- it actually fits the concept of German expressionist cinema of the era.  Silent movie acting itself was generally exaggerated anyway -- just look at those faces!

[Mild spoiler ahead] In the above scene an audience of men from the privileged upper class of Metropolis, a great dystopian city of the future -- as envisioned by director Fritz Lang in 1927 --

are getting their first look at Maria, the female protagonist, and are going mad with lust as she dances for them.

Except, it is not the real Maria, who is a champion of the exploited underclass who labor literally underground to keep the city runnning,

but a robot

that's been transformed to look like Maria by Rotwang, the mad scientist/wizard with an artificial hand (could be this visual detail inspired the character of Dr. Strangelove, whose black-gloved hand kept giving the Nazi salute against his will),

for the purpose of leading the workers astray.

I won't spoil the rest of the movie for those who haven't seen it.  It's a masterpiece, though -- I mean, how can a movie be bad that includes amazing visuals like these?

(and of course, This)

The War In Heaven

If it happened today.  If it was made into a movie in Hollywood.  A sci-fi epic about a power struggle among some advanced parahuman species who are mistaken for angels by ordinary mortals.  Starring Chris Hemsworth as the archangel Michael

with James McAvoy

or maybe Michael Fassbender

or even Keanu Reeves playing Lucifer.

And the War as seen from the ground just might look like this^.

 Related posts:  War In Heaven

Another Mysterious Whatsis(?)

Back in 2018 I was living in a studio flat in a highrise in downtown Los Angeles.  This image was shot in March of that year from the sidewalk next to the building.  Evidently it had rained earlier in the evening, and once the rain was over I had decided to step out into the fresh night air and shoot some street views.

What is that colorful gleaming circle at top center right?  My first thought was it's an unusual lens flare, possibly caused by a drop of water on the camera lens.  This was an entirely reasonable suspicion, given that the air must still have been damp from the rain.  But then I looked up images of lens flares and raindrops on lenses, and they were not close matches at all;  the complexity of colorful internal detail present in the "flare" in my photograph was lacking in all of the internet images I found, and also the absence of any other similar artifacts in the photograph is suspicious, as misty wet air would naturally be full of water droplets, but all of the images I found on the internet search were of groups of water drops, not isolated lone drops.

Of course, a flare doesn't have to be caused by water on the lens, but compare the first photograph with this other one from the same set.  Very different, are they not?

Actually, all of the foregoing is just a lead-in to what I really wanted to talk about;  that it reminds me of the fictitious creatures known as "Vitons" in the novel Sinister Barrier by British writer Eric Frank Russell.  Vitons were described as living beings made of energy that resemble large floating spheres.  They share the earthly environment with humans, but normally they are invisible and imperceptible to human senses.  They are conceived as the true masters of this world, who raise humans as livestock, just as ranchers raise cattle, vampirizing humans by feeding on the electrochemical energy of human emotion.  Well, in the novel this discovery of their existence was supposedly made in 2015, and that year came and went without any such startling announcements, so I guess the novel was not meant to be prophetic and we're safe^.

[Eric Frank Russell was (1905-1978) a British writer who was influenced by Charles Hoy Fort (1874-1932), the American writer, anti-establishment-science iconoclast and cult favorite.  Fort famously said "I think we're property" (half seriously, one-quarter tongue-in-cheek;  that was Fort's style), and I think Russell was greatly inspired by it.  Russell's novel was originally serialized in the magazine Unknown in 1939 and published in book form in 1948]

(I do suspect that the light circle in the first shot really is an especially fancy sort of flare, despite its significant difference in appearance from the flares in the second shot -- due in no small part to its suspicious proximity to the same street light.  But still, who knows -- maybe the camera really did capture something that was invisible to the naked eye)

Related post:  Mysterious Floating/Flying Object

Sunny Cloud

A CLOUD KISSES THE SUN

Poul Anderson wrote a short story titled 'Kyrie', whose emotional ending makes it one of the most memorable ones I've ever read.  In it, the crew of a spaceship includes a rather asocial young woman whose gift of telepathy enables her to stay in constant mental contact with an alien creature accompanying the ship.

Named Lucifer, the creature is an intelligent plasma cloud, indigenous to space, with a surprisingly humanlike mind.  Eloise, the girl, and Lucifer are not just fellow explorers -- they have fallen in love with each other.  Since their radically different natures made it impossible for them to ever physically express their love, I suppose theirs could be considered the purest, most platonic of love affairs.

At the climax of the story [HERE BE A SPOILER] the ship is in danger of being destroyed by the gravitational pull of a collapsed star -- a black hole -- and in order to save his beloved Eloise, Lucifer sacrifices himself by letting himself be pulled into it, in place of the ship.  But as Lucifer approaches the event horizon of the black hole, the time dilation effect approaches infinity, and the agonized mental scream Lucifer emits as he is killed is drawn out to an infinite length -- which Eloise will forever continue to hear in her mind.

That tragic romance has found a real-life echo -- very Wagnerian (think "Liebestod"), albeit one that is less unbearably sad, I think, and even paradoxically life-affirming -- in these images of a curiously lifelike cloud which, against all good sense, embraces certain destruction in order to experience one moment of unimaginable glory -- one magnificent, indescribably beautiful, fatal kiss that lasted forever, is lasting still, and will outlast us all.