Kiss Me, I'm Irate

The gold standard of explosives is, and has been for years, the nuclear weapon.  Why is fairly obvious.  Between the godlike power to create a small Sun and destroy an entire city, that cool mushroom thing it does (not, contrary to popular belief, unique to nukes), the fact that one pretty much won World War II, and the word “nuke”, it’s no wonder that the nuclear bomb holds a special place in our collective heart.  Or… something.

But nukes have their downsides.  I’m not talking about civilian casualties or the fact that it completely destroys any structure within about ten miles of ground zero (let’s assume total war here), but the fact that after you drop a nuke, you can’t touch anything within a certain radius for decades.  That’s not cool.  So, great, you levelled an area… what are you going to do with it now?  It’s a useless wasteland.  Scratch that actually, it might be useful for a nuclear waste dump.

There’s another type of bomb that’s incredibly powerful for its size technically called a Thermobaric weapon, but more commonly known as a fuel-air explosive.  These are the most powerful weapons we have, short of a nuke.  The largest in the US arsenal is the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast, also known as MOAB or the “Mother of All Bombs”.

Let me explain why fuel-air explosives are so cool.  Your basic FAE has two conventional explosive charges in it.  The first disperses the primary fuel into the surrounding environment.  The second is a more incendiary type of charge, used to ignite the fuel.  If you’ve ever seen that trick where they throw a cloud of cornstarch or something into the air and ignite it, it’s kind of like that.  Or more accurately, it’s like a grain tower explosion, but bigger.  And using a fuel designed to burn, not flour.

A large FAE essentially sets the air around it on fire.  This first creates a massive shock wave, and hellish heat – enough that a small device launched into a building can flatten it, and a large one can flatten and/or burn out a forested area – and then a backdraft so powerful that it can pick up and throw a man or asphyxiate them.  And when it’s done?  Everything destroyed by it, all the area cleared by it, is perfectly safe.  A bit hot, but give it a couple days.

So, even though the MOAB has only about the yield of a very small nuke, and less than one thousandth the yield of the nuclear weapons used in Japan, I’d rather use one of them than a nuke.  At least you can use the area you just blew the shit out of.

I bitch a lot about wizard rock on IRC.  Nobody, of course, wants to hear it, so I figure this way I can express it and nobody will.

Anyone who’s likely to read this post already knows what wizard rock is.  For anyone who doesn’t, it’s a sub-genre of filk, which is a musical meta-genre derived from the word “folk” that includes any music tied to some kind of sci-fi or fantasy.  A very well-known (and rare good form, in my opinion) example of filk is the Star Wars Gangsta Rap.  Go look it up if you’ve never seen it (it’s part of a Flash animation).  I suspect the reason I’m attracted to that song is that it’s good parody that refuses to take itself or anything else seriously, and I love parody.  And the song is actually well done.

What bothers me about filk in general is that it’s ridiculously artificial, and a lot of it is a miserable attempt at instant nostalgia ala this decade’s sorry parade of genre parody movies (Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Superhero Movie, etc) that all suck.  You cannot create instant nostalgia.  What’s worse is when it sucks already and you’re trying to ride on the coattails of something hugely successful.  See my earlier comment about recent genre parody movies.

Which brings me to wizard rock.  Harry Potter filk, for the uninitiated.

In my (carefully and intentionally) limited experience, I’ve never come across wizard rock that had any chance of standing on its merits as music.  That is, it’s invariably the bad type of filk – it’s centered on a recent work of fiction, and it’s terrible, terrible quality as a work of art.

And when it comes down to it, Harry Potter is a kids’ series.  I’m not going to get into how the plot is simple and shallow, because as much as I can critique it, It’s a good story.  But it’s a kids’ book.  Let me break it down for you: you’re going to concerts and buying CDs of lousy music performed by people with no exceptional musical skill except maybe the ability to fit “Voldemort” and “Hermione” into this or that meter.  You look like a fool.

Hey, if that’s your thing that’s cool.  Fans of wizard rock don’t offend me (although they do have a tendancy to be rabid about it, which is annoying), and there’s much worse.  At least you’re not wearing your pants around halfway down your damn thighs.  That is offensive.

The quantity of comment spam I get on this blog never ceases to amaze me.  (You may never see it thanks to Akismet, but it’s there.)  This blog is not particularly popular, and I guess it isn’t that much spam, about one or two a day.  Still, what the hell is it doing here?  Maybe one of the things that ping-o-matic bounces updates to just does that?  I ran for a time a blog that was somewhat more popular – when it got dugg, I remember seeing triple-digit spam caught by Akismet daily for about a month.

Aside from considerations of quantity, there’s quality.  Somewhere, someone is paying someone else (why else would they do it?) to post pseudorandom strings of text, containing links consisting of random text, linking to URLs that look like random strings of text.  What exactly are they trying to accomplish?  I am, quite frankly, afraid to click on said links – friend of mine works in high-level security at a rather large web-based transaction company and has plenty of horror stories.  Some of them are doubtless malware.  Some of them probably redirect to real web sites.  Maybe some of them are just referrer link lists.

And some people actually click them.  Maybe that’s the real WTF.

And no, electronic quasi-meat in this context has nothing to do with teledildonics.  Don’t google that at work, either.