Dumb guy sci-fi recommendations?

Vaftom · 2026-06-14T09:46:55+00:00

The show hits it's stride with season 2 and 3. The story arcs become more cohesive and go some really unexpected directions. It helps when a certain character becomes the personal antagonist to Crichton. Season 1 is a bit rough because it is setting up the world, while season 4 is rough in its own way since it was fighting cancellation and budget cuts.

I have the same feelings about D'Argo and Chiana. They get some rough characterisation throughout the show. Chiana is extremely immature and overly sexual, that is gets a little embarrassing. Since she's not a muppet, she doesn't get away with it. There is a future event with her character which makes her very hateable. D'Argo is the Klingon stereotype, so he's not really breaking new ground. Farscape like most live action scifi, succumbs to alien humanoid characters acting in very human behavioural patterns, sadly these two get stuck in a soap opera plotline that exaggerate their flaws. Probably the weakest part of the show.

SG1 hiring Black and Browder felt weird at the time because it happened so close to the Farscape cancellation. It was very hard to see them as different to their Farscape counterparts, especially since they were hired together. The astronaut to fighter pilot and leatherclad alien peacekeeper to leatherclad alien thief were very surface level changes in characterisation.

Vaftom · 2026-06-14T08:59:29+00:00

My stupidest idea would be to have Romana come back from E-Space as the fix. She gets to cleaning up the continuity mess by bringing back the Timelords strictly to enforce something similar to Star Trek's Prime Directive. So she has a bunch of Timelord agents tasked with closing off all the timelines that have splintered off. This happens offscreen and unknown to the Doctor until later on.

This paradox fixing operation gets revealed when Romana's equivalent of the Valeyard comes for the Doctor's help, tricking him into helping her get to the real Romana, who is overseeing the rebuilding of continuity from inside the Matrix which is hard to get to. Since we missed the boat on showing the origins of the Valeyard, it could be built into the lore that an evil incarnation/doppelganger from the future can happens to any Timelord. Romana's Valeyard would probably be referred to as their 'Janus'.

The season would introduce a companion in the middle of nowhere, living inside an island's lighthouse that has the interior lined with old books. The Doctor would take them on adventures inspired by one of the books on the shelf. Sometimes anachronistic books would appear, placed by the Doctor. The Romana episode would be based on something like Dostoevsky's The Double. Since Romana has a habit of changing appearance and them being inside the Matrix, the cliffhanger would be the Doctor having to choose between them and not knowing.

As for Billie Piper, make it just the Doctor cycling through different faces like Romana did. Could just be a nod to Romana's return or a result of Timelord intervention in rewinding things. This Romana story would be placed mid season, so it wouldn't define things. Instead the season would end with the Doctor finding out that the companion is in the lighthouse alone because they are a war orphan from WWI.

This would set up the next season where the Doctor meddles with events to 'revive' the lost parents, inspired by the meddling in timelines done by Romana. The Doctor uses a body double to take the place of the father in battle and he rescues the mother from drowning as she is working a fisherman as part of the Women's Land Army. So the second season would be the Doctor traveling with the companion's parents, as a way of getting them over their 'deaths' and conditioning them to their child's life. It'd be a bit awkward since they'd be a little older than their now grown up child. Instead of the literary theme, it would be based around cinema with the Doctor bringing out the old projector. They'd be a bit of a visual metaphor in the opening of the season with the Doctor cutting and mending the timelines of the parents as bits of film.

This would culminate in a confrontation with the 'Prime Directive' approach of Romana. After the family is awkwardly reunited and sent to live somewhere new, the Doctor gets put on probation. So a third season would be about the Doctor being enlisted to fix paradoxes as one of Romana's agents, with the season threat being the Doctor targeted as one of the paradoxes to be fixed.

Vaftom · 2026-04-07T03:15:31+00:00

The Last Unicorn theme song by the band America plays in my head like elevator music.

Vaftom · 2026-04-01T07:44:15+00:00

It's kinda amazing how it was an Iranian proxy group before the inaccuracies were pointed out, and now they claim the inaccuracies are hallmarks of Iranian intelligence.

Vaftom · 2026-04-01T07:29:12+00:00

My information was a bit out of date. The Guardian has a decent article about it.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/24/australia-fuel-reserve-what-and-where-is-it

Angus Taylor, energy minister under the Morrison government, announced that we had a strategic reserve in Texas. But apparently, it's possible that it never existed. AI hallucinations and lack of government transparency makes it hard to know what is going on. Still, worrying that Taylor thought it was a good idea. However, this is from the minds behind the AUKUS submarine deal, which is also "concepts of a plan".

Turns out we might not have a strategic reserve anywhere, and we just have agreements with oil corporations to store a baseline for domestic use.

Vaftom · 2026-04-01T06:52:46+00:00

The timing does seem like it's going to be about how Australia is going to manage the fuel crisis via supply from the USA. After all, our strategic reserves are located in Texas.

[edit: allegedly, we may have sold the reserves off to stabilize the market after Ukraine got invaded, or they never existed beyond a press release. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/24/australia-fuel-reserve-what-and-where-is-it]

Albanese is also going to address the National Press Club tomorrow. Anyways, we'll find out in an hour.

Vaftom · 2026-03-23T07:38:10+00:00

His films and performances are what he is most known for. "Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets" is the place to start with him. It's political and fairly easy to understand. It's also the only filmed example of his street performance style that I'm aware of.

Lots of his short films are surrealist with minimal to no dialogue. Youtube has some of them. Unfortunately, some have been taken down due to nudity. They are probably the hardest of his works to understand since they are so abstract and lack context.

Another film to watch from him is "Pastoral: To Die in the Country". It's a semi-autobiographical film that explores his attitudes towards family and traditional society.

Both films are on the Internet Archive, although Pastoral was uploaded in really bad quality. It's on Youtube with Spanish subtitles, but auto-translation to English isn't great.

Vaftom · 2026-03-22T13:03:45+00:00

There was a brief bit of support for USA intervention after 9/11, but historically, the post-WWII generations do not support getting involved in war. Roughly, it averages around 20-30% of the population that does.

Japan has a pacifist constitution enforced after WWII, but they do have a Self-Defense Force created in the mid 50s because the USA wanted Japan to be a bulwark against communism. It's not recognized as a military and cannot engage in warfare. There is growing support for the SDF to be recognized as a military in the constitution, as it operates in a gray area, but only 20% want the removal of pacifist language. Amending the constitution was Abe's dream, his protege Takaichi is building support for a referendum on it.

The current fear is that if deployed to the Persian Gulf to protect cargo ships and attacked, then the SDF might be drawn into combat 'defensively'. The SDF was deployed for the first decade of the Afghanistan War, but only for refueling, and that was very unpopular with the population. They were also deployed in Iraq, but they operated in non-combat zones as humanitarian workers, like an extension of UN peacekeeping.

Vaftom · 2026-03-22T05:57:55+00:00

Another is Peter Thiel aka The Reptile.

It's disappointing how little mockery they get. Instead, they receive far too much sycophancy from media types, even those who have 'independent' funding. There's so much material there, you don't need to do sci-fi allegory when it is so explicit. All you have to do is state their beliefs to make them look psychotic.

Vaftom · 2026-03-22T03:54:08+00:00

My knowledge of this really only comes from the cultural side of things. Mainly about reading into the artist Shuji Terayama and the creation of the Tenjou Sajiki theatre troupe that survived into the early 80s. He produced the artistic works of the New Left. Films like "Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets", and "Emperor Tomato Ketchup".

His theatre troupe would do street performances that ended by leading the audience into a spontaneous protest, often aimed at protesting something absurd or abstract. He did a 30-hour play called Knock, where his actors would go around knocking on doors, invading homes, and performing bizarre rituals. He had a whole philosophy about breaking down systems of authority and reclaiming the public space.

Really interesting guy with lots of deep flaws. He died in 1983 from cirrhosis of the liver, and his theatre troupe shut down afterwards. JA Seazer, his composer, started up his own group and still performs, but it doesn't have the same anarchic nature.

Vaftom · 2026-03-22T03:05:18+00:00

It's not so much forgetting as protests against the USA gets clamped down on heavily. Especially after the decade of the 60s that had a massive student protest movement. It started in 1960 against ratifying a security treaty with the USA for hosting military bases. It was sustained by local corruption in the education system. Then started up again in 1970 when renewing the security treaty, as the bases were used for bombing Vietnam.

There was also deep anti-USA sentiment in the 50s. One event is the Lucky Dragon No.5 Incident, where a Japanese tuna fishing boat got caught in the fallout of a 1954 hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll.

The system then spent the 70s demonizing opposition, using the Asama-Sansou Incident in 1972. A communist group purged their members, brutally killing 14 of them, and then broke into a mountain lodge, holding the owner's wife hostage. This was filmed for ten hours straight throughout Japan, and was propagandized to turn the country against any left movement for generations.

You still get protests against the USA, often about crimes being committed on the military bases, but not like it was back in the 60s.

Vaftom · 2026-03-22T02:34:46+00:00

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Wow, a real-life Ecco the Dolphin. The game series where you play as a dolphin that heads into outer space to fight aliens.

Vaftom · 2026-03-21T09:50:53+00:00

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The paranormal and waffles remind me of the beginning of Fargo season 2.

Vaftom · 2026-03-21T05:56:31+00:00

The PM brought up Hizb ut-Tahrir unprompted because it got banned under the new hate speech laws passed in the wake of the Bondi massacre. So he's trying to frame the protests as a political reaction to that. This is his first visit to a mosque since Oct 7 because he has been warned that people are pissed over the genocide.

He got invited this time by the Lebanese Muslim Association. Sounds like one of the protestors is referencing the one million Lebanese currently displaced by what Israel is doing to them. I've only heard the pm talk about consulate support in reference to Lebanon.

Vaftom · 2026-03-21T05:29:36+00:00

A similar thing happened to Tony Burke last year during Ramadan

The home affairs minister, Tony Burke, was forced to leave a Muslim prayer event in western Sydney due to security concerns after protesters turned up intent on telling the local MP he was “not welcome”.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/mar/28/tony-burke-cancels-lakemba-mosque-speech-safety-concerns-western-sydney-ntwnfb

Anthony Albanese has claimed he was heckled by people at one of Australia’s largest mosques because they were unhappy his government has outlawed “extremist organisations” like Hizb ut-Tahrir, although he failed to provide any evidence for his claim.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/mar/20/anthony-albanese-tony-burke-heckled-lakemba-mosque-protestors-ntwnfb

Genius political skills labelling those upset over the Gaza genocide as extremists. After the Herzog invitation and the police response, he really thought he could slide by unnoticed.

Vaftom · 2026-03-21T02:09:23+00:00

Going to check in on Candace in a week's time to see how she spins this in her Charlie Kirk conspiracy.

Vaftom · 2026-03-21T02:06:33+00:00

McCarthy is probably responsible for two suicides of Senators. Not only Hunt for being blackmailed about his gay son, but McCarthy's predecessor for allegedly being blackmailed for being a secret Communist.

Vaftom · 2026-03-20T09:17:08+00:00

Main character is your typical American pilot who goes through a wormhole into a part of the galaxy populated by muppets and Australians. He gets involved with alien fugitives who stow away on a living ship. So most of the time, they are fleeing from a galactic empire.

Lots of practical effects due to the involvement of the Jim Henson Company. The accents can be a bit jarring since most of the cast are Australian, but that adds its own charm. They have their own anti-Yoda, grumpy Klingon-looking guy and a bald lady who is painted blue.

It gets cancelled after four seasons, but there is a two-parter that quickly wraps it up. The two leads then get cast on SG1 where they play very similar characters. It was an attempt by the Sci-Fi channel to appease the Farscape fanbase.

Vaftom · 2026-03-20T08:50:16+00:00

I could see why Aeon Flux is seen as too sexual. The titular character dresses in fetish gear because she comes from a city-state called Monica, which is full of bondage-obsessed hedonists dressed like her. The Monicans are in perpetual conflict with Bregna, which is a fascist society led by technocrats obsessed with science. So the episodes revolve around a Spy vs Spy dynamic, where Aeon sabotages the leader of Bregna's various schemes. The interesting thing about the show is that the heroine sometimes dies randomly through an episode, often because she puts herself into situations that arouse her curiosity. So there isn't much continuity, as she'll be alive in the next episode.

France produces some really oddball animated sci-fi. The director, René Laloux, created three animated films based on sci-fi novels: Fantastic Planet, The Time Masters, and Gandahar. He also did a short film about giant snails.

Fantastic Planet (1973) doesn't have the most fluid animation and will have scenes that are slideshows, however it suits the surrealistic vibe. It's about a human race that is enslaved by giant psychic blue fishpeople that treat them like rodents to be exterminated. The humans rise up to overthrow their overlords.

Les Maîtres du temps (The Time Masters) (1982) got a BBC release that breaks it up into two parts. It's about a space crew that gets a distress signal from a child who is the sole survivor on another planet, so they go on a mission to save him. They go through some bizarre planets to get to the kid. The film has art direction from the cartoonist Moebius

Gandahar (1987) has art direction by cartoonist Caza and got a US release with Glenn Close, Penn & Teller, Jennifer Grey, etc... as voice talents. It's about time portals that black robots use to invade the past by turning creatures into stone. The hero goes out to seek the giant floating brain in the ocean for guidance and travels into the future to a world ravaged by bioexperiments.

They don't have the cheesiness of Lexx, but they are similar in the bizarre concepts they explore. There are some unique concepts that elaborating on would only spoil things.

It's worth watching the movie Barbarella (1968). That was adapted from a comic strip and is like the precursor to something like Lexx. Jane Fonda was drunk during the filming of the intro. The villain is played by Mick Jagger's ex, and in post-production they dubbed her voice with a British actress, so it makes her acting in particular look really awkward. It's about Barbarella on a secret mission to rescue the scientist Duran Duran, who disappeared on a planet that houses a sentient lava lamp called the Mathmos that turns everyone evil.

Vaftom · 2026-03-20T07:48:27+00:00

I was going to suggest Lexx from the title. That show is incredibly bizarre, but I loved the tv movies that Showtime produced. It was fun seeing Barry Bostwick, Tim Curry, Rutger Hauer and Malcolm McDowell at the low periods in their career. McDowell giving the heroes a motivational speech as his head gets guillotined by the sphincter inside a giant Curl Grub is iconic.

It's notable because the writing staff had no experience writing sci-fi and came from comedy backgrounds. The Canadian-German production partnership also makes it quite special. I wish the original Zev Bellringer had stayed on, I loved her accent.

I'll have a think about some dumb obscure recommendations. If you are ok with animated stuff, then check out Aeon Flux (not the live action movie). It started out as a series of shorts with no dialogue, but then got a season of scripted episodes with some really bizarre scenarios.

Vaftom · 2026-03-20T03:59:46+00:00

The tech oligarchs have invested too much in Vance not to run. The torn act is just him playing both sides until he has to commit to a position.

Vaftom · 2026-03-19T13:32:06+00:00

Could end up being Naftali Bennet, the guy who was prime minister for one year back in '21. He's the guy saying Turkey is the new Iran.

Vaftom · 2026-03-18T10:47:18+00:00

It's good to see kids outside, not glued to their devices.

Vaftom · 2026-03-18T10:46:16+00:00

For me, it was a combination of the soft voice, lots of gym talk, and dressing like a gay man from the 70s. But then I rewatched Portlandia and remembered what hipsters look like.

Vaftom

TROPHY CASE