Stu-Fi – Impact (or How I Learned to Hate the Stupid)

I’ve been a Science Fiction & Fantasy junkie since I learned how to read. The two earliest books I remember reading that didn’t involve Dick and Jane were “Around the World in Eighty Days” and “The Magician’s Nephew”. I don’t agree with Harlan Ellison that the shortened “Sci-Fi” is an anathema that ruins the genre; and as such I wish to now coin the counter-term Stu-Fi as a shorted version of Stupid-Science-Fiction.

I want to coin this term because I’ve been watching a mini-series called Impact. It is supposedly a science fiction piece, but the science is so frelling bad that it is damn near Fantasy. Since there are no Unicorns, I can only conclude that it is Stupid-Science-Fiction, or Stu-Fi for short; which is basically the science fiction genre written for the inhabitants of the movie Idiocracy. To put it bluntly, if you have a sixth grade understanding of science this mini-series will make your head explode.

It’s one thing for Star Trek to show warp drives, and Star Wars to have super-light drives; because these are theoretical technologies that we may still develop even though we don’t currently know how to accomplish it. It is an altogether different thing to show a scene where the counter balance of a massive orbital object effectively neutralizes the Earth’s gravity causing an ocean freighter to rise out of the water, which then closes up the hole where the ship had been. Hey, you fraking boneheads, water closes up and forms a smooth surface because of gravity! If you neutralize that gravity, even if it is by means of a completely wrong understanding of mass and orbital mechanics, the water would rise up with the ship! What kind of moron wrote the CGI scripting to show a ship float out of the water because of ‘gravity fluctuations’ and yet coded the ship to be dripping water back down to the ocean? Did anyone consider that without gravity water doesn’t drip downwards? Please, don’t bother trying to explain that the ship is metal and is somehow affected differently, because the next scene showed bales of hay floating in the air. If you are inconsistently stupid you are still stupid!

Einstein was right: “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

I wanted to credit Mike Rohl with inspiring me to coin the term “Stu-Fi” but a little bit of IMBD searching reveals the disturbing fact that he has been involved in a lot of shows that I have enjoyed. The thing is, Supernatural and Smallville are more Fantasy than Sci-Fi, and so I can cut them a lot more slack. Impact takes itself much more seriously, and so my condemnation is more serious. As much as I want to shield someone whose work I have liked, I still can’t blame just the writers; Mr Rohl, as the director, surely had some ability to quell the stupidity that this show not only displays but damn well flaunts.

I have googled it. “Stu-Fi” doesn’t exist anywhere else as of 2009-07-02. This is where you heard it first. I blame Michael Vickerman,Mike Rohl and Impact.

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Building the foundation for Idiocracy

This is how the end of the world looks… It looks like the slow disintegration of our society as we reward people who make stupid and selfish decisions. Single mom, on welfare, with 14 children; and now they are making her into a role model.

Octuplets mom gets TV, book offers
By JOHN ROGERS, Associated Press Writer
Monday, February 2, 2009

The mother of the longest-living octuplets in U.S. history is being deluged with offers for book deals, TV shows and other business proposals, but has made no decision on what she might do other than care for her children, her newly hired spokeswoman said Monday.

Hundreds of requests have poured in from all over the world since Nadya Suleman gave birth to six boys and two girls a week ago, said Joann Killeen, president of Killeen Furtney Group, a public relations company.

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Crimes Of The Future: Teen with Home Chemistry Lab Arrested for Meth, Bombs

Stories like this scare me. They show that we are descending into a new Dark Ages, where we will be ruled once again by Fear and Ignorance. Had I been born a few years later, this could have been me. I remember the absolute glee I felt in high school, when I discovered that my uncle had left the majority of his college laboratory equipment and chemicals in my great grandmother’s garage, and that she would let me poke around in there if I listed to some of her stories on the weekend. All the glassware, the hard to obtain chemicals, and the endless possibilities. That is the very thing we are losing these days, the endless possibilities that we have when someone with a real passion is allowed to explore their imagination. No, in the ‘post 9/11 world’ we must stamp out such passion. We must treat it with suspicion, and send it off to jail.

Imagine if you would the idea that Tomas Edison had been born in our time. Imagine his famous ‘boxcar fire’, where he accidentally started a chemical fire on a train. In the UK, the cops would have shot him in the head and then later claimed to have seen wires sticking out of his jacket. In the US, he would have been ‘extraordinarily rendered’ to some unpronounceable country and nobody would have ever heard of him again. In Canada, apparently, they would have accused him of building a meth lab and hauled him off to jail. This is what happens when we allow police departments to discriminate in their hiring practices because the applicant is too smart; they take a quick look and if they don’t understand what they see it must be against the law.

Crimes Of The Future: Teen with Home Chemistry Lab Arrested for Meth, Bombs
By Annalee Newitz, 8:16 PM on Sat Dec 27 2008

A Canadian college student majoring in chemistry built himself a home lab – and discovered that trying to do science in your own home quickly leads to accusations of drug-making and terrorism.

Lewis Casey, an 18-year-old in Saskatchewan, had built a small chemistry lab in his family's garage near the university where he studies. Then two weeks ago, police arrived at his home with a search warrant and based on a quick survey of his lab determined that it was a meth lab. They pulled Casey out of the shower to interrogate him, and then arrested him.

A few days later, police admitted that Casey's chemistry lab wasn't a meth lab – but they kept him in jail, claiming that he had some of the materials necessary to produce explosives. Friends and neighbors wrote dozens of letters to the court, testifying that Casey was innocent and merely a student who is really enthusiastic about chemistry.

[Follow the link above to read about how the authorities just wont admit a mistake, to the point of ruining this kid’s life.]

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I use Amazon affiliate links in some of my posts. I think it is fair to say my writing is not influenced by the $0.40 I earned in 2022.