Merged Apollo "hoax" discussion - continuation thread

ApolloGnomon said:
The two items in my signature, beneath the post text, are links to the lunar samples compendium and the lunar surface journal. I request that you visit those links for actual information about the moon landings and present the catalog number of photographs proving your #1 and #2 points.

Your #3 point is nonsense. In college I was employed for a year as a "party pix" photographer for fraternity and sorority parties. At one unpleasantly drunken event I shot 9 rolls of film in 45 minutes in order to complete the job and make my escape. That's 9 x 38 = 342 frames, shot with a manual focus/manual exposure Nikon. That's 7.6 frames per minute, or 7.8 seconds per frame. These were semi-formally posed pictures (we were paid by how many pairs of faces were in each image) and the total time includes rewinding and reloading the camera.
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I made this point myself the other day. I was the 'official' photographer at my stepson's wedding a couple of months ago, during which lovely weekend I took more photographs than in the Apollo 11 and 12 EVA's combined.

While I appreciate I was using a digital camera, I think this was slightly compensated for by the fact that there was only one photographer and that photographer was quite drunk by the end of the day.

You take bursts of photographs, you do other stuff, you take bursts of photographs, you do other stuff. It's not difficult.
 
Oh, and I saw The Shining high as a kite on psilocybin mushrooms and it still made more sense than the contorted conspiracy interpretations out there.

(For the record this was not the smartest thing I have ever done, and I would not recommend it)
 
It starts to get boring.

You all know, what is right and what not, but nobody is able to see what is hidden in Wendys pages. How could that fit ?


Hans
 
Hans Peper said:
It starts to get boring.

You all know, what is right and what not, but nobody is able to see what is hidden in Wendys pages. How could that fit ?


Hans
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Stop it with your idiotic comments. Either present your actual evidence or please go away.
 
ApolloGnomon said:
The two items in my signature, beneath the post text, are links to the lunar samples compendium and the lunar surface journal..
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Lunar Samples Compendium is a fantastic site. I always use it when I see claims about 'fake rocks' etc.
 
Why would Kubrick, in emulating the Riddler, leave clues pointing to the one landing mission of which there is almost no video?
 
Hans Peper said:
It starts to get boring.

You all know, what is right and what not, but nobody is able to see what is hidden in Wendys pages. How could that fit ?


Hans
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Fit what? Even if you were precisely correct in what way Kubrick playing a joke
within his film affect the mountain of evidence that Apollo is real?
 
Hans Peper said:
It starts to get boring.

You all know, what is right and what not, but nobody is able to see what is hidden in Wendys pages. How could that fit ?


Hans
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I'm a professional actor. I've done work for both film & stage. My current job involves writing, directing, & performing in a LARP (Live Action Role Playing) game that is full of visual puzzles & clues, I've been doing this for 6 years. In that time I've learned than when no one gets the puzzle you're trying to present, you've done something wrong. 90% of the time, whst you've done wrong is see something that isn't actually there.
 
Hans Peper said:
It starts to get boring.
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Yes, often the real facts are "boring" compared to conspiracy theories. If you aren't willing to participate in a debate of your claims, why present them here?

You all know, what is right and what not, but nobody is able to see what is hidden in Wendys pages. How could that fit ?
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Stop accusing your critics of being blind, pig-headed, or reluctant. You have presented your claim. Despite all requests for it, you have failed to present any actual evidence. Your contrivances and speculation have been patiently heard and commented upon. Several of your audience have asked you specific questions and have given you good reasons why your speculation is not likely to be true. You have largely ignored most of it in favor of chiding your critics for their apparent lack of insight.

I'm sorry that we have failed to entertain you, but that wasn't our goal.
 
Hans Peper said:
You all know, what is right and what not, but nobody is able to see what is hidden in Wendys pages. How could that fit ?
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Very easily. There's even a whole theory about it. Basically, the viewer imports into the work something meaningful to him or her.

The TV show Cagney and Lacey was a huge hit with lesbians. Despite the fact that one character was married and the other serially dated men, lesbians watched the show as though Cagney and Lacey were a lesbian couple. Why? Because there were no shows about lesbians on at the time. They had no other models on which to project what was important to them.

That's what you are doing. You are bringing your own personal meaning to a work because that's what is important to you. The meaning isn't inherent in the work. It is a projection from your mind. That's why no one else can or ever will see it. No one else needs that meaning to be there like you do.

You might want to read a bit on film criticism. It's all in there.


(source)
 
Redtail said:
I'm a professional actor. I've done work for both film & stage.
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Well done! I'm a professional engineer, but also a (paid) set and prop designer and sometimes a (paid) actor. Not relevant until farther down the post, but I thought I'd verbally shake your hand here for your choice of profession.

I should also put up my standard "Jay in costume" avatar, now that I've been here a while.

In that time I've learned than when no one gets the puzzle you're trying to present, you've done something wrong.
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I hide stuff in sets and props all the time, but as tips-of-the-hat to people who worked on the production, not as some nefarious attempt to overthrow the Establishment. I had a set design that used a lot of street signs, and the streets were named after the executive producers. All the price tags in one convenience store set were "$6.66."

We all do this, if we have the chance.. I actually burst out laughing in the theater at Serenity when I saw the ID number "C57D" on something. All the illegible labels in the spaceship Leonov set in 2010 were reproductions of the original instructions for using the zero-gravity toilet, from Kubrick's 2001. It's part of designing in this idiom.

But these are just Easter Eggs. I've never been asked by any director to encode some irrelevant pseudo-dramaturgical bombshell into a set or prop design. Nor have I any inclination (on the typical schedule and budget) to do this myself. Much of what comes together on the stage or film set is a happenstance marriage of my efforts plus the set dresser and prop buyer. And this is how Kubrick worked too. He obsessed over some details but left others (like what Danny's sweater would actually look like) to others.

Sure Kubrick (or someone working with him) might have had an Easter-Egg sense of humor. The classic example is "Serum 114" from A Clockwork Orange. Many critics consider it a homophone of the "CRM-114 discriminator" device from Dr. Strangelove. The device is mentioned and named in the book, so Kubrick simply and wisely reflected his source material there. But since you still have to sort of cherry-pick the elements of the prop label in Clockwork to get that, it's a dubious connection.

I laughed when someone told me that in The Shining the elevator indicators are always set to floors 1 and 2, and that this was a significant numerological detail. I laughed because, from my own experience in film and theater, it simply meant that all the elevator shots were filmed the same day, regardless of when they would appear in the final edited film. It's just as plausible to conclude Kubrick didn't notice or care what the indicators said. Or that the indicators were immovable, fastened in place by the set designer. Or that -- since I haven't checked -- the claim they "always read the same" might actually be false. Or that Kubrick in his infinite penchant for detail researched how elevators work and discovered that "rest floors" for elevators are a thing, and that the middle floor is often the rest floor for an unused elevator, to which it returns automatically after a certain period of disuse. That is, it could be intentional but not for the suspect reason (e.g., a shout-out to the Twelve Apostles).

You can go round and round with this sort of nonsense, trying to read hidden meanings into meaningless features. It's pointless unless the people involved actually confirm that this was their meaning. Artists, including filmmakers, know that people will take away things from their work that they didn't intent. And that this is the brilliantly collaborative nature of art. Thus they aren't necessarily opposed to what people want to say about their films. However in this case Kubrick has made it fairly evident that "fake moon landings" is not any sort of intent in The Shining.

90% of the time, what you've done wrong is see something that isn't actually there
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Indeed, and here's where we get back to engineering -- especially forensic engineering that tries to uncover why things go wrong.

For any incident you choose to investigate, there will be one network of causation that interests you, because it leads backward from the catastrophic effect to the original causes. Finding that set of root causes and the manner in which they conspired to wreak havoc is the art of forensic engineering. But real life never lays that causal chain or network out in neatly labeled form for you to discover. You must carefully extract it from all the irrelevant causal chains -- all the other things that were happening at the time. The art of forensic engineering investigation is not knowing what to include, but knowing what to pare away.

At any given moment in any endeavor in life, several things are going on. While the operator of some equipment may be distracted by surreptitiously sending his wife a text message and thus open a hydraulic vent valve by mistake and cause heavy stuff to crash to the floor, at the same time you may have (irrelevant) safety violations at the electrical panel, (irrelevant) goofing off in the foreman's office, (irrelevant) illicit drug deals on the assembly floor, (irrelevant) abstenteeism, (irrelevant) maintenance irregularities, (irrelevant) thermal loads, etc.

In that line of reasoning, it's proper to say by analogy, "The Shining is a story about off-season caretakers in a haunted hotel." But Kubrick isn't that kind of filmmaker. He will embellish the theme and put it in a thematic framework that dictates or affects details about the production. Likewise, "A distracted operator mistakenly opened the wrong hydraulic valve," accurately describes the cause of some incident, but is more helpfully embellished by things such as, "The safety culture at Blabco Industrial is lacking," or "Insufficient safeguards to prevent operator error."

And at no time do we have to incorporate everything that we seen in our snapshot of the factory floor into our theory, just as we do not have to incorporate everything we see on the screen into some over-arching theory for the filmmaker's intent. Sometimes an elevator indicator is just an elevator indicator.
 
Loss Leader said:
Basically, the viewer imports into the work something meaningful to him or her.
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Stanley Kubrick explicitly knew this and embraced it about his work. He explicitly chose subjects he believed had "meaty" themes, knowing that people would see his films and debate how he handled those themes -- which was often offbeat, shocking, or revelatory. The parent of a 15-year-old girl will approach Lolita with a different perspective than a wealthy widower. Hence they will come away from it with different reactions and impressions. Kubrick had no problem with this, but he didn't presume to know or care about catering to it. He always made the film he wanted to make, regardless of how others might interpret it ex post facto.

Granted, with Lolita he had to craft the film to be acceptable to audiences (and film distributors) of the time, but that's kind of the point. In the 1960s you could joke about pedophilia and make a film about it. Kubrick's treatment is a comedy of juxtaposition. Could you make Lolita the same way in 2013? Or even at all? No, I don't think so. Disapproval of pedophilia and child sex abuse, especially in the United States, these days achieves almost hysterical proportions. The subject matter of Lolita is, these days, no laughing matter.

You are bringing your own personal meaning to a work because that's what is important to you. The meaning isn't inherent in the work. It is a projection from your mind. That's why no one else can or ever will see it. No one else needs that meaning to be there like you do.
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That's it, in a nutshell.
 
Not in the same august company, but I've been employed in theater for most of my working life. At one theater, we used to put a pig somewhere on every set in memory of a former props designer. Myself, I've tried to sneak a Wilhelm into every sound design (and it just as often gets cut).

Closest I can come to this kind of whistleblowing-the-conspiracy-in-scenic-elements was a set designer who had just been through an acrimonious divorce, and designed the courthouse set for a production so that when looked at from the right angle the jury box, witness stand and a decorative pillar formed a distinctive middle finger at all courthouses, everywhere.

Okay, sure, theater has often been subversive. From political theater back to the pointed commentary of the court jester. But I really can't think of or even imagine a scenario in which a few people on a production decided to reveal their own role in a conspiracy by putting in clues so opaque almost no-one would ever see them.

That sounds a lot more like a product OF Hollywood, than it does a Hollywood production.
 
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