Lost in Space is stupid (Part 2)

Season 3: The Promised Planet

I remember seeing this episode as a kid. This episode is a lot of fun but doesn't make a lot of sense.



They finally arrived at Alpha Centauri (or so they think) and land on planet Delta at intersteller relay station 9 which is an advance station for new arrivals for orientation and processing. They're told in a few days there will be a shuttle to planet Gamma where they can join the main colony. Apparently the habitable planets in the system have been populated by humans for 3 years. I'm not sure how they would explain it. The Jupiter 2 left Earth for Alpha Centauri October 16, 1997. They were the first to go so they should be the first to arrive.

By the 3rd season it should be about the year 2000. Actually I'm not sure. There have been episodes where they travel through time for example they landed on Earth in the 3rd Season episode named Visit to a Hostile Planet except the year was around 1950. They left Earth but never explain if they returned to their own time or not.

I'm not sure how many years it was supposed to take to travel to Alpha Centauri but you also have to take into account that faster ships will be built over time and may arrive sooner than the ships that left earlier. My point is that they play fast and loose with time which is stupid. They obviously wrote this for a younger audience who wouldn't question such leaps in logic. For an adult, it's stupid.

Both this episode and Visit to a Hostile Planet use the same special effect.






The shot where they land is also a shot that is re-used again and again. See my last blog post where that shot is used twice for a planet and Earth.



The youngest, Penny and Will are separated from the rest of the group and tested while listening to music and exposed to bright lights. They are told they need to pass the test in order to qualify for the fun colony on planet Gamma. Penny has trouble at first but soon lets go and gets hypnotized by the groovy sounds.




This Delta colony is run by teenagers who seem to like nothing more than to dance to 60's groove music. Will is a square and has trouble becoming "groovy" which is code for getting hypnotized. It turns out these teenagers are actually aliens.




The aliens want to hypnotize the kids so they can perform some kind of transfusion so they can grow old. Apparently their "DNA" forces them to stay young forever.



I'm not sure why living forever is a bad thing. I'm not sure why they want to grow old and die. In the end the aliens fail to perform the transfusion in time. Dr. Smith turns on the music and the kids can't help but dance and Will and Penny get rescued.




The one kid says "All I want to is shave, see?" The unseen kid behind the intercom stops the music and says "We have failed Bartholomew. We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that we can never grow older ... that as time takes the Earthlings forward ... it takes us back ... back to our end." They don't explain what this means. Will they grow younger and die that way?

Here's why this episode is stupid. Once Will and Penny were separated from everyone, the aliens could have forcibly gotten the transfusion. They don't make it clear what harm might come to Will and Penny but if it's simply a transfusion they need, certainly they could have asked for it. The Robinson's may have been OK giving some blood, plasma or whatever the aliens needed to grow old. Instead the aliens tried to hypnotize them with a combination of testing, music and lights.



They erase the olders memories of the two kids and send them on their way. Luckily Will gives them some memory cones and they remember in time to return and rescue them.

It boggles my mind why aliens around the year 2010 (now) would want to behave like it's 1960. This episode did first air January 24, 1968 so they some how assumed that the 60's motif would continue to be popular for the next 50 years ... which is stupid.

Bonus Stupid: The alien monkey named Bloop Bloop they picked up in Season 1 Episode 3 Island in the Sky ...



isn't seen much after Season 1. We see this monkey during a take-off in Season 2 Episode 1 Blast off into Space.



Then the exact same scene is used again in Season 3 episode 2 Visit to a Hostile Planet.



I haven't finished Season 3 yet but Bloop Bloop is all but forgotten. They simply write him out of the scripts and assume we'll forget him. They treat us like idiots in this respect, insulting our intelligence and that's just stupid. Since Bloop Bloop is part of the family, they should have taken him off the ship when they landed on planet Delta but apparently they abandon him in the ship somewhere to fend for himself. Poor Bloop Bloop. He's an ignored pet sitting in his own poop somewhere ... starving.

Lost in Space is stupid (Part 1)

As a kid, I loved Lost in Space but even I could see it was a bit cheesy. I had no idea how bad Lost in Space really was until I got older. I started watching every episode of Lost in Space starting with the black and white Season 1. I'm nearing the finish line half way through the last season which is Season 3. Lost in Space started out as serious science fiction and the earlier black and white episodes are actually quite good. The episodes that started to veer to toward campy in Season 1 are:

• Welcome Stranger
• The Sky Pirate
• The Space Croppers

The best episodes in Season 1 IMHO are

• The Hungry Sea
• My Friend, Mr. Nobody
• Return from Outer Space
• A Change of Space

I just gone done watching Target Earth from Season 3 and saw a few stupid things

Here they are landing on the alien planet. Now this shot is used over and over in many episodes.



but then they have the nerve to re-use it when they land on Earth in the same episode. I understand why they re-use shots. They didn't have the budget to shoot different landing scenes.




Dr. Smith and Will knock out their alien doubles with Karate chops to the neck. Stupid! Dr. Smith notices that his double has webbed fingers. Notice the double is also wearing the same ring Dr. Smith has. How do you get a ring on when you have web fingers??? Stupid! The aliens have the ability to copy the humans exactly so why do they have webbed fingers? Stupid!



They take the clothes off the double and go to the trouble of dressing their doubles. Why would they dress their doubles??? Stupid! Here is the alien Dr. Smith waking up. Notice he doesn't have web fingers now. In fact, the other alien doubles only have web fingers for close-ups. Stupid!



The alien doubles easily take over the Jupiter space craft. They fly it back to Earth within a matter of hours. Stupid! The real Will, Dr. Smith and the robot are along for the ride. Will manages to warn Earth that they are aliens so Earth begins to shoot missiles at them. Will tells the aliens there is no possible way they can land on Earth now and yet the ships lands on Earth using the auto-pilot. Stupid! At this point, the robot has knocked out the aliens. Instead of letting Dr. Smith get out on Earth, Will immediately takes off and flies back to the planet ... within hours. Stupid! After Will rescues his family, they don't return to Earth and continue to remain Lost in Space even though it was so apparently easy for the aliens. Stupid!

SimCity 2000: MountCFC

I just added my contribution to this coop city MountCFC.





21 sections done. 28 remaining. If you want to add a section, make sure you start with the latest city at the end of the thread.

CFCopolis coop city

It took 49 people and 3 years to build this one SimCity 2000 city! Check out this time-lapse video I just made of the construction of CFCopolis.




Download the city here. If you want to help build the next city, go here.

Bare Bones Version 2

I've named this "bare bones" SimCity 2000 city Behold!

That's my wife's eye staring out at you from the trees. For a time lapse of the build check out YouTube.











Here are some close-ups.

















This one hurts my eyes from the chaos.









It's actually painful to watch since all of the wind power stations flash since they are not generating enough electricity. The map goes black as all the buildings get abandon since the power drops to zero, then the power rebounds and all new buildings are built and the population explodes. This cycles over and over.

After creating the city Bare Bones version 1, I determined this is the smallest city you can create.

I decided to make a city with these 2x2 cities. But filling a 128x128 grid with 64x64 of these 2x2 cities would be boring so I began to think of an interesting pattern I can make. Then the idea came to me that I could create a picture of something. At first I wanted to create a face so I tried converting a lot of different images to black and white to see how they might look. I realized that the image had to be something simple for it to stand out and be recognized like a big peace sign or smiley face for example.

This city is "bare bones" because it only has wind power, road, residential and industrial zones. It has nothing else. There are no commercial zones. There is nothing else in the city like hospitals, police, fire stations, libraries, parks, schools, airports, rail, tunnels, subway, seaport, etc. and yet it easily makes a profit even though the population fluctuates wildly and goes to zero frequently. Even though there's not enough power and there's no water being supplied. Everyone keeps moving out and moving back in and this causes SimCity 2000 to freeze every few seconds. The only other city I've seen do that is my first bare bones city which is essentially the same city, just arranged differently.

Previously I had created a 40x40 icon of my wife's eye from a wedding photo which she had used on a social networking site. She got a lot of attention from that icon mainly from men wanting to meet her. I took the original image and cropped a 64x64 image of her eye. It was the perfect size and no scaling was necessary. I reduced the image to black and white using Paint Shop Pro using Palette component: Grey Values and Reduction Method: Error Diffusion, Stuck, Palette Weighted. There were lots of different ways to reduce an image to black and white and I tried them all and thought this gave the best result for my needs.

I converted the image to a negative because I wanted the eye to come from the trees and not from the buildings to give it a "mother nature" theme. Click on the photo below to see the original picture, the crop and the black and white versions.














At first I created this blow-up which I hand-numbered the rows and columns to guide me.


But it got too hard to follow once I got deeper into the city so I wrote a program to read the black and white image and write out a map I could easily follow telling me what row to put the 2x2 cities for each column.


Sample of program output:

• Column 1: 3 8 13 26 30 33 37 40 43 46 48 51 54 56 58 60 62 64
• Column 2: 2 5 6 9 11 14 16 18 20 22 24 27 28 31 34 35 38 39 41 42 44 45 47 49 50 52 53 55 57 59 61 63
• Column 3: 3 7 10 12 15 17 19 21 23 25 29 30 32 35 36 38 40 43 46 48 51 54 56 58 60 62 64
• Column 4: 2 4 6 8 11 14 24 26 31 33 37 41 42 44 45 47 49 50 52 53 55 57 59 60 62 63
• Column 5: 1 5 9 12 13 16 18 22 25 27 28 30 32 34 36 38 40 43 46 48 50 51 53 54 56 57 58 60 61 64
• Column 6: 3 6 7 10 14 17 21 23 26 29 33 35 38 39 41 42 44 45 47 48 49 52 55 56 59 61 62 63
• Column 7: 2 4 8 9 11 15 20 24 27 30 32 36 40 43 46 50 51 53 54 57 58 60 63 64

I needed enough money to build the city but I didn't want to use any cheats to get the money so I built a small bare bones city that made a profit and aged it. All this city had was a street with some wind power and the residential, commercial and residential zones. I budgeted the ordinances to get money and none to spend money. Each 2x2 city costs $130. Since there are 1997 cities, the total cost would be at least $259,610. It was more due to the mistakes I made and had to re-zone, de-zone or bull-doze.



Once I had $2 million dollars, the map was fully mossed over with trees so I had to plow them all down which took a long time because every 3 seconds, this popped up.




There were 1997 black pixels in the 64x64 image which meant that I had to build 1997 2x2 cities.



I used signs along the columns numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. to tell me what column I was on. I numbered the rows for cities with signs 5, 10, 15, 20, etc. That's city rows, not grid rows. It took about 10 minutes to create a column and there were 64 columns so 640 minutes or about 10 hours. I taught my wife how to create rows and we took turns working on it and finished the city in about 5 days so about 2 hours per day.

Once the "chia" city was finished, I turned it on and let the action begin. I aged it so it fully mossed over with trees.

Bare Bones Version 1

SimCity 2000: Bare Bones Version 1

You can watch the time-lapse of the build on YouTube.

In this previous post I described a "bare bones" city that I was planning to build. I call it bare-bones because it has the least amount of things you need to build a city which is ...

• Transportation
• Zones
• Power

You need nothing else. No parks, no police, no fire stations, no hospitals, no schools, no water pumps, no power lines, no libraries, no museums, no airports, no seaports, no connections to neighbors, military, etc.

You can actually make a profitable city this way which can be taxed any amount from 0% to 20% and still make money from finance ordinances alone. Finance ordinances are the type that earn you money. The others require you spend money.

I started in the terrain editor with 100% mountains, 0% water and trees. I lowered the water table to the lowest you can have it and still have water. I started on Easy ($20,000) in the year 2050. My new city would only use wind power with no power lines.

I saved the city under a different filename every time I reached a new mile-stone then took a screen capture of it.

Here is the raw terrain I started with. It has no edits from me yet.
















I created a small city and let it age over night on speed African Swallow and made about $30,000 which is plenty. You can see that it fully "mossed" over with trees.















Next I carved out a new lower city and added every form of transportation. The streets were all twisty. It had every bridge type.















I destroyed my first city and plowed a new plateau.















I added an upper level plateau and created a city of just street, zones and wind power.








On the upper level I created 3 small cities. The left one is subway only, the middle city is rail only and the right city is highway with some streets.














I grew bored with the direction this was going so I plowed it all flat.










































I randomly drew wind power over the surface. Then I zoned the whole thing as low density residential then cross-crossed it with single tile strips of low density industrial and commercial. Then I strategically placed single tile sections of road and watched cities sprout around it. It spread like a virus.














Below is the final city for version 1.














One crazy thing about this city is that it cannot make up its mind as to which industry is in demand. Each month it changes. Watching that it full speed is crazy. It's also the first city I've ever seen to cause SimCity 2000 to freeze every few seconds when aging at full speed. When the power level drops to 0, most of the sims move out, but then the power rebounds and so does the population.

Here are some final stats about this city.

Year: 1,516,123
City size: 30k
Residential: 17k
Industrial: 6k
Commercial: 6k
Traffic: 50
Pollution: 1
Value: 174
Crime: 22
Power: 13
Water: 0
Health: 58
Education: 81
Unemployment: 12

Here are some stat snapshots














































I'm planning a version 2 with the things I've learned. I gave up on this version for two reasons. 1. There's a bug in SimCity 2000 when you raise and lower terrain too much. It gets confused and it becomes really hard to impossible to access certain tiles. This made this city very annoying to work with.

Version 2 will have minimal terrain lowering or raising to reduce that bug. It will also have more structure. I'm also planning to have single tiles of each of the 6 zone types: High & Low RCI. In other words, there will never be two tiles touching of the same zone type. When I mean "touching", I mean left/right/up/down. The corners can still touch. The goal is to limit the sims to building single tile buildings. I will also have single tile roads. There will be no two tiles touching that are road tiles. Road will be the only form of transportation I use. Version 2 will be flat and only wind power.

I need to figure out whether the city should be the lowest or highest possible altitude. I remember reading that wind power works better in higher altitudes. I'll need to run some experiments to confirm this. Either that or I'll just make it the lowest level for the challenge.

SimCity 2000

I'm planning to create a new city in SimCity 2000 but this city will be different than most cities. It will be the un-city ... the anti-city.

The city will have NONE of the optional stuff.

• schools, colleges, libraries, museums
• police, fire stations, hospitals, prisons
• parks, zoos, stadiums, marinas
  
• water pumps, towers, treatments, desalination
• acros, mayor house, llama dome, city hall

I will fund 0% of Police, Fire, Health and Welfare and Education. Transportation will get 100% funding. Taxes will be maxed at 20%.























For city ordinances I will will only select the Finance ordinances.

• 1% Sales Tax
• 1% Income Tax
• Legalize Gambling
• Parking Fines

There will be no ordinances for Education, Safety & Health, Promotional or Other.












It will also have no power lines. It will be powered by strategically placed wind power and nothing else.


It will be a bare-bones city with just the following

• wind power
• zones
• transportation

It will have both dense and light zones for residential, commercial and industrial. It will have every possible form of transportation. It will use every possible bridge type.

It will not have ...

• airport
• seaport
• connections to neighbors
• military base

I will start with a terrain of 100% mountains, 0% water and 0% trees. I will lower the water table down as far down as it goes (no ocean possible) then up one. It will start with no river and no coast.


















I will start on Easy ($20,000) in the year 2050.











The forms of transportation it will use are streets, highways, street tunnels, subway tunnels, rail tunnels, bridges, rail and buses. Roads, subway tunnels and rail will be as twisted as possible. No straight lines. No patterns. It will also feature every bridge type.

I will build no water pipes, water pumps, water towers, water treatment or water desalination plants. It's going to be a dry city. The sims will just have to go thirsty. I will not add any water or trees.

I'm going to attempt this city with no cheats. I'm also going to screen-capture the city as I build it to create a time-laps video to upload to YouTube.

I haven't named the city yet but I'm sure it will name itself. As I build it, a name will emerge.

To get inspiration, I've been studying every city I can find which is over 1000 cities. The idea for this city came when I saw the city Newark.

It is one of the ugliest cities I've ever seen with high crime, pollution and half the buildings abandoned. It's a total slum and I love it (download).




Most people try for happy, shiny cities like this one (download).

Newark is the anti-city and it's very much reminiscent of the real Newark, NJ. I'm not trying to base my city on a real city. I just hit upon the idea of creating a profitable city that is high in crime, pollution, unemployment and low in value, education and health. A city with none of the usual elements people put in their city. Maybe I should call it "bare bones".

When I'm done, I'll post the city here along with a link to the YouTube time-laps build video.

I'm building the city using SimCity 2000 for Windows 95. I'm using Windows Vista on a fast Dual Pentium PC.