Éole from a dream

This time I took a road a little different. I was in a poetic mood, I guess.

Now, some years ago I built Clément Ader's Éole, a steam-powered aircraft from 1890 which allegedly flew a few dozens of meters , just 50 centimeters from the ground. Whether if it's true or not, the aircraft itself is a beautiful thing to behold with its bat-like wings and its pretty shaped fuselage.

Now, my real profession, as some of you might know, is film maker. A friend of mine from that 'scene' won 'best film' in last year's local film competition with her beautifully made, dreamy animation film 'Memories wrapped in paper planes". The film has a very poetic quality and rewatching it a couple of weeks ago, it suddenly inspired me to build the Éole again, but in a more surreal and possible etheric way.

For All Mankind - an (ongoing) review of a what-if series.

When I read Apple had made an original alternative history series about NASA and the space race with the Soviets, I was over the moon (pun intended). I really was looking forward to the first episode. And it was good. Okay, I realised they took a lot of liberties and immediately there were discussions online on whether it was realistic enough with all the initial deviations from our timeline. I didn't bother to elaborate on them, it is after all a work of fiction, just starting out at a point in real time.
I was prepared to put all of those incorrect things aside to just enjoy a different point of view, with some ficticious names and storylines. The first five episodes were very good. They focused on the somewhat clumsy efforts NASA took to get something done, some personal drama here and there, but they followed that history line. That was the base of the series. Good. It had good characters, the set dressing was meticulous and superb in its attention for contemporary details.

The last 4 episodes changed my opinion. After making a couple of well-placed jumps in time, they got stuck in 1974, with an absurd amount of huge disastrous events piling up on one another. So many, that it has not even degraded to a regular SF drama but to just plain unrealistic, in spite of all the detail and realism in all the props and sets.