Weirdly enough, the only game I tried to play that didn’t run was this random Indy game. Didn’t even have fancy graphics, it was one step up from macromedia flash games

The AAA games I’ve played are fine on Linux. Baulders Gate, No Mans Sky, Fallout 76, Cyberpunk 2077, Crusader Kings III.

Yeah, people forget that form follows function.

The parameters for making a USEFUL plastic that ALSO degrades gives a narrow band. Too degradable, and the function of fulfilling all the areas plastic is currently used for can’t happen. Not degradable, and we have the current situation.

Plastic being is in use not simply to fuck the planet over or something, but because compared to other materials it has physical qualities that things like glass, wood, fabric, etc. don’t have, that’s why it’s ended up in so many things. It’s lightweight, strong, and “plastic” (that is to say, more easily shaped and molded than other materials, and I suspect there’s a labor component too where maybe it needs less labor to shape and form).

I’m eventually going to write a story about a sci-fi world that’s under quarantine because they successfully made a plastic-eating bacteria that never stops eating and breaking down plastic. Go there and most of your technology/clothes/etc. are eaten away. I might throw in wood, too…a world with no wood or plastic because the local bacteria is like, “Yum, yum, food!” and gets into every nook and cranny. I anticipate I’ll have to do a lot of thinking to figure out how drastically technology would change under these parameters…I imagine a lot of it would be very “brutalist” because you’d have to rely on heavy-as-balls metals and cement and stone and such. Unless there’s an Aluminum Future or something, where everything that can be made out of aluminum, can. Of course, there’s also the byproducts of intense metals mining to think about on a fictional world like that. Anyway, lots of details to pick apart for worldbuilding.

Fred’s absolutely a setup to have Brent Spiner appear as SOMEONE in some episode.

And given Season 3 of Picard, it might even be Data, with his new hybrid with-bits-of-Lore personality.

But it could be a human Soong too, or another Soong-type android (I absolutely hate they call them “synths”, all I hear is Fallout references.)

Edit: It just really stood out to me there was a line referencing that Fred might have “a family”.

No, but knowing people and being so persuasive they’ll come do shit for you and your team is a skill.

I’ve had bosses that were very affable and able to talk just anyone around and it truly is a useful skillet

Edit…skillset, even

Religious rituals.

Not because they know anything about Easter. It’s just that religious rituals seem to be the catch all bucket.

Is this a nostalgia thing? Like how people who grew up without records now get vinyl for the looks or nostalgia of a time that was better or something?

The downside of optical disks for me was how easily they got scratched, plus you have to store them somehow (a big physical library takes up actual physical space, like the wall of a room), plus you have to get up and physically move something to play it. If you’re a super-neat person, perhaps this won’t be downside (I am not, and still have rips of a CD that used to be in my car and got scratched, so the rip has a part marred by skipping).

Also, are ordinary blu-rays kept in ordinary home conditions (that is to say, not archival and not climate-controlled or pitch-black) going to hang onto their data for 20+ years? Or is continually moving it to new SSDs and thinking about raid setups a better defense against data loss for an ordinary home media user? I remember vividly having old CDs and floppies that would not run years later due to becoming corrupted by physical media decay.

Anyway, I have no answers, just want to put some thoughts out there.

…now I really want to know if they do dilate, but I’m too cowardly to google it.

I ran into something like this from a company named Botrista who was supposedly hiring remote positions. I got suspicious before they got my personal info, dug deeper and found their site ran on wix, tried to contact them by other methods to see if I could get a real person, and concluded it was all a scam to collect the typical prehire personal info like bank accounts, ss number, home address, etc.

Yeah, I’ve come to realize even in the medieval world, people had a huge impact on the environment even then. Esp. regarding wood. There’s a reason cutting wood and gathering sticks was valuable–people needed daily cooking fires, and heat in the winter.

Add industry, even just smelting iron, bronze, copper, or firing bricks, and that’s an even bigger need for fuel.

I imagine natural game was under similar pressures, which is why people moved to herding/farming instead of relying on hunting and gathering. And game was also affected by trees being cut for industry and fuel.

I’ve never been a huge fan of “adult animation”, or really animation in general. So I had to get over that hill of bias. But once I did, I found I enjoyed this show. Those Old Scientists on Strange New Worlds is actually what made me go back and give Lower Decks a second try.

Anyway, I’m excited to see where season 5 goes. I also kinda want another live-action crossover.

Edit for others: Looks like I fell for your troll ragebait account.

(Or rather, it looks like your type of account has followed its propaganda marching orders from reddit and other places to make Lemmy shitty too.)

(For those unaware, pop fandom spaces are infiltrated by people stirring shit to keep a cultural miasma of misery going on, even for people who disconnect from overtly political/news subs as an attempt to try to avoid it.)

Still, I think what I said is useful, so I’ll leave it up for lurkers.

I’ve seen mindsets like yours coming into book fandom more and more as the years have gone on.

I’m going to say some things from a meta perspective that you might not like. And while I’m making assumptions, and they might even be wrong about you in particular, I think there’s still worth in trying to see my perspective, and trying to understand WHY I am saying what I am saying, and why I’m saying it in response to your post at this particular point in time, even if I’m wildly off base with you as an individual. You’ll probably learn more from doing that than by trying to get into a one-on-one argument with me over details. Like, even if I’m wrong with you–WHY did I choose to say this right now in response to your post? What details in your post made me react in this way?

So, as far as I can tell, looking in from the outside, it looks like takes like yours arise when someone is raised in a religious context, following a holy book of some sort (Bible, Book of Mormon, the Koran–any writing really that is supposed to be your highest moral guide), and then either has not left that religion, but is trying to understand other people’s moralities through the same lens because everyone they personally know forms their morality from the bible or another holy book (so surely everyone else must too? And maybe other people use Star Trek?), or comes from someone who HAS left but hasn’t yet examined old habits left over from that upbringing, and and thus brings them into new spaces, as you seem to be doing here with Star Trek.

Like, I see religious folks, or recently ex-religious folks who have not yet examined their inner drives to get over-involved with the media they consume. They interact with their show the same way they would interact with their church, or with the Bible or another holy book. Even if they claim they are no longer religious, they were still raised in a religious environment which has an effect on habits and thinking esp. re: the topic of morality, and emotionally fandom spaces and fandom drama can feel a lot like church from a socializing and discussion standpoint, so old habits of churchy stuff sometimes seep into fandom.

But not all people interact with stories in this way. In fact, when you look at how people actually interact with media, people often take bits and pieces here and there. They agree with some stuff, disagree or just ignore others, and transform things too. You can truth-check this by looking at your peers in school. How many times did a teacher say something, and someone next to you said it was bullshit? People take in, reject, and transform information all the time. Words are not a total telepathic mind-control, people have agency.

I’m a writer, and it’s fairly common to see a reader interact with what I said and take a totally different insight from what I said, because all of their life experiences are getting tangled up with whatever story I was trying to tell, and that MIXTURE is showing them something new that I might never have realized or thought of. And this is normal–this is how humans interact with fiction.

The idea that a work of fiction has to demonstrate moral things perfectly or else be doomed as irredeemably flawed is really in my opinion more of a religious-brain thing. And no, maybe you didn’t say that directly, but I question the drive behind why you posted this post, listing the things you did. I question your motivations and assumptions. Approaching Trek asking the questions you do doesn’t align with how people actually interact with media in my experience, but it does align with how I’ve seen people utilize religion, and holy books in particular.

I’d encourage you to look up a community college and see if there’s any ethics classes you can take. I had to take an ethics class for the degree I was working on. I didn’t actually want to, as I’m in my 40s and comfortable with my sense of morality–but it ended up being shockingly useful, because it laid out different frameworks in which people can evaluate the morality of something, and the pros and cons of each. It kind of started with the “gut feeling” a lot of people use when they feel more than think, then progressed through religious frameworks, then a few philosophers, and then storytelling frameworks, and basically gave me a lot of different and new tools to evaluate things I hadn’t explicitly had before. It was very useful, much to my own surprise, and I’d recommend the experience to everyone if they go to college.

Ah-ha! Knew there was a reason I was scratching my head over it. Thank you!

For a new watcher, especially a young one, Strange New Worlds is probably the best start. It has a lot of the classic "Trek" philosophy going on, but paired with modern production and special effects, and also paired with more modern treatment of female characters.

I love The Next Generation, that's "my Trek", but certain things haven't aged well.

I've been watching Babylon 5 for the first time (didn't see it when it was actively airing), and while it's not Trek, it was produced in the same era as TNG, Voyager, etc. and I find myself jarred by certain ways they portray characters, esp. female ones, and that same sort of stuff is present in older Trek too. Like, Crusher and Troi got absolutely cheated when it came to great arcs and such. Strange New Worlds handles its female characters much, much, MUCH better.

• Section 31 seems to be moving forward - Michelle Yeoh had the chance to move on but I guess she's putting herself behind the project instead of ditching it, as she conceivably could given how her career is going and all the new opportunities she likely has knocking on her door. The show is called a "movie event" in the article.
• Starfleet Academy is going forward - Tawny Newsome (Mariner from Lower Decks) is on the writing team for that.
• The final season of Discovery is coming out next year, and they were allowed to do some reshoots as it's the final season.

.

Personally, I really hope that Saru makes the transition to Starfleet Academy. I love him to bits and Doug Jones could do a ton more with his character if given the chance. I also suspect, due to the way Picard ended, that Brent Spiner's Data in some form or another might show up as an instructor, maybe as a guest star. I'd actually really like to see a Lore-influenced-Data bringing the snark in a classroom. Data's earnestness and Lore's sense of humor are especially charming when combined together, and we only saw a bit of it at the end of Picard. And I'd love to see Saru and Data interacting.

Pelia is also long-lived enough to show up, and she was an instructor prior to becoming the Enterprise's Engineer. They've already set her up to be replaced by Scotty, so I could see the actress moving to Starfleet Academy, since we already know her time on the Enterprise is limited.

Unrelated to Starfleet Academy, I do notice there's no word on a post-Picard series starring Seven of Nine–I hope that's mostly because the strikes disrupted early planning or something.

But they set Picard up perfectly to spawn a new series from that and I'd absolutely LOVE to see Seven of Nine as Captain of her own Starfleet ship, and Jack would make an interesting foil to Wesley as the cocky ensign. I think with the topic of AI being a thing now, and all the loose ends with the Borg and with Data's offspring (and Data himself), we could actually really use right now a series that talks a lot about AI. I imagine interaction with Jurati-Borg could be an ongoing arc. And Soji could appear and we could get some interaction with Data to tie off that storyline.

Hey, since you're familiar with pinball machines, I have a question…in his video above, some of the solenoids seemed to have a motorola logo on them.

But I don't know enough about electronic parts (or replacement parts–or hell, blue tape with a motorola-like logo on them) to know how to interpret it. I was mostly like, "Wait, motorola did solenoids in the 70s? Or are those replacements? Or just branded electrical tape?"

What are your thoughts?

I like all his videos, but I particularly like this one because it kind of feels like the "missing link" between clockwork machines and electronic machines that I didn't realize I was missing a ton of stuff about.

This is actually really amazing. They scan charred, burnt scrolls that can't be physically opened without crumbling, and the AI is able to use subtle deformations the ink on the scrolls caused to reconstruct letters.

The scrolls were discovered in the eighteenth century, when workmen came across the remains of a luxury villa that might have belonged to the family of Julius Caesar’s father-in-law. Deciphering the papyri, Sommerschield says, could “revolutionize our knowledge of ancient history and literature”. Most classical texts known today are the result of repeated copying by scribes over centuries. By contrast, the Herculaneum library contains works not known from any other sources, direct from the authors.

Well, in the context of a world where stories are being told, Spock always being perfect even when young and figuring this stuff out wouldn't lead to any interesting stories.

Personally, I've seen his story with T'pring as a variation on the very common struggle people who grow up in strict cultures go through. Some of those individuals break away from their cultures, some come to terms with it personally.

Spock's been interesting in that he chooses his Vulcan side ultimately. I think most character stories go the other way–the uptight, rules-following individual breaking away from the rigid culture that nurtured them. Spock in contrast finds a balance.

Yeah, seems a great channel. Solid info presented in clear words by a guy who is a research scientist on this exact topic.

Mars Guy is Arizona State University associate research professor Dr. Steve Ruff, a Mars geologist with decades of experience exploring the red planet. This channel follows the exploration of Jezero crater by the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter, presenting science, engineering, and the search for life on Mars using a novel in-person experience.

This project was initiated in part with collaboration from the NASA Infiniscope project.

https://search.asu.edu/profile/224420

Steve Ruff is a planetary geologist with a focus on the mineralogy of Mars determined via infrared spectroscopy, part of an effort to understand its geologic history and potential for past habitability. Through field work in Mars analog settings and laboratory work using field samples, he seeks to better interpret observations from Mars.

The guy's channel revolves around solutions that are super-cheap so that someone handy in a poor country can easily source the materials to build the thing. So I imagine some of his design decisions are based on his knowledge of what materials are locally available to relatively poor people in various places in Africa, or Panema, or Tibet, or wherever.

I was watching another one of his videos, and he was trying to get a bike chain to act as a belt for his wind turbine, and his rationale was that bike chains are easily accessible in poor countries, but he had to fall back on a car drive belt that was cut down and modified because he couldn't get his first option to work.