MudMan

Neat. Not the version I played, and arguably a lot of those issues were fixed in the PC port. But then, there are a lot more options for accurate hardware-level emulation and preservation of period-appropriate Amiga than the much muddier explosion of PC specs, so it’s weirdly a cleaner way to preserve an optimal version.

I’m never sure how much to push early releases like these, though. Is the clumsy one-unit-at-a-time approach to Dune 2 worth messing with? Or do you just go play the (extremely good) remaster of Command & Conquer at that point?

Even better. There’s a solid chance Bumble wasn’t even born when loss.jpg happened.

What a life.

“Under the age of 30”, huh?

Alright, nerds, just so we’re clear, that was more than 15 years ago. Assuming this is current, which it probably isn’t, that “53yo” dad was in his late 30s at the time, could very much have been posting about it when it happened. Given the current average age for having kids, “bumblebeebats” was probably wearing diapers by the time the Internet got to the point of entirely abstracting it to shapes. There is a longer period of time between loss.jpg and now than between the first rickroll and loss.jpg.

If it makes you feel any better, all of this is hurting me just as bad as it’s hurting you.

Oh, so it’s even worse. They aren’t trying to get any practical effect, it’s just pointless vandalism that won’t achieve anything. Cool.

Please explain to me how this keeps climate change in the public consciousness. We haven’t spoken about anything even vaguely climate change-related in this entire thread. None of the discourse around it is about climate change. It’s a distraction, at best. It’s the sand the “people and the media” bury their heads in.

I hate the defeatism, too. If it doesn’t do anything, then why even bother? Let the people who are… you know, actually working on it do their thing and get out of the way with the cornstarch and the stunts.

I also don’t get the necessity to be defensive about it. I get to very much advocate for climate change action (and take action myself, by voting accordingly if nothing else) and still acknowledge this was a dumb thing, which is… honestly pretty obvious. Speaking of bad optics that make you lose the culture wars, denying how dumb this was just makes you seem delusional. After all, if climate activists are so obviously wrong about the obviously wrong thing why would they be right about the other thing? There is literally no upside to this.

No.

And you can’t make me.

And since a protest is ultimately an attempt to manipulate an entire people into shifting the national consensus over to your opinion, if I’m refusing to stop being dramatic about the optics of what they did then what they did was an abysmal failure.

That’s the point people are trying to make here. That ultimately this thing is marketing, and that if everybody is pissed at you after your marketing impact you just did bad marketing.

Alright, you want me to tone it down? Here it is toned down: it’s not the puppy coat.

It’s Apple’s hydraulic press iPad advertising.

You do realize that isn’t any better, right?

Nah, when you deface a one-of-a-kind prehistoric monument that not only is of genuine historical relevance and recognizable worldwide but also a key cultural touchstone with deep identitarian components for a whole country you are deep into Cruella territory. In good faith. Genuinely. I’m not even English and I am pissed. You don’t even get the usual excuses about bourgeois art these idiots have used for other stunts like these.

This is literally supervillain stuff. It’s the stuff they put in Superman movies to show he’s gone bad. In the zeitgeist of normal humanity it’s shorthand for “these are the bad guys”, right alongside suspiciously spotted fur coats and shooting your minions for failing to catch somebody.

How anybody wouldn’t get this makes me not only question their ability to socially engineer a planetary revolution of the ways we generate power and consume goods, but the ability to function as an adult and put their pants on in the morning. If I hired a PR consultant to advertise “climate action” and they proposed this I wouldn’t just fire them, I’d sue them for trying to sabotage me. It’s incredibly stupid. Seriously. Genuinely. As somebody who wants these people to actually succeed.

Oh, is it? Man, this is such a Rorschach test of a thread.

Is the point of a protest to be in the news? I guess the clout economy has rotten our brains after all.

I mean, yeah, you can make news by acting like an idiot, in that the people that oppose your cause will thoroughly cover it. It’s not hard to be in the news with a protest, as long as you don’t care why you’re news. Stage a mass murder of puppies to protest against the lack of gun control and I guarantee you’ll get a spot in Fox News every day for a year, very much accompanied of a pro-gun lobbyist commenting the footage.

That may be the core of the confusion here. I’m saying that turning climate change activism into the puppy murder cause is not an effective way to curb climate change. I’m saying that feeling powerless doesn’t make it any more effective at curbing climate change just because it gets news coverage.

It’s not making anybody aware of the issue who already isn’t, because everybody is already aware of the issue. It’s not explaining anything about the issue to anybody, because all we’re talking about here is the stupid stunt. It doesn’t convince anybody who was neutral or hostile to the cause because they came off as complete idiots at best, malevolent assholes at worst.

So I guess my answer to your question is that even if the jet thing did nothing it still was more effective than this. Because it’s not about being in the news, it’s about making effective action more likely to happen.

This is such a clarifying post.

It’s not about being useful, it’s about feeling useful. It’s about the impotent frustration of feeling you’re not having an impact being channeled through a media stunt whether or not it in fact changes anything, or even if it makes things worse.

That is what’s going on here, I think. Strategic thinking about this is slow and involves a long road and political concessions and compromises and getting involved hands-on with very out-of-sight things for a long time. This takes a second and it makes it to the news, so it feels like something got done, even if it wasn’t the case.

And that’s 21st century activism in a nutshell, basically.

Oooh, oooh, I got one.

I went to multiple protests after the Iraq war and got my Iraq war-supporting government to immediately plummet in support and lose the next election. It was nice. No harmed irreplaceable monuments that I remember. The marches I attended were entirely peaceful, as well.

Did the other thing achieve any of that?

I’ll say the jets were effective in that I don’t like the jets while I am primed to try to physically stop you from doing the other thing if you try it in front of me. And I already agree with the underlying point already, so imagine how the normies that don’t think about this at all feel.

“Ah, a cartoonish self-parody of activists defacing a monument I’ve spent my entire life feeling a sense of kinship with, I feel compelled to rethink my stance on this dry, complex political issue”. That’s a bold pitch for a PR stunt.

Oh. No, I meant the strip, not the activists. The implication is that we’re all so dumb that we end up underwater but we’re still complaining about how the activists were assholes. For the joke to work, the stunt itself needs to be pointless. If the stunt was indeed to “provoke action against climate change” the strip would make no sense. The premise of the joke requires the action it’s defending to be useless.

So yeah, to me this transmits that a) the author thinks the action itself did not work and was not going to work in the first place, and b) the author thinks we’re getting angry about it instead of taking action against climate change because we’re dumb and we don’t get it, so the action was fine, it’s our fault.

It’s the children who are wrong, but also we’re entirely powerless, but it’s because everybody is stupid except for us, only the activism is to make everybody else stop being stupid only it can’t work becasue of how stupid you all are. Impotence and Skinner-esque arrogance for a tasty mix of surreal kafkaesque self-contradiction.

And beyond getting charged it’s the optics. I am from a place where you’re less likely to get shot by police and where serious charges are not likely to come from protesting (at least back then, it has gotten worse). But even then the marching orders were that if cops charge or disrupt the protest that’s good optics, if the protestors riot unprompted that’s bad optics, which should be pretty straightforward to understand.

The dictionary definition I was going for is: “The quality or condition of being impotent; lack of strength or power”.

Oh, spare me that rhetroric. Protestors in the 90s and especially the 2000s felt just as disenfranchised. That’s how you end up protesting in the first place. And those were the nice ones. The stories my parents could tell you about the 60s and 70s.

It’s not like “don’t be an idiot” is a struggle only now. I was in protests back in a different millenium where the smart ones were already standing in front of cops and bank windows to stop the idiots from throwing rocks at them and spoiling the whole thing.

The despondent “you just don’t get it” online discourse is pretty new, though.

Man, the way this channels a mix of “it is the children who are wrong” and sheer impotence is hitting me hard. I mean, it really explains so much about modern activism.

Oh, yeah, it’s ALL handwavy bulls#!t. It’s a 60s sci-fi TV show. A great one, but… you know.

I’ll say that the transporters are some of the most consistent pieces of tech they came up with, though, at least as they get explored over time. They need a beam, they are disrupted by shields and interference, they turn people into a data buffer “pattern” that seems to follow the way data would behave, in that they can add and substract to it. You need to assume they don’t use them as full-on cloning machines because of regulations, rather than tech limits, but it mostly makes sense.

Unfortunately the version that makes sense is the most disturbing interpretation, so they still need to handwave the crap out of it.

Yeah, I think in canon the curvy bit at the front of the ship (or the nacelles, sometimes) is just gathering dust to then burn into energy. It gets trickier with the transporter, because in theory the dust is going into a matter/antimatter thing, but if the transporter is fueling itself from the body it’s disintegrating… well, where’s the antimatter?

I think in their minds the transporter isn’t doing that, and is instead taking energy to both turn a person into a pattern and then build the pattern back into a person. Seems like a waste, but I guess the raw matter isn’t the real concern here.

But we know that’s not how transporters work. If that was the case you wouldn’t be able to get “accidents” where you end up with two copies of the same guy. The transporter must work like the replicator, not the other way around.

Also, that doesn’t work with some of the stuff they say, like how they don’t replicate anything alive, and so food does taste noticeably different. Plus… you know, no massive farm deck anywhere on the Enterprise and no transwarp to beam that in from a planet, so… we’re going to have to accept this stuff may be just handwavy bulls#!t at some point.

I’m a bit shocked that nobody has pointed out the obvious:

The economics of Star Trek are super inconsistent and make no sense because multiple writers had a crack and they each liked and believed different things.

Sometimes it’s a post-scarcity socialist utopia where money is obsolete. Other times, Picard invites someone out on a date and she answers “you buying?”.

This is obvious enough that multiple people have tried to fix it, which as always in franchise worldbuilding only makes things less consistent and more complicated. So now some things just can’t be properly replicated. Sometimes it’s because of regulations and laws, other times it’s because of technology limitations. Sometimes the Federation doesn’t use money but they still have it for trade, other times they use money, just for random commodities.

The middle of the road for Trek seems to be some form of socialdemocracy where you’re provided with anything you need and labor is largely vocational, but out in space there is enough variation over time and different areas that there is still a bit of a pseudo-capitalist economy even in regions where Federation-level post-scarcity tech is still available. Go into any more detail and the whole thing breaks down.

This goes for other political elements of the series, too. Picard gets super mad at the notion of endorsing religious beliefs in a prewarp society because he finds it barbaric. Meanwhile, Sisko is out there becoming Bajoran Space Jesus and everybody is just cool with that.

It’s almost like Rick Berman’s, Ronald D. Moore’s and Gene Roddenberry’s political beliefs were different from each other’s, huh?

You know the irony of this interpretation? By canon, replicators are energy to matter conversion devices. Basically a 3D printer using relativity to poof atoms into existence from an energy source.

Replicators are straight-up the most expensive way to make anything. Using that technology to make you a cup of tea is the most inefficient use of any resource put on screen in media history. It’s absurd. The notion that instead of heating up water you would go ahead and make the atoms out of energy is so much worse than just filling in a space station’s worth of water and carrying it with you into space just to keep Picard’s Earl Grey habit going.

It’s not the replicator at all that drives the post-scarcity, it’s whatever nonsense antimatter generator stuff dilithium is enabling where they get infinite energy forever. Although we know dilithium is a limited resource, since they don’t seem to just replicate some when they need it, so… somebody should do the math there and figure out how expensive all those Janeway coffees actually are.