Coincidentally, I’ve been rewatching Doctor Who and yesterday I watched the 2nd episode of the revival where they go to the end of the world watch party. The manager of the place was in his office and one of the mini saboteur spider robots showed up and pressed one key on his keyboard that opened the safety screen stopping the sun from cooking anyone in the room.

Why does the ship have a retractable safety screen? Why can it be lowered with a single key press from an office computer? If it can be lowered that easily why couldn’t he raise it again just as easily?

It’s Doctor Who, so none of these are remotely relevant questions, but I found this quite funny.

Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Oh yeah. I guess it’s kind of a shame that we didn’t get to see a longer story for the founding of the Federation.

Trying to refund it, although pretty low chance since it’s well past the window. But that’s part of what makes it so bullshit to bring this in long after that window closed. I’d have refunded the game on the spot if it actually required the account creation from the get go. I refunded Red Dead 2 after it turned out to require a Rock Star account. Fortunately that was apparent on start up so I just quit and refunded.

I’m of the opinion that time travel stories are never good, at least when time travel is the focus rather than just an excuse to get to a fun setting.

Since time travel seems to be a physical impossibility, essentially any set of rules you create for it are just as valid/nonsensical. So you spend a bunch of time dealing with technobabble and paradox talk that has no hope of making sense outside of whatever the author needs for the story.

I didn’t actually have a problem with the way Enterprise ended. Setting aside the actual quality of the episode, I think the framing device connecting the beginning and ending of this era of Star Trek was fitting given that this was the end of Star Trek for the foreseeable future.

“Spends more on groceries than on other categories” so they’re poor. You can just say that. It turns out your money needs to go to keeping you alive before it goes to other things, and if you don’t have much money left after that, you can’t exactly spend more than you spent on food on other things.

Imagine being a consultant and get paid to write completely pointless things like that.

I’m assuming OP means that the fictional warp drive and light speed drives from the television show and motion picture respectively, are not in fact real. But I could be totally off base and this random commenter on a Star Trek forum created a conspiracy theory nobody has heard of. /s

Ok, sorry about that. I’m more than happy to update it if you want to give me some constructive feedback on what was confusing about it. Note though that this was the 3rd part in the series, and maybe you didn’t go back and read the previous 2 parts? They start here

NP. I’m not really great at giving writing advice, so can’t really help there. Something about it just didn’t click when I read it. The extra context you linked did help a bit.

As far as the issue: After reading it I think it does just seem to be a matter of terminology mixed with problems that arise with when you need to write math expressions inline in text. If you can write things out on paper or use a markdown language, it’s really easy to see how a fractional expression is structured.

8

2(1+3)

is a lot easier to read than 8/2(1+3) even if they technically are meant to be evaluated the same. There’s no room for confusion.

And as for distributive law vs multiplication, maybe this is just taking for granted a thing that I learned a long time ago, but to me they’re just the same thing in practice. When I see a(x+1) I know that in order to multiply these I need to distribute. And if we fill in the algebraic symbols for numbers, you don’t even need to distribute to get the answer since you can just evaluate the parentheses then use the result to multiply by the outside.

Conversely, if I was factoring something, I would need to do division.

ax + a

a

= x+1, thus: a(x+1)

I think we’re basically talking about the same thing, I’m just being a bit lose with the terminology.

And while we’re at it, the best way to make sure there’s no misunderstanding is to just use parenthesis for EVERYTHING! I’m mostly kidding, this can rapidly get unreadable once you nest more than a few parens, although for these toy expressions, it would have the desired effect.

(8)/(2(1+3)) is obviously different than (8/2)(1+3)

Something about the way this thread was written was kind of confusing, so I don’t really get what their point was. Is it just that the terminology is wrong? Or am I missing something?

Like, whatever you call it, a x b, a*b, ab, and a(b) are all acceptable notations to describe the operation “multiply a and b.” Some are nicer to use than others depending on the situation.

• Slay the Spire: I don’t just think it’s the best deck building roguelike, I think it’s the quintessential deck building roguelike. It’s such a complete exploration of the design space of the genre in terms of the options it gives the player to build their deck and the challenges it puts those decks up against. Not that there aren’t any other fun games in this genre, but they all still feel like STS, but worse and with a gimmick that doesn’t add much.

-Will edit with more in a bit.

Voyager certainly has some great bits in it, but for me I think it’s just that TNG is quintessential Star Trek and DS9 does something very different pretty well. Voyager doesn’t feel like it has enough of a distinct voice to differentiate it from comparisons to TNG.

It’s still baffling to me why there is even an unsafe mode in the first place. What could that possibly be used for?

On a related note: why is the holodeck door so hard to open when the computer is on the fritz/taken over? Surely this isn’t such a high security room that they couldn’t just leave the door with a manual latch?

Big “let them eat cake” energy.

Yeah. I usually have my system volume sub 20%. Things like videos, system sounds, voice calls, etc all sound reasonable at that volume. It’s just a lot of games that end up way too loud relatively to that.

Agreed. The funny thing is some games go the other way around but still kind of get it wrong: Games where the options are a part of a launcher, so you don’t actually get to experience your changes as you make them. I guess that’s still better than just throwing you into a loud cutscene on startup though.

But seriously. When the game loads, I want the sound to be set to as low as possible, then just give me a slider that plays a sample sound that I can increase until it’s right.

Every time I open a new game, the volume is set to the absolute max, which is orders of magnitude louder than any other sound on my computer. When I go to change the sound settings, I usually have to put the slider comically low before it gets to an acceptable volume range. At that point fine tuning it becomes kind of difficult.

Seriously, why can’t most games get volume right?

Did anything meaningful come from those leaks? People can try to do stuff to powerful people to reveal their misdeeds, but they’ve written the laws and are barely bound by the reach of nations in the first place. Few receive consequences for their crimes.

As for existential threats like nuclear weapons, that’s it’s own can of worms. So yeah, I guess in that respect they’re not really in control. But short of nuclear annihilation or the eventual collapse of the human-suitable environment, they seem pretty untouchable.

EDIT: Actually, we even have a great example of the ways they can fly above some world spamming catastrophes: COVID 19 happened. Many died, many more lost their livelihoods, homes, etc. Meanwhile many of the rich got to take private transportation to private places so they could wait out the pandemic in safety while their companies’ profits increased and they used that increased wealth to buy up even more capital.

I’d seriously doubt any claims that there’s some cabal that deliberately caused it, but they sure do have the means to escape the worst of disasters and even exploit them for profit.

I have all sorts of problems in my personal life. Mental and physical health are terrible. The few friends I have moved to other timezones and have jobs that make it harder and harder for me to even talk with them online much anymore. I’m too depressed and anxious to go out and get a job or meet people. I’m too depressed and unfocused to try to work on the art that interests me.

But the worst of it all is a feeling that even if I fixed all my personal problems, what’s the point when the world is this shitty and keeps getting worse? The planet is rapidly becoming unlivable and we’re never going to do anything about it because the power structure depends on the things that are causing the problem. People have less and less control over our lives as corporations gain more and more power through consolidation and technology.

I’ve heard people say that the world just isn’t suited to accommodate some kinds of people, but I don’t see how it accommodates ANYONE who isn’t rich and powerful. I think most people just do better at suppressing that feeling than me. Is anyone really healthy and happy working some awful job for low pay so they can just barely afford to live in an apartment they don’t own and eat food that’s slowly killing them?