Maiar is the plural

Sam also had the ring for a short time (longer than Déagol)

Gothmog was possibly not an orc 😜

Yeah, Paikin is a great interviewer!

I saw it a couple of days ago and thought of posting it but that nobody at a Star Trek community would be too interested in a TVO interview, and nobody in the Ontario community would be overly interested in a Robert Picardo interview. Glad there’s an overlap!

This song was released 21 years and 3 months ago, it’s close in time to the TNG premier (15 years 10 months) that it is to now. Let it go.

Could it be High Park in Toronto? I was just there yesterday and saw a Great Egret much like this one (also a Green Heron and a couple of beavers).

I’m sitting on an Aeron at work, it’s good, but I can’t in good conscience pay that much for a chair. I was recently on the market for a new office chair and extensively researched it. It really looks like it’s a hit or miss with every chair in every price range, and I was very seriously considering replacing my Hyken with another Hyken. I decided to go with the IKEA Markus and have been sitting on it for about a month. I’m only moderately happy with it, may even return it before the year is up although I’d hate doing it.

That is almost certainly Staples Hyken. Comfortable chair but cheaply made, mine started disintigrating in a couple of years.

My top intro music shows: TNG, VOY, DS9, DIS, SNW, LD
Honorable mention: ENT
Top movie theme: First Contact

Rumania and Makedonia probability the closest to the country’s native name.

The balrog was already awake, but maybe wasn’t paying attention 😜

Interestingly, that is not the case. Month names can differ in different languages. I discovered the hard way that Ukrainian has completely different names for months when I had to connect to a Linux machine in Kyiv with Ukrainian locale (I can read Cyrillic, but the abbreviated month names meant nothing to me). The name for August is “serpen” by the way, and it is similar in some other Slavic languages. Also Arabic has its own month names based on Akkadian, August is “ab” but an Arabized version of the word August is also commonly used and understood. Finally, in Mandarin and presumably other Chinese languages, Gregorian months are only referred to by their number, so we are in “bayue” (lit. eight(th) month).

The start of the calendar has to be arbitrary, there’s no way around that as it’s not feasible to measure the time since the beginning of the universe with good enough accuracy.

As others commented, the Julian Day is a time measure that is actually used in astronomy, and Unix time is a time stamp standard (not really a calendar, although it could be if we got used to it) that is mostly a way to store time points, not really to consume them before converting to a more readable form.

But as a scientist who is wholly irreligious, I’m not overly bothered by using the Gregorian calendar, even though it has Christian (and a lot of pre-Christian) elements. Its annoyances (different numbers of days in each month, weeks not aligning with years, leap years etc.) are due to the fact that we decided to measure time in these arbitrary units. At least it’s universal in the modern era (often in conjunction with another calendar), and everywhere you go people understand what “August 5, 2024” means (although August might have to be translated to the target language, since the names of the months are not universal).

That’s more than you can say about non-time units of measurement (I’m looking at you, imperial and US customary units!!)

It’s a way for the vehicle owner to broadcast to the world that they have a small dick.

It’s exaggerated but yes, this map really reminds me of many large Chinese cities. It’s probably true every major city has a People’s Square. I think the map is based on Beijing.

Also note that if it’s just for personal use, you don’t have to have a domain for HTTPS. You can self sign, or create your own certificate authority, you just need to clients to trust it. But domains can be cheap or even free, so it’s better to get one so you don’t have to specially configure your devices.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way 🇨🇦🏴‍☠️🇨🇦

These two had the misfortune of being in the grey zone between background and supporting characters. It’s fine for a show not to focus on the bridge crew (who’s at the helm on the Cerritos?) but Detmer and Owosekun got a raw deal because sometimes it seemed like they were gonna have some character development. Like in season 3 that Detmer had this bizarre beef with Stamets out of nowhere, and that was probably the only episode where she got more than a couple of lines.

I’m not surprised that the actresses chose their other projects (they were probably at the bottom of the totem poll of the show in terms of pay).

I probably wouldn’t have noticed they were missing, but in episode 3 Michael introduced Rayner to the crew and said “You’ll meet Owosekun, Detmer and the rest of the crew in a little bit”, and then later Tilly said “I’ll send Commander Owosekun in”, off screen of course. Lame.

For years now I haven’t watched a Discovery episode at less that x1.2, and at the worst parts I speed it up to x2.0.