Joined the Mayqueeze.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • If we needed everyone we want to name anything after was required to be a saint, we wouldn’t have anybody to name stuff after.

    Churchill - the man who rose to lead his country through WW2 - was a big colonial killer in India before. Both the reformator Luther and the philosopher Kant were raging antisemites. A non-insignificant number of US founding fathers held slaves. Bill Clinton balanced the budget while molesting an intern (and allegedly worse). It’s rare that we already know the president is a sexual predator before he gets elected. Yet, there will be a probably very small library named after 47 if there isn’t one already. It’s probably the best library in the world!

    History goes through many hands before it gets whittled to a generally agreed upon narrative. Churchill was lucky in real life. Daystromn was lucky in canon. And while sympathies may change over time, I’m not expecting a name change in trek Okinawa.






  • I think with Disco S1 they attempted a reset that didn’t work. They all looked the same. Nobody really liked it. So they reverted to giving them hair and there’s a throwaway line in S2 by Burnham that’s tantamount to admitting failure by the show runners. And then we don’t hear anything about it again. My guess is SNW will continue with ridged Klingons and just never explain it.

    If they really wanted to go into canon, you could say there was the augment era during ENT, then they fixed their ridges with a hypospray, and then just before SNW reaches TOS times, there was a recurrence of the augment craze on Qronos. Or a COVID like virus escaped from a lab. It would be odd because all the characters we know from TOS never comment on this oddity - Spock, Kirk, Uhura have all seen ridged Klingons, then the smooth kind, and then ridged again in the movies. But stranger plot points have been ignored in Trek. Borg Queen anyone?


  • I think these two are almost if not entirely exclusionary. It cannot be Federation space if the inhabitants are pre-warp.

    There are prime directive eff-ups. Like the flower bed trespasser assassins of S1 TNG. The Fed is in contact with the Edo although they shouldn’t be but somehow s happened. We don’t really know where they’re located in reference to everything else in the Fed or the universe. But even if everything around them was warp hopping mad, the system of the Edo or at least their planet Rubicun III should be an exclave. In the scenario where the Fed would have to defend them from a hypothetical anti-prime-direxxer it could be a protectorate but not Fed territory.

    I can think of two other instances with the PD that come close to this scenario but are no cigar. Data’s long-fingered pen pal Salenka or something like that and Worf’s adopted brother trying to save his knocked up pre-warp Penny Johnson. In both cases I don’t think we know if the territory was Fed, Fed adjacent, or something else. And it’s a moot point anyway because they were defending against natural disasters, not other species.




  • The Cory Doctorow cycle of enshitification starts with a focus on users, giving them exactly what they want. With a strong user base behind them they then pivot to business customers, advertisers, and the like. And then they turn in on themselves, only looking for shareholder value, and leave the tied up users and the B2B side in the lurch. It’s a business process, during which a social media site’s offerings would decrease in quality. But not every drop in quality is enshitification. A sudden burst of new users, an unforeseen bug in the software, a terrible event in the real world, a scandal behind the scenes can all affect the public’s opinion negatively.

    I don’t think every social media platform is doomed to play through the e-cycle. The moment you remove the need for or drastically limit the patronage of B2B customers in the organization, you remove one crucial element from the equation. The same happens if you remove the need to create earnings growth, i.e. not become a corporation with a fiduciary responsibility to maximize profits. That’s why federated social media can probably only turn to shit because of the people who use it and not because a boardroom somewhere decided to squeeze the last bit of juice out of that lemon. That’s just life then but not per se enshitification.

    So I think Facebook and Insta are good examples of enshitification. Reddit to an extent also. Twitter I think was a different story. It never got beyond a point where it was just great for the users. They didn’t make enough money from advertisers. They didn’t then turn their attention solely to their share prices with any success. They saw a sucker who was gonna pay billions for it and parachuted out. Twitter then became shit but because of its new owner, not because of this business cycle.

    We tend to look at everything with nostalgia. Was the past not more fun? We cannot be trusted to judge this dispassionately.