I’m curious about two things. Will nesting birds or animals find this material tasty or good to gnaw on?
I always ask that ever since I learned vehicles using a more organic plastic for wiring harnesses suffer from shorts due to animals like mice nibbling the plastic because it smells tasty.
Leaving its carnal meaning in oblivion, eh?
That sounds like a challenge…
Dungeons and (bad) Dragons
Just so anyone reading knows…some games with Linux binaries sometimes run better using proton and the windows binaries.
Crusader Kings 3 is buggy with Linux binaries but fine using proton, while Stellaris is the reverse for me. Ymmv.
I’ve been trying to move to Linux for about 20 years, but gaming issues always sent me back to Windows.
I tried again after hearing about how proton and steamdeck have made it so much easier for most games and it’s true. Been exclusively on Linux on my gaming rig since about September. The only one I couldn’t get working was oddly a little simple indie game, it lagged badly while stuff like No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk ran fine.
Microsoft is pushing this at a very bad time, because you CAN game on Linux now.
Yeah, I’ve had such an easy time of it that I’m actually surprised when a game doesn’t work in Linux now too. Which is a reverse of how it used to be.
I switched from Windows to Linux in the last year.
There are sometimes odd things to configure, but it’s no more difficult than the windows XP era was.
It is much much easier than Linux used to be due to Steam, and I find I more often have problems with smaller indie games than big ones.
I’ve been playing Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Stellaris, No Man’s Sky, Crusader Kings 3 no problem. Plus many others.
I tried to game on Linux for many years with wine, but it was Steam that actually made it feasible for me .
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”.
Like in a file?
Bitwarden already syncs between PC and phone.
So, from a meta perspective, no real people died or were harmed. And the things real people get from a story are not a direct one to one analog to what goes on in a story.
Stories let people process things without actually having to participate in them. The fictional characters are not real. The person reading is, and generally filters what they read through a lifetime of experiences, picking and choosing what to integrate into themselves. Watching media or reading books and liking things doesn’t turn you into a bad person simply by exposure.
It’s true a story can spread a dialogue, but acting like someone is a terrible sinner guilty of the most horrifying thought crimes because they like the bad guy in a story isn’t really different in my mind that someone religious peddling nonsense like you’ll go to hell if you merely think a thought that isn’t in line with a holy book.
I think sometimes people raised in religious homes with all that guilt about thinking sinful things stop going to church, but sort of copy and paste the moral thought crime bullshit onto random things and pick that up as their replacement zealotry because it feels familiar.
I see it happening a lot in discussions of media with darker content.
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.
Oh damn, didn’t know he’d written more than the original 3
When I was in middle school, Sabriel was a stand-alone book with no sequels. It’s STILL weird that there’s other books in the series!
Thumbs up for the World Tree.
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.
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.
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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.
It worked. I’m seeing it on lemmy.world using Firefox. I’m not using any of the special front-ends.
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.
I’m always excited to see new designs for her. She always looks awesome.