Setting aside stuff like Plan Nine and Manos and The Room and Birdemic, probably Star Trek XI, the one that JJ made. Splicing together test footage of Bela Lugosi and his chiropractor is one thing, but desecrating something beautiful is a sin.

The funny thing about heliocentrism is, that isn’t really the modern view either. The modern view is that there are no privileged reference frames, and heliocentrism and geocentrisms are just questions of reference frame. You can construct consistent physical models from either, and for example, you’ll probably use a geocentric model if you’re gonna launch a satellite.

But another fun one is the so-called discovery of oxygen, which is really about what’s going on with fire. Before Lavoisier, the dominant belief was that fire is the release of phlogiston. What discredited this was the discovery of materials that get heavier when burned.

Userland malloc comes from libc, which is most likely glibc. Maybe this will tell you what you wanna know: https://sourceware.org/glibc/wiki/MallocInternals

Actually, I’d like to expand on this a bit. Setting aside the question of whether storytelling itself is necessary, though I believe it is, I think part of why so much modern writing is so soulless is the focus on getting from point A to point B. “Story beats,” they call them. Or we might call this the Pixar Algorithm.

The software tooling around computer graphics is such that any major studio will produce stunning visuals. Whether they nail visual design or cinematography is still a question, but the fidelity of the graphics will be great. Do something tried and tested, and you’ll get a Marvel movie.

Writing is something else, though, because writing well requires having something to say. It seems like nobody in Hollywood has anything to say anymore, so they try and paper over that fact with “cleverness.” But they aren’t very clever either.

This is a round about way of saying, I think the “unnecessary” stuff, the stuff that doesn’t drive the story to the next beat, is where most of the soul of a story resides. The reason it’s so important to have something to say is, that gives you some direction on how to add relevance to the unnecessary parts. So all this stuff is tied pretty tightly together.

This is also why my commentary on “Tomorrow Is Yesterday” was mostly talking about other, better episodes.

It isn’t necessary, sure, but fish out of water is part of what makes time travel fun. Like Sisko constantly forgetting that communicators were little flip phones in “Trials and Tribble-ations.”

It’s like how current “history buffs” only know about the Roman Empire or World War II. Kirk was fascinated solely with the history of the United States, circa 1969.

Sounds like gin and tea, served hot with a twist of lemon.

I’m not sure this is a level headed take… They say, when someone tells you who they are, believe them. Meta has already made it very clear who they are; I’m not sure skepticism is really in order.

I’m not a Mastodon expert, but I’m pretty sure you can still get their memes if they reply to you (or @ you), or if they post to a tag you’re following.

Well… They are of course right about the fact that these sorts of decentralized systems don’t have a lot of privacy. It’s necessary to make most everything available to most everyone to be able to keep the system synchronized.

So stuff like Meta being able to profile you based on statistical demographic analysis basically can’t be stopped.

It seems to me, the dangers are more like…

Meta will do the usual rage baiting on its own servers, which means that their upvotes will reflect that, and those posts will be pushed to federated instances. This will almost certainly pollute the system with tons of stupid bullshit, and will basically necessitate defederating.

It’ll bring in a ton of, pardon the word, normies. Facebook became unsavory when your racist uncle started posting terrible memes, and his memes will be pushed to your Mastodon feed. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Your posts will be pushed to Meta servers, which means your racist uncle will start commenting on them. This will basically necessitate defederating.

Then yes there’s EEE danger. Hopefully the Mastodon developers will resist that. On the plus side, if Meta does try to invade Lemmy, I’m pretty confident the Lemmy developers won’t give them the time of day.

Very random side note. Apparently the Toddhead was originally supposed to be played by John Drew Barrymore, father of the actor John Blythe Barrymore (and also some actress named Drew Barrymore). Appropriate enough, since I spent a fair bit of this episode wondering where my pipe could be.

My personal feeling is that first contact retcons are signs of lazy writing. I feel the same way about the NX-01 being boarded by ferengi. Just come up with your own aliens, that’s part and parcel for Trek.

I’ve only seen two episodes of Strange New Worlds, basically in isolation. I saw one episode shitting on “Arena,” and one episode shitting on “Balance of Terror.”

By this I mean, “Arena” is about understanding that aliens get to have territorial sovereignty too, and that the gorn weren’t exactly wrong, even as they weren’t exactly right. Spock mentions that right and wrong will have to be sorted out by diplomats. Not exactly great news for the dead, but what can you do?

Meanwhile, the anti-Arena episode I happened to see of Strange New Worlds, everyone was champing at the bit to disintegrate some lizards.

I’m not even opposed to doing an anti-Arena episode, I mean, that’s “Siege of AR-558.” But if you’re gonna do that, you have to acknowledge what a tragedy that is.

I suppose I want to remark on why I’m contrasting the metrons, these strange Greek god creatures, with Daniels, the time cop from the 31st Century.

The metrons condemn both the humans and the gorn for their barbarism. But what do you do in the face of invaders? Or more broadly, what do you do under threat of violence? Do you meet it with more violence? Do you lay down and die?

The metrons appear to have a level of technological superiority that makes these questions irrelevant. And just… how precious.

“Just become gods” doesn’t answer the question. Starfleet and the Federation put a lot of work into making peace, and a lot of work into making war. As it goes in the real world. Hence, I can’t take the metrons any more seriously than I can take Daniels, and I don’t take Daniels seriously at all.

I sometimes get mistaken for the human pope, while you can clearly see that I’m the raccoon pope.

While there are technical solutions to that problem, realistically it’s only a problem if people start thinking they’re celebrities. Personally I prefer a platform that lets people dunk on celebrities.

Mr Spock, that man has unauthorized Lucky Charms!

I understand the fantasy of beating the shit out of obnoxious people. Not something I’d actually do, but if I were on an amusement park planet, well…

I’m sure you know, we’ll get to the weird stuff with “Hollow Pursuits” and “Fair Haven.”

As for McCoy, there’s a reason they call him Bones.

So uh… who put the house up for sale? Did the bank foreclose on the house?

Fun question, but it leads to other questions…

First, are vampires stopped at the property line, or only at the threshold of some appurtenance (e.g., a house)? After all, you’re asking about real estate, and real estate is primarily concerned with land, not buildings.

This sort of matters because, are we assuming that vampire law is coincident with human law? By this I mean, if vampires were to take control of the government and abolish real estate law, would they then be able to enter any property or building, anywhere, anytime?

If vampires do observe human law, then realistically, they probably wouldn’t be able to enter a leasehold without the tenant’s permission. The fundamental right of tenancy is peaceful enjoyment, and in fact tenancy is a legal property right, to access the property in question and do anything, without undue burden, allowed under the terms of the lease. It would be a violation of peaceful enjoyment for a landlord to allow vampires into the unit.

The right of inspection, by the way, is explicitly carved out in real estate law. The right to let vampires into the unit is, to my knowledge, not enumerated.

The other issue to consider is MBAs. Or at least the MBA way of thinking, that “caring about customers” actually means “leaving money on the table.” The relentless search for “business efficiency,” evaluated in pure accounting terms, can easily lead to destroying the core business due to a lack of understanding of how the core business shows up on a P&L statement.