Some drumhead court-martial, lifelong prison sentence, violently separating a mother from her child and some goons beating up a prisoner

The key point here is that it is portrayed as horrible. Ake resigned in protest and only came back for the opportunity to make amends. The scene is there to show how far the Federation has fallen, in order to set up the task of rebuilding it.

Starfleet Academy has a justification for how shitty the world is, and IMHO it’s approaching it correctly. There was a galactic disaster that almost completely destroyed the federation, so SFA is literally post-apocalyptic. But it’s using that setting to tell a hopeful and positive story.

The core message of the show is that you can rebuild a just society even after it’s gone so far down the shitter. You can choose to do better, to be better. This is culturally relevant.

The number in e.g. “Category 5” hurricane actually refers to the Kinsey scale.

Same with Italian food. Tomatoes were only introduced to Europe in the 16th century.

Leonardo da Vinci lived his whole life never knowing what a tomato was.

I don’t think anyone called those “web apps” though. I sure didn’t.

As I recall, the phrase didn’t enter common usage until the advent of AJAX, which allowed for dynamically loading data without loading or re-loading a whole page. Early webmail sites simply loaded a new page every time you clicked a link. They didn’t even need JavaScript.

I am curious if they are going to reveal anything about Gideon S. Turner. I can’t entirely tell if Caleb is making stuff up and Tarima is playing along or if Gideon S. Turner has a very strange history.

I was confused by this. It came hot on the heels of a truly excessive number of historical name-drops and references, so I was like “Turner? Was he on…Enterprise? DS9? Did they mean Tucker? What’d I miss?”

It was a funny bit but it didn’t really land for me because of that.

Yeah. I’ve been using Macs since System 6 and while I’ve often disagreed with Apple’s direction, this is the first one that feels downright incompetent, in much the same way as Microsoft’s Vista and Windows 8 designs were.

There’s no consistency between how things look and how they behave. There is useless clutter everywhere. Legibility of text is an afterthought. It’s like they forgot the distinction between graphic design and UI design.

But it looks pretty at a glance, so…great…

Unrelated, but can you tell me how you set up your Mac OS 8 Platinum theme?

This is a perfectly reasonable take. This part pretty much sums up my thoughts:

Still, it’s utterly ambiguous here where Vincke is drawing the line between “critical” and “hurtful” or “personal”. And in any case, it can be appropriate to direct some outright vitriol at the people making a game, inasmuch as art expresses the values of its creators. You don’t get a pass for making poison just because you poured your heart into it. Sometimes, utter scorn is justifiable. If Vincke is serious about this conversation, I would encourage him to actually cite some reviews, games and game developers and discuss the finer workings.

I don’t expect Vincke to call out any specific writers, but unless he does, I really have no way to tell what, specifically, he’s trying to argue against. He’s opening himself up to being misinterpreted, and a lot of people won’t even realize they’re doing it. His little rant is like a horoscope reading — so vague as to let you project your own ideas onto it and pretend they came from somewhere else.

But really, I have no idea what he’s talking about. Perhaps I just don’t read those types of publications, but I can’t recall the last time I read a professional video game review (as opposed to, say, Steam user reviews or randos on Reddit) that personally attacked creators. If anything, most professional reviews err heavily on the side of positivity to avoid angering fans and potential advertisers. The article touches on that, too:

I’ve received plenty of death threats for scoring things 8/10 or lower, and in a media sphere that depends on traffic volume, there is continual ambient goading to approve of, or at least acknowledge games that already have some kind of mass following.

Death threats. For an 8/10 rating. Completely insane, but sadly not surprising.

On the one hand, sure, it would give the administration an “excuse” to escalate still further.

On the other hand, who are we kidding? They’re not going to stop escalating no matter what. There’s no point in trying to appease fascists. They’ll take whatever excuse, no matter how flimsy, whenever they feel like it regardless. That’s how we got here.

Do they even say what processor it has? All I see is “4-nanometer, 5G IoT SoC platform from MediaTek” which means nothing to me.

Sounds interesting. What kind of data can it reliably ingest with “attach”? If I dropped, say, the entire Python docs in there, would it be able to get anything out of that? Or does it need to be minimalistic plain-text statements? How is it actually performing retrieval?

I’ve yet to see a major media outlet call it what it is.

It’s sheer cowardice at this point. The president himself has called it war.

Chicago. LA. Minneapolis. And more, but those are currently the most egregious.

A poly group (also known as a polycule) is a network of polyamorous people’s relationships. Polyamory, in case you’re unaware, is the practice of having multiple romantic or sexual partners at the same time, in contrast to monogamy.

If you were polyamorous and wanted to graph out your relationships, you could do it a few different ways. For example:

• Just you and your partners. If any of your partners are also in relationships with each other, you’d draw lines between them as well.

• Extend an extra level and include all of your partners’ partners (known as metamours), again connecting any pair on the graph who are partners.

• Extend that further and include all of your partners’ partners’ partners (no specific term for this as far as I know). This would likely include people you don’t personally know, and it would be difficult to build a complete graph of all their relationships.

Etc.

Unga bunga.

Unless you have your router specifically configured to isolate wi-fi, it shouldn’t matter. Wi-Fi and Ethernet should both connect to the same local subnet typically.

Honestly, I would like to see more of Queen Jurati and her Borg Cooperative. It was a cool idea that, like all the cool ideas in Picard, was poorly developed and overshadowed by nonsense.

I see this as kind of like the “loudness war” in radio.

It’s not a conspiracy or anything, it’s just the networks and producers adapting (correctly) to how people actually watch/listen to stuff.

Audiophiles can complain all they want about low dynamic range, but if you’re listening to radio in a noisy environment (like a car), high dynamic range is actually fucking awful.

Similarly, there’s nothing inherently wrong with watching a show when you can’t give it your full attention. Sometimes I watch TV while I’m doing chores, or even during my workday. You know what’s great for that? Those stupid competition shows where they narrate everything on screen, and have five instant replays plus recaps after ad breaks. I never feel like I’m missing anything even if I ignore 80% of the show. I’d never sit down and really watch this stuff though. My brain would rot. It’s just a step above white noise.

Let’s not pretend we understand the mechanics of consciousness. If you can prove what is required for consciousness, there’s at least a Nobel prize in it for you.

SNW Pike is not a man’s man or a lady’s man. He’s just a human’s human.