data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • I second this. It’s basically just an extra TNG-era spinoff that fits really well after Voyager.

    The first season is a bit rough (though you’ve got to watch it at least once - important info for the rest of the show’s plot) but then the show starts doing its characters really well and has a sincerity to it you wouldn’t expect from its genre.

    When I first heard of the idea of an adult animated Star Trek comedy, I thought it was a terrible idea, but they executed it so darn well, and it’s my second favorite series behind DS9.


  • Watching Enterprise (currently on season 3), I’m not sure I can blame you, despite the plot getting interesting.

    Each 90s series has their fair share of “I want to put Rick Berman in my trunk and [redacted]” moments, but Enterprise takes it to a bit of a disgusting level.

    Like, with 7 in Voyager, you learn to tune out the unnecessary catsuit after a while and just enjoy an otherwise good character, but they take the sexualization of T’Pol’s character to such extremes that it interferes with her just being a person on the show.

    I’m watching ENT because I’m a sucker for canon, but I totally don’t blame you if you skip it.





  • Who the heck came up with “Fek’lhr”?! Like, it’s clearly it intended to be a Klingon word and not an Anglicization, but they failed miserably to actually follow the rules of the language.

    • “F” is not used for that sound in any major Klingon Romanization system (“f” corresponds to “ng” in xifan hol mapping); “v” is the closest thing.
    • “k” is also not used; that should be a “q”.
    • The apostrophe usually only comes after vowels, as it denotes a glottal stop.
    • “h” is not pronounced silently like it is here; it’s a weird consonant kind of like a soft g.

    It’s so bad it looks like Okrand had to fix it in one of his Klingon audio tapes - the official Klingon word is “veqlargh”, leaving the TNG onscreen versiob as a very weird Anglicization with a pointless apostrophe.




  • Yes and no. I think connotation is important here; “stable” means different things in different contexts even within computing, and they both denote different but important things - kind of like free of cost verses freedom.

    In the distro case, people need/want a distribution where they know a new version won’t come and break their config when they update at 2 AM and miss it in the changelog, and “stable” has been agreed upon as the term in that context. Of course, that can change, as all language does, but that’s just the current convention.

    Also, Debian tends to make sure software is not unusable before stable is shipped (the Nvidia thing is an anomaly I’ll explain below); while they sometimes fail, as you’ve hinted, I find it quite rare that it actually happens. Also, the “static” of Debian isn’t absolute; if something really has a breaking bug or a security vulnerability that affects overall system usability (basically something that can’t be fixed by installing a Flatpak), they will put out a fix, like with the Linux kernel or a web browser (via the security repo, included by default in all installs).

    Additionally, looking at this changelog, while the Nvidia situation is objectively a bit embarrassing, it looks like they were working on getting them updated, but just didn’t have much luck - I’m guessing a breaking change in the software that made it harder to package. Also, it’s in the non-free repo, which is on the back burner compared to the rest of the distro - something in the main repo will usually only be at most a few months behind at time of distro release.

    https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/nvidia-graphics-drivers


  • I mean, I think static is stable.

    I feel like stability in some contexts means more than just the software not crashing often (although that is the big part); it means being able to expect the behavior to stay the same until you’re ready to upgrade to the next release and confront the new behavior all at once, sort of like upgrading Windows XP to Windows 7.

    There’s certainly a place for rolling release - I use Debian Testing on my desktop - but I certainly appreciate being able to go a month without opening my laptop without getting a daunting notification like “There are 1578 updates available “ (on my Debian 12 Thinkpad, it’s usually only double digit, very minor updates).







  • I think this is why we need more animated Star Trek. While no recent animated Trek show has really managed to get past the equivalent total runtime to a ~5 season, 10 50-minute episode Trek series, I think animation could be a medium to get past some of the budgetary and labor limitations of a live action show in order to return to something closer to a TNG-style season. Not only that, but you could have the cast doing and interacting with things that would simply be impossible to do with any quality in a live-action show.

    Although truth be told, I think half my opinion is just fueled by sourness over the end of Lower Decks and Prodigy. I really think though that animation could be the medium for a serious mainline Star Trek series that isn’t (originally intended as) an excursion into a genre. Unfortunately, we sort of live in an animation dark age because of executive and general stupidity.


  • I enjoyed this episode much more than the previous one. It was quite fun. Sure, holodeck episodes aren’t the most original idea in Star Trek, but they’re almost always good, and I think this episode was worth the slight fudging of canon.

    Also, seeing the “Last Frontier” bits and how well they captured the TOS feel makes me think, “Why do they need to make modern Trek so fancy? Why can’t we have cheap-looking sets again?” Also, I think this is one of the better Paul Wesley performances in this show.

    I was relieved to find they didn’t go to far with the meta this episode. So many of the clips and dialogues of this episode I saw in the initial trailers made me worry this season was going to do a multiverse plot or venture a bit too far beyond the fourth wall.

    The only thing is the Spock/La’an romance is driving me nuts. Neither is emotionally ready, and Spock STILL has a fiance. It’s painful to watch it knowing that it’s almost certainly doomed. I don’t necessarily mind them acknowledging that they have feelings to each other, but I would have thought there would be a mutual desire to keep it platonic. In the end though, at least dancing isn’t Vulcan neuropressure - as I get further into Enterprise, I kind of wonder how Rick Berman has evaded the trunk of my car for so long.


  • I’ve never run an installfest, but I’ve been to my university’s Linux Users Group installfests, and here’s what they did:

    • Brought USBs with Fedora and OpenSUSE, which are their standard noob recommendations. Personally, I’ve used Debian for a long time, but I can get why Debian might not be something they want to recommend for noobs.
    • Be there to help them
    • If they’re a bit squeemish about it, have them install in a VM software like VirtualBox on Windows or something like UTM on macOS.

    Also, I’d recommend you bring extra USB peripherals in case the internal devices need a little bit of work; bring some extra mice, keyboards, and ethernet adapters. You hopefully won’t need any of them, but they’ll certainly make life easier if you do.

    As for time, I’d imagine doing the basic install and ironing out some (not all) of the kinks probably takes less than it takes for a group to stat D & D characters, if that’s a helpful comparison for you.