I agree, and am not a big fan of Wesley being warp Mozart either, but I think the core difference between those and Discovery is that they were one offs. Plenty of single episodes can be shrugged off (*ahem* Threshold) but in Discovery the spore drive was in every episode, and The Burn was a persistent feature of the future timeline. The show spent seasons dealing with these things.

Totally fair. I honestly didn’t like the mycelial network because it broke the storytelling and the future more than the fact it was unbelievable. Teleportation is way too strong and led to too many situations with Discovery being the only ship “in range” on a show that was already way too action/emergency oriented. It needed episodes that made it feel less like the only ship in the universe.

Discovery could have redeemed a lot of the idea in my mind if they’d destroyed the network. It would have made it obvious why the tech was never pursued more than just spore drive damaging it. Or, you know, by not being a TOS prequel in the first place and taking place after all of the other stories, like it ended up doing anyway…

Love this fact. A major plot point revolving around characters knowing the spectrum of color an element produces when burned feels very old school Trek, quiet competence grounded in science.

Compare this to all the places that newer shows paid lip service to science being cool and then went back to teleporting around instantly with mushrooms or causing all of the dilithium in the galaxy to explode with emotions or whatever.

Haha, I was going to make that joke but then thought aluminum would probably be just as bad or worse than glass.

Obviously the ones on the Enterprise are made of some crazy space age transparent ceramic.

Wow, SNW over DS9? Hot take.

Picard and Discovery were both pretty awful.

I enjoyed the first season of Academy. It is a bit teen drama for some though, and it picks up in the far future Discovery timeline which means its basically a different continuity from the other series.

SNW is good in spurts, not nearly as bad as Discovery/Picard, but it does have some pretty clunky episodes as well as ones that are pretty great.

As others have said though, Lower Decks is easily the best new(ish) Trek show but it’s a love letter to 90s Trek so I wouldn’t watch it until you’re ready to get the myriad references.

There is an element of this, because the people using it for policy or writing headlines always disregard a ton of caveats and qualifications in any field (including actual hard science like physics), but most economics texts I’ve read hide a ton of complexity behind “rationality” that doesn’t exist and are implicitly describing the system that we have (capitalism) without acknowledging that we could do it any other way - which frees them from any ethical conflict with capital/exploitation and lets them pretend they are describing a natural system.

The truth is we are irrational both as individuals and as groups with outside influences, and the economy can function in whatever way we want it to function. In that lens economics quickly turns into psychology, ethics and philosophy. Which, to be clear, would be a useful thing to study in any economic system (all of which have incentives and pitfalls), but it is not nearly as objective or concrete as it currently pretends as it fiddles with interest rates while billionaires run roughshod over our entire society.

It’s almost like we’d have no problem with it if everyone in our society didn’t need to work to survive and it didn’t accelerate the planet becoming unlivable while making the worst people alive even more money.

Weird.

Economics is soft science pretending like it is describing fundamental laws of the universe.

Economists don’t know shit, they are describing how the economy could work in certain conditions in a vacuum and sometimes politicians/business people buy into the fantasy to backup doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place.

Oh shit, it’s religion again.

I don’t think it’s directly related to ABV/proof, but it can definitely taste that way. “Drier” drinks tend to not mask the alcohol as much, IMO. For example, the main difference between sweet and dry vermouth is how much sugar is in them, but they tend to be basically the same ABV.

For booze, dry is the opposite of sweet.

Oh shit the third Semiosis came out? Loved the first couple, how did I miss that?

clunky and slow interface of email that for some reason we continue using 30 years later

Email is actually great, it’s the original fediverse - anyone can start a server and interoperate with everyone else. With a decent client it doesn’t need to be clunky either, although with 90% of people stuck in webmail I can understand why people think it sucks.

“Two movies we cite as comps for what we’re hoping to do are Training Day and Crimson Tide,” Goldstein tells Inverse.

Hmm, I like both of those movies but way different vibes. Crimson Tide might as well already be a Trek script, but Training Day? Freshly minted Captain versus effective but corrupt badmiral perhaps? XO and captain maybe?

My hopes this will be made are pretty low, but there could be some good Trek here. Especially if they actually made a movie that wasn’t a cameo fest (it does say all new characters).

I’m not sure I agree this is an awful location if you’re going to make a big studio campus. It’s not in Austin atm but it will be eventually (it’s currently surrounded) and 290/183 are useful veins. You say “outside Manor” like it’s also not ~10 miles from the capitol and downtown. In LA terms that’s basically nothing.

That said, as an eastsider, yeah fuck the billionaires generally and the Ellisons specifically.

Trans? More power to you.

CIA? Go fuck yourself.

If you’ve read all the OG Dune content, I say go for it. They aren’t at the same level, but they’re… Fine. Get it from the library or wherever and try it. Go in with low expectations and possibly get pleasantly surprised, or never pick them up again.

Turns out I liked the game only because of what I thought the game could be instead of what it actually was.

I never played Star Citizen, but this is kinda where I ended up with No Man’s Sky. I played it at launch and again earlier this year and there’s definitely some fun to be had but nothing fits together right, or feels fully realized. NMS lost a coherent vision of the game at some point and eventually it just made me itch to play better games that were more focused.

3 all day, every day. I can no longer sit normally, I can only lounge.