FriendOfDeSoto

I didn’t hate it when I saw it in theaters. Thought it was better than IX and VII but not VIII. It was a hit heavy on wanting to be star wars. The buggy ride, fighter ships, fights on gangways above huge chasms on the ship, the humorous banter while pew pew. Didn’t like the death of Data. Didn’t we learn anything from Spock? I liked the world building for the Roms and the Rems. I liked Hardy in it.

I don’t mind rewatching this movie. I feel it benefits from aging a bit like III doesn’t (but V does for me). And I’d argue it’s definitely better than PIC S2, if not the whole show.

The general vibe around this movie is bad because the box office take wasn’t great and then we learned all these little tidbits from BTS: Wesley (the boy?!) being cut out of the wedding scene or the director thinking Geordie was an alien. I think Frakes in the chair would have done a better job with it.

I appreciate the air of publicity this story brings.

You probably can’t trust your password manager if it’s compromised

In other headlines: water is surprisingly wet.

This is sign that Google is worried that a market of 500 million people could decide to move away from the US tech giants. Very worried, judging by this flimsy fear-driven argument. Good.

Would you agree though that there is a qualitative difference here? Platonically befriending a person and having an intimate, probably sexual relationship with a person are two different scenarios. And the question was about dating in particular. I’ll have a much easier time trying to humor a person I don’t share a bed with. People tend to not take one for the team to get them over their misogyny.

I suspect the lack of experiences of being with or even having a significant other is what drove the majority of these bastards to this proto-SA. Where they can be powerful grunt grunt and dress up in GI cosplay. There is this lordofthefliesification that takes place when all these frustrated men get together. Anyways, that’s why I suspect this is almost a trick question. How can you detect if you’re dating an ICE prick? You won’t have to. Chances are they are socially very awkward, behaviorally weird and therefore undatable. It’s this quality that set them on an authority loving, very likely misogynic, for various reasons chronically underfucked path in life where they thought hunting and terrorizing innocent people and shooting them if they can get away with it is a great career choice. It shows.

I think that is a slight misconception. The full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. So UK≠GB. Great Britain is just the three contiguous home nations (and possibly all the weird little islands I think). And then the British Isles include all the islands including all of Ireland. It is no wonder people are confused.

It’s a question of shorthand and relative distance to the country. In most European languages, the spelling equivalent of America refers to the country by default. The continent as an entity doesn’t get mentioned that much and when it does either context gets you there or a regional attribute like a cardinal direction or central. In my experience this applies to British English as well. “The United States” is often more cumbersome in translation and might require grammatical inflection when used in a local language - and confusingly could refer to Mexico as well. Funny enough though some languages adopted “USA” as another way to refer to the country, even if in translation this should get you a different letter combination.

Because of the dominance of the English in the United Kingdom, a lot of continental Europeans lazily refer to the UK as their version of “England.” Might be Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, a channel island or what have you. We gave up in trying to distinguish. People and how they call places are like that. Quiet understanding beats accuracy.

I think you overthought that one.

I sympathize with your point of view here. I feel like that ship has sailed though. Messaging is the preferred means. That ship is not coming back any more.

Email is not well protected unless you and everybody communicating with you is taking extras precautions. Signal is E2E encrypted, WhatsApp also but owned by Meta so barf, Telegram’s encryption status is complicated but probably better than plain email. There is a privacy advantage.

I treat instant messages that have the content of an email as such. I’ll reply in my own time. Just because I got it instantly doesn’t mean I need to act on it right away. I have some groups and contacts muted and have set quiet hours on my phone for evenings and nights. My advice is to look for ways to manage the stress you feel about this. That could mean going off the chat apps all together but I think you can also tweak settings and your behavior.

It happens. A very highly intelligent user will occasionally post something in a lot of communities and gets a rise out of downvotes, annoyed comments, and blocks. It’s annoying but that is often the nature of the internet. Report, block, and move on.

It’s only the very highly intelligent users who do this. So it doesn’t happen a lot.

Don’t engage with anybody you don’t know well on DMs. And if some other very highly intelligent person goes to the effort of sending you abuse via DM, take pride that you really got under their skin. Ignore it if you can.

I can kind of understand why people who aren’t used to bikers on their roads are lacking practice. And that becomes a problem when there are more people on bicycles. Another thing that makes this worse is that a significant fraction of bicyclists often disregard traffic code as well.

That being said, this article reads like a subtle way to shift responsibility away from drivers. It’s not their fault per se! It could be the laws. That is some bullshit. If you are unable to read the bicyclists next move unambiguously, keep a safe distance. Done.

One thing that what they call agenetic AI will undermine might be a lot of the subscription based biggies of the industry. I’m thinking about Adobe in particular. They charge a monthly premium for having user-friendly, low learning curve software that often has become industry standard. But there are open source alternatives for many of their big hitters (Inkscape, GIMP, etc.). If the agenetic model needs a tool to design a logo or expand an image - and you probably already pay for the privilege of using the agent model - this may prove to be a boon to the open source development of these intermediary software tools. Because the relative difficulty to use them as we hear from Adobe heads all the time won’t matter to the computer. And they are free (with a request to donate). So a chunk of interest and probably money and effort will move from those subscription services to open source alternatives and their development. This is just one positive effect so-called AI could have for some open source projects.

Sadly, at the same time we squander resources and kill polar bears.

a few years ago

Like 15+ years ago.

They performed horribly

I mean, this is all a matter of opinion. They promised stuff they couldn’t do - like everybody else. They gave us a revolving door of PMs - like the LDP, the party that won all the other elections, does as well. I think what broke their back was having to deal with a big earthquake, massive tsunami, and exploding nuclear reactors. The LDP can consider itself lucky they weren’t in charge then so the stink of failure to deal with an impossible crisis didn’t attach to them. They really aren’t the more capable politicians.

I think you can change the Klingon makeup as much as you want. Have one guy day Qapla and we’re golden. Recognizable enough. This Cardassian getup was too far from the one we’re used to - definitely what I was used to. Even the Fed president lady in Disco looked more Cardassian and she was only a quarter Cardassian. They went too far with the redesign. Which is sad because the choice of species wasn’t random.

I learned about her Cardassianess on this podcast. There is also a deeper meaning behind it because the Cardassians are great record keepers and that’s why she would be entrusted with keeping Jake’s unpublished book! A lovely touch that completely escaped me because I didn’t recognize her as a Cardassian until I heard Tawny talk about it with the Greatest Trek boys, subscribe today on the Maximum Fun network.

I was, initially, because I’m a fan, mad when it was revealed that Tawny Newsome’s character was supposed to be Dax. I later learned she was also supposed to be Cardassisn, which I totally missed as well. But I was mad in a “here we go again, new writers pulverize the canon of old, Trill synbionts can live a gazillion years now” way. But when I put the phone down before firing off a number of senseless hot take posts, I came to the conclusion that the Burn would have probably necessitated a system of hibernation or cryo storage for symbionts in need of a new host but unable to get back to Trill. In my head canon, the Dax symbiont was on ice for a couple of centuries.

I like the idea of the symbionts having an influence over their life span. And that Dax would cling to life no matter what for the off chance to meet The Sisko again makes sense to me too.

We’ll see which theory holds because I’m sure we’ll see Tawny in makeup again somehow.

No, it isn’t.

Maybe I’m out of the loop but can you point me towards some western liberals advocating for a stronger China?

Trouble with Tribbles! Worf just says they don’t discuss it with outsiders. ENT does more of the heavy lifting if you ask me.

Spoilers galore for PIC