Semisimian

Have you watched any other Trek besides those two? If not, you’ll probably enjoy Discovery.

I tried to get into Discovery when it first aired, coming from being steeped in the TNG era shows. It was not the Trek I was used to and I felt it didn’t show reverence for the franchise. Now that Academy is out, though, I’m planning to rewatch and finish Discovery.

Woo-oooo-oo-ould.

Lost. The first episode is a master-class in both “show and don’t tell” and setting up “mystery boxes.” It was downhill from there.

Flip it and you got me.

They can rehash the Death Star plot four times, but they can’t bring back the Darksaber. I feel taken advantage of.

If they listened to the fans, everything would be Andor-level writing, Mandalorian-level characters with Clone Wars-level story and world-building.

Just do that.

8 finished episodes sitting in the can was really odd for the time. I would expect that production would be about 4 finished episodes ahead for a weekly show, and that is generous. But 8? I wonder if they finished the episodes after cancelation back then or if they did it recently.

It doesn’t look like they had a control group of people doing the strength training without any protein supplement. I would assume that group would also perform the same.

Hell arrived a while ago and it is summer on Lake Myvatn, or Midge Lake. You can’t breathe without inhaling insects, so you have to wear a mask just in case a cloud of those things happen your way.

From the article: “Is it Ed Gein who was abused and left in isolation and suffering from undiagnosed mental illness and…that manifested in some pretty horrendous ways? Or was the monster the legion of filmmakers that took inspiration from his life and sensationalized it to make entertainment and darken the American psyche in the process?”

Especially from a tech critic.

This episode answers a very important question for me: how the heck can some alien being sneak onto a Starfleet ship? The answer: abject incompetence.

NX-01 aside, we see that by the time of the Enterprise, there are cameras everywhere! And, they are set to start recording on all channels during a Red alert. I always wondered with episodes all the way back to TOS The Man Trap, how could someone not have some sort of sensor or visual record of what happened on the ship? Vash can seemingly go anywhere she wants to pilfer relics. The Kazon can waltz around Voyager without security being hip to their game.

I feel like the video is there, just no one is watching.

Okay, now defend us from the foreign censorship that Israeli lobbyists baked into our state constitutions. https://www.newsweek.com/pro-palestinian-protest-states-colleges-illegal-bds-1895292

Wasn’t the genome sequencing in 2010 to determine just how the hell he wasn’t suffering from his epic substance abuse? So that we could get some of that Ozzy sauce and party til we drop, of course. Did Keith Richards ever do the same?

The Orville is great!

She just talked with Adam on the Factually podcast this past week, FYI.

There’s no wrong time to cancel Paramount+. Even when they had all the Trek content, the UI was dog shit so you could barely play what you wanted to watch anyway. And now that they’ve made the decision to split their IP, ugh.

I watched the CBS morning show for years. Amongst the morning news, I felt it was the best programming: had long-form investigative reporting, balanced viewpoints, etc. Then they added a shopping segment. Okay, gotta pay the bills. Then they started doing more pop-culture bits, even prompting Nora to ask, in the middle of her prompter read, “is this news?” Then they started to carve out time for at least 1 segment a week for Moriarty to interview a billionaire about their passion projects. And so on. The last straw for me was normalizing Trump’s shtick a second time.

Now the only news I watch is the Weather Channel.

I’ll hang on to 10 as long as they’ll let me, but I am never going to 11. Then it’ll be a distro for dis bro.

Sorry.

Avalon on the island of Catalina. It’s the one and only town on the island and there isn’t really anywhere else to go. People use golf carts to get around. There are no gas stations on the island, so if you do have a car, you have to import your own fuel or use the marina.

Miniscule car infrastructure + laws limiting the number of cars on the island = no car culture. Bam.

From the article: “There’s something about the freedom of mobility and there’s something very American about it, and so, I also think that there’s a lot of people around the world that think about American cars, and they think about American road trips, and we want to invite the rest of the world. They’re going to come for FIFA’s club games, or they’re going to come for the World Cup, or they’re going to come for the Olympics, come and see sporting events, but then you can also take a week or 10 days with my family to travel around this great country. Stop at our great restaurants. Stay in our wonderful motels or hotels. Gas up your car with great American energy.”

THIS is actual car-brain thinking. I see a lot of memes in fuck cars attacking individuals and the choices they are forced to make, but this article illustrates issues that we have to fight. It’s got all the delusion you expect from a government source written by car companies: tying car ownership to freedom, oddly thinking that non-americans think about our car culture as a positive experience, and that wonderfully tone-deaf tagline.

Your city likely has some form of a transportation committee. Join it. Go to the meetings. The switch to Zoom has made it even easier to do so. My experience with our local zoning committee has reinforced that you have to fight like hell, even with your own neighbors, to do simple things like decrease parking requirements. Car-brain is real and it’s propped up by decades of propaganda and policy.