Don't you mean that that you like PADDs with 3.7% deeper bevels?
Exactly. Luckily, back in high school, my IB History class spent a good couple months just learning about authoritarian rulers and their tactics.
I especially like pulling out Pinochet because he’s a clear and relatively recent example of right wing authoritarianism, manipulation of existing religious structures, and US government support of authoritarian regimes that help contextualize its trend towards authoritarianism.
I think the biggest issue with ENT is probably the sexualization of T’Pol, the culmination of a nasty habit in Berman Trek.
I could tune out 7’s catsuit because she was otherwise well-written and the good plotlines outnumbered the bad, but it feels like at least 75% of all T’Pol stories were of the horny Berman type, to the detriment of her character.
s/MP3s/FLACs/, but otherwise, I agree.
Drive space isn’t scarce these days, so I think keeping a lossless copy somewhere is good, if just to compress the audio for a device with less storage.
2 things:
At least in the objective legal sense, it very much is in the eyes of the YouTube terms of service and the law of most jurisdictions with strong copyright protections.
There is a legal distinction between streaming on YouTube (normal TOS-compliant use) and downloading the video as a whole through a 3rd party tool (circumvention of copyright protection, and YouTube gets no ad revenue with the download), which is usage outside the TOS.
Now, I don’t really give a darn about following US* copyright law for a megacorporation’s sake^1^ and have gone ahead and downloaded from YouTube, but it’s still piracy in the legal sense. This is not intended as a criticism of your actions, just a legal nitpick.
*Obviously, not everyone here is American (good riddance); this is just my personal experience. 1: Especially considering Google’s breaking it all the time with their ML models in my opinion.
I second this, but with a few things I wish I would have known:
Of course, there's a whole other ethics of piracy rant I have, but I'd rather not pull it out right now. The main time I used SoulSeek was to download a rip of a rare TMBG CD (like, not a single copy on Discogs and only 1 on eBay).
Yes, but these are my two thoughts:
*: if the media isn't easily legally accessible, if it's stuck under a bad corporation, and fair use like making an FMV. I think it's much more ethical to pirate film and television, as if you pay for a film (whether a subscription or a Blu-Ray), it's often just going to go to some ultra-rick executive who had nothing to do with the talented people who worked on the film. Also, DRM makes streaming an inferior experience to just opening a video file. Music is a completely different game, especially with the proliferation of indie labels and self-publishing.
1: Of course, if the artist is some multi-millionaire or billionaire artist, then go ahead.
Honestly, while I still use Apple Music for some things (I don't like Apple, but I'm unfortunately stuck on it right now), I'm a big fan of building up a collection of digital media files bought either directly from artists or ripped from the CD collection I'm building. I usually go for FLAC, though less for its compression and more for its superior metadata support compared to WAVs.
For discovering new music, Bandcamp allows you to check out some songs; otherwise, check it out on YouTube or something and buy it directly from the artist later.
Like others have said, Bandcamp might not have everyone, but they do have a lot of indie artists and even some bigger ones. Some artists that don't have everything on Bandcamp might have their own store you can buy from.
It for a fact uses CEF: https://www.spotify.com/us/opensource/
Chromium Embedded Framework literally describes itself as follows on its Git repos: "Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). A simple framework for embedding Chromium-based browsers in other applications."
The Spotify "app" is mostly just web app code running on top of a single page Chromium instance, meaning for the most part, it isn't truly native.
While we're at it, let's just pull in Chris Pine (multiverse crap) and William Shatner (Nexus crap) and have one of those nutty SNW episodes that sounds like a horrible idea but is surprisingly one of the better episodes that season:
I'm usually not one to beat a dead ~~Reman~~ ~~horse~~ being, but I had to point this one out.
As it turns out, besides also playing background characters in every episode Quimp appeared in, Tom Kenny also played Mariner's ex Malvus in "An Embarrassment of Dooplers", D'Onni in "We'll Always Have Tom Paris", the Ferengi antagonists of "Mugato Gumato", and several background characters in each of those episodes.
In LD S3 E8 "Crisis Point: Paradoxus", the holographic version of Dr. T'Ana was able to recognize they were in late 20th century Earth, seemingly by a single sniff.
I am assuming this is a reflection of T'Ana's actually ability rather than mere cinematic indulgence, for two reasons:
Anyhow, it makes me wonder if Starfleet Academy has some sort of sensory training courses for species with certain stronger senses. For instance, T'Ana might have had the option to take a course working with smell samples that they are likely to encounter in their Starfleet Career with other species that have enhanced senses.
In Prodigy, Nova Squadron has been revived by the mid-2380s.
This feels like a very terrible idea for a multitude of reasons. Besides the initial incident, I would think Starfleet would hesitate against elite cadet groups even further after both the attempted Red Squad coup and the USS Valiant incident.
Also, I have two takeaways from the LD Nova Fleet incident. One, Locarno feeling the need to “revive” Nova Squadron suggests that it didn’t still exist in 2381, meaning the revival must have been relatively close to 2384. Second, I feel like the coming back of a former “elite” cadet to bite them would further make Starfleet wary of establishing an elite cadet group again.
Overall, it just seems every time the Academy does this, they just produce a group of arrogant cadets very susceptible to manipulation and/or recklessness. Even 2384 squadron seems this way - we see their elitist attitude towards the former Protostar crew matching that of Red Squad and such.
So why did they do it again?
Perhaps Nova Squadron is a long-held academy tradition, and despite the initial fallout of the 2368 incident, that’s overshadowed by its long history of outstanding cadets, a legacy the academy didn’t want to suddenly erase.
Still, I feel like they could have turned Nova Squadron into an honors society that recognizes students without the special treatment rather than resurrect what seems to be the original format.
Honestly, I hope (big emphasis on hope) the new SFA show elaborates on this and overall fleshes out the Academy as an institution, at least before, as I predict will happen, our “cadets” will be starship officers in all but name by the end of the season and will barely get a proper academy experience.
I kind of wish we had an academy show either early 24th century (lost era Monster Maroon) or a chill (post-PIC) 25th or 26th century setting that just followed a normal group of cadets without weird stuff like an early commissioning.
Edit: When I say "Center Right" I also mean relative to Ferengi society.
A small addition to my post, Gender and Sexual Orientation in FERENGI society from a few months back.
I caught this frame in the background of LD S4 E6 Parth's Ferengi Heart Place, depicting an unclothed Ferengi woman.
This provides an interesting insight into the Ferengi social/political landscape of the Nagus Rom era. It suggests a center right that is fine with women traveling in public to some extent (maybe with limits, like it can only be with husband or father or out of necessity), but not them being clothed. This doesn't seem to be that common, as most Ferengi women we see in this episode (including on the television in Boimler's apartment) are clothed, but it seems to be a position that exists.
Honestly, I'd be interested in a novel (perhaps written from the perspective of an autobiography) or something about how Nagus Rom and Leeta survived leading Ferenginar the first few years and adjusted to such a different role from his engineering days. We could learn a lot about the Ferengi political system.
cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/21461844
From LD S4 E4 "Something Borrowed, Something Green".
In response to a meme I saw comparing Nog and Wesley.
I've uploaded the source SVG: https://gitlab.com/dexcube/random-assets/-/raw/main/wesley_meme.svg
From LD S4 E4 "Something Borrowed, Something Green".
In response to a meme I saw comparing Nog and Wesley.
I've uploaded the source SVG: https://gitlab.com/dexcube/random-assets/-/raw/main/wesley_meme.svg
In the pilot, they depict Mojave, California as being very terraformed from a desert to a lush parkland.
However, I find this a bit antiquated... this seems to be very much rooted in an atomic age scientific idealism that thought of how we could make the world work for us and bring it to more western standards of natural beauty.
I think this is in conflict with the TNG solar punk aesthetic and the general respect for nature implied by the Prime Directive - notice how there's no desert bushes in sight as if they wiped them out. This seems to be insane damage to the ecosystem.
I wonder if they'll ever revisit Mojavo on-screen, and whether they'll retcon this so that Mojave is a gorgeous desert town where they solved the problems of drought and extreme heat plaguing the southwestern US while working in tandem with and even boosting the local wildlife, rather than just razing everything and plastering grass and non-native trees over it.
I'd bet we probably only have 3 seasons for it to happen, considering that 5 seasons has tended to be the length of most recent Trek shows (except poor old Prodigy). The only thing giving me hope is that SNW seems to be a decently successful series.
The 2023 IDW Star Trek Annual's plot was basically all the holodeck programs on the USS Theseus read "Photons Be Free". Luckily, Tom Paris happened to be there and understood what the phrase meant, and Captain Sisko dropped off holographic Spock, Janeway, Stamets, HMS Enterprise Picard and Riker, Sato, etcetera with their holographic equipment to settle on a planet.