I learned this when I was buying beer, walked into a free-standing display, and somehow exploded one of the cans I was carrying. The cashier put the remaining three in a box to clean up and sell later.

There's not even a bathroom in that place. Given the external size of the station, they should have just put a couple inaccessible doors somewhere in there (maybe next to the bar and in the junk corridor) and it would be fine.

They're probably meant to live in one of the inaccessible parts of the big factory building. There's even a whole tower on there. Since it's a company town this would make perfect dystopian sense.

One thing that would have helped immersion in all the cities (and the Den) would have been to schedule the citizens and minor named NPCs to take an elevator to an inaccesible floor with an empty room for a few hours. If they could build all the space for that would be cool, but especially for the unnamed NPCs it might be impractical.

Yeah, I think we mostly liked that place for the donuts before those got worse too. Now they're even worse than that. Any random grocery store with a bakery makes better donuts that Tim's.

Meanwhile McDonald's makes pretty tasty generic dark roast, and they sell it dirt cheap.

McDonald's has Tim Hortons' old supplier. They don't have the same blend, and probably not exactly the same procedure for brewing it. The McDonald's coffee is much better than Tim's ever was since at least ~2000 when I first tried it.

Yeah, I've spent hundreds of hours in Daggerfall and never got far with the story, but I did figure out how to fly in the void outside the dungeons and shoot the really hard monsters with arrows! Daggerfall is so ridiculously big it probably has hundreds of towns that have only ever been visited by one obsessive kid who made a point to click on them all.

adopting The Forge for rendering and animation

Interesting. Your comment is the first mention I've seen of that. Their page on global illumination is interesting. On the one hand, their little trailer shows the system displaying more detail than Starfield does, but on the other hand in their last screenshot they failed to build the lighting the same way as the reference photo.

TNG had some movies (bald guy on the poster) and they were written by people who didn’t like the show for people who didn’t watch the show. You have to turn your brain off, but they’re well-directed.

LOL I'm stealing this to use as my IRL description of those films. I wish it wasn't true, but it is.

It looks like they also made it look Roman as a reference to Bread and Circuses.

The arrangement of the music in the restaurant felt more TMP than TNG.

Yeah, it translates them so closely that phasers act like depth charges and there's one part where both crews are trying to be quiet for some reason. It's a a brilliant episode, but that part was really jarring on my last rewatch with a friend.

There was some issue with the achievements for those of us who played the early launch. I'm playing the Steam version, but it thinks I never went to space or joined Constellation despite me having them for things like quests and killing 300 creatures.

NPCs appear to operate according to the local time of the cell they're in. So they sleep on UT in your ship in space and Jemison time (local hour == 125 UT minutes) in the Lodge. The game doesn't appear to have any issue with this whatsoever.

Vendors, and many quest-related NPCs never seem to sleep or eat. It looks like some of this was done to decrease player frustration. Now we never have to wait for shops to open and we never have to worry if we arrived to confront a corporate exec while they're out or sleeping. It simplifies the work the designers have to do too. They could have designed around this, but might have considered it a low priority to have night-shift workers or different kiosk rules.

Meanwhile the members of Constellation use their bedrooms (except Cora who seems to wander the basement at night), and that guy living on disability in Cydonia keeps going to back to bed without asking me for the next book. Muria from the GalBank lobby in New Atlantis likes to go sit at the outdoor TerraBrew all night and have a non-conversation with the diplomat lady.

The GotY version of Morrowind feels less buggy than the original release. For example, some older PC versions frequently crashed because of some pointer error in the UI. The game detected this and created crash-recovery savegames like what MS Office does for your documents.

Alien. It was well made and it aged well. I'm a sucker for scary, atmospheric films.

Because there aren't a lot of Kelseys on TV in the USA. Same reason I get a weird vibe about characters like Liam Shaw. (After the events of PIC season 3 I still think he's punchable.) ... Firefox doesn't think punchable is a word. Firefox is wrong.

My oldest niece is 9. Last year I said something about Star Trek and she said, "Star Trek is awful." I really need to ask what trek she's seen and why she thinks it's awful. She doesn't seem to be a sci-fi fan, but that's the only comment I've ever heard about Star Trek from someone her age. I'm very curious now.

This seems more apparent with Star Wars. As a child of the 80s I always preferred the original trilogy, but kids who grew up ~10 years after me seem to prefer the prequels. Do even younger kids prefer the new trilogy that most of us seem to dislike? I need to ask some of them.

Anyway, Prodigy is pretty great. I'm disappointed more people didn't give it a chance to start with. I'll readily admit I'm not a fan of Discovery and Picard, but I watched them all the way through, hoping for improvement, and at least have a good idea why I don't like them. I think it's worth trying anything that tries to be Star Trek.

If my friend and I have time at the same time this week we need to catch up on "Foundation" and "What We Do in the Shadows."

Our previous thursday sci-fi binges have included rewatches of TOS and Red Dwarf.

CBS killed it, but some (all?) of them are working with OTOY and the Roddenberry Archive now. They had a site up a few months ago where you could walk around the bridge of nearly every iteration of every Enterprise. There were about 30 of them, including speculative designs for some early concepts for the Enterprise.

They haven't said anything about making a full-scale Ent-D yet, but several of their videos on YouTube show glimpses of a full-scale 1701 refit.

Yeah, the part that puzzled Geordi was the transporter was able to hold a pattern for nearly 80 years. SNW shows M'Benga had to pull his daughter out periodically to keep her pattern from degrading.