williams_482 @ williams_482 @startrek.website

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51

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155

Joined

2 yr. ago

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The "Riker Maneuver" blooper absolutely killed me.

Did they ever open up Civ VI's code the way they did for IV and V? Prior to VII coming out, they hadn't left any way for modders to do the kind of deep dive total conversion mods which happened with the older games.

Harry never got promoted because the writers never figured out how to evolve his function on the show.

This one is a bit of a copout, because Kim's official role as the ship's operations officer would absolutely have been appropriate for a higher ranking officer. It's the same job Data held as a Lieutenant Commander on the Enterprise; if anything, the strange bit is that it was given to a green ensign in the first place.

Ultimately, the real explanation is a much sillier bit of bad writing. According to Garret Wang, quoted here:

Kim was probed, beaten, tortured and held the distinction of being the first Voyager crew member to die and come back to life. What more does a guy have to do to get promoted to Lieutenant for frak’s sake? To add further insult to injury, other crew members such as Tuvok (Russ) and Paris were being promoted, demoted and then re- promoted throughout the seven-year run of Voyager.

I’m not trying to be negative here; just saying it like it is. During the fourth season, I called writer/producer Brannon Braga and asked him why my character hadn’t received a promotion yet. His response? “Well, somebody’s gotta be the ensign.” Geez, thanks. Thanks for nothing.

Why it was important that "somebody’s gotta be the ensign" is a mystery to me.

I've been running steam on an unsupported OS (osx 10.13.6) for almost a year and a half now, and the only issue is a banner at the stop claiming that steam will stop working in 0 days.

I don't remember what if anything I did to make this happen, but I've had no trouble buying, downloading, or playing games in that time.

Lemmy does not currently have an equivalent to Modmail where a moderation team can all send or receive messages.

Brighter lights

I'll stand by the position that the Enterprise augment virus arc was an error, and the "explanation" for Klingon ridges is the same one you should use for the bridge of the Enterprise looking like it was cobbled together from plywood and plastic beads. This issue was best left to Worf's lampshade in DS9 Trials & Tribleations.

It's really interesting which visual differences humans will accept unthinkingly and which we will demand answers for. The Klingon ridges thing comes up constantly, but I have yet to see anyone earnestly ask why all the characters in Lower Decks have huge eyes and unnaturally uniform coloration, or why hand phaser beams in TOS go so much more slowly than later phasers and why everyone agrees to stay really still while they are being fired.

https://explosm.net/rcg/vzyafxanj

Reading the caption before seeing the image definitely weakened today's comics for me.

Captions of Far Side comics are often effectively punchlines, clarifying whatever weirdness was drawn in the comic. Reading the words and then seeing the image feels disjointed, and loses a lot of the "punch."

It's because citrus at high concentrations kills earthworms. Citrus in compost in normal quantities relative to other compostables seems to be fine, but you shouldn't be trying to compost a huge pile of just pulp and orange peels in your back yard.

As for why this worked here, I'm sure there are a whole lot of things that aren't earthworms living in a formerly rainforested spot in Costa Rica which can break that stuff down over 15 years.

Nomadic people don't just wander around aimlessly, and there are big differences in how desirable different territory is for nomadic hunter-gatherer humans. The principle is the same as with nomadic pastoralists: your group has a territory which can sustain them when hunted on/gathered from/grazed/etc over the course of the year, and your group will wander within that space in a deliberate pattern. If some other group decides to "just move on to" your group's territory, hunting the animals and foraging the plants that your group knows they are going to need to survive the year, that's an existential threat to you. And you can't "just move on" yourself without wandering into the territory of yet more groups whose territory borders yours, and who will react violently to your presence for the same reasons.

Given the choice between fleeing to who knows where and fighting who knows who for the privilege of moving, or staying right where you are and fighting for the land you know your group can survive on, you stay and fight.

Humans spread out across the earth as the losers of these conflicts (those who survived, anyway) fled until they stumbled on new-to-humans territory, often displacing or eradicating groups of more "primitive" hominids they found there. This process continues until just about everywhere which humans can reach and which can support human life has humans in it. But expanding populations, the occasional natural disaster, and normal human frustration that their territory sucks while their neighbors have it great (which was often true; again, not all land is the same to a nomadic hunter/gatherer) meant that these conflicts were constantly reignited.

There was organized violence deployed by groups of humans against other groups of humans long, long before anything we would recognize as warfare. Particularly brutal violence too, because the objective was not to conquer other people (something which only makes sense once agriculture is the dominant mode of sustinence), but to either drive off or exterminate a rival group so you can use their territory for yourself.

And we don't even need to talk about people here: we have records of chimpanzees fighting small scale wars of harassment and extermination against neighboring groups.

Pre-modern, pre-civilization, pre-aggriculture, pre-you-name-it human life was far more violent than what we deal with today.

Regarding the future uniforms, the same uniforms appear in most portrayals of "future starfleet" during the TNG era, such as DS9 The Visitor. I don't believe they are meant to indicate a connection between alternate futures beyond being the next step for Starfleet uniform designs (although the uniforms shown for a similar time period in Picard turn out to be different anyway).

Regarding your question more broadly, yes. And also no. Both, really.

I'm not sure Q recognizes or cares about the distinction between spinning up an entirely bespoke simulated reality for Picard to do his thing in, versus altering the past such that branching timelines are created and shuttling Picard's consciousness between them before ultimately closing them off. Or whatever other myriad mechanisms an omnipotent being would have for triggering the events portrayed. Nor is there any real way for us the viewer or Picard the participant to distinguish between those things. What is real, what clearly matters both to Picard and to Q, is that Picard did pass a test, and that Picard remembers those events in a way which will influence his future actions and relationships.

Sure. /u/williams_482

I still have a Reddit account and am willing to help people figure out Lemmy registration, but I do not moderate any active Reddit communities.

It's amazing how good 30+ year old Car Talk episodes are, as someone who had never listened while they were on the air and stumbled into the edited NPR rereleases a couple years back.

Civilization 4 was good at launch. Naturally it got even better over time.

Worth a mention that 4 is the most recent of these games released primary on physical hardware. That meant patching was a more difficult process so they actually had to hire a bunch of play testers to test stuff (and fix the problems they found). Contrast that to the approach of the most recent three games, which had their customers pay $70 for the privilege of being beta testers.

This is a shitty way to develop games. We should be mad about it because we deserve better.

It’s also the team anthem of Emglish football team West Ham United FC.

And a well-chosen anthem it is!

You have no idea if China did that. If they had, they would have taken great efforts to cover it up, and could very well have succeeded. It's a small wonder we know any of the terrible things they did, such as the genocide they are actively engaging in right now.

Sure! Here's my crude, MS-Paint-esque diagram:

1-6 are pretty obvious, just marked with numbers. 7 and 8 are circled with a line looping back to their number. 8 is just peeking around a corner, while 7 is only barely visible, with part of the top of his head peaking out from behind 5's neck.