To be fair, it’s a BB gun, which are tiny metal pellets that, while possibly painful, usually aren’t super lethal and are not a useful instrument in a “good ol’ traditional” American mass shooting. They’re more often used on tin cans than flesh. A few sociopathic kids might use them to torture birds, though.
Maybe they contribute to our dangerous gun culture by getting kids involved early, but getting an older kid a BB gun isn’t as weird or comically American as it sounds in and of itself.
Eh. I mean Christmas Story’s kind of fun, but fair warning, it has a scene that’s rather racist to Chinese people.
The main thing that personally drives me nuts about DRM is as a Linux user, many streaming services will only give you 480p or even 360p video even though you're paying for more. With that bullcrap, combined with buggy streaming services, the high seas is sometimes literally a better experience than streaming. Then the hippy moral stuff gets involved:
Although of course, if I can buy it used on Blu-Ray at a local business (Zia and Bookmans are probably the two best places to do it in my area), I'll do that instead, and just rip the Blu-Rays; it funds places I like while still being (more) legal (than just straight up pirating).
(Granted, I'm a bit of a hypocrite, as I don't pirate that much. I'm still on Paramount+ for now because my parents still pay for it, but we're so focused on Star Trek that my idea to just get the Blu-Rays and DVDs is tempting them to get off.)
I mean, that's true, but that doesn't mean that's why Debian's doing it.
If they were solving just that, then they would have just pushed for something like a reproducible tarball where you can point to a commit, branch, tag, etcetera from which that tarball can be reproduced and not bother migrating their package format.
Debian has a serious ease-of-packaging issue that I've witnessed first-hand, and I think they've made it clear that it's moreso the ease factor they're focused on that the security factor.
Not really. If xz were the issue, Debian would have just switched to a different tarball format like lz4.
This is more about Debian packaging conventions being very archaic and requiring a lot of futzing with upstream tarballs and patches.
I'm usually not big on ebooks, as I tend to read in the evening and haven't had a good e-reader for a long time, and I just don't enjoy blue light at night.
However, I got a bunch of Star Trek comic eBooks in a Humble Bundle recently, and I need a good way to read those; I'm thinking I'll pick up one of the Kobo Colors. I've seen their limitations, and while it's enough to annoy a lot of comic readers, I'm personally fine so long as I can distinguish the division colors and think it would still be a good purchase for my use case. It might also be nice for my many Star Trek Adventures RPG PDFs; it'd be one less window on my laptop when I (occasionally) GM.
I’ve also been jumping into the novelverse recently; my grandfather had a friend who was trying to offload his late wife’s Trek collection, and I ended up the recipient.
I started with the second Department of Temporal Investigations book, then used this chart to decide where to properly begin. Even though I heard some grievances about it, I chose the DS9: Avatar books; it all made fun enough reading for before bed.
Unfortunately, my collection has a bunch of weird gaps, so now that I’ve finished those, I have to look for the next book, Section 31: Abyss (Little relation to the now-infamous film), at a used book store in my area.
“Is this really necessary? The wormhole aliens already put me through this kind of crap.”
I wouldn’t take any chances either… I’d put the bullet through his heart before he causes any more suffering for anyone else, personal consequences be darned.
Weird. Guess it’s a crazy fluke.
Try e-mailing them. I don’t know about that specific mirror, but I use the University of Arizona mirror, and when issues came up, they got back to me pretty quick about what was going on.
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
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.
I have a feeling “Severance” has a different connotation with Klingons.
I was especially trying to imitate Prodigy's styling of him.
I don't know that it looks like Jellico, but it does look like an experienced officer circa 2381.
The stardates are just there to fill in the document - I got them from event years on Memory Beta and then just put a random date into the stardate calculator.
I was looking at references of both TNG and Prodigy Jellico to try to make an LD-style Jellico, when I found how they styled his face varied a lot between episodes - I count about 4 significant variants.
For reference, here is TNG Jellico:
This was his first Prodigy appearance in S1 E15 Masquerade:
Definitely a bit yikes, but I also slightly dig the "old man who will bite your hand off if you get within one mile of him" look.
They totally changed his face for his second appearance 4 episodes later, in S1 E19 Supernova Pt 1:
I like this look - it feels very Clone Wars. However, I can see why they might have gotten right of it - it makes it difficult for the face to show anything but aggression.
They dialed back the clone wars for his next appearance in S2 E5 Observer's Paradox:
I think it was also largely the same in S2 E9 The Devourer of All Things Pt. 1:
They might have enlarged the eyes a bit, but I think the other differences are mostly because of perspective differences and facial expressions.
The final, and longest-lived Jellico variant first appears in S2 E14 Cracked Mirror:
This model leans on the more realistic side. This one is probably the most recognizable as Jellico from TNG. It also allows much more expressiveness (not just an aggressive scowl), as seen in these images from E15, E16 (It looks like a different variant, but if you go a bit before, it's actually the same one), and E20:
Overall, I think my favorite Jellico is probably S1 E19, but I can see why they had to switch.
Still, I wonder why it took so long for them to make up their mind on the face and why they didn't get it right the first time.
cross-posted from: https://startrek.website/post/19356345
I finally got around to watching some Discovery (though I'm only through the first few episodes of season 4). My thoughts:
- First three are a moderately enjoyable sci-fi drama
- I have to admit, season 3 just presented enough interesting ideas and mystery I was able to ignore most of its flaws
- I've really started to notice death by subplots, though. It feels like they try to do 4 different plots in an episode, 2 which they do okay and 2 which are way weaker than they should be. I would have rather they done 2 subplots really well.
- I felt season 4's conflict was really contrived. The plot could have almost written itself with what happened in season 3. Osyra died and we don't even talk about the aftermath in the Chain - the slavery isn't just going to magically disappear, and there's sure to be a power struggle. Also, killing Book's family was kind of idiotic - talking about grief and obsession again is like beating a dead horse. Heck, if you'd let his family live but still destroyed the planet, we could have had an interesting story on diasporas instead.
- Also, background character development feels a bit weak. I spent half the first couple seasons wondering who the heck Ariam was, and just when I did, they killed her before the audience could develop much of an attachment. They could have at least thrown in a few more crew barbecue scenes.
- I am now more impressed at what Lower Decks did with fewer, shorter episodes a season than Discovery. They really managed to create a sense that we'd been with these characters a long time and that they were growing despite the entire show being shorter than 1 TNG season. I do have a few gripes about season 5 (my main one being how does Ma'ah go from "Beckett is honorable" like, a few hours after meeting her to immediately distrusting her in the finale), but my respect for LD has only grown.
I’ve made a bizarre observation: commemorative plates tend to be associated more with Star Trek or Star Wars more than other franchise (Stargate seems to have some, too.), and I kind of wonder why.
Obviously, they’re not actually that popular anymore and have faded into kitsch, as the only plate that seems to have come out since DS9/VOY era is the Lower Decks Tom Paris plate - there are no DSC, PIC, Kelvin, or even ENT plates, while newer Star Wars plates don’t seem all that common as well unless you want paper plates.
I’m wondering if it has to do with 2 factors, still somewhat true today but especially in the 1990s:
These would have made the plates commercially viable, meaning to both inside and outside observers, plates became a stereotype of the fandoms.
Anyhow, what are your thoughts?
P.S. Wow, this is starting to feel like a meta version of Daystrom.
If I had any close friends who used Linux, I would install this for April fools.