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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Strange New Worlds catches the feels of TOS without feeling dated. It honors the best of TOS, Next Generation, DS9, and Voyager, but leaves behind the parts that don’t really work anymore. There are women on the bridge and Rick Berman’s shadow is long gone. Although there is still some interpersonal drama, it doesn’t feel nearly as center stage as it did in Discovery, focusing more on the adventure and focusing less on ACTING-centric monologues that made Discovery unbearable sometimes. I wouldn’t call the politics luke warm, though they are maybe a more subtle and less center stage than they were in Discovery. In general, my feeling is that Strange New Worlds has distanced itself from all the parts of Discovery that didn’t work for me.

    My chief gripe is that Spock is often way more emotional than makes sense.

    -A millennial that watched every episode of Next Generation at least twice, once when they aired and again from VHS tapes when my dad got home from work. I guess I’ve watched them all way more than twice now.


  • All of those kinds of communities, where people tell anecdotes about their lives, turned into creative writing excerises for wannabe authors long before we had to worry about AI slop. TIFU, AmITheAsshole, RelationshipAdvice, etc. were all getting pretty derivative and sensational for clicks long before the exodus. Now they’re all either that or illiterate attention seekers showing off the results of their latest LLM prompts. I liked those stories too, but I don’t want anything to do with any of those communities anymore. It all just turned into a training ground for LLMs generating engagement. YouTube still tries to force those dumb AI story voiceover videos to me constantly. We used to joke that “nothing ever happens”, but everyday that sentiment feels a little less cynical and a little more real.



  • Pineapple pizza really is kinda meh by itself. But, pineapple + jalapeno + a salty/savory topping like pepperoni can be amazing.

    Semi-tangential non-sequitor: The news algorithms offered up the recipe for an “Italian treat” recently that had me appalled and curious in the same way I expect pineapple pizza haters are. It was very ripe cantaloupe slices wrapped in prosciutto. I don’t even really know what to say. I just don’t want to be alone in knowing about that monstrosity.





  • Reminds me of a sci-fi story I read. A detective (wait was this in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, maybe? I don’t remember, anyway) is looking for a person and asking around. I stead of carrying around a picture of the person they are looking for, they compare the person’s features to a list of celebrities and just go around asking if anyone has seen someone that looks like that celebrity. Point being lots of people have surprisingly similar features and there really are “doppelgangers” out there.

    But just try explaining that to some stranger that just caught you staring off into space directly at their face because they look like a person you had a crush on in college, only you’re an old fart now and they don’t look like that old crush would look now, but like the memory you have of them. “You look like someone I know” always sounds like a pickup line.



  • Focusing at a point behind the image is exactly what we’ve always done for every other magic eye poster because it only requires relaxing your eyes (staring off into the distance) for the image to pop into focus. Cross eyed viewing is damn near impossible on any screen at less than an arm’s length away without significant eye strain or external devices (like the stereoscopic viewers that photogrammetrists would use to view these kinds of images without inducing a migraine) and since the dot is on top holding a finger up as a guide ends up obstructing the entire view unless your arms are growing out of your forehead. The wall eyed view has none of these issues.

    I appreciate the post and your effort. But, the images themselves are frustrating and have killed my initial reaction, which was to share them further. Because I’m nearly the only person I know that wouldn’t loose interest in the explanation for “correct viewing” half way through. If they were wall eyed stereoscopic images, I could just say “Magic Eye”, they’d remember Mallrats, see the schooner, and go “Ooh neat.”