FriendOfDeSoto

I signed up for Ente last fall as a Google Photos replacement. The backup works fine. The Android app is prone to crashing so I don’t use it as my go-to gallery app. The process of moving a big library of pictures away from Google was painful. Ente does a lot in terms of making it easier - but it’s still a pain in the butt. Their desktop app runs poorly on old desktop hardware if you keep their machine learning on. The ML lets you search images content down the line.

I signed up for a year and I’m already looking at another solution. Laziness may win though because transferring the library was a terrible experience.

Well, he can skip the “shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” one and they can just reuse his rendition from Ménage à Troi. I cannot believe he could top that performance.

I would start by suggesting we look at fewer youtubers and their views on the subject. I’m tired of dumb facial expressions on thumbnails and exaggerated video titles that do not aim for calm, measured critique but to please the algorithm. And the algorithm likes controversy. So this linked video may be the outlier - I wouldn’t know because I refuse to click through. These video links are more often than not efforts to increase views and thus nudge the video up in the ranking.

Is the death of the franchise nigh? Maybe. It wouldn’t be its first. We have had deaths after TOS S3 and ENT S4/Nemesis. There was stuff in print or in games but nothing on screen until Star Wars became a success and the arrival of the binge streaming age/Star Wars again respectively. We may be on the verge of another lull. We are very dedicated fans of a franchise that needs to be bigger to be financially viable long term. But we are a big enough chunk of the market that executives will be tempted to bring it back.

Can Star Trek tell more stories? Sure it can. It depends on the writers. I was personally disappointed with the stories Disco and PIC told. They thought Star Trek storytelling needs to be Breaking Bad’s mixed with Game of Thrones’s and that equalled universe destroying threats that need to be fought every season. For SNW they learned that you can have a season long plot but you want to be more episodic. Academy is like that as well. There is a lot of fan service in them by design and references only a subset of viewers will catch. But I don’t think that makes the shows less good or accessible to new audiences. And Marvel has established the easter-eggification of storytelling in modern franchises so a lot of viewers will want that.

Many scripts that became Star Trek stories were just sci-fi ideas that were then molded around the universe. There are still good sci-fi story ideas out there that can be told.

My fear is that we are at a ENT S3 point in time. It’s a good season but not enough people are watching. Same with SNW or Academy. That’s partially pissed off fans but also people not paying Paramount to watch it for reasons unrelated to the fandom. And the maneuvering around the Warner deal makes me fearful that all new projects will be shelved very soon for lack of funding and projected economic success. If the third lull is upon us, it’s for economic reasons, not the lack of stories to be told.

I heard the clip haha

Best boss I ever had.

I don’t necessarily understand why they chose that director but I kind of get why they wanted to try someone else. IX hadn’t been a great success. They wanted to find new momentum like a sports ball team swapping coaches when the season is going south. Team still got relegated. Life is like that sometimes. It’s easy for me to say Frakes would’ve been better because I have the benefit of hindsight.

I didn’t hate it when I saw it in theaters. Thought it was better than IX and VII but not VIII. It was a hit heavy on wanting to be star wars. The buggy ride, fighter ships, fights on gangways above huge chasms on the ship, the humorous banter while pew pew. Didn’t like the death of Data. Didn’t we learn anything from Spock? I liked the world building for the Roms and the Rems. I liked Hardy in it.

I don’t mind rewatching this movie. I feel it benefits from aging a bit like III doesn’t (but V does for me). And I’d argue it’s definitely better than PIC S2, if not the whole show.

The general vibe around this movie is bad because the box office take wasn’t great and then we learned all these little tidbits from BTS: Wesley (the boy?!) being cut out of the wedding scene or the director thinking Geordie was an alien. I think Frakes in the chair would have done a better job with it.

I appreciate the air of publicity this story brings.

You probably can’t trust your password manager if it’s compromised

In other headlines: water is surprisingly wet.

It happens. A very highly intelligent user will occasionally post something in a lot of communities and gets a rise out of downvotes, annoyed comments, and blocks. It’s annoying but that is often the nature of the internet. Report, block, and move on.

It’s only the very highly intelligent users who do this. So it doesn’t happen a lot.

Don’t engage with anybody you don’t know well on DMs. And if some other very highly intelligent person goes to the effort of sending you abuse via DM, take pride that you really got under their skin. Ignore it if you can.

I think you can change the Klingon makeup as much as you want. Have one guy day Qapla and we’re golden. Recognizable enough. This Cardassian getup was too far from the one we’re used to - definitely what I was used to. Even the Fed president lady in Disco looked more Cardassian and she was only a quarter Cardassian. They went too far with the redesign. Which is sad because the choice of species wasn’t random.

I was, initially, because I’m a fan, mad when it was revealed that Tawny Newsome’s character was supposed to be Dax. I later learned she was also supposed to be Cardassisn, which I totally missed as well. But I was mad in a “here we go again, new writers pulverize the canon of old, Trill synbionts can live a gazillion years now” way. But when I put the phone down before firing off a number of senseless hot take posts, I came to the conclusion that the Burn would have probably necessitated a system of hibernation or cryo storage for symbionts in need of a new host but unable to get back to Trill. In my head canon, the Dax symbiont was on ice for a couple of centuries.

I like the idea of the symbionts having an influence over their life span. And that Dax would cling to life no matter what for the off chance to meet The Sisko again makes sense to me too.

We’ll see which theory holds because I’m sure we’ll see Tawny in makeup again somehow.

Trouble with Tribbles! Worf just says they don’t discuss it with outsiders. ENT does more of the heavy lifting if you ask me.

We are all confused. I feel they wrote themselves into a corner in PIC S2 and airlifted out of it without addressing the little unpainted corner they left behind. From a writers’ room perspective, it keeps their options open. From a fan POV it’s maddening. I don’t think it’s all that clear that the OG Borgs are dead after S3; they could return as well because they caused a subharmonic regression in the 500 Cochrane range that traveled back a transwarp corridor in time. Or something like that.

This is a Klingon makeup problem. For the longest time, it wasn’t addressed why the movie Klingons looked different from the TOS ones. Then ENT tried to fix this. And then DISCO came in and completely obliterated that fix. It doesn’t make sense. It cannot make sense. We mustn’t be so Vulcan about it.

I don’t think that what you are envisioning and the fediverse are necessarily a good fit. The fediverse is potentially able to network with every other instance operating on the same protocol. With every instance you add more potential to have bad actors within reach.

a system for stricter content moderation, especially something that would automatically delete NSFW/NSFL posts,

There is no tool that can automatically remove everything. There is also the Scunthorpe problem. And there aren’t enough moderators in the world to do this job safely for children that don’t also expect remuneration for their services. And then you need to add in the cross cultural differences in what constitutes NSF anything. Maybe in a few years you can train a model to do a decent job with this.

The protocol can probably be adapted to fit most of your requirements. But the fediverse is held together by donations, sweat, and duct tape. It’s having a hard enough time attracting adults; I don’t think a kids version is in the works. Plus, there are now real legal hurdles like in Australia.

Personally, I wouldn’t want my kids to social network until they are 15-16. Before that I’d try to keep them in services and settings where I’m the moderator. And only after having not only the birds and the bees talk but also the know about grooming, no nudes, and no bullying talks you can slowly release them into the wild. And at that age they will not want to sit at the kids table any more.

You are your own algorithm. If you see a lot of propaganda or whatever, it’s because you chose that content at one point or another. And you can just as easily stop seeing it by unfollowing and blocking.

Also, evidence. I see no signs of rampant propaganda on the fediverse, not on Lemmy or on Mastodon. Now, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. But that’s where you should provide examples so I can check for myself.

I don’t think this was “blistering.” At the time watching it as a kid I thought it is weird that nobody ever talked about the Cardassians or the war before. But things get introduced like that in Star Trek. And it is a big universe. I don’t think this is the worst or the most pivotal of retconning because it fit into the story and quickly got expanded on.

Chekov hadn’t met Khan. WW3 didn’t happen in the 90s. Mark Leonard was both a Romulan AND Soock’s daddy. Picard meets versions of his parents during TNG that are nothing like the ones in PIC. Virtually all main TNG main characters lost at least one parent early in their life (or their sight). There is no way in hell that Riker can just stay #1 after Wolf 359 and not get his own ship. There wasn’t a queen but baby borgs! Scotty knew Kirk was dead already. And there are plenty of cases when beaming through shields is possible.

That’s just a few examples that grind my gears more than the introduction of the Cardassians. But I love Trek and am willing to forgive a lot.

Trek is a statue that many sculptors work on at different times. Inconsistencies must happen as a result. It’s not like The Expanse where the story has been written down before in great detail before they started filming. They took liberties from the original but would’ve succeeded at sculpting their piece of marble as planned if it hadn’t been for the assholery of a certain Mr. Anvar.

I’m not an Apple user so I cannot answer your question there. I just wanted to add another way to get ad-free podcasts. If the podcast offers a patreon feed, any RSS-based podcatcher anywhere will be able to do this.

I am not an expert and I think this falls at the first hurdle because a login is required to view more than the latest post or two.

Here is how I use it: you take an old device that you never installed Insta on, run it under a burner account at the OS level, run a kill switch VPN on it (preferably always on the same server), and then create an account on Insta that you’re ready to ditch the moment they want your ID. That device doesn’t do anything else than Insta.

You go to this website, choose the theme, then look for the floating bar at the bottom, hit the hamburger menu icon (three lines), choose log in > forgot password

Tried it with VPN on and on Vivaldi on Android and it works just fine. I think you have another gremlin in your setup.

This has to be in the top 5 of story threads they should pick up again in any show. Conspiracy bugs are on one. Then Living Witness backup doc. What’s the gamma quad like post dominion? Maybe followed by Moriarty with a mobile emitter. Etc.

While I think of all non-animated Trek shows, DS9 had the best first season, it still contains a lot of dogs. Move along home, anyone? My point is first seasons are rough. Discovery gets better in S2. I would watch it that far before you start SNW because it’s basically the backdoor pilot for that show.

I don’t think a mutinous commander is that outrageous a plot line in a universe where Riker once had Q powers, Janeway had warp 10 lizard babies with her pilot, Sisko poisoning a planet’s atmosphere on purpose, or where a man like Jonathan Archer was made captain of anything.

Is Disco the best Trek show? I don’t think so. I think overall it’s better than PIC though. So if you have suffered through that, you stand a good chance of being more delighted by Disco.