williams_482

I really liked this one. I think it did a good job making Starbase 80 fit into the universe as more than just a joke (why does starfleet have a starbase that everyone knows just totally sucks? Well, because of a bunch of weird circumstances, and also it's more complicated than the reputation).

Interesting, although unsurprising, that Mariner apparently didn't hang around SB80 long enough to figure out that there was more there than met the eye. A lot of the stuff uncovered in this episode should have been noticeable to a new transfer.

How did you do this?

Apparently your tap water is dramatically colder than any house or apartment I've lived in.

Yes, putting ice in water does make me enjoy it more, and no, letting the tap run doesn't do nearly as much to cool it down as ice cubes do.

It's really depressing how any internet discussion about global warming is full of comments like this which only exist to downplay small but existent improvements that others have made. It's whataboutism, plain and simple, and only serves to discourage people from doing anything at all.

This guy getting a more efficient stove isn't going to save the planet, but at least it helps. Your comment (and many others in this thread) doesn't do anything at all about our climate problem, and mostly serves to make other people feel stupid and inadequate for even trying to do something.

There is so much, so fucking much, that needs to be done to save our planet. If you think that political change is the only thing that will "really" matter to save the planet (it's obviously going to be a huge factor), and you are so deeply committed to the ideal that the only things worth doing are those which directly further said political change, then you have serious work to do on your messaging strategy because what you had to say here clearly isn't causing global change.

Alternately, if you think the situation is so impossible that nothing can be done to save it, go find a different void to yell into and stop trying to drag down those of us who still have some hope.

I'm very fond of Jack Frost. It's as corny and delightfully bizare as one could want from a Russian mythology movie made in 1965 USSR, and the riffs are obviously great.

Ahh yes, Civ IV. From ye olden days, when the dev teams cared about such weird and obsolete ideas as testing the game before release, or creating an interface that tells the player what the fuck is actually happening. Or useable asynchronous multiplayer, or an AI with enough of a clue to play the damn game competently... I could go on.

Some people apparently liked V's whole "don't build too many cities, we don't want to have an actual empire here" deal, which definitely isn't my thing but does create less micro. But most of the mechanics were reasonable and the UI shared more or less enough info to follow along. They also opened up the code after the final expansion so modders could do some really great things.

IV had a lot of really good ideas, and zero polish. The current version of the game is laden with silly bugs, ride with bizarre balancing choices, and hideously opaque with simple questions like "how much research have I put into this tech", "how much production overflowed off this completed build", and "how likely is this unit to kill this other unit, vs simply damaging it." They haven't opened up the code to modders, nor have they put any effort into fixing these frankly silly errors themselves.

Civ IV is great because of relatively simple mechanics which allow a lot of interesting choices in how to construct and develop your empire. It accentuates this by getting all the boring stuff right: bugs are few and minor, the interface is communicative, etc. it's not perfect in either regard, and yet somehow it far exceeds its successors in these simple categories. This is how you make a good turn-based 4X game actually fun, even with 2005 graphics.

And yet, V and VI sold extremely well, and VII seemingly will as well, despite inevitably being a grossly inferior product at release which will be dragged most of the way to a truly finished state over five years of patches and DLC.

I guess this is very "stop having fun meme", but why the hell are the only games in this genre (of all genres) trading balance, bug fixes, and comprehensible interfaces for fancy graphics? Is it really not profitable to make a game like Civ IV in 2024?

From the Washington Post piece:

But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

• It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
• Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
• Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

And

“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.

This is an excellent post.

Wrong number of wheels too.

I kept expecting William Boimler to show up before the end of the season, guess they’re holding onto that thread for next year

I think it would be pretty funny if they just never picked up that thread again. William Boimler, already presumed dead, joins S31, does ???? because ?????, is never heard from again.

Then again, this show could do a great job riffing off of how counterproductive and ultimately stupid S31 is, in addition to their absurdly twisted and seemingly inconsistent history. So I'd be perfectly happy to see that too.

This was an excellent finale (as all four of them have been, not at all a given with modern Trek or frankly modern television in general), and fully justifies the somewhat weaker setup episode before it.

"A paywall on a bomb?" might be the best joke this show has delivered in it's whole run. I don't often crack up while watching these episodes, but this one really got me. At the very least it's up there with "It's a bomb! You can only use it once!" from Wej Duj. I'm sensing a pattern.

In more typical lower key Lower Decks humor, Boimler and Rutherford arguing about if Locarno looks like Tom Paris was excellent.

I do wonder what the plan is with Tendi. We've seen supposed major shakeups like this dropped into previous finales, of course, with Boimler leaving the Cerritos for the Titan at the end of season one and Freeman getting arrested at the end of Season 2, which were quickly reverted in the first few episodes of the subsequent season. Odds are that's the play here. I hope so, because losing Tendi would suck. She's a delight.

Why was Boimler the acting captain when the command staff took off on the captain's yacht? There was a full Lieutenant right behind him on the bridge, and surely tens of others on the ship who are more senior and more qualified. A little bit of a main character boost there.