Inspired by the ongoing Resurgence giveaway, I thought it might be fun to discuss some of our favourite Trek games. Underappreciated gems are particularly welcome!
Yeah, I spent a ton of time with that. It had a terrible memory leak, though, which made it unplayable slow after an hour or so. I was really hoping that Star Trek: Infinite would fill that void, but it’s basically just Stellaris.
I really enjoyed Starfleet Academy for the SNES. It wasn’t particularly difficult or long, but there was enough interaction with your “crew” outside of space combat that it felt pretty well-rounded, especially for a SNES game.
If that’s the case, then the whole process is as wrong-headed as can be. You can only choose an alternative if a viable alternative exists. Transit isn’t supported enough to be a universally practical option while electric vehicles are too expensive and have infrastructure requirements that can’t necessarily be met by everyone. And speaking as someone who’s tried cycling, well, Edmonton is making some big moves, but In Calgary? Maybe I’ll give it a shot again when I get tired of living.
And none of that covers the fact that what is being paid at the pump as a surcharge to cover carbon taxes holds no relationship at all with what the oil companies are paying. It’s being used as an excuse to bilk the consumer even further and to line the pockets of investors.
My friends and I recently challenged each other to list our top five starship classes and were surprised by how different our opinions were despite being generally in agreement with what we like about the various series....
Trek actively gave opportunities to its actors in the TNG-VOY era to learn and try directing. The number of Main Cast actors who’ve got directing credits is pretty significant. The full list, along with the episodes they directed, is here: …fandom.com/…/Cast_members_who_directed
Of the TNG cast though, Jonathan Frakes, Levar Burton, Gates McFadden and Patrick Stewart all have at least one director’s credit in the series. Michael Dorn would also later do some DS9 and ENT episodes.
Hearing his experiences on Voyager, you really have to feel sorry for the guy. The higher-ups really seemed to have an axe to grind with him. It’s kind of startling how you go from TNG where even now the cast gets together like family, to DS9 where it was like “It was a good job and the people I worked with were wonderful and professional and we produced something that we can be proud of,” to Voyager, where the cast largely describes it as a cesspool of passive-aggressive resentment and largely only mended fences years later.
Although when they created DS9 in Star Trek Online, they had to massively scale it up because otherwise it would have gotten lost among all the players’ ships, both by sheer volume and because so many ships in the game are absurdly large.
I mean, I do like so-called “Nu-Trek”, but at the end of the day this is kind of a tail-wagging-the-dog response. You can explain just about anything in lore after the fact, but when the rubber hits the road the real explanation is that someone in a Hollywood design team said “We want it to be BIGGER,” and then left it to the people who cared enough to find a reason why it would be justified.
Far easier to just suspend your disbelief a bit further, I think. Yeah, Discovery is weirdly big. It also flies through space by a man infused with a giant tardigrade’s DNA sending the whole ship from place to place through willpower and a mushroom trip. If you can accept the second one, it kind of feels like the fact that the ship is a larj boye isn’t that much of a stretch.
I guess I just fundamentally don’t agree with the need for a “backsplanation”. I am of the camp that I’m totally OK with the Klingons looking different in TMP than in TOS because it wasn’t a 1960s TV show anymore and they wanted the aliens to look more alien, and that’s all the explanation that I need. The Enterprise is different between SNW and its appearance in Discovery because it’s a different show and they wanted to tweak its appearance some to make it more of a “hero” set. Spock and Sarek never mentioned his having an adoptive daughter/sister in spite of being in two series and a half dozen movies because Michael didn’t exist until Discovery and the writers thought it would make for an interesting tie-in.
I have enjoyed the series since TNG in the 80s, and I’d love for it to come true some time in the future. But it’s a TV show, it’s not a history book. It’s fine if there are inconsistencies, none of it is real anyway.
The ENT mini-arc “explaining” the difference between Klingons “then” and “now” was absolutely unnecessary, but I do have to admit to finding it cute that the reason why Klingons became smooth-foreheaded instead of bumpy-foreheaded turned out to be a combination of all three of Bashir’s guesses in that scene.
Hi, English isn’t my mother tongue so I was asking myself that question since I first encounted a w/… Back then I was like: “What tf does ‘w slash’ stand for?” And when I found out I was like “How, why, and is it any intuitive?” But I never dared to ask that until now
The ampersand (&) was so commonly used that for a while it was taught as a letter. British schoolkids in the mid- to late-19th century would include it as the 27th letter on writing work and needlework samplers, usually after “z”.
There’s some discussion that the Alphabet Song ends with “w, x, y & z” specifically to include it.
I hated these Dairy Queen commercials so much I haven’t done DQ willingly in over 20 years. It used to be a regular thing to grab ice cream in a hot afternoon during the summer.
Tensions flared in the House of Commons on Monday over opposition calls for House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota to resign after apologizing to the House of Commons for inviting, recognizing and leading the chamber in a standing ovation for a man who fought for a Nazi unit during the Second World War.
The problem is that if the candidate from Party “A” is a competent weasel who wants to undermine everything I stand for, and party “B”'s candidate is an incompetent boob who won’t help matters but also is popular and won’t actively ruin everything, then it’s far more important to my interests that party “A”'s candidate not be voted in than it is to cast a vote for candidate “C”. The system is working how is designed to and the only people who are capable of changing it are the ones benefiting from it being broken, so the only way that’s likely to happen is if there were somehow a mass exodus away from the big two parties.
I actually enjoy this weird episode a lot. Then again, one of my favourite VOY characters is Neelix, so what do I know? What’s your take on this bizarre episode?
The premise is interesting, and the mystery of “what’s happening to Tom” as he gets this weird body horror transformation is actually fairly well done. But any time that a scriptwriter types the word “evolution” into a keyboard there’s should be an automatic spray bottle that pops out of the computer that spritzes them in the face and shouts “No! Bad!” Because any sci-fi script that mentions evolution is inevitably going to completely fuck it up.
I used to do land surveying in Canada and we’d use “decs” for decimetres when laying out points. You’d put down the rod, they’d tell you something like “dec and a half left” then you’d move closer and it’d be “two cents right” and you’d be even closer and then it’s like “3 mils right.” Then you’d take the shot and they’d tell you how much closer or farther you’d have to go to get the point. If you were way off to the point where you might have tens of metres, usually for rough layout we’d rarely use “dee-kays” for dekameters, but typically it would be just “30 metres north”.
The landscape company that maintains the condo I live in uses them exclusively to “clean” the paved common areas and every time they do, the dust blows up into the air, and then 15 minutes after they pass it resettles right back where it came from, while also leaving a fine film of dust on every flat surface in the apartment, as well as small piles of long-accumulated gunk in every corner and crevice. I can’t help but think how much better and quieter this place would be if they just used brooms.
There are inspiring, epic quotes in Star Trek. Words that stir the soul, shining a light on paths to a brighter now and a better future. But, what about those bits of dialog that don’t have a stirring message, that you enjoy just because you enjoy them?...
I’ve used gummy bears as tokens and maps thrown together in 30 seconds with Sharpie on wrapping paper and it works fine too. Players generally are pretty happy with whatever you throw at them.
I’d still expect better than that from a product that a major company is expecting you to trade money for.
I feel swipe to type should be an option on laptops. Using keys to type is slow compared to swiping across alphabets. Remove the physical keyboard and put a 6" to 10" lcd with touch input on it.
Sweetie seems fair right up until I needed to go back and reevaluate everything I’ve said and change half the words because the store system has made it’s own decisions about what I’ve said.
(Swype seems fast right up until I need to go back and reevaluate everything I’ve said and change half the words because the Swype system has made its own decisions about what I’ve said.)
For some reason my phone always wants to use “it’s” regardless when Swyping. I’m not sure if they just figured they’re going to be wrong half the time anyway so they’ll just default to the one they figure people will use more.
My parents did a lot of business trips when I was a kid and it was pretty common that we’d spend time at the airport where they had one of these in the arcade/lounge. I sank a lot of money into those machines. I’ve never really been very good at pinball and don’t generally care much about pinball simulators, but this might convince me to pick this up, just for the sake of nostalgia.
Their arms are small, but beyond that there’s basically nothing similar between them and an ostrich’s wing. The muscular anchor points are not similar at all to winged creatures, who require significant musculo-skeletal connection to the breastbone even in mostly vestigial wings. You can see this in the ostrich skeleton as the large “blob” of bone in the middle of the rib cage. There is nothing similar in the T-Rex. Even more of a problem with this theory is that the T-Rex’s popularity is in large part due to the fact that we’ve discovered a fairly large number of T-Rex fossils in good condition and not substantially disturbed… It’s why we have famous models like “Sue” and “Black Beauty” that make such good displays in natural history museums. Unless you’re proposing that a dozen different skeletons from several different regions with different ages all had bones shift after death to end up in the same position…
Our knowledge of what dinosaurs looked like is not perfect, but we’ve also come a very long way from the Magdeburg Unicorn or horned Iguanodons of the 1800s. Paleontology has largely moved past “puzzle piece” biology, where things are just haphazardly thrown together because they kinda look like they fit. There’s comparison to other species - not just reptiles- to see what are comparable modern equivalents or to other contemporary animals. There’s kinematics and musculature considered. Unless some fossil discovery is made that completely upends the evidence we have now, at least in the case of skeletal articulation of well-known and well-studied species like T-Rex, we can be reasonably confident that we’ve got it pretty close when it comes to what their skeletons looked like.
There are countless places on earth that I’m sure have seen as few or even fewer visitors - desolate rocks in the middle of the ocean, remote mountain peaks, areas made inaccessible due to vegetation or climate. Going to any of them would be infinitely cheaper and less difficult than going to the moon, and yet no one has, because unless you have a particular reason to spend the money and effort to get there, why would you?
I’m sure there are scientists who’d love to run some sort of experiment on the moon, but aside from that it’s a lot of work for not much beyond bragging rights, and the US kinda got those by getting there first. There isn’t a lot of political will to spend billions right now to test things on the moon that we can reasonably simulate here much cheaper with computers.
That’s not an actual solution though. Not everyone is in a position to simply uproot like that, when you may need services that aren’t available in small towns, or you might be caring for someone who can’t move, or you might just be part of a tight-knit family or community and moving takes away more support than independence gives. Even if that’s irrelevant, not everyone can simply find a job in a small town because every job doesn’t exist in the same way everywhere. Think there’s a lot of demand for administrative assistants in Irvine, AB? And that’s not even counting the fact that while people can work remotely (assuming the destination has decent internet, which depending on how small & remote the town is is not a guarantee), there’s plenty of companies whose policies have removed it because they need to justify their investments in real estate and middle managers.
Even if we assume a genie appears and gives everyone who wants it the opportunity to find fulfilling jobs that they can work from small towns, exactly how long are those prices going to stay low as soon as people jump ship from the cities, or worse, once real estate investment companies are able to create income properties in these same places?
And that’s not counting the fact that it’s expensive to move, and especially moving a long way. Even if you just rent a U-haul and chuck all of your junk into it, the truck costs, fuel costs, there’s usually hookup fees for services, you may not be able to work during this time if you can work remote, or you may have to go without pay if you’re between jobs… It’s not an insignificant barrier to entry and that’s assuming you’re young and healthy and none of those are concerns. Moving away from major cities is potentially a workable solution for some people, but it doesn’t solve anything and it doesn’t help the people who most need help.
I found this after reading and responding to this post here about early Trek fans’ prejudicial negative reaction to TNG. One of my responses (see here) was to point out that any fans of the progressiveness of Trek ought to have been mindful of the room for improvement over TOS, with female representation being an obvious...
an episode that passes only because Beverly and Crusher have a quick exchange in a meeting.
Ok, I know this was probably meant to be Troi and Crusher, but in Star Trek it’s not impossible, so I found it funny. Riker had the transporter duplicate, not Crusher!
There’s a few notable crater lakes in Quebec. My favourite by far, though, are the Clearwater lakes/Lac Wiyâshâkimî in the far northeast. Two impact craters almost right on top of one another, now filled with water. What makes them really interesting to me is that they aren’t caused by one space rock breaking in two just before hitting the ground. The two lakes have been proven to be created almost 200M years apart, which means two separate asteroids hit almost exactly the same spot, separated by 200M years or so.
By that I mean that the basic premise being: that the means of (re)creating new technology is lost, the current technology around is treated as sacred and the function marred in elaborate rituals or prayers because they don’t know how to otherwise operate it, and to a lesser extent that new ideas or (often xenophillic)...
The Aldeans, from TNG’s first season “When The Bough Breaks” are close, though they don’t necessarily treat their advanced technology as “sacred”, though they certainly see it as infallible. The whole setup of the episode is that they would hide the planet away from the universe at large and have only appeared before the Enterprise to steal their children as the now-deteriorating technology is causing the Aldeans to become sterile.
LoglineWhen the USS Enterprise investigates an attack on a colony at the edge of Federation space, Captain Pike and his crew face the return of a formidable enemy....
I like the Gorn being legitimately scary, but to me it kind of retroactively highlights how silly “Arena” was. You can’t really compare modern TV with the episodes from the 60s, but stick one of these Gorn on the planet with Kirk and he would have been proper fucked. I can accept it easily enough and take it with a grain of salt that, if we assume they were going to re-shoot the episode today with Paul Wesley and modern cinema techniques that the fight scenes wouldn’t be these silly ponderous things and the episode would probably largely not have Kirk confront the Gorn at all, mostly running away until the big climax with the “cannon”. However, it is kind of an unforced error, where they could have simply introduced the aliens as a totally new species without really losing anything while also not highlighting how silly the rubber suit Gorn was.
Ortegas was in the alternate future with Pike at the time of “A Quality of Mercy”, which is not necessarily “plot armour” but if we assume the timeline still hasn’t diverged — Pike not having had his accident yet — then it would seem reasonable she should get through to survive long enough to see the point of divergence and therefore survive long enough to be on the bridge with Pike when he meets the Romulans. However, that’s all very timey-wimey and subject to a lot of “maybes” and “what-ifs”.
They seem to be bookending the season with flashbacks to Pike’s expedition to Rigel VII. His decision to withdraw there cost people their lives and led to Zak corrupting the local culture. Now he’s back under fire, under seemingly unwinnable odds, and forced to make the call to leave people behind again.
AI very provably does use other peoples’ art more than any other artist. It needs huge amounts of media that’s used as a basis for training material — far, far more than your average artist will consume. You can teach a person how to draw, sculpt, paint, model, etc. without ever showing them another artist’s work. You really can’t do that with ML tools we have currently. It’s not completely impossible, but you would be relying on getting a lot of training data in another way and it would probably require a lot of input from humans on the output end to make a model that can come up with something reasonably comprehensible. A
We don’t have much in terms of laws about this kind of usage because it’s not like in the past a company like DC comics has decided that they want to make Jim Lee’s style to become the “official” style of DC comics, but they don’t want to pay Jim Lee, so they hire a Chinese art factory to mimic his style and cut him out. Something like that wouldn’t be illegal in the sense of current laws, but probably would have been substantially more expensive than simply hiring Lee himself. However, it definitely would have been unethical. It also would likely have caused a legal challenge that might have affected how our laws deal with replication of a “style”. Even in cases where a company establishes their own style guide based on an art style of a specific artist as is common in animation (where it’s understood that the usage of that style is part of the concept art), there is typically an evolution in how that style as it standardizes- See “Steamboat Mickey” versus current versions of Mickey Mouse, or the changes from the first season to the current season of the Simpsons for example.
This isn’t about using AI tools for your average DM to make art resources for their home campaign. That’s a perfectly reasonable use-case. It isn’t as though your average DM is likely to be commissioning custom art every time there’s a new character in the campaign - they’ll do what we’ve always done: Find reference material that’s “close enough” from copyrighted works and say “something like this.” But if a company is going to start digging into AI, then we as the audience have the right to say, “No, I’m not going to support that and won’t buy a product produced in that way. I assign value to art made the ‘traditional’ way” The obsolescence of industries due to technology is not an inevitability - by all rights it’s entirely possible that an automated process to make perfect, nutritionally balanced food bars that are both cheaper and healthier than a McDonald’s burger could have been produced by now - but no one wants that. Very few people have a diet that consists entirely of Soylent. Just as there’s more to food than nutrition and value, there’s more to art than pictures. The so-called “free hand of the market” goes both ways.
I’m a digital artist. I’m in an interesting position in this debate, because I see the value and the power of tools like MidJourney and Stable Diffusion and the like. The prospect of training an AI tool on my own work and giving it to the public to be able to make their own art using my style is exactly the kind of artsy-fartsy “concept” thing I dig. I use things like “content-aware fill” tools and special brushes in my work that are basically cousins to these systems and they help me immensely. But also I think that artists should have the right to choose whether their work is used in this way and that if a company is profiting from the usage of an AI model that’s been trained from mass scraping of the internet there should be some legal consideration for that.
I’m currently designing a keep for my players to explore. It will be a ruined keep, taken over by an evil cult. But to start off the design, I am looking at how it would have been designed in its prime. Here are some rooms I’ve thought of when creating the layout....
May or may not be an actual room in a castle, but there’s often going to be one or multiple cesspits. This could literally be simply a pit under a garderobe/bathroom or it could be a walled and enclosed space, but if present it would be serviced regularly by gong farmers.
AI discourse has way too much “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” especially from a lot of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. AI, as a thing, is not a perfect system. It’s not a magic panacea that will cure all. There are legitimate concerns about how much it infringes on creative spaces and how it may put people out of work. There are also legitimate concerns about the AI training data scraping web-hosted content indiscriminately without permission. However, these are not the same as AI just being “bad”.
Do I think a D&D campaign led by a ChatGPT-like DM would be “good”? Probably not as it stands. I’ve played a lot with ChatGPT and its limitations are pretty obvious. Could it get better in the future? Probably. Is it an interesting possible way to get to play D&D if you can’t get a group together? I mean, it’s gotta be better than nothing, right? But the real interesting prospect to me is machine-learning powered tools for the DM. A System that’s trained on WotC-owned resources that lets you just choose a paintbrush that’s labeled “cave” and draw out a series of tunnels and have it automatically populate with crystals and mushrooms and visual points of interest, which lets you sketch out a good-looking map in minutes. Then, as your party is in the cave, the system knows what type of “biome” you used so it has a button to let you generate a random encounter, which it takes from your character levels and where your players are. There’s a lot of ways that “smart” tools could take a lot of work off the DM’s shoulders that would be great. I don’t know if they’re in the pipeline, but the point is that AI isn’t a boogeyman that’s just out to steal jobs and IP.
I was browsing Tik Tok (yes I am ashamed) and saw a video of caver in pretty narrow passage. So that caver took another rock and started to chip in order to widen a little bit the passage, while complaining about not having a hammer with him....
LoglineUhura seems to be the only one who can hear a strange sound. When the noise triggers terrifying hallucinations, she enlists an unlikely assistant to help her track down the source....
I own it. It’s fun to play with but ultimately suffers from the same problem that almost every tool in this style does. The resources you get to use are limited to the ones that they’ve thought to include. If you want to make a jail, that’s fine, you can make it work. A tavern? Easy. An ancient Greek temple? Eh, you can get there with a bit of imagination. A bathroom? Sorry, bud, you’re on your own.
I’ve traditionally used Dungeon Painter Studio for my maps, and while it has similar limitations, it has the benefit of being able to import other art, and you get a whole dimension to hide your crimes in. That vaguely bookshelf- looking rectangular thing on the map? It’s an armory cabinet in the barracks. Now in the bathroom it’s a medicine cabinet. In the bedroom? A wardrobe. You can’t see what’s in it, can’t see how tall it is or how high it’s mounted on the wall, so you get to fill in the details with my description. 3d limits your ability to do that because everything looks like what it is. So if you don’t have a model of what you’re looking for, it’s more obvious when you’re making do.
I mean, there might be a secret AI technology that is so advanced to the point that it can mimic a real human, make posts and comments that looks like its written by a human and even intentionally doing speling mistakes to simulate human errors. How do we know that such AI hasn’t already infiltrated the internet and everything...
Yeah, my in-person campaign didn’t survive the transition to online. One that started online is still going strong online, but it feels like transitioning from one to the other is a big ask, especially since what someone gets from an in-person game is not necessarily the same as a remote game.
On the other hand, online is nice in that there’s no rushing around to get somewhere, no travel time to deal with. Just be at your desk on time and spend a few hours throwing dice. If I could figure out how to do that but still get to play with my minis I’d be in a good place…
• The title refers to the Homer’s “Odyssey” when Odysseus’ voyage reached the land of the Lotus-eaters. These people’s primary food source was the fruit and flowers of the lotus, which was powerfully narcotic, and caused those of Homer’s crew who ate it to forget their desire to return home....
• ”We’ve got subdermal universal translators.” This is the first mention of Starfleet personnel having translators implanted beneath the skin. In “Little Green Men” we saw that Ferengi had translators implanted in the ear canal, but Starfleet translators have always been part of the communicator or combadge, a function of the ship or station, or a wholly separate device.
Subcutaneous transponders have been part of the Trek lore since “Patterns of Force” though, and Archer had one implanted in “Stratagem”. Given that there’s no reason to believe that the Ekosians spoke English (at best you might expect German) it seems likely that these shared the UT functions that the other communications gear has.
Just about to finish TNG Season 2, I only watched the odd episode on television in the 90’s and ST: Enterprise is the only complete series I have binged....
“Move Along Home” is objectively pretty not great, but I have to admit I really like it too. I appreciate what they were trying to do with it and they just never really got there. It’s a plot that I’ve cribbed for running D&D games in the past when player are unable to make a session. The party gets trapped in the game and the missing player/s is/are the one who’s on the outside trying to get them free.
Generally speaking, I think it’s the ideal use case for AI art. You wouldn’t likely otherwise be buying art assets, and most likely just be finding whatever comes up under a Google search anyway. Meanwhile you can dial in to a clearer representation of what you want to depict from the art without necessarily having to “make do” with “oh, it’s like this but imagine he’s an elf instead…”
Let's remember some Star Trek games
Inspired by the ongoing Resurgence giveaway, I thought it might be fun to discuss some of our favourite Trek games. Underappreciated gems are particularly welcome!
The ‘carbon tax’ isn’t causing inflation. No matter what politicians say | The Narwhal (thenarwhal.ca)
The surprisingly robust careers of Star Trek stars who became video game voice actors (arstechnica.com)
Let's talk starship classes!
My friends and I recently challenged each other to list our top five starship classes and were surprised by how different our opinions were despite being generally in agreement with what we like about the various series....
TIL that Geordi directed some episodes (pxscdn.com)
Better place for discussion I suppose
Just some fun size comparisons (startrek.website)
Not sure how accurate it is but given the figures I vaguely recall, this feels pretty accurate....
Where did the abbreviation "w/" for "with" come from?
Hi, English isn’t my mother tongue so I was asking myself that question since I first encounted a w/… Back then I was like: “What tf does ‘w slash’ stand for?” And when I found out I was like “How, why, and is it any intuitive?” But I never dared to ask that until now
Why advertise on YouTube?
Why do companies advertise on YouTube when their ads are only used to annoy people into paid accounts? I never see anything, I am interested in.
[Discussion] What games are you currently playing on your deck? - October 2023
Speaker's Nazi veteran invite 'profoundly embarrassing' Trudeau says, as Rota faces calls to resign (www.ctvnews.ca)
Tensions flared in the House of Commons on Monday over opposition calls for House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota to resign after apologizing to the House of Commons for inviting, recognizing and leading the chamber in a standing ovation for a man who fought for a Nazi unit during the Second World War.
Watching Threshold again. Yay or nay?
I actually enjoy this weird episode a lot. Then again, one of my favourite VOY characters is Neelix, so what do I know? What’s your take on this bizarre episode?
Are metric measurements like decameters and hectometers ever used?
I’ve learned about them in school, but I’ve never heard anyone say something is 8 decameters long or anything like that. I’m an American.
Is it recommended to wear a face mask when riding bicycle around cars?
Hello....
What's Your Favorite, Not at All Epic, Star Trek Quote
There are inspiring, epic quotes in Star Trek. Words that stir the soul, shining a light on paths to a brighter now and a better future. But, what about those bits of dialog that don’t have a stirring message, that you enjoy just because you enjoy them?...
[CBR] Why It's So Important For D&D To Steer Clear Of AI Art (www.cbr.com)
If an ear is an icon for sound, and a nose is an icon for smell, what's a good icon for thought?
And what’s a good icon for all of the senses, collectively?
Anyone feel typing on the keyboard is a chore compared to typing on the phone with swipe enabled? (kbin.social)
I feel swipe to type should be an option on laptops. Using keys to type is slow compared to swiping across alphabets. Remove the physical keyboard and put a 6" to 10" lcd with touch input on it.
Pinball FX Releases Classic ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ Table DLC (trekmovie.com)
Why do dinosaurs have big heads and tiny arms?
What evolutional benefit is that?
Walk on the Moon (clarifications needed) (simple.m.wikipedia.org)
The last humans to step foot on the moon, the crew of Apollo 17, did so in 1972. So far, no one has gone back…...
Canada likely sitting on the largest housing bubble of all time: Strategist - BNN Bloomberg (www.bnnbloomberg.ca)
How Many Star Trek Episodes Pass the Bechdel Test? (TOS to ENT) | The Mary Sue (www.themarysue.com)
I found this after reading and responding to this post here about early Trek fans’ prejudicial negative reaction to TNG. One of my responses (see here) was to point out that any fans of the progressiveness of Trek ought to have been mindful of the room for improvement over TOS, with female representation being an obvious...
Look at a map of Quebec. How did that giant circle get there? (www.cbc.ca)
How a six-kilometre-long space rock formed the crater that's known as the Eye of Quebec.
What's a faction/group/alien race in Star Trek most similar to the Tech Priests / Mechanicus in Warhammer 40,000?
By that I mean that the basic premise being: that the means of (re)creating new technology is lost, the current technology around is treated as sacred and the function marred in elaborate rituals or prayers because they don’t know how to otherwise operate it, and to a lesser extent that new ideas or (often xenophillic)...
Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x10 "Hegemony"
LoglineWhen the USS Enterprise investigates an attack on a colony at the edge of Federation space, Captain Pike and his crew face the return of a formidable enemy....
AP: Dungeons & Dragons tells illustrators to stop using AI to generate artwork for fantasy franchise (apnews.com)
Rooms you would find in a Keep/Castle
I’m currently designing a keep for my players to explore. It will be a ruined keep, taken over by an evil cult. But to start off the design, I am looking at how it would have been designed in its prime. Here are some rooms I’ve thought of when creating the layout....
[The Gamer] Hey Hasbro, Please Don't Ruin Dungeons & Dragons With AI (www.thegamer.com)
deleted_by_author
Do cavers accept chipping ?
I was browsing Tik Tok (yes I am ashamed) and saw a video of caver in pretty narrow passage. So that caver took another rock and started to chip in order to widen a little bit the passage, while complaining about not having a hammer with him....
Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x06 "Lost In Translation"
LoglineUhura seems to be the only one who can hear a strange sound. When the noise triggers terrifying hallucinations, she enlists an unlikely assistant to help her track down the source....
[PC Gamer] D&D's upcoming virtual tabletop radiates a big-budget misunderstanding of what matters in role-playing games (www.pcgamer.com)
How do we know that everyone on the internet isn't just a bot?
I mean, there might be a secret AI technology that is so advanced to the point that it can mimic a real human, make posts and comments that looks like its written by a human and even intentionally doing speling mistakes to simulate human errors. How do we know that such AI hasn’t already infiltrated the internet and everything...
[PC Gamer] Taking your D&D campaign online is a game-changer, and so easy I wish I'd done it sooner (www.pcgamer.com)
Canon Connections: Strange New Worlds 2x04 - Among the Lotus Eaters
• The title refers to the Homer’s “Odyssey” when Odysseus’ voyage reached the land of the Lotus-eaters. These people’s primary food source was the fruit and flowers of the lotus, which was powerfully narcotic, and caused those of Homer’s crew who ate it to forget their desire to return home....
What are your favourite TNG episodes?
Just about to finish TNG Season 2, I only watched the odd episode on television in the 90’s and ST: Enterprise is the only complete series I have binged....
Non 5e players
Those of us who play D&D in an iteration other than 5e, what do you play and why?
How do you feel about AI artwork used in your campaign? (lemmy.world)
How do you feel about AI artwork used in your campaign?...