It’s already one of several planets that are identical to earth and have a history that parallels our own. The idea that planets in different solar systems would form as perfect copies of each other, and that they would both independently evolve humans, and those humans would form identical cultures that diverge only enough to create a 20th century Rome, that’s a level of ridiculous implausibility that seems more like something you’d find in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
By comparison, the fact that they also developed modern English seems like a far more logical possibility, given that they are starting with copies of the same cultures and presumably the same linguistic roots more or less. And the word play itself might actually have been intentional, making it the least implausible part of the whole thing.
It’s like using literally to add emphasis to something that you are saying figuratively. It’s not objectively “wrong” to do it, but the practice is adding uncertainty where there didn’t need to be any, and thus slightly diminishes our ability to communicate clearly.
For Combs, I was only counting Weyoun as one character, even if he’s playing multiple copies of him.* And I’m only counting TV and movies, not video games. This also means that Tallman doesn’t get to have her Romulan appearance counted twice because the trading card game turned it into a different character.
For Tallman, I’m not counting any work as a double,** but I am counting her unnamed Starfleet officers that each had the misfortune of being played by a stuntwoman, and therefore tended to die. She gets one redshirt role each in TNG, Generations, DS9 and Voyager. She also plays one of the trilithium thieves from die hard in space, one of the aliens that knocked up a warbird’s engines, an immortalish prisoner in the gamma quadrant, a Bajoran nurse, and one of the space succubi that tried to beat Harry Kim with a large phallic object and drain him of his genetic material.
So, by that count, Tallman has 9 roles while Combs has 8.
Obviously this is a matter of preference and interpretation, and the more you think about it the more you start to open Pandora’s box. Are clones with the same look and personality all the same character? What about clones that are wildly different? What about parallel universe versions? Is a doppelganger added to the count? Or a time travel duplicate? What about body swaps or possessions, do they count as being a different character? What about a character who is playing another character in an in universe fiction? What about versions that appear in dreams or simulations?
** If we’re going to nitpick, I’d argue that stunt doubles are intended to be seen as the character by the audience, so it’s not unreasonable to count them that way, even if I’m not.
Going down to the planet, introducing yourself to the pre-warp civilization, making no effort to hide the fact that you are aliens from another world, planning your shore leave and preparing to fuck as many of them as you can? Not a prime directive violation.
Rescuing one of your kids who accidently breaks one of their rules and is immediately condemned to death, and asserting that as a member of your crew he is subject to your punishments and not theirs? Prime directive violation.
Taking one of the locals up to space to see the thing they consider to be a god, and openly defying the very foundations of their civilization’s system of law and order? Not a prime directive violation.
The more mundane, day to day stuff is where there’s a big difference.
(Young) Obi-Wan gets super powers and a highly respected position in society that allows him to operate independently on a day to day basis.
O’Brian gets dragged out of bed in the middle of the night because a hypochondriac feels a tingle, and after extensive diagnostics show nothing is wrong, he’s ordered to take the transporter apart piece by piece and put it back together again.
During a disaster where he is the most experienced person left on the bridge, he has to take orders from Troi (who needs him to explain everything to her)
Has arachnaphobia, gets stationed somewhere that’s overrun by giant spiders, just has to deal with it.
Let’s not forget that Miles fought in a war against the Cardassians, which caused some serious psychological scars that don’t seem to be getting addressed. Those same events broke his commanding officer, and Miles is the only one who really understands why.
Then he goes on to take a quiet post at a space station in the middle of nowhere, only for it to become the frontline of an even bigger war.
Just realized I forgot the time that his wife got turned into a 10 year old. A 10 year old who got mad at him for being uncomfortable with physical affection at a time when she is going through something crazy and wants to feel comforted. Forget the Kobayashi Maru, that right there is the real no-win scenario.
Now if only I could go back to forgetting that episode.
Let’s not forget that time when primitive 20th century freezer jockeys were thawed out on the Enterprise D and a sleazy 80s business man was able to do pretty much whatever he wanted with the computer. When Picard yells at him, he replies that if there were things he shouldn’t be allowed to do, why didn’t they set the computer to not allow it? And Picard replies that people shouldn’t have to be told they aren’t allowed to do certain things, they should be able behave without the computer forcing it.
So, the reason they have such a huge security issue is that they run everything on the honor system. Though I suppose this was right after Worf took over security, so I guess that makes sense.
Give Tom a break. He got forced into being the nurse because he took biochemistry classes before getting kicked out of the academy.
Plus, he’s juggling nursing duties with his full time job as the pilot. And his side gig as a commando team leader. While moonlighting as a spy. And despite all that he’s still finds the time to develop an encyclopedic knowledge of twentieth century earth. And let’s not forget that he also designed engines with a top speed of infinity. He’s the most competent man in Star Fleet. Not bad for a dropout and ex-con.
Pretty sure if you Tuvixed Paris and O’Brian, combining Paris’s competence with O’Brian’s work ethic, you’d get some sort of god.
Description of image: Meme image. I can’t believe he didn’t cry during Titanic! Do men even have feelings? The man is crying at Picard crying in the mud.
You want to talk moments that kicked you in the soul? Lore saying “I love you… brother” as Data is deactivating him.
Maybe it just hits too close to home after being in a similar situation with my own evil brother. But that’s one of those moments that always catches me off guard. Especially since the rest of the episode isn’t all that great, so it’s easy to let your guard down.
While I’m feeling nostalgic, here’s a few other honorable mentions in the “I wasn’t prepared to feel emotions today” category:
Ivanova after getting healed - Babylon 5
I didn’t count on being happy - Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Arctic creature here. I wear a kilt and t-shirt all year round. Sandals too, unless snow is recent enough that it won’t have been cleared from wherever I’ll be walking.
You can find relatively cheap ones online. Damn near kilt em is one I can vouch for as a good first kilt. Or stillwater kilts for something cheap and more traditional looking.
The number one thing to know when buying is that you need to actually measure yourself. Pants lie, kiltmakers generally don’t.
If you want something a little nicer, there are plenty of businesses that make kilts to measure. My last few came from alpha kilts, but I think they quit. Alt.kilt does crazy custom stuff. Utilikilt is probably the most famous one, though I’ve never actually tried theirs.
There’s whole communities online for this stuff. I used to get reviews and find new stores on xmarksthescot.
If you get a contemporary kilt, meaning pockets and modern style, you just need a belt. If you go traditional tartan you probably need a sporran or some other kind of bag or pouch since they don’t have pockets. Traditional kilts also typically use a kilt pin to add weight to the front apron to keep it from blowing around too easily.
Tall socks are good formal wear or cold weather. I am a very casual guy and an arctic creature, so I usually just wear closed toe sandals. But if you live in a cold place and need to stay warm, a full size “9 yard” kilt will do the trick, it creates a pocket of warm air, and the legs being together gives it a mitten effect.
You can go commando (aka going regimental, because in highland regiments underwear is considered out of uniform), but I don’t recommend it. For one thing, you don’t know fear until you’ve been caught in a gust of 50 mph wind while walking past a school playground on a day that you decided to save time by forgoing underwear, and now you are desperately holding down all sides of a lightweight kilt and trying not to end up on sex offender registry. But on a much more mundane level, it’s also just a lot easier to keep your kilt clean when it isn’t directly touching your junk or your crack. I wear briefs but I go up a couple sizes, so that the elastic still holds them up but they hang off me when I’m standing, which feels like I’m wearing nothing at all.
Of course, if anyone asks what’s worn under the kilt, you have lots of options:
Nothing’s worn, it’s all in excellent condition.
If you want to find out it will cost you dinner and a movie first.
I remember hearing that Russel T Davies thought it was one of his worst episodes. I thought that made a weird kind of sense, as he had been responsible for a lot of bad episodes, so of course a really good one would clash with his tastes.
You have the humans of the enlightened future meeting a team of military personnel from the past, lead by a man who tries to avoid enlightenment whenever possible. He’d probably end up in Quark’s playing darts.
Carter is going to immediately frustrate any attempts to limit damage to the timeline (not that it makes sense given that they’d have to be from a parallel reality) or invoke the prime directive. She’s going to be full of questions, and she knows enough about advanced alien technology that she’ll probably be able to figure out more than they’d want just from observation. She’d also probably figure out how to use the wormhole to get back home, being something of an expert on the topic.
Daniel is going to have the unique experience of being an archeologist that is now a relic of the past. Not much for him to do as a linguist since they have universal translators, though it would be funny if they brought it up and he thought they had all just been speaking English, since everyone in their galaxy does for some reason. It’d also be funny for him to be recognized by the prophets or Q, as though they knew him from his brief period as a vorlon or whatever.
I think Dax and Teal’c would hit it off, they have so much in common.
And things would get very confusing if someone activated an emh.
Also probably for the best that the Atlantis team isn’t there, as O’Brien would have some awkward questions to answer. Besides, they’re already too busy crossing over with Enterprise and answering their own awkward questions about Tripp.
Oh, and I really hope Jellico is visiting the station.
If we aren’t being strict about warp technology specifically as the measuring stick, I think the gate network itself would qualify, even if they weren’t the ones that built it.
That said, the principle of noninterference likely should apply to some extent at least. After all the trash talking they’ve done over the years about people in the 20th/21st century, it would be crazy to let a military unit from that era get access to anything that might help them advance technologically. Especially when they’ve already got a history of capturing and reverse engineering alien technology. And all the more so when it becomes clear that any technology they do get their hands on will be used almost exclusively for the purpose of fighting alien civilizations (and perhaps even others on their own planet).
In the long run, if a stargate found it’s way onto DS9 or Bajor and permanent relations were established, I could see the federation providing aid to the Tau’ri to help them fend off the Goa’uld and/or the Ori, which they could justify because they would be preventing an advanced civilization from exploiting a technologically inferior one. But I have to think it would take them a while to get to that point.
House Republicans have yet to coalesce around their own plan to avert a government shutdown with just 10 days until the deadline, raising the stakes for a new speaker who will have to contend with the internal dynamics of his conference and a Democratically-controlled Senate and White House....
Hostage takers remain undecided on the best strategy to free the hostages.
They aren’t trying to avert a shutdown, they’re trying to get the most concessions possible in exchange for averting it. They are the ones causing the shutdown, everyone else is actually trying to keep the government running.
I don’t understand people who are only interested in a very specific type. As long as a woman is generally attractive to me,^1^ I can be interested regardless of her height. Sexy little hobbit or death by snu snu, it’s all good. Same goes for skin color, hair color, and most healthy body types.
^1^ Obviously, finding them attractive in the first place is kind of the point. But I think we can also understand the difference between “would be attractive if not for [insert turn off here]” and “is not at all attractive.”
Old.reddit is reddit from a time when it was designed with user experience in mind, rather than trend chasing and maximizing ad placement.
I’ve heard that the reason old.reddit is still supported is because new reddit can’t run without it. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if the developers of new reddit were pushed to rush something out to meet demands from higher up, and therefore didn’t make something clean and severable. I mean, we’re talking about a site whose video player wants to load every resolution at once on every video you scroll past in an infinite feed, my expectations aren’t terribly high.
It seems like all the other markdown stuff works, but we’re missing ^superscript^ and subscript in connect. As a frequent user of footnotes,^1^ I would greatly appreciate support for these tags....
Works for me on the standard view on lemmy.world, as well as the Alexandrite and Photon views. But they don’t work when using the old.lemmy.world view.
I feel like I’ve been hearing this for a decade. Not that the show has been good for the last decade, but that the latest season is always the one that was pretty good.
The last time someone I knew told me this, I pressed for details. I tried to get examples of good episodes vs bad episodes, and a sense of the ratio between the two. The impression I got was that each recent season had a few episodes that stood out as pretty good, and the rest were either forgettable or kind of crap, but not as bad as the worst episodes in the show’s history.
I remember asking my wife it she could remember the last time we actually saw Homer at the power plant. Did he still work there? Did he finally get permanently fired and this season represents his decent into madness as he realizes there’s no coming back this time? Or maybe he never worked there and I’m the one who’s gone crazy.
lemmy.world/c/[email protected] is the basically the only one I’m aware of, and it’s not exactly active. The community just never really made to shift from reddit.
In fact, there’s more subscribers for lemmy.world/c/cremposting, and it’s basically just a redirect.
Maybe I should actually post something and see if I can stir up some activity. Or just send @The_Picard_Maneuver some Mistborn books and wait.
And honestly, the memes are as good a reason as any to get into the series. Hell, I sent a friend all six^1^ books just to get him hooked enough to help nudge our gaming group into playing the wild west setting in the RPG.
With two more trilogies planned. And possibly another trilogy between those two trilogies (he has an idea but hasn’t committed. I assume he’ll do it just to get it to 16 books, which is the significant number throughout the series)
The great thing about Sanderson is that he’s a machine that just won’t stop writing. The man wrote 5 extra books in secret just because he could.
The terrible thing about Sanderson is that he’s a writing machine, and just when you think you’re caught up he drops 5 extra books on you! Still, beats waiting for G.R.R.M. to finish a book.
By repeatedly bringing up the issue and putting it in the court record, Mr. Kise said that he was laying the groundwork for either an appeal or a motion for a mistrial.
Spouting a stream of bullshit that you can’t actually defend in open court just to get it out there. It’s a classic strategy
It can be easy to dismiss it due to the 90s TV budget and effects, and there’s a little awkwardness in the first season as the show figures itself out. But once you get into it, it’s just amazing.
Every episode changes something about the status quo and usually advances the ongoing plots, avoiding the reset button so many other shows at the time would have, while still making each episode a satisfying story that can stand on its own, unlike a lot of modern serialized shows. It deals with timeless themes and ideas that echo history, a lot of which feels more relevant today than when the show was new. The writing is complex and nuanced, the dialog is snappy, the humor is fantastic, and the storylines are compelling.
But more than anything, it’s the characters that make the show such a treat. There is a richness to the characters, a complexity that allows them to have layers and go through significant changes as their arcs progress, while still feeling natural and consistent. And all throughout you can’t help but like and root for them, even when they are doing something misguided or horrific. Hell, you will often see conflict between two characters and find yourself wanting to root for both, no matter who (if anyone) is right or wrong. And when one of those big character moments hits, be it a man realizing the price of his obsessions, or a kind hearted doormat spitting in the face of a mass murdering power broker, when everything comes together and those characters get their chance to shine… Chef’s Kiss
For our last campaign, I made a big spreadsheet with all of our inventories. It tracked ammo and consumables, carry weight, and value. It also tracked how each character was doing compared to expected wealth by level, which had been starting to become an issue, as the GM wasn’t paying close attention when generating loot and many rewards were really only useful to some characters buy not others. I even added wishlists for things we wanted to save up for or create.
Then I added a page for tracking spells known / prepared / used, which could populate any available spells and abilities on a shortlist. Not only did this help stop one player from basically forgetting that spells are limited, it also made the most complicated character I’ve ever played into viable option, as he had full access to 4 spell lists and several powers chosen from three different classes, plus two specializations (each of which granted two more abilities automatically and gave access to even more powers to choose from) all of which had to be adjustable on the fly, because he could respec it all on a daily basis.
Then came the quest tracker and NPC index. No more forgotten plotlines or missing NPCs.
Then the kingdom building page, because we had a kingdom to run and that gets complicated. And an additional page for each settlement.
Then there was the calendar, because we’re not using some boring earth calendar, and the GM wasn’t going to make one himself. He refused to figure out some fantasy calendar that he isn’t familiar with, so he told me to change the names on the real calendar. So I renamed all the months… and all the numbers. All the numbers, with no overlap, meaning each month counted 1 to 30ish in a different way… So whenever we checked the sheet it would remind us that it is currently Jantober Seconst, Apruary Firg, or Juch Firstandthefirious. Every time a new day rolled around he would read the date, die a little inside, and then we’d all laugh.
In a way, the inventory became as much a game as the game itself. Plus, I showed it to my boss and got a promotion. True story.
How Bread and Circuses should have ended. (i.imgflip.com)
6÷2(1+2) (programming.dev)
zeta.one/viral-math/...
It's been a stressful week in Engineering (startrek.website)
Please don't let this be Gene's legacy. (lemmy.world)
The name of the place is Deep Space 5 (programming.dev)
I can’t get enough of these familiar spacefaring faces!
Discuss (startrek.website)
He'll go down in history (startrek.website)
Unlimited Suffering! (lemmy.world)
Let me know what I’ve omitted from either list. O’Brien still “wins.”
Starfleet may have a security problem (startrek.website)
Give thanks to the healers. (lemmy.world)
TOS and SNW Chapel count as separate characters.
WFH (i.postimg.cc)
Getting spoiled by big budgets and CG can ruin your palate. (lemmy.world)
And don’t get me started on modern conveniences.
I'm thankful for the multiversal defense force. (startrek.website)
Yes. I know she’s a changeling. I don’t think Delenn cares.
NOBODY WARRNED ME 😭😭😭 (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
Description of image: Meme image. I can’t believe he didn’t cry during Titanic! Do men even have feelings? The man is crying at Picard crying in the mud.
Seems like it could become a problem very easily (startrek.website)
I have never understood that. (lemmy.world)
Insert witty title here (files.catbox.moe)
Hobbies (lemmy.zip)
It's not fair (startrek.website)
(sorry if anyone got this post twice. I posted while Lemmy.World was down for maintenance, and it was acting weird, so I deleted and reposted)
deleted_by_author
Why does that man have a funny U shape on his head? (lemmy.world)
I wish I knew how to assimilate you. (pixelfed.social)
No reason, why? (lemmy.ml)
With 10 days to go, House Republicans remain undecided on best strategy to avert shutdown (www.cnn.com)
House Republicans have yet to coalesce around their own plan to avert a government shutdown with just 10 days until the deadline, raising the stakes for a new speaker who will have to contend with the internal dynamics of his conference and a Democratically-controlled Senate and White House....
If Remans were an ice cream flavor, they'd be pralines and dick. (files.catbox.moe)
Solar energy storage breakthrough could make European households self-sufficient (sifted.eu)
Just disrespectful (startrek.website)
I won’t download your stupid app (lemmy.world)
Everyone Is a Luddite Now (www.wired.com)
Superscript and subscript
It seems like all the other markdown stuff works, but we’re missing ^superscript^ and subscript in connect. As a frequent user of footnotes,^1^ I would greatly appreciate support for these tags....
Two distinct eras of television (i.postimg.cc)
Hup hup! (lemmy.world)
Octopus/Caveman @OctopusCaveman...
Trump Civil Fraud Trial: Trump Lawyers Attack Law Clerk, Overshadowing Eric Trump’s Testimony (www.nytimes.com)
Since NYT paywalls everything, here’s the article:...
deleted_by_author
Who was holding the bags of holding again? (ttrpg.network)