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melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The ending was decent. It ended right where the book series it’s based off of has a 30-year time skip, so it worked out pretty well for them. They have plenty of time to come back to it and still keep continuity with actors too FWIW.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Apple products are an ecosystem. It’s not just the physical devices they’re selling. It makes sense from a business perspective to keep iMessage on iOS only, because it keeps people in the ecosystem.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I found that so frustrating because among the people being ableist about it, it was just so ridiculously poorly balanced. But people then wanted to defend it and paint anyone who criticized it as ableist. The doc even has a section saying that the combat wheelchair doesn’t give any advantage over able-bodied players, that it just allows people to continue adventuring, and that it is cruel to deny disabled folks the opportunity to adventure.

Then they turn around and write upgrades like 1/day dimension door. That’s equivalent to a rare magic item, which XGE says sells for 2000-20000gp, being sold exclusively to wheelchair users for 500gp. If that’s not an advantage I don’t know what is.

I have nothing wrong with the premise of a combat wheelchair, I think it could be cool, it’s just poorly made with all the “upgrades”.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The show is also about a space navy that has near total autonomy on the frontier, securing the interests of the Federation while inducting new worlds into its ranks, with our heroes being the Good Guys who are high ranking officers in the military who give orders and investigate conspiracies and hold life and death in their hands as they fly around their heavily-armed “totally not a warship” exploration vessels.

It’s very Space America, and at times almost libertarian in its politics and non-interference. It’s not even explicitly socialist, all we know is that they don’t use money, except when they do. The writing is sort of fuzzy on the matter, which results (regardless of the intention) in an economy that doesn’t actually seem that different to our modern day in practice. There’s no money, but people still own businesses and talk about buying stuff, which allows for the economic system to fade into a sort of forgettable background space.

Besides, Star Trek isn’t necessarily about a socialist future. It’s about a post-scarcity future. I think that’s a key difference. I’ve spoken to many conservative fans who say that they believe that capitalism is the only way that we can achieve a post-scarcity future, i.e. invent replicators. Because Trek isn’t about a worker’s revolution, it’s about the slow progression of technology, followed by a nuclear war, and then at some point they just sort of got rid of money because it was obsolete. All we even know about it is from one-off lines.

There’s a bunch of info on the economy of the Federation in this article on Ex Astris Scientia.

It makes me think of the Culture series, another sci-fi universe I’m fond of. It’s even more leftist-coded than Star Trek, yet somehow Elon Musk is a fan of it and names his rockets after ships from the books. Apparently Jeff Bezos is a fan too. Ugh. And as a result, a lot of people’s first introductions to the series is through these awful people, since it’s a lot more niche than Trek.

melmi, (edited )
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I largely agree with your analysis here. My point was that the way the economy is portrayed is such that we don’t get to see much of how it actually works, meaning that a lot of our understanding is speculation based on a handful of lines.

Meanwhile, they’re still participating in the aesthetics of commerce within the Federation, and literal commerce beyond its borders. The idea that there’s a currency used for trade outside the Federation, but citizens get everything for free within it, is a popular interpretation but it’s never actually explicitly stated within the text outside vague mentions of a “Federation credit”. It’s personally my favorite interpretation, but I think everything’s vague and in the background enough that I can see how people can walk away with different interpretations. Just look at that Ex Astris Scientia article; I even disagree with where some of the evidence should fall on whether it’s pro- or contra- money.

The wildcard here is that we see Federation worlds that seem to still use money, namely the Bolians who are members of the Federation, but the Bank of Bolias is a major financial institution.

The interesting thing to me is that people often assert that replicators are the reason that money doesn’t exist in the Federation, but that’s simply not the case; it’s established in VOY that money “went the way of the dinosaur” in the late 22nd century, prior to the invention of the replicator over a century later. Neither replicators nor money existed in Kirk’s era. It seems that replicators are not essential to eliminating money in the Trek universe, although I’m sure they’re a boon to the standards of living.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

This is true, but also it’s implied in technobabble that replicators operate on a lower “molecular” resolution whereas transporters operate on a quantum scale. I rationalize this as a space saving measure; when you’re transporting living organisms, you need perfect precision, and thus a full pattern buffer worth of resolution. This is clearly expensive to store, so much so that it decays over time unless you do something tricky.

Replicators use a lower resolution scan, as you can just reassemble protein molecules into the right shape most of the time. Eddington complains about this issue. (The non-canon TNG technical manual mentions tanks full of protein sludge used for replicators.) Now, is this actually detectable by a human palate? Eh, maybe.

I imagine if you were to beam a plate of non-replicated food though, the full flavor profile wouldn’t be lost. It’s specifically the low resolution of the replicator tech.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The annoying thing about that is that if you don’t long rest enough in BG3, you miss a lot of story beats. Unlike tabletop, it wants you to long rest, and will punish you for not long resting rather than punishing you for long resting.

I’m doing a second playthrough and I’m realizing just how much I missed during my first playthrough where I used my tabletop mindset of “rest only when absolutely necessary”. And even then sometimes watching other people’s playthroughs I see scenes I never saw.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I’ve never had that problem, I play Tactician and I consistently have a ton of food in my inventory, but then I’m a loot gremlin that picks up everything that isn’t nailed down. I have more trouble spending all my food than picking it up. Even my max STR char was somehow always overencumbered :'(

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Yeah, I figured that out eventually, but then I have to remember to go back to camp and pick up the dozens of mundane shortswords I sent to camp and sell them

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

They even show up in Star Trek Into Darkness as furless cat girls that the writer claims are the same species even though they’re clearly not. Memory Alpha dutifully lists them on the Unnamed Caitian page, but amusingly doesn’t actually call them Caitians explicitly.

To be fair, the text never refers to them as Caitians, it’s just the writer saying it in an interview.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

You can buy alcohol cheap from a store in real life, along with all the ingredients to make drinks, yet people still go to bars where cocktails cost more than a meal. They’re not going just because of superior bartending skills, they’re going as part of the experience of drinking with other people. Because on DS9, your other option is basically to drink in your quarters, which is no fun.

There are more options for food on DS9, but people still go to Quark’s for the atmosphere. It’s lively and fun, which is probably hard to come by otherwise on a remote space station. I doubt people are coming to Quark’s in droves for the food though, it’s more just something you get if you’re already there.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I don’t know about the other games, but The Expanse: A Telltale Series released this year.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I’m confused how something could connect all of time and space together without being omnipresent. It seems to me that the network is omnipresent by definition, because it exists everywhere.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

That’s true, it spans the entire multiverse but only within one galaxy. It’s odd, but it’s cool that the network is so deeply tied to the Milky Way, just in every reality.

It makes me wonder what the network is actually feeding off of. Life? Some sort of nebulous “energy”?

Not something that they need to (or should) answer, but it’s just so cool to think about the mystery of it. I love fungi, and I love the mycelial network as this truly cosmic-scale organism living in subspace, holding the multiverse together. It’s beautiful.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Well, the question still remains of “symbiotizing what”? Fungi on earth range from saprophages, which decompose dead matter into nutrients, to mycorrhizae, which form symbiotic relationships with plants which produce nutrients. In either case, they’re feeding off of things, it’s just the source that varies. All living things need to gain energy somehow.

The mycelial network is spooky and probably feeds off something more abstract, since sci-fi and all that. That said, maybe it’s in some sort of symbiotic relationship with the multiverse itself? There’s so much energy in a galaxy, let alone a multiverse worth of galaxies, that it’s not hard to imagine a fungal network feeding off just a tiny fraction of that energy. And interstellar space has relatively low energy, so it makes sense the network wouldn’t build hyphae there.

You’re right that they never said it only works in the Milky Way, I had just assumed that since it peters out at the border of the galaxy that it ends there. And if it resumes in another galaxy, it seems like it would be discontinuous and thus a separate organism. But I suppose if you imagine it as a wholly separate subspace realm, with hyphae that connect out wherever there is sufficient “energy” of whatever sort it feeds off of, it makes sense. And jumping to another galaxy could be a cool twist indeed!

I would give anything to be an astromycologist

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

A video of someone playing the game, on somewhere like YouTube. You get to watch someone else (the “lets player”) play, and use all the mechanics.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

What’s the advantage for the bank?

What's stopping banks from creating FOSS (or atleast open-source) banking solutions (apps)?

Let’s say, I create a bank with the caveat that all of my banking phone apps and webapps are FOSS (or if they depend on non-free components — banks probably do to communicate with each other —, then just OSS). Am I going to be behind the competition by doing this?...

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

What incentive would a bank have to release their apps as FOSS?

You probably could create an open source banking app and use it to run a bank on a primarily open source software stack. But banks are not software companies, and they have no reason to engage with the FOSS world. We could think up lots of potential reasons for why a bank might not want to release their apps as FOSS, but the simplest answer is “why would they?”

I’d love to live in a world where free software is the norm, but we’re not in that world. So if the bank has no incentive to do it other than the comparatively niche interests of the FOSS community, they just won’t do it.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Marco has so much charisma. A huge part of his insidiousness is just how charming he is. There are points you almost wonder if he’s really the bad guy.

On the other hand, Winn isn’t as charming, she’s not particularly sympathetic for most of the series. She’s kinda just hubristic and antagonistic, and isn’t very good at pretending to care about anything other than her own power grabs.

Plus she’s way less hot.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Poor people should try wanting things more

What VPN do you use and why?

If you are a pirate VPN is an essential tool. I am trying to ascertain the popularity of various VPNs in piracy community. In this excerise, I will list several Popular VPNs in the comment if you use one of them just upvote that comment and reply the reason. If you don’t find your VPN listed add a comment with just their name....

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Generally CnD letters are not generated by the ISPs themselves. ISPs don’t care what you do unless legally obligated to. When you get a CnD letter, it’s usually because someone working for a copyright holder was on a torrent and snagged your IP, then sent an infringement notice to your ISP, who in turn sends a CnD to the current holder of the IP, i.e. you.

At no point does your ISP have to read your digital communications themselves. Any one of your peers on a torrent can tell what your public IP address is, it’s inherent to the BitTorrent protocol. Copyright holders take advantage of this to catch pirates.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Step 1.5) The bag of holding is destroyed and all your items are scattered across the Astral Plane

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

IPv6 is actually widely implemented. Home ISPs are mixed on providing IPv6, but mobile providers widely embrace IPv6, some even running IPv6-only networks that rely on translation services to reach IPv4 destinations. T-Mobile is IPv6-only for example

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Yeah, IPv6 adoption varies quite a bit by country and region. It’s a shame that it’s going so slow

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Coerces a guy into sex and then expects him to want to call her back smh…

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

When you’d rather be playing Pathfinder

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It might seem a bit complicated if you’re only used to 5e, because core mechanics like conditions work rather differently in Pathfinder, but it’s honestly much more flexible than 5e’s system. Rather than having an abstract number of passes and fails, you have a single number that fluctuates up and down. Less things to keep track of.

You do have the wounded condition on top of that, but it helps counter the thing you see in 5e where people pop up and down repeatedly with no consequences for repeatedly being beaten unconscious.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Unlike Tor, which is built around accessing the clearnet anonymously, I2P is primarily designed around keeping traffic in the darknet. When you join I2P, you route traffic for other nodes but only within the I2P network, it will never leave through your clearnet address.

The equivalent of Tor’s exit nodes are called “outproxies”, but they aren’t often used, there aren’t very many of them, and you have to specifically set them up manually as it isn’t the default behavior like it is for Tor.

What are your thoughts on fiber through the city?

After 16 years of living in my city, they will finally have city-wide fiber internet. I’m pretty stoked because the fastest internet I could possibly have is a WISP at 50gbps down and 10gbps up. Now I will finally have gigabit but it’s through the city, and I’m wondering if they will be more strict on illegal content...

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I’ve heard of people doing fiber to the desktop in their homelabs. Seems a little overkill, but it’s the cool factor that counts!

melmi, (edited )
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Connecting to a switch/router doesn’t change anything, that’s just how the Internet works. The fiber from the street is almost certainly connected to switches before it gets to your house as well.

If anything would break the “fiber to the desktop” meme, it’s the fact that most residential ISP ONTs I’m aware of do not support SFP, which means that you’d have to get copper out of the ONT, then convert it back into fiber. You’d have to get lucky with an ISP that has compatible options.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

This is a weird one because despite being a “good” spell, it entails the mass murder of innocent neutrals. It really doesn’t seem like a good action to me.

It seems like anyone who was okay with this would fall to neutral or evil simply by virtue of being okay with mass murder, and in turn fall victim to the Great Neutral Purge.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Ah, but there is an evil equivalent, Blasphemy. It affects non-evil creatures instead of non-good creatures, and as such has no self-balancing properties. There are even equivalents for Law and Chaos, which are… worryingly abstract.

melmi, (edited )
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I don’t get why they call hosting a mail server being your own ISP. It’s a very very loose definition of the term “ISP” there. ISPs may provide mail services on the side, but that’s not what makes them an ISP imo—its providing internet access that makes them an ISP.

On looking it up, apparently some people consider email providers ISPs in their own right though? Seems like confusing terminology.

melmi, (edited )
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

No. It fits Captain Angel’s perspective as an edgy pirate pining after their lover, but Starfleet is full of hopeful, enthusiastic scientists who are in space because they want to be. They love exploration for exploration’s sake, and are on a ship full of people who likely have similar interests.

Angel’s perspective is warped by their passion; I mean, they’re literally in the middle of hijacking a Starfleet ship to get their lover back. They think their dependency on love is universal, when in reality most people are more emotionally stable than them. Although it probably helps when you’re in Starfleet and have an incredibly supportive working environment and not, you know, a pirate crew.

melmi, (edited )
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

True enough; it’s a very different framing, but there’s still love there, still passion.

I think a big difference is that Starfleet folks tend to be more intrinsically driven. Space isn’t something that needs to be “made bearable” (unless you’re McCoy I guess)—space is cool in its own right, tons of things to see and people to meet. But on top of that, the Federation has such a high tech level and quality of life that living on a starship is pretty luxurious.

melmi, (edited )
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

This project uses mDNS, which is specific to the .local TLD. The whole reason that people are against the use of .local is because it would break mDNS. So you can set a custom TLD, but it doesn’t matter because this is actually the correct context for .local to be used, and changing the TLD will actually break things for a lot of clients.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Paradox games require you to turn on Ironman mode to get achievements, which is why all of them have really low achievement percentages. That combined with vanilla just seems like not a whole lot of fun to me.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

They linked directly to the post on the Lemmy side, so I’m guessing it’s an issue with how Mastodon handles Lemmy posts. I’m on a different Lemmy instance and I can see the direct link just fine.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It’s an interesting article, you should read it. You’re thinking of too direct a translation. The idea is that you strip out all of the events, and just adapt the scenario. For Lord of the Rings, the important part is that the One Ring exists, and it needs to be taken to Mt. Doom to be destroyed. Everything in between there is a complete sandbox.

You can then pull in lots of characters and places from the books, but they will almost certainly all show up out of order as your players won’t take the same route that they did in the books.

The OP article talks more about the steps to adapt a scenario including a Star Wars example, but here’s the LotR one: thealexandrian.net/…/ask-the-alexandrian-7-classi…

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

No one was saying that you should follow a story exactly. That wouldn’t be very interesting imo, even if it was possible.

I feel like the most interesting way to do it would be to have it very explicitly in an alternate timeline. You could do this by killing a main character, or by otherwise having a major divergence. Then it feels less like just stealing ideas and more like a “What If?” story, and would help nip the urge to follow the story too closely.

I seem to recall a podcast or comic or something that was this but in a Star Wars universe, that opened with Luke Skywalker dying and the podcast/comic characters taking over for him. I tried to look it up but I can’t find anything about it now. Wish I’d remembered the name.

melmi, (edited )
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

It looks like the instance has only existed for about a month, so it’s not too surprising it hasn’t been noticed before now.

They already removed pedo instances before, so they’ll probably remove this one. They seem to draw a much harder line on pedophilia than politics.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Well yeah, that’s what pro contact means. Pro sexual contact. They don’t think there’s any inherent problem with sexual relationships between adults and kids.

“Pro contact” is just a polite way to say it, obfuscating what they’re really talking about.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I think you may be using a different definition of terms. Pro-contact MAPs think that having sex with minors is fine, and that it isn’t abuse. Here’s a link to the MAP wiki on the subject: map-wiki.com/index.php/Pro-contact

If you go to the instance being discussed, you’ll see people openly saying that sex with kids is okay and that they don’t think there’s a problem with it.

melmi, (edited )
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

The term is real, it’s even used in scientific literature. The term possibly even predates 4chan, or maybe it’s just a success on 4chan’s part, successfully laundering a term into scientific discourse? It’s hard to find too much solid evidence on the origin of the term. 4chan did seriously signal boost it with the whole “MAP Pride” thing though.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

You’re right that the post is badly written, because it just sorta says “this is a place that promotes paraphilia!” But in this particular case, this server hosts reprehensible content and is not just a community for kinky people that happens to have pedos on it.

It’s like if there were a knife enthusiast instance where the largest local community was about committing crime, where the admin self-identifies as being into commiting crimes. It’s absolutely true most knife enthusiasts have no interest in committing crime, and therefore the knife enthusiasts who don’t want to commit crime probably wouldn’t join the server that promotes crime.

The analogy falls apart a bit because it’s true that they’re not doing anything illegal over there, at least not publicly. But they’re still promoting viewing kids sexually, promoting sexual contact with kids, even talking about nude photos of kids.

melmi,
@melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

10.50.50.0 is not a valid IP address in most configurations. Have you tried 10.50.50.1?

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