I suppose it’s too much to hope for, for RSS feeds to make a comeback. Or JSON feeds being more prevalent. I’m totally serious, I miss being able to just check the headlines without going through a bunch of bullshit.

At this point I’m more or less done with Reddit. My latest ban was because I posted a screenshot of an ad with a wacky old person comment to r/oldpeoplefacebook. I carefully smudged out the person’s name and profile pic…and got a three-day site-wide ban for sharing personal information. I protested, they said, nope, you shared personal information. All I can figure is they decided the advertiser’s name is personal info, which would make it even more bizarre because I’d say about half the posts have group or advertiser names unedited.

People they let mod, can end up getting this really bizarre God complex not dissimilar to what you see in university settings, their word goes, questioning their word is a sin and they’ll just double down.

The Twitter bots started in on that shit before the damn rain stopped and haven’t stopped since. At this point Twitter’s living in a goddamn fantasy world. “Where’s Biden? He hasn’t done ANYTHING!” Meanwhile he issued several emergency declarations? “Where’s Kamala in all this? This is her problem!” …is it? What’s with Twitter bots acting like Kamala Harris is already the President?

I gave up on it because I’ve tried logging in via Jeroba, Connect, and Voyager on my phone, and no bueno. I don’t mind putting in some effort but eventually I give up.

It was briefly syndicated, I think; I watched the first season on the local ABC affiliate. In my area a tiny little TV station in the middle of a cornfield got the rights to TNG and I honestly think that’s what kept that station afloat. The affiliates fought over DS9 and VOY. There was a UPN station in my region but it was too week for me to watch it OTA.

I feel like they tried to learn from BSG without bringing in Ronald D Moore for insight, and just said, hmm, yes, the things that make BSG work so well are depression and alcoholism.

If you like that one and you’ve never seen the original Rat Pack Ocean’s Eleven movie, do yourself a favor and watch it. It’s not deep, it’s not fantastic cinema, but it’s entertaining as heck.

Brace yourselves

Decades ago I was at the Visitors Center for the Western band of Cherokee and this woman was giving a talk next to a campfire, and the wind kept shifting. She kept moving and finally coughed and then apologized for the smoke blowing in everyone’s faces.

There was another guy there who was clearly hitting on her, and he said, “they say smoke follows beauty.” With comedic timing the wind shifted and blew the smoke towards him, and she, quick as lightning, said, “Smoke follows wind.”

(And in case you don’t know, in American English when someone is “windy” they talk a lot and don’t say much)

I’m also going to give a curve ball: M*A*S*H.

Movie recommendation: Run Silent, Run Deep. It’s a WW2 Pacific theater submarine movie with Clark Gable and Burt Lancaster. But it’s directed by Robert Wise (Star Trek: TMP) and the story beats will be recognizable by fans of both TMP and Wrath of Khan. It also focuses pretty heavily on the lower decks crew.

Oh lort. You just gave me flashbacks. One of my kids bought one of those $200 Chuwi laptops and it would barf all over itself about once a month, so badly it would require a reinstall.

Go back and rewatch TOS. Spock is emotional.

Yeah, basically they took the intro Dennis McCarthy wrote for TNG, and replaces his theme with the TMP theme

https://youtu.be/jzpeulsbv8o

PSA: Word isn’t layout software, it’s a WYSIWYG document editor. You can change settings to make it work more like layout software, but it’s better to use a layout tool if you need that.

Recently I switched to using Affinity Publisher because it did everything I needed from InDesign. The only problem being, if I want to share files with anyone, I have to make sure they also have Affinity Publisher.

It seems like a lot of iot tech is geared more towards iPhone in the US. For example my wife’s Odyssey will read the entire header of a text message with text to speech, and if you look into it Honda says it’s a known issue. No such issue with iPhones.

Good Lord they established that Pike and Batel have a relationship in the first episode.

Rigel 7 is literally a callback to The Cage

I…see…

A little scary to contemplate since some of the code comes from the NSA