You know, the nuts and bolts of Generations just don’t hold up to scrutiny, the sci fi mumbo jumbo about how the ribbon/nexus works is not well crafted and does not hold up to Trekkie “umm why didn’t he just fly a shuttle into the Nexus”-ing.

But tear the skin off it with a gardening trowel and you’ll find a kickass theme: Heroes cannot tolerate heaven.

Both Kirk and Picard enter the Nexus with regrets, Picard over the death of his brother and having never raised a family of his own, Kirk in choosing his career over the woman he loves. Both find themselves in an environment that offers this reality directly to them in 4k HDR, but they can’t accept it, and instead choose to re-enter reality to make a difference. Because heaven ain’t no place for no heroes to call home.

Though, backing up a little bit, it does boil down to two men who have chosen duty over family over and over again throughout their careers choosing duty over family again, except this time the “family” choice is presented to them a bit more vividly than usual.

The one where USS Saratoga was the only ship in the quadrant and they got dick shit done.

Happens AGAIN in Generations. The Enterprise B is taking an inaugural cruise out to Pluto and back, “A quick run around the block,” and dialog indicates they weren’t even going to do that under warp drive. So they get the call that they’re the only ship in range, while well inside the Sol system.

In Star Trek V, we get the exchange “Sir with all due respect, the Enterprise is a disaster, are there other ships in range?” “Other ships, yes. But no experienced captains. We need Jim Kirk.”

If you insist on watching TNG from the beginning, be warned the first two seasons are a bit rough and there’s that one “Then we went to the black people planet and got blacked at” episode which even the cast of the show hates that episode.

…And still gets its ass handed to it because they show up and are like “Well now what?” Because the Klingons are perfectly invisible.

fun fact: Undiscovered Country features the only instance of Kirk’s Enterprise arriving to a battle in fighting trim amd ready for combat.

Start with Wrath of Kahn.

Sure. It’s a sequel to a Franchise: The Movie. It is also a direct sequel to a random episode of the show. It is a self-contained story; I don’t think it bothers to mention the events of The Motion Picture, it does a good job establishing the antagonist because this movie came out in 1982, it’s entirely possible that even a Trek fan in the audience missed that one episode of a 20 year old TV show so there’s a whole sequence where Kahn puts Chekov on his knees and recites “I am the very model of a vengeful space antagonist, I blame the death of my wife on the deeds of the protagonist. I quote from Melville’s Moby Dick completely unironically. I grapple thee, I stab at thee, I spit to my last breath at thee.”

Beyond beating the audience over the head with its literary references (to the point of showing a copy of Moby Dick and Tale of Two Cities on screen YOU FUCKING HACKS) it does a reasonable job of world building, and the rest of the franchise refers back to this movie a lot…to the point of remaking it twice.

It’s a self contained plot that comes to an end…even though it has two direct sequels. Search for Spock is where we get fully formed modern Klingons complete with their language, and The Voyage Home is weird, but also kind of cool, and probably the most Star Trek of the TOS era movies…I also believe Voyage Home has the best soundtrack of a Trek film.

The title of this post is “Loops - short form video wtih ActivityPub - is now open source!”

To mean they’ve published the source code to the public. Reading further, I see “First alpha release” a couple times, meaning the project is in its very early stages and is just now in a state where the developer can upload it to Github for access by the public.

Viewing said Github repository, I find it is licensed under the AGPL, a strongly copyleft license. This software will be free to use, distribute, examine and modify forever under those terms. Looks like the intention here is for the software to be Stallman-style “Free.”

So you have apparently pissed your panties at the mere usage of the words “open source” in which case I’m not even going to bother to try telling you to go touch grass. You’re too far gone.

Removed by mod

Another salvo fired in the battle between Perfect and its mortal enemy, Good.

Data’s head being pretty much just full of jumper wires and LEDs is hilarious.

A lot of RVs already use that roof space for solar panels and battery charging. For the house batteries.

An electric car makes sense; the majority of the cars in the United States are used to drive a double-digit number of miles in a day, are not expected to provide a significant amount of energy for anything else, and they sit parked most of the time. You can run that mission on batteries.

RVs are expected to drive hundreds if not thousands of miles, then be a house for a week, and then drive hundreds if not thousands of miles back. A large RV will be equipped with a main engine for highway propulsion, an APU for recharging batteries or running HVAC, a bank of deep cycle batteries for power when no engines are running, and a bottle or two of propane to run the stove and refrigerator. Solar panels on the roof are often used to extend the parked “boondocking” endurance, as running the APU (or in some RVs especially those that aren’t built on tour bus chassis, the main engine) consumes motor fuel, making it possible to strand yourself.

That does assume “boondocking” or parking somewhere without utilities. A lot of RVs are driven from socket to socket and all of the house systems are run from 240V mains electricity and the batteries may see mere minutes of use, but even then while traveling you want the fridge to stay cold and the lights to work while you’re parked at a rest stop in Oklahoma having lunch on your way to the Grand Canyon.

An RV is perhaps the last vehicle I want to fully electrify.

It is my understanding Bluesky outright is not decentralized. It may have an API that allows satellite instances but if the main official instance goes down the platform dies.

Mastodon, Lemmy and their siblings are decentralized in that no one instance is sacred. If sh.ijust.works were to go offline right now, the rest of Lemmy would keep right on trucking. Hell, all of “Lemmy” could die and Mastodon and Peertube et al would keep right on trucking.

Q is omnipotent. If he wanted them gone he could snap his fingers and they’re gone.

I’ve noticed he’s shied away a bit from machine learning in recent times and just does wacky shit like this.

Yeah that feels like the kind of smartass thing Python would do.

Apparently they’re going to push 1000 volts at 1000 amps through it. Which…STILL!

What does the charging cable look like?

It is my understanding that the cables used for most car charging stations are actually liquid cooled. There’s only so thick and stiff you can make that cable before a significant number of people just can’t physically plug in their cars. What kind of conductors do you need to pump a megawatt of power?

I always somehow thought the distinction of “burning” a USB thumb drive was adding an MBR or setting something that ordinary file writes don’t do.

Raspbian Wheezy. I remember learning how to use apt-get because I wanted to see a Pi 1B run Minecraft. Minecraft Pi Edition was the first apt-get install I ever did.