SpaceScotsman

This is a great site. Trying to break it is fun. It's possible to make a long neck giraffe ship with a giant cowcatcher on the front.

Aside: This is the first time I've ever seen a site ask for cookie consent via a submission box. Annoying. At least in EU if the cookies are purely functional, as seems to be the case here, you don't need to ask permission and you can just notify when the user is about to save to local storage.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot while I've been rewatching DS9 while listening to The Delta Flyers.

They do have the odd one-off "fun" episode in DS9 - this past week was "Our Man Bashir" which is also a fun holdeck episode, and shares a lot with this episode. But the one off fun shows aren't really needed for DS9 to be funny. What makes DS9 work so well is that they have more episodes to develop character relationships. Once you have that built up, DS9 is able to pack in a lot more humour without even needing one-off comedy episodes, just from the characters riffing off each other.

When you have a limited episode count, like in SNW, that's much harder to do. There is a bit of genial poking at spock's vulcan nature, and some character based humour between the engineering staff, but that's about the extent of it at the moment.

And so as nice as these fun episodes are, it does feel like there's missing opportunities. There is a random line about giving Ortegas the bridge when we know there was character development from the last episode that still needs to be dealt with. And one of the main characters in this episode wasn't even really there, so that's a whole lot more time unspent, and whatever development Spock and La'ans relationship has may end up happening offscreen.

I wasn't expecting another "fun" episode. I enjoyed it. The campy awfulness of the old TV set design and costumes was spot on.

Spock-La'an works well, I want to see more of it. It's difficult to find a lot of plot progress in comedy eps, but pushing their relationship forward a bit is nice. I really hope it goes somewhere meaningful, but this being a prequel, I guess just how far it could go is limited, unless they're willing to diverge off canon.

Hollywood AR walls don't hold anything against a holodeck, but we're getting there. It's cases like this that make me think I wouldn't enjoy one for real though, I'd just spend all my time getting paranoid. And did La'an get permission from everyone to use their patterns?

This earlier holodeck is lacking in any kind of true failsafe and is relying on the simulation program alone to not hurt people. Later on the enterprise, they never really figured that out. Scotty should have wrote his notes on safety much bigger than footnotes.

The writing staff must have been using this episode to vent their frustrations of the TV industry. When they were writing it, I wonder if they knew yet they had a confirmed 5 seasons, or if this was written during a hiatus.

I guess the takeaway message from this episode is "you can always rely on those around you". Except when they're holographic murder simulations, then all bets are off.

I just finished Hail Mary Project which I started last week - really enjoyed it. It scratched a perfect itch for some optimistic sci-fi.

I think I am starting to lean towards ebooks for the convenience when reading novels and prosey nonfiction.

However for reference books a physical thing is easier to flip through, and for anything with illustrations, physical still has better quality.

The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn't mention steam or valve. I don't know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they've explained it very badly.

What happens when anti-porn organisations like Collective Shout go after the currency exchanges?

Much of the episode is devoted to zombies, and zombies are boring. Moving on. I thought the directing and/or editing was pretty lifeless (heh) in this one, too - not a lot of tension throughout.

This could have been a bottle episode and might have been better for it. The plant was a macguffin that could have been anything. A molecule on some random asteroid could have served the same purpose and allowed the plot to continue mostly unchanged.

Maybe without the zombies that would have given more time for focusing on discussion around what the characters are feeling - More of ortega's struggle; something better than spock's mind meld which seems to serve as nothing more than foreshadowing for something that's going to be said out loud a few minutes later anyway.

If the writers were going to use zombies in a story, then they should actually use them as part of the plot.

This was an ok episode. Very character focused rather than sci-fi.

Everyone should recognise what is happening with ortegas, they really shouldn't be letting her do anything until its figured out, nevermind chain of command training. There must be something seriously wrong with starfleet's psych evals if she had one and they didn't spot this.

Last week I did wonder if the Gorn DNA was going to cause problems, and here we are going to get a... hybridisation of some sort. I wonder where this is going to go - hopefully not the same way as Paris and Janeway went. We know Pike must suffer, and I wonder if he is going to have to deal with losing Batel altogether on top of everything else. I wonder if she is going to have to deal with heightened violent emotions, as the mind meld suggested, and end up having to be "dealt with" in a permanent way.

Zombies. M'benga's "don't call them that" was hilarious - Zombies in Star Trek just feels kind of wrong. They were alright, but, it's zombies. The fact that it came from genetic modification with plants reminds me a bit of Cordyceps which has featured in many other zombie stories. Something that did bug me is M'benga is a medical doctor, and the best mask he could bring was some sort of fabric wrap? Do they not have surgical masks or M95 masks in the future? I wondered if the story could have been about saving the infected, maybe a "do I have to make the choice of cutting off this limb to save someone" moral quandry. The closest we got to that was the klingon that got bit and immediately vaporised. Zombies were kind of just set dressing / a mechanic to keep the characters moving forwards.

A running theme in this episode seems to be the characters falling out of their comfort zones. For all but Scotty, this seems to leave them worse off than when they started. It's good to see him slowly making progress after being thrown in the deep end.

Misc notes:

• The gravity loss shot was very nicely done.
• For all that I didn't like the zombies I did like their design. There was one bit where one got stepped on the head and it slowly deflated, like it was made of plant material.
• With all the AR wall stuff, I liked the actors having some set they could really interact with.
• The viewscreen has a "rear view mirror" display :) why isn't that always visible in the corner?

My point was that brave's solution, like Signal's, is dependent on microsoft playing fair. If microsoft decides they don't want brave, signal, or anyone else using DRM to interfere with their screen scraping chatbot, there is not going to be an easy way to fix it.

I picked up Project Hail Mary from the library this week. Only just started but I'm enjoying it so far.

They haven't blocked the windows feature, they're using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.