I’ll stand by the position that the Enterprise augment virus arc was an error, and the “explanation” for Klingon ridges is the same one you should use for the bridge of the Enterprise looking like it was cobbled together from plywood and plastic beads. This issue was best left to Worf’s lampshade in DS9 Trials & Tribleations.

It’s really interesting which visual differences humans will accept unthinkingly and which we will demand answers for. The Klingon ridges thing comes up constantly, but I have yet to see anyone earnestly ask why all the characters in Lower Decks have huge eyes and unnaturally uniform coloration, or why hand phaser beams in TOS go so much more slowly than later phasers and why everyone agrees to stay really still while they are being fired.

https://explosm.net/rcg/vzyafxanj

Reading the caption before seeing the image definitely weakened today’s comics for me.

Captions of Far Side comics are often effectively punchlines, clarifying whatever weirdness was drawn in the comic. Reading the words and then seeing the image feels disjointed, and loses a lot of the “punch.”

It’s because citrus at high concentrations kills earthworms. Citrus in compost in normal quantities relative to other compostables seems to be fine, but you shouldn’t be trying to compost a huge pile of just pulp and orange peels in your back yard.

As for why this worked here, I’m sure there are a whole lot of things that aren’t earthworms living in a formerly rainforested spot in Costa Rica which can break that stuff down over 15 years.

Regarding the future uniforms, the same uniforms appear in most portrayals of “future starfleet” during the TNG era, such as DS9 The Visitor. I don’t believe they are meant to indicate a connection between alternate futures beyond being the next step for Starfleet uniform designs (although the uniforms shown for a similar time period in Picard turn out to be different anyway).

Regarding your question more broadly, yes. And also no. Both, really.

I’m not sure Q recognizes or cares about the distinction between spinning up an entirely bespoke simulated reality for Picard to do his thing in, versus altering the past such that branching timelines are created and shuttling Picard’s consciousness between them before ultimately closing them off. Or whatever other myriad mechanisms an omnipotent being would have for triggering the events portrayed. Nor is there any real way for us the viewer or Picard the participant to distinguish between those things. What is real, what clearly matters both to Picard and to Q, is that Picard did pass a test, and that Picard remembers those events in a way which will influence his future actions and relationships.

Sure. /u/williams_482

I still have a Reddit account and am willing to help people figure out Lemmy registration, but I do not moderate any active Reddit communities.

It’s amazing how good 30+ year old Car Talk episodes are, as someone who had never listened while they were on the air and stumbled into the edited NPR rereleases a couple years back.

It’s also the team anthem of Emglish football team West Ham United FC.

And a well-chosen anthem it is!

You have no idea if China did that. If they had, they would have taken great efforts to cover it up, and could very well have succeeded. It’s a small wonder we know any of the terrible things they did, such as the genocide they are actively engaging in right now.

Sure! Here’s my crude, MS-Paint-esque diagram:

1-6 are pretty obvious, just marked with numbers. 7 and 8 are circled with a line looping back to their number. 8 is just peeking around a corner, while 7 is only barely visible, with part of the top of his head peaking out from behind 5’s neck.

I count eight Kims (two of them only partially visible) in that shot of the prison cell, and there’s a fair bit of room around the corner for more to be hidden. I think it’s also easy to believe there are more cells containing more Kims just down the hall.

It’s reasonable to assume that the Defiant class’s 50 crew compliment is pretty close to a bare minimum already. 16-17 active at any one time is a pretty short list as it is, with roughly half that posted to the bridge during normal operations and most of the rest in engineering, plus a transporter chief, doctor, and other specialists. Having two shifts of reserves is crucial for covering both a long term assignment and for battle situations: you need to keep the crew as fresh as possible in the long run, and in combat you need those people to fill in for casualties and act as damage control, security, and emergency medical personnel. So unless Section 31’s strategic level idiocy extends all the way down to inane meddling in shipboard operations (possible, these guys are morons with dangerously inflated egos!), it should be safe to assume that the Anaximander was supposed to be staffed with about 50 crew.

Are you seriously drawing equivalencies between being imprisoned by the government and getting banned from Twitter by a non-government organization? That’s a whole hell of a lot more than “a little more gentle.”

If the USA is trying to do what China does with regards to censorship, they really suck at it. Past atrocities by the United States government, and current atrocities by current United States allies are well known to United States citizens. US citizens talk about these things, join organizations actively decrying these things, publicly protest against these things, and claim to vote based on what politicians have to say about these things, all with full confidence that they aren’t going to be disappeared (and that if they do somehow get banned from a website for any of this, making a new account is really easy and their real world lives will be unaffected).

Trying to pass these situations off as similar is ludicrous.

Greece is not a major world power, and the event in question (which was awful!) happened in 1974 under a government which is no longer in power. Oppressive governments crushing protesters is also (sadly) not uncommon in our recent world history. There are many other examples out there for you to dig up.

Tiananmen Square is gets such emphasis because it was carried out by the government of one of the most powerful countries in the world (1), which is both still very much in power (2) and which takes active efforts to hide that event from it’s own citizens (3). These in tandem are three very good reasons why it’s important to keep talking about it.

That sidesteps the question of why all of these comically evil people are okay with using this arbitrary contest to determine succession, instead of the usual route of organically murdering each other until someone emerges who is good enough at disposing of potential assassins that they keep the throne for a while?

I didn’t watch the movie, so I’m probably missing something. Did Georgiou also have to deal with a bunch of normal assassination plots after officially gaining the throne? Or are we to assume that by virtue of winning this contest, she is widely seen as too dangerous for anyone to attempt to usurp?

Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Barclay?

Yes?

Lieutenant Barklay and the huge, powerful, and successful paramilitary organization who employs him are exactly who is supposed to guard Federation worlds. Which is what they do.

That makes quite a bit more sense, and if that was the intention I wish they’d been a little more explicit about it. I didn’t even realize the implant was mucking with his emotional processing? Despite the Episode 1 throwaway line about it being a “Vulcan” implant, he seemed to have pretty normal emotional responses to me.

The showrunners said from a very early point that the two would not get together during the shows run, and I get the distinct impression that they actively enjoy trolling shippers. So this is pretty much exactly what I expected, and I’m perfectly happy with it.

(Also, look at Tendi in that last scene, when she gets a scan of Rutherford during a conversation about them being “just friends”. She saw something on that Tricorder which she didn’t expect, and then when Rutherford gets up and has his back turned, she’s clearly checking him out. Draw your own conclusions.)

The overall Rutherford arc was less successful. I guess they seeded it previously, but I always just assumed his implant was on the fritz, so it was odd to see him suddenly blaming the ship.

I am at a loss as to how Rutherford’s implant could be flexible enough to function as part of his brain in day-to-day life, and yet somehow be incapable of helping him solve engineering problems on an old ship? Is there some kind of weird DRM installed that prevents it from opening schematics older than a couple years? Or is all the data on California class systems stored in a file format that they latest and greatest starfleet tech can’t open? Both of which would be rather colossal failures of Federation computer tech.

This was a pretty solid episode with some very good jokes (the thing about creating a warp field with one nacelle was fantastic, for example), but I left feeling underwhelmed because of the bizare “the first officer is two LTJGs” thing. Lower Decks has had a shockingly strong track record of not doing things that strike me as immediately stupid, but this is really silly. “Ransom must be pulling another twisted prank, because he’s not this bad at his job” level silly. I think it’s still better than promoting Tilly to XO, but that’s a bar I had hoped this show would remain well clear of and a close shave is disappointing.

I think I understand why they did this: there’s no obvious non-specialist XO candidate of an appropriate rank in the main cast (arguably Shax, but he’s “only” a LT and does not seem ready for the job), and they didn’t want to just trot out a handwave and say they’ll be picking up the XO at the next starbase or something. I’d also theorize that they had planned to have two more seasons in which to work Mariner and Boimler into positions where they might actually make sense for an XO billet. But they aren’t there yet, and they both know it.

Also, gosh would that alternate universe explorer thing have been useful in DISCO S3. And probably Prodigy too. It’s also a dangerous can of worms to open for future stories, because having reliable access to random slightly different universes, apparently at different points in their timelines, is incredibly useful for both anticipating and solving problems in the “prime” universe. There’s also cool stuff they can do with it and I’m sure they will, so I’m trying to keep an open mind.

Finally, props to them for coming up with a more plausible reason for our heroes to literally save the universe: because someone connected to them got unwittingly thrown into a position of enormous influence, and deliberately picked them. It’s Zeus and company antagonizing Hercules, not Michael Burnham being central to solving five (?) entirely unrelated but galactically significant disasters, apparently by pure chance.