Traveller, Aftermath (post-apocalyptic), Top Secret (spies and terrorists), and Villains & Vigilantes (super heroes) are all lost in the sands of time for me, but I really loved them all.

Archie, gopher, wais, Usenet, Telnet, and ftp were the internet at that point. The www was basically a guy with a fan page for the hobbit and someone who gave a virtual tour of MIT.

I’m a biologist rather than a physicist, but I will take a swing at this.

Not really, although it depends on how you do your definitions. Most of the elements were formed by stars, which were themselves formed by the OG hydrogen, so hydrogen came first. So, first energy, then particles, then hydrogen, then stars and such, then oxygen and iron and all of those things.

I’m open to any corrections.

I can’t say what their corporate culture is like now, but they’ve had a pretty poor reputation in the past, including the notion that the lowest performing 10% should be fired every year. The Amazon folks I’ve known have been great people - not at all the Gordon Gecko types you’d imagine from that - but culture in large corporations varies a lot by the team you’re in.

I came up with a saying back in the 90s when I was doing the startup scene - “Do you want it right, or by Tuesday?” Sometimes they do indeed need it by Tuesday. More of the time they have no idea why you need the extra days to get it right. But it’s really important for those in a leadership position - whether they’re managers or senior engineers - to push back and set expectations.

It is a joke.

This is the rpg where you join the “not a fraternity” in college and then go on to become a political or business leader of the United States, right?

It’s a bit of both, tbh. I use both it and Apple News for news curation. Flipboard is by far more ad-centric (and AN has more content) but Flipboard is pretty customizable for identifying topics so I keep it around. Flipping through it, every second or third page is an ad, but most of what they link to is available (at least for me) and they’re not overly swamped with clickbait (again, at least in my feed).

I probably use it about 1/3 as much as AN.

Thanks! Giving it a shot!

The worst was the in-universe explanation for why all of the aliens are shaped like humans. That was just cartoonishly bad. I mean, I get it. There’s very few ways of casting actors that can play a sentient shade of blue.

But just leave it. You don’t have to explain it. We all know. You especially don’t have to explain it in a way that demonstrates no one involved had ever taken Bio 101.

Thank you!

I was thinking that VNs were more like “walking simulators,” where most of the action that takes place is pretty scripted but you explore the world and the story being presented by the devs. Games like Life is Strange and Firewatch were my introduction to the genre, and I found that I really enjoyed playing them. Fire watch was my first and, not having read anything about it or the genre, I kept being afraid of dying. It took me a ridiculously long time to figure out it was just telling you a story with some interactive elements. There was also a company that was publishing comics that had audio and (minimal) animation, which I thought was a fantastic innovation. I had some really good horror comics from them, but I don’t know if they got acquired or are still in business.

Anyway, I’m going to look into that one. I do like gothic horror and period work.

This is a great write up - thank you!

I’m not a big fan of anime as an art form or storytelling style, but I’m going to be looking into these titles.

I’ve loved what I’ve seen of Lower Decks but my partner has a things against animated tv shows. I haven’t been able to watch it as a series as a result, but everything I hear about it makes me want to find a way to do it.

I have a tendency to wait for seasons to be completed before marathoning them, with a few exceptions. The problem with that approach is that I can fall away from shows as new ones come out, and forget to circle back. Despite being a huge Trek fan (I can’t estimate the number of times I’ve rewatched TNG, DS9, and VOY), I’m behind on all of the new Treks.

I am a fan of Michelle Yeoh. She’s one of my favorite actors, and I’ll go out of my way to watch whatever she’s in. Stamets was a favorite character, and more often than not it was his plot lines that pulled me along into the next episode. I mean, I’m a biologist with mycophobia, and I still obsessed with his personal, romantic, and scientific journeys.

I just could not get into Burnham, though. One of the reasons I loved DS9 so much was that Sisko was about as close to a realistic military officer as Trek has come. I love Picard and Janeway, but Sisko was the only one who I felt could have been someone I knew during that stage of my life. There was still plenty of Trek going on, but when he got military, you could tell.

Burnham was the exact opposite. It was like every single decision point was where she’d do the least military and even the least Starfleet thing. I could throw around words like selfish or immature, but it wasn’t even restricted to that. And they were entirely broadcasted and predictable - I’d be watching and say “Oh, please don’t let her do X,” and sure enough she’d do X. This wasn’t a plot point or a flawed hero motif, it was built into the character.

I loved Milly. I loved Saru (love anything Doug Jones does). But Burnham was terrible, and the show revolved more and more around her. She wasn’t a femme Kirk or a woke Janeway. She was like a privileged 15 year old given command in a galaxy-spanning military/scientific/governmental organization.

I will make it back to the new Treks. I’ve finished all of my Taika Waititi shows, I just did my Nth rewatch of Schitt’s Creek and The Good Place, and I’m still a couple months away from redoing The Other Two. I need to scratch my sci fi itch. I just don’t know if I’m going to make it back to Disco before doing something else like SNW or Picard, or yet another pass through the old Treks.

You should store them in your fallout shelter.

You know, just in case.

The eye hook through the top of his head kind of ruins the feel-good effect for me.

Other than checking with other countries, I’m not sure what else you could do.

I also used to watch Spanish language programming to help learn Spanish. I do have to warn you that the subtitles will often not match the spoken words. Sometimes they’re completely different, as if they were produced by two different translation services. I found that telenovellas were often very accurate, but other kinds of media were hit or miss, and the translated ones were the worst. If you don’t need to read subs, though, you should be fine.

I think that Trek plays with ideas like this by creating throw away alien races. By that I mean they’re not foundational, but rather are used as a cardboard cutout to illustrate a point for the plot of an episode.

For the tech angle, I think there’s a couple of candidates. The Bynars, for instance, had an intimate coupling of technology and society - and here I’m mostly thinking about the way they were floated in TNG.

At the other end of the spectrum you have the Pakleds. Although they have a high tech space faring society, their grasp of the science and engineering that the tech requires is… rudimentary and primitive. They’re not creating new technologies.

I agree, but I was concentrating on the Roddenberry-verse, since I think we started with the idea that it would be something apart from his conceptualization of the world-building he was doing.

In fact, I think that Lower Decks is a comedy, and one of the organizing features of the humor is poking good-natured fun at Roddenberry’s conceptualization of the universe and the Federation. It’s not outright parody in the sense of Galaxy Quest, but the non-Trekness is deliberately used as a source of humor.

I think that’s the pivot point. The US Army is worthy of endless parody and it doesn’t have to be good natured. We’ve hit a weird part of our timeline where we (as Americans) are idolizing our military as heroic icons. As someone who has been there, I’d rather go back to what we had in the 70s and 80s (not the institutionalized homophobia, but the skepticism of civilians). Starfleet was created at a time of such skepticism, and was set up in deliberate contrast as a near-utopian future. We’re coming to a different place now, where any given soldier is a selfless defender of freedom around the world but Starfleet is getting a more comedic and skeptical treatment.

Anyway, I’d really love to see the idea get a treatment, but it’d be tough to balance the Trekness with the MASHness.

The problem is that they’re not really trekking anywhere at that point. I remember that being a big criticism of DS9 when it was first airing. DS9 partially made up for it by having a very cosmopolitan setting and the occasional offworld episode, but it wasn’t until a few seasons that they were regularly having adventures off station.

Interestingly, I think DS9 was also the most war-related series, at least of the first four. Voyager had their ongoing Odyssey combat adventures, but not a larger war the way the Dominion War was portrayed. Generally speaking, wars with the Klingons or Romulans just provided context for episodic plots, not drive a multi-season story arc.

I even think there were several MASH-like episodes - stories like Nog playing medic, Jake as a war reporter, Kira being forced to evict that farmer, and some others. They showed the cruelty and absurdity of war, but of course without MASH’s humor. And I think that’s what made MASH, MASH. The bitter, jaded, drafted doctors and medical personnel using humor as a defense. It’s not war that’s non-Trek so much as that kind of human attitude (even if it did surface in later episodes of later series). There’s no Burns and Hot Lips versus Hawkeye and Trapper kind of dynamic in Starfleet.

Come to think of it, Q was a literary trickster character, like Hawkeye. They both had a bemused but sometimes quite angry disregard for authority and did what they could to show it up as absurd. That analogy never occurred to me before. Q is what Hawkeye would be given the power of a god.