In the article, that comment is directed at Boots Riley, though to be fair I think he could only be accused of Trojan Horse level obfuscation by people who think anything with social commentary subtler than Hacks is a Trojan Horse.

I like Hacks a lot too (even if the final season was a bit of a low-stakes victory lap, it still made me laugh), but “boomer actually has to explore social justice with an open mind” is at least half the point of the show.

Patrick Stewart was also deeply involved in the creative decisions on Picard seasons 1 and 2. He got to the point where he just wanted to do what he wanted to do, and since he is Jean-Luc Picard, what he wants is ipso facto the right choice:

“What I’d like to see at the end of the show,” I told them, “is a content Jean-Luc. I want to see Picard perfectly at ease with his situation. Not anxious, not in a frenzy, not depressed. And I think this means that there is a wife in the picture.” You see, the line between Jean-Luc and me has grown ever more blurred. If I have found true love, shouldn’t he?

Sometimes you do not want your actor actually in charge of their iconic character, and genuine embrace of it can manage to make it worse if they’re not writers. I will do my occasional hornet’s-nest kicking and say that Mark Hamill’s take on Luke Skywalker after filming The Last Jedi was similarly myopic, but in a direction that more fans at least think they wanted, and since we’ll never see his choices play out he still gets the benefit of the doubt.

To be honest I think I’d prefer to see them cast a regular-sized Ackman, like Alyson or Margaret.

Oh, yes, I did start playing with a screen reader; why do you ask?

Yeah, that’s the main gist. DoD is straying from their lane because Hegseth is a raving Christian Nationalist, and not even one of their better advocates, and that is a LOOOOOOW bar. This all stems from a published list, screenshot in the article, that still includes Mormons but doesn’t preface them with “Christianity” like it did for the others.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he personally redlined a Word doc to delete “Christianity” from the Mormons’ line before approving it for release, and maybe without any particular emotional animus, just parroting what he remembered from Sunday School that one time he wasn’t hungover. The fact that the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Adventists made the cut might also argue for there not being a ton of theological rigor to the decision.

I think Mormons get too defensive about wanting to be included in other Christians’ theological definitions of Christianity (literally can’t happen… The Mormon Trinity is polytheistic by almost any standard, to say nothing of extra books and other heterodox beliefs), but those invested in one group or another’s theology can overlook that there are other contexts (shared history, cultural practice, self-iidentification, etc. etc.) that can generate just as much passion and be internally reasonable. It’s almost like the separation of church and state is a pretty good fuckin’ idea, especially in a pluralistic republic…

I guess, but that’s some pretty unnecessary gatekeeping when one is dealing with the definitions assigned by a secular government who, in your analogy, is not in the business of evaluating wellness and healing practitioners’ truth claims at all. All the various outgroups that became heretics when a very political conference wrapped up in Asia Minor didn’t suddenly stop identifying as a Christians, and the fact that some provincial American conman steeped in Great Awakening Protestantism inadvertently reinvigorated some of their ideas 1500 years later doesn’t make it nonsensical for his marks and their descendants to self-identify as Christians. The state has a very good reason (and no bar) to evaluate whether a given “healthcare provider” is going to harm the public by claiming certain titles, but the situation with religion is very different, particularly for a bit of minor military bureaucracy (historical contextisn’t even really relevant here). Unforced error by the MAGAs.

Now, IMHO Mormonism is a pretty toxic, high pressure religion, and it believes some shit that strikes the modern mind as particularly goofy, but it’s a religion with a creed that’s very clearly arising out of the Christian tradition. If you want to take different magic sky-daddy theology at face value, then sure, within that framework you can reasonably draw a line and declare anyone on the Arianism line of it as “not Christian,” but that’s not the US government’s job. Absolutely not the hill for the Department of Defense to pick at all, much less to die on, but if it makes some Mormons disillusioned with one oppressive cult of personality, then that could be a good thing.

On the one hand, as an Ex-Mormon, LOL.

On the other, maybe it helps depress gop voter turnout and makes sure the Democrat wins their new district in central Salt Lake City. And maybe MAGA finds Utah is a lot less inclined to run through walls for them in 2028. Nobody does “stoically endure oppression, real or perceived” quite like Mormons.

The way DoD did this is also classic Bible thumper Protestant shit, right out of a Chick tract. Mormons are absolutely not Nicene Christians, but they profess to follow Jesus of Nazareth, so if they want the gummint to lump them in with the Christians, it takes a special kind of stupid and short-sighted religious pedant not to humor them.

This corporate product placement is getting out of hand!

LOL, okay I read your article too now. I assume there’s some sort of interior wall-ish structure that would probably be fine to cut through, as long as you know exactly what you’re doing and don’t make any mistakes or encounter any surprises whatsover.

So… fine then? What is all the fuss, comrade? Is just like making CO2 scrubber adapter.

The headline was misleading to begin with, since it was done as a precaution while Roscosmos busted out the good duct tape instead of their usual fix of chewing gum.

It’s almost like the tech companies are preying on places that have cheap land and residents with less political influence…

Jesus, at least the meat packing plants and shingle factories employed people they were poisoning.

I saw The Mandalorian and Grogu a week after opening. It was… fine. Filoni loves wolves and bringing characters in from his animation. Favreau likes to smash the action figures together. We got pretty much all of that, and I smiled more than I cringed, though to be clear I did both. Also, as much as I disagree with his “spectacle movies are without artistic merit” take, there was something kinda sad about hearing Scorsese voice a CGI alien in a franchise that – although it lodged itself in my soul at the exact right moment to stay there forever – is obviously past its prime.

We shouldn’t tease. Right now I think he wants his political career banally centrist. When we make too much fun, they go full Tuberville or Walker!

42 hours

it lives about twenty minutes away from me

nm 🤣

TIL. Bad for cholesterol, but maybe good for cancer and nerve issues. Coffee is fuckin’ weird.

I do basically the same thing. I just try to make sure it’s light or medium roast, use brown sugar and a bit of milk, and the second half goes in the fridge to become iced rocket fuel for the next day. Also means I get to alternate making and cleaning.

In the meantime, OnShape is cross platform cause it’s all in browser and I don’t care about my designs being public. I actually post them all free anyway.

The biggest issue with their license is that they went so hard on protecting themselves hosting it, that they basically give everyone BUT the creator the right to monetize a public design. It’s an offensively sloppy ToU, or at least it was the last time I checked it.

Some of it will depend on what your goals and OS are. OnShape is pretty good, and being in-browser it’s inherently cross-platform. BUT… their free tier has the single worst licensing setup imaginable: your designs are public, you can’t make a single cent off them, BUT any paying customer (and arguably any other user at all) can. They also jump straight from free to enterprise pricing.

Fusion you know. Licensewise, the free version gives you a small grace zone to make a couple of bucks without issues, and you can at elast keep your designs to yourself.

SolidWorks has an extremely heavy and unfriendly web interface, but their in-browser parametric 3D CAD is better than it used to be, and you can get a maker plan for $25-$50 a year that gives you a little wiggle room to sell a few trinkets and not get blasted if someone or something rats you out to Dassault. If you’re on Windows, you’ll also be able to install proper SolidWorks (though files will be watermarked to limit them to a hobbyist/maker install.

Solid Edge is a bit clunkier than (real) SolidWorks or Fusion, is windows only, and there’s also a doughnut hole for limited commercial use, but it’s the full software and it’s free as in beer.

Since they cleared up the worst of the toponaming issue, FreeCAD is way better than it used to be. I still feel like the moment you have to do anything more than draw/extrude/fillet, then all the clunkiness comes back, though. It’s a brilliant project in its way, but it remains a mixed bag, shall we say.

I paid for a permanent license for my version of Alibre Design, and that’s what I generally use. It’s somewhere between SolidEdge and Solidworks in user-friendliness, and more than powerful enough for my keyboards and random widgets. I also do like the simplicity of owning my license and therefore fully controlling my designs, but it wasn’t cheap, probably two years’ worth of monthly payments on the Shapr3D usable tier or the fancy Fusion tier, so I will probably keep plugging along for a while yet. They have a more basic product (Atom) that’s missing some fairly useful features, but is still parametric and is rather cheap. It’s also all Windows only, though I keep hearing the next version will play nice with Wine/Proton. For now, my investment with Alibre is pretty much THE reason I occasionally boot back into Windows.

TinkerCAD (opwned by Autodesk like Fusion is) is great for certain things, and the “make shape, set solid or hole” workflow is much more intuitive for the abject beginner, but if you’re on Fusion you’re already past the need for it, i’d think.

There are other players (Rhino, Plasticity, DesignSpark, SolveSpace, among others), but Fusion, Shapr3D (for single parts only, no assemblies),OnShape, SolidEdge, FreeCAD, Alibre, and Solidworks pretty much cover mechanical CAD that’s (1) full-featured, (2) 3D, (3) got parametric history and (4) available with usable free or maker versions.

In general, the production design here is on-point, but I have a weird feeling that about 80% of the movie will be on Earth. Maybe I’m just jaded by being a little kid when the Lundgren movie came out, but given that history I’m surprised they went with a concept involving Earth at all.

ND Stevenson’s She-Ra is by far the best stuff done in this broader franchise, but the Kevin Smith He-Man wasn’t bad either. Neither of them spends a moment on Earth.

I could even get behind the one game per team per year. It would even mean an easy return to 8H/8A every year while in the US. Selfishly, as a Jags fan it would also mean no more god-damn road-shows spending multiple weeks in England and fucking up the rhythms of the season.

Beyond that, the NFL needs to understand that it will never displace soccer in most of the world and at best it will be playing on the edges, and that it’s important to be seen as a product that is premium (to its potential audience) because of its rarity and American-ness. You start thinking that there’s enough fan interest in every place every week, and then you hurt the quality of play and become less of an event. THAT’S when you have a real problem. American football is an odd beast that is just not set up for truly global mass appeal.