IMHO, the APIpocalypse resulted in too many communities that died on the vine and discouraged their creators and few visitors. Funneling that energy into fewer, more general communities to build up views and conversations strikes me as a a necessary forerunner to a massive “Cambrian Explosion” type of thing. Subreddits, for the most part, naturally evolved because there was already a critical mass of users interested in the topic, not because the sub existed first and attracted the users. What would you think about a different approach to collect various subreddits and file them under healthier lemmy communities that are not one-for-one, but still relevant?

Sub : Community

• askreddit : asklemmy
• amitheasshole : asklemmy
• explainlikeimfive : asklemmy
• gaming : gaming
• pcmasterrace : gaming
• minecraft : gaming
• etc, etc.

Looks like Cobb Vanth to me.

Honorable and dishonorable are official designations for the US military, and a dishonorable discharge is tantamount to a criminal conviction for many professional purposes and veterans benefits.

My brother was a huge fuckup in the Marines, but they waited until he sprained his knee and then gave him a medical discharge, which doesn’t carry the same stigma as a dishonorable.

I would argue that there’s a lot more good than bad in that movie, but it is what it is.

One of the main points of the prequels was that the Jedi order isn’t good. The Clone Wars just made it explicit.

As did The Last Jedi. [ducks for cover]

Butlerian Jihad intensifies…

Yup. Big-ass syringe full of warm water, possibly with some solution in it (I don’t recall that part). It was affecting my hearing in one ear, and the flush fixed it right up.

Something (maybe Alexandrite") borked the link for me. If anyone else has the same issue, here you go:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCaqQJj24yCY_bDQ35jS0Gvw

And yeah, that’s nasty. I had to get my earwax flushed out once. It was unpleasant and super gross, and I’ve used the specialized peroxide solutions a couple of times in the years since. My wife has the dry wax gene, and finds wet wax both gross and confusing.

The only thing I’ll add is that having used a cheap camera earwax cleaner, the magnification makes every normal little waxbooger look like a Star Trek brain slug, so while still dramatic (don’t get me wrong), the videos always look just a touch more dramatic than they really are.

…people were upset it wasn’t followed up on in Rise of Skywalker.

Fair warning, I am coming at this as a fan of TLJ who found it really worked for me after falling in love with Star Wars as a little kid in 1983, but one of the great sins of TROS is exactly that.

Every movie before that had its retcons, sometimes pretty significant, but no movie simply rolled back the previous one or refused to engage with it like TROS did. I’ve been forced to accept that there is pretty significant contingent who didn’t connect with TLJ like I did, but Disney and JJ took absolutely the wrong lesson from the backlash in how they responded. The fans who care that deeply view an installment they don’t care for as an annoying relative, but one one to be addressed, rehabilitated if possible, explained if not. Dave Filoni built his entire career on this.

I absolutely believe it’s been set down. It’s just a weird number to have picked in the first place, a full 20k years or whatever into the future. It feels more like Frank Herbert originally just wanted to say “all that happened a long god-damned time ago… don’t fixate on it.” Yet here we are, fixating on it. If it’s a good show, I won’t mind at all, but I find it amusing.

I believe that Herbert intended it at some level, I just don’t think it was well-considered as world building.

It is fine though, as a way to handwave anything that doesn’t make sense and to underline just how weird this setting and these people’s cultures are going to be. This is not to denigrate it. It’s just more a storyteller’s trope intended to tell the audience to settle in and leave your expectations behind. I guess this show will step in just after the end of the Butlerian Jihad maybe, but the ebbs and flows of human cultural change over 10,000 years means that it’s just one more thing he was intentionally not focusing on, and making a very specific prequel about an era that should be almost lost to the mists of time is inviting questions the “Duneiverse’s” nerd-infrastructure is poorly equipped to handle.

I’m sort of just musing, though. I’ll absolutely watch it, and if they tell a compelling story I will smile and shrug and not let it affect my enjoyment.

I feel like “10,000 years” works better as a bit of hand-wavey poetry rather than a serious suggestion for a setting. I know that societies can be more or less static, but damn, 10,000 years ago, people were just beginning to play with the idea of doing cooler stuff with their stone tools.

That said, the cast and production design looks good. I hope this doesn’t suck.

You mean the thing for hosting galleries because Lemmy can’t do that yet and Imgur won’t work on Mobile without an app? Yes.

As a social network? No, and even when I tried it wouldn’t let me switch my post’s visibility from unlisted to public, so I shrugged and used it as an image host as I’d originally intended.

Counterpoint: If people from Europe love the metric system so much, why are their musicians using eighth notes instead of tenth notes?

I did come away from this thinking she could do well as a cheerfully out of touch middle-aged mom who is pretty sure she’s a dork, but isn’t 100% convinced she is.

I guess if the trailer just makes me focus on someone pretending to be the character, it was probably miscast. The rest of the trailer also looks like expensive B-movie half-assery a la Red Notice, so I’m not going to get too worked up over it, though.

Fair, and Charlotte Nicdao deserves more parts in bigger projects, but Ian is definitely, on net, a character we’re supposed to root for while many of his real world inspirations are… not.

I like it. It’s generally a decent workplace comedy, kind of a Silicon Valley with the edges filed down (and occasionally the serial numbers filed off), and then every once in a while they hit you with some awesome writing, though it’s perhaps telling that two of their strongest episodes (s1 and s2 stand-alones) have absolutely no one from the regular cast, and the s2 one has some great work from Silicon Valley’s Josh Brener. I gather people actually in game development don’t find that aspect very realistic.

I wouldn’t subscribe to Apple TV for it, but it’s worth checking out. I do think the shine is off the rose with man-child tech entrepreneurs since the show was first developed, though.

There is, of course, a Canadian alt-country novelty song about this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cP6nod0cmbc

Folks like your mom and dad are just

Shock troops of gentrification.

The entire first season is more alt-history than sci-fi, and that can take some of the wind out of your sails. The ratio changes slowly over time, but they’re trying to at least plausibly start with our world, circa 1965, as a jumping off point to fork the timeline (I think the conceit is some key soviet scientist and administrator who died in real life survives here and quietly keeps them on track).

Most of Season 1 is basically if somebody walked onto the set of The Right Stuff and replaced everybody’s scripts. It takes into Season 2 for it to really get sci-fi-ish at all, and it’s only S4 where we’re past “The Martian” in tech level. If you are intrigued and just want it to get a move on, yes, it’ll get “better,” but change happens incrementally, and a lot of the drama is earthbound or at least human scale, and some plotlines are better than others.