Call your girls legs Dolly the way I be Parton them

You know, Picasso wasn't appreciated in his time either

D:

this is a legitimate problem in robotics.

like, if you're a bomb disposal guy and your team has a cool bomb-disposal robot which you've given a cutesy name to, you may hesitate to put that robot in harm's way, which is NOT OPTIMAL in the bomb-disposing field.

it also doesn't help if you hold funerals for the robots after they get exploded (this happens pretty regularly).

anyway nobody has worked out how to stop humans from pack-bonding with literally inanimate objects and they probably never will. (like even knowing it's a problem, I *still* think those EOD robots deserve funerals).

What if we started naming the bomb disposal bots after terrible people? Or would we risk people having a softer image of Unibomber-bot?

DS9 Writers: Think of all the cool things Odo could turn into! This is going to be amazing!!

Production Budget: No.

It's amazing they were able to do what they did, honestly. I'd love to see a Changeling in Lower Decks or Prodigy, animation would let them do so much without significant costs.

I want to see a Changeling character some time who's played by a rotating cast of actors, because shapeshifter. Not a new actor every episode, like maybe a core three or four different appearances that the Changeling feels comfortable in - you could investigate some interesting and challenging ideas around unspoken assumptions about categories and demographics if you're putting a variety of different looking bodies into the same situations and relationships, but they’re all literally the same person.

On one hand, wrapping your gender diversity in aliens is a somewhat problematic sci-fi trope that implies that queerness is only acceptable for non-humans. On the other hand, think about how cool it would be to find a genderfluid actor that had three distinct voices based on the Changeling's identity.

Oh! Oh! OH! Make it one of the hundred infant Changelings! We've only ever met two (three if you count Armus but that's just my headcanon) and it'd be a great opportunity to expand the canon.

So, this sucks.  This show that meant so much to so many is taken off the service in order to “save money” on residuals, license fees, etc.  But it’s not lost on me that the only Marvel show with LGBTQ+ characters as the leads is the one to get cut.  They will fly the Pride flag beginning next week, but we all see the hypocrisy here, don’t we?  A bad look Disney and Marvel.  The hypocrisy is pretty discouraging.

the idea of ted going back to kansas make anyone else really stressed? like he’s going back to henry of course, but also: back to his complicated relationship with his emotionally unavailable mother and his ex wife who left him for their therapist with whom she’s currently in a relationship with? besides henry, what waits for him?

and left behind is a found family full of people who would die for him (sam’s line about this was a joke, but you can’t tell me those himbos wouldn’t kill if not die for ted lasso, rebecca would definitely hire a hit man for ted, and don’t get me started on beard, roy, and trent)? and ADDITIONALLY, since ted mentioned her last episode, i’m assuming he’s still seeing doctor sharon. i’m not up to speed on how this works, but i feel like she’s not able to be his therapist if he goes back (this could be wrong, but if it’s not, then color me concerned, it seems like he still really needs her. where was she was he was hiring a PI to follow his ex wife?)

and if BEARD stays in london? truly, what is waiting for ted on the other side save for henry, a child, who needs his dad to fill his own cup first, and is too young to be any kind of real emotional support to his fragile father.

i trust the writers, truly. so if they convince me this week that ted needs to go back to kansas, alright. but at the moment, i am wary

Y'all are treating Henry like an afterthought when he's not. Ted knows it's his responsibility to be a good father and he can't do that for Henry from London. His entire reason for going to London was because he didn't want to face the difficult parts of his life. He spent three years running and growing but now he knows that it's time to go home. He had his big "thank you and also fuck you" speech to his mom and he knows that if he stays in London, he'll be on the receiving end of it with Henry someday. This episode was not about Ted's relationship with his mom, it was about Ted realizing if he's not careful he's going to fuck up the exact same way with Henry.

You know the poem that Mae recites for Ted? The one about mom and dad's fucking up their kids who inevitably fuck up their own kids? When Ted heard that he wasn't just thinking about his mom. I'd wager his mom wasn't even mostly what he was thinking about. He knows he's suffering and going home is hard but he knows that he needs to be there for Henry or Henry will also suffer.

I don't know how many people reading this are parents and I promise I don't mean this part to be a "oNlY mOmS WiLl UnDeRsTaNd," but Ted is dealing with a lot of the same issues as a parent that I face. He knows he's broken and he wants to do what's best for himself but he knows he has to balance that with what's best for Henry. Henry's just a kid who needs his dad. I cried when Ted blew up at his mom because I've had that same fight with my mom (different details but the same fight). But what was done to me was done and there's no changing it. My goal for my daughter is simple: I want her to need less therapy than I do. And for that I have to sacrifice my wants and needs while also taking good enough care of myself.

And on the note of Ted's mom, her name being Dorothy ("Dotty" for short) isn't just a fun Easter Egg reference to Wizard of Oz. One of the main points of Wizard of Oz is that you can't run away from your problems for long. Pretty soon you need to grow up and face them or they'll just get worse.

Coming home from London is the final and necessary step for Ted on his character arc. He needs to come home from Oz.

I sent a letter today - something I haven’t done for years

It’s full of plastic bread clips

It’s for Science

At the risk of loosing some mystery, I think I should add some context:

There’s this website-I mean, scientific organization called the Holotypic Occlupanid Reasurch Group.

They are a group of abiologists who study and classify Bread clips.

I found a species that has not yet been described:

Yay for citizen science 👍

wtf?

Apparently HORG is widely appreciated by pediatricians since knowing exactly what kind of Occlupanid a child may have swallowed makes removing it safely much easier

IIRC this is actually part of the reason HORG was started. A man swallowed a breadclip and the clip closed around part of his tissue linings (in his intestines I think?). The specific shape and flexibility of the clip were significant determining factors in the removal process, as some bread clips have spikes and prongs that would have made extraction more complicated. They started the taxonomy so they could work out extraction techniques for each type.

are you fucking kidding me occlu like oculus or close and panid like bread. its a fancy word for breadcloser

happy very specific archive thursday, everyone

Okay what I've gleaned from that one post is this

American 2000s reality shows: Based around either literal torture or a deranged civil rights violation dressed up as a "social experiment". Ran one or two seasons or was cancelled unaired. Wikipedia page's longest section is titled "controversy", "criticism", or "allegations"

British 2000s reality shows: Split between every single possible variation on the dating show and deranged civil rights violations not at all dressed up as a "social experiment". Ran for sixteen years and twenty-two episodes

Scandinavian 2000s reality shows: Mostly just game shows with occasional side dish of racism and weird sex stuff. Most British and American shows are based on something Scandinavian at some point down the family tree. Also for reality show purposes the Dutch are Scandinavian

Canadian reality shows: We have stranded [insert group of people] in the wilderness with NO FOOD, NO TOOLS, NOTHING but ONE RUSTY BUTTER KNIFE and a FULL FILM AND PRODUCTION CREW. Can they survive.....

Could I have an example of the civil rights violation shows?

EVERY fucking stupid liberals university in the star trek future their fucking student sketch comedy group OF COURSE has at least one Vulcan and it's like their thing where they're like "haha I bet you wouldn't expect a VULCAN in an IMPROV group!!!!!" as if this hasn't become such a fucking tired cliche like literally since 2063 every fucking comedy show has the token Vulcan to be the straight man. you're doing nothing. call me when you guys make an effort to actually include tellarites in the writing room instead of confining them to punch lines. and to be honest with you guys your Vulcan isn't even that good. his performance was highly derivative of T'min's work in the big bang theory 3 (the third big bang yheory. they make a lot of sitcom sequels in the future)

The last thing you said cannot be true because star trek is supposed to be a utopian future.

star trek is very demonstrably not a utopian future it's a broken society playing at paradise. we see hints of this earlier in the post when I mention university improv comedy groups

Grossly underappreciated Ellen Ripley moment.

Star Trek: Voyager 3x03: “The Chute”

I love how long it takes Tuvok to get down the chute after Janeway as though he wasn't quite ready.

Tuvok, preparing his equipment: Captain, I must again advise you to remain on the ship. I cannot assure your safety in this unknown environment. However, since you insist on coming, allow me to enter first and secure the area before yo-

Janeway, grabbing the biggest phaser they have: Fuck that, my babies are in danger! Jumps in chute Weeeeee!

I mean.

Star Trek: Voyager 1x04: “Phage” vs. 2x24 “Tuvix”

She saved two others and everyone on Voyager needed their commander and ambassador back

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few

Here's what I don't get about this argument though, was there any indication that Tuvix could not perform his duties as well as Tuvok and Neelix? And yeah, Tuvok and Neelix were two people and you could make the case that one person couldn't do the job of two, but were Neelix's duties that vital to the ship's function? Cook, morale officer, ambassador. Assume Tuvix could do the job of ambassador just as well if not better than Neelix (I'm thinking he's given more perspective from Tuvok which could only help that). Surely there's a handful of people who could do part shifts in the kitchen and ask Kes to take on some of the morale officer duties. Or hell, I honestly don't know why there would be anything barring Voyager from taking on more crewpeople as they meet new peoples, it probably wouldn't be hard to "hire" someone to come along for the ride (hire as in, you won't get paid but you'll get full room and board as well as all the privileges and responsibilities due a member of Starfleet).

Caught my first student using ChatGPT to write their report yesterday! FUN TIMES

@aelaer:

So: this was actually for a module on the Masters course that I don't teach. But the first tip off was a claim about a local museum that my friend, who was second marking, thought "I didn't know that was a place." And so looked up. And it doesn't exist.

But it had a citation attached, which the student had used heavily throughout the site background section. So my mate looked up the citation, and it also was fake. Real journal, but non-existent paper.

So he called me, and I was like... Well, that is the big giveaway for ChatGPT, isn't it? It's just a glorified autofill service. It often spits out "lies". So I had him show me the paper, and immediately spotted a second bit of bullshit that claimed that the site was named after a family who settled the area in the industrial Revolution, whose founding father was called John, when in fact that family did not exist and the name actually comes from the Welsh word "Dyfnant". That led to another two cited references turning out to be fake.

So we scoured the internet, couldn't find this info literally anywhere. And finally went and asked the robot itself. It wouldn't confess to having written it, but when we asked it about the site history, it promptly gave us the same made up bullshit (including John, who once again, does not exist ANYWHERE else), and cited three references - two of which we'd already clocked were fake, the third of which was also in this guy's paper.

Interestingly, it kept telling us that these references were hypothetical. Almost as though its training set remembered being asked for those exact references, and having to explain to someone before us that they weren't real.

So I looked through the reference list for anything else mentioning this made up site, and found a fifth, which again, wasn't real.

So, we've forwarded everything on to the head of school, and I'll be speaking to Academic Quality today. Best case scenario for the student is that the uni doesn't consider this proof of ChatGPT, BUT he will still be excessively marked down because he made up, like, a third of the paper (that I checked). And, to be super clear - academically speaking, the paper was garbage anyway. He was already barely passing, because there was no depth whatsoever to it.

But if the uni DOES consider it proof, that's academic malpractice, and worst case scenario is he might be thrown off the course and barred from further study at this university. (It's unlikely to go that far, but the possibility exists)

jealous…

Don't get me wrong, I'm agnostic, my viewpoint on the universe isn't very "religious" and I don't quite vibe with paganism or a defined spiritual belief system, but I still don't think religion and spirituality is regressive and silly

i took an astrobiology class in school where we read stuff by medieval and early modern scholars debating about whether extraterrestrial life existed and what stuck with me the most about it is how their framework of the universe was expanded by their religious viewpoints.

I mean, I think I was also mind-blown by the fact that people have been talking and writing about aliens for all of recorded history, even before there was any scientific precedent to guess that they could exist.

But that very thing (asking questions without a scientific precedent) was instrumental to proto-scientific thought ever becoming a formalized scientific method. These guys had a baseline for asking questions. So there are these scholars in the 1600's seriously articulating ideas like "So if God created the universe, doesn't that mean it's likely that every planet is inhabited, since it would be created for a purpose?" And "No, no, that doesn't make sense, Jesus would have to come to every planet and die, and that would be messed up." And then "Okay, but what if the people on other planets never sinned?"

And they speculate in great detail about the composition and environment of the other celestial bodies, and it was a real paradigm shift for my mind because of just how little they were working with. They had to debate questions that never occurred to me because I took the foundational knowledge for granted, like "Could the Sun be inhabited?" They thought that maybe if you viewed the Earth from outside, the outer atmosphere would appear bright like the Sun from a distance, so the Sun might be the same "kind" of celestial body as Earth.

I think we often misrepresent the misconceptions of the past too—the geocentric universe wasn't accepted just because of the Bible, it was also because we hadn't cracked chemistry yet and we didn't know how gravity worked, and our models had to explain why everything seemed to be attracted to the center of the Earth.

And yet, the Earth's circumference was calculated pretty accurately all the way back in Ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder knew that the Earth was a rotating sphere.

I feel like it's easy to take modern knowledge for granted and not appreciate how tirelessly inquisitive and clever the people of the past had to be to figure shit out let alone pass the knowledge along

like, chemistry and biology are fundamentally built from things that aren't directly observable without certain technology that is very difficult to make. We can't directly observe microorganisms using any of our senses. We can't directly observe how chemical elements are different. The guys who first cracked important parts of chemistry did so through stuff like evaporating the solids out of gallons and gallons of human piss.

There's a theory that alien civilizations that can't observe the stars will never develop science because astronomy is thought to have been important on earth for building the fundamentals of scientific thought. Celestial bodies can be observed and understood using math. Humans had to figure out that there WERE consistencies in how the universe works!

The people of the past were just as smart as us. We just have the benefit of compounded knowledge that they did not have.

This is why John of Salisbury said that we were "[little people] standing on the shoulders of giants." They did the work so that we can see farther.

god I fucking LOVE Star Trek they had $5 a bunch of sexual tension and a dream and they fucking delivered pop off my funky lil 1960s science nerds

Too good to stay on twitter