Basilisk

@Basilisk@mtgzone.com

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What future AI applications are you most excited about?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t help but feel like if we didn’t live in a capitalist hellscape, the increasing democratization of art would be unambiguously a good thing. I’d be more than happy to see “art as decoration” (as opposed to “art as a human means of expression”) opened to being something shunted off to machines, if it weren’t for the fact that this is a method that people currently use to make sure they have enough money to not starve to death in the cold. Advertising art of polar bears drinking Coke is nicer to look at than big block text saying “consume”, but it’s hardly a soulful expression of the human condition. Or maybe it is, which is even more depressing, but the ultimate apotheosis of this is pushing that sort of messaging to robots to make anyway.

  Meanwhile, giving people who aren’t necessarily “artistic” a vehicle to create art as a means of expressing themselves is also really neat, and in the hands of people who are artistic, it gives them a low-impact tool for pre-visualization, inspiration, and a new medium to experiment with. It also reduces barriers for people with disabilities to make art. I’d love to see artists training LLM systems on their own work as a way of sharing their “style” with the world — something which is difficult to justify in a world where your style is something that needs to be jealously protected against copyright infringement, which again comes down to needing to monetize your expression as a matter of survival.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Quentin Tarantino's 'Star Trek' Movie Would Have Been a "Balls-Out Hard R" Movie⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I feel like in the best case it would have been a catastrophe that somehow manages to fall together in a way that actually works, and in the worst case it would have just been bad to the point of being offensively bad, appealing to neither regular filmgoers whole also pissing off established fans.

  … But it also feels like giving a chainsaw to a bear: You know whatever’s gonna happen you’re not gonna like, but also you kinda want to do it just to see what it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's remember some Star Trek games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I really enjoyed Starfleet Academy for the SNES. It wasn’t particularly difficult or long, but there was enough interaction with your “crew” outside of space combat that it felt pretty well-rounded, especially for a SNES game.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's remember some Star Trek games⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I spent a ton of time with that. It had a terrible memory leak, though, which made it unplayable slow after an hour or so. I was really hoping that Star Trek: Infinite would fill that void, but it’s basically just Stellaris.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Let's talk starship classes!⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In no particular order:

  Steamrunner Miranda D’Deridex Magee Constitution

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL that Jordie directed some episodes⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Hearing his experiences on Voyager, you really have to feel sorry for the guy. The higher-ups really seemed to have an axe to grind with him. It’s kind of startling how you go from TNG where even now the cast gets together like family, to DS9 where it was like “It was a good job and the people I worked with were wonderful and professional and we produced something that we can be proud of,” to Voyager, where the cast largely describes it as a cesspool of passive-aggressive resentment and largely only mended fences years later.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨TIL that Jordie directed some episodes⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Trek actively gave opportunities to its actors in the TNG-VOY era to learn and try directing. The number of Main Cast actors who’ve got directing credits is pretty significant. The full list, along with the episodes they directed, is here: …fandom.com/…/Cast_members_who_directed

  Of the TNG cast though, Jonathan Frakes, Levar Burton, Gates McFadden and Patrick Stewart all have at least one director’s credit in the series. Michael Dorn would also later do some DS9 and ENT episodes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just some fun size comparisons⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I guess I just fundamentally don’t agree with the need for a “backsplanation”. I am of the camp that I’m totally OK with the Klingons looking different in TMP than in TOS because it wasn’t a 1960s TV show anymore and they wanted the aliens to look more alien, and that’s all the explanation that I need. The Enterprise is different between SNW and its appearance in Discovery because it’s a different show and they wanted to tweak its appearance some to make it more of a “hero” set. Spock and Sarek never mentioned his having an adoptive daughter/sister in spite of being in two series and a half dozen movies because Michael didn’t exist until Discovery and the writers thought it would make for an interesting tie-in.

  I have enjoyed the series since TNG in the 80s, and I’d love for it to come true some time in the future. But it’s a TV show, it’s not a history book. It’s fine if there are inconsistencies, none of it is real anyway.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just some fun size comparisons⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I mean, I do like so-called “Nu-Trek”, but at the end of the day this is kind of a tail-wagging-the-dog response. You can explain just about anything in lore after the fact, but when the rubber hits the road the real explanation is that someone in a Hollywood design team said “We want it to be BIGGER,” and then left it to the people who cared enough to find a reason why it would be justified.

  Far easier to just suspend your disbelief a bit further, I think. Yeah, Discovery is weirdly big. It also flies through space by a man infused with a giant tardigrade’s DNA sending the whole ship from place to place through willpower and a mushroom trip. If you can accept the second one, it kind of feels like the fact that the ship is a larj boye isn’t that much of a stretch.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just some fun size comparisons⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Although when they created DS9 in Star Trek Online, they had to massively scale it up because otherwise it would have gotten lost among all the players’ ships, both by sheer volume and because so many ships in the game are absurdly large.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where did the abbreviation "w/" for "with" come from?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The ampersand (&) was so commonly used that for a while it was taught as a letter. British schoolkids in the mid- to late-19th century would include it as the 27th letter on writing work and needlework samplers, usually after “z”.

  There’s some discussion that the Alphabet Song ends with “w, x, y & z” specifically to include it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Where did the abbreviation "w/" for "with" come from?⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Q.E.D. is “quod erat demonstrandum”, meaning “thus, it has been demonstrated”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Watching Threshold again. Yay or nay?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The premise is interesting, and the mystery of “what’s happening to Tom” as he gets this weird body horror transformation is actually fairly well done. But any time that a scriptwriter types the word “evolution” into a keyboard there’s should be an automatic spray bottle that pops out of the computer that spritzes them in the face and shouts “No! Bad!” Because any sci-fi script that mentions evolution is inevitably going to completely fuck it up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are metric measurements like decameters and hectometers ever used?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I used to do land surveying in Canada and we’d use “decs” for decimetres when laying out points. You’d put down the rod, they’d tell you something like “dec and a half left” then you’d move closer and it’d be “two cents right” and you’d be even closer and then it’s like “3 mils right.” Then you’d take the shot and they’d tell you how much closer or farther you’d have to go to get the point. If you were way off to the point where you might have tens of metres, usually for rough layout we’d rarely use “dee-kays” for dekameters, but typically it would be just “30 metres north”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is it recommended to wear a face mask when riding bicycle around cars?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The landscape company that maintains the condo I live in uses them exclusively to “clean” the paved common areas and every time they do, the dust blows up into the air, and then 15 minutes after they pass it resettles right back where it came from, while also leaving a fine film of dust on every flat surface in the apartment, as well as small piles of long-accumulated gunk in every corner and crevice. I can’t help but think how much better and quieter this place would be if they just used brooms.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's Your Favorite, Not at All Epic, Star Trek Quote⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  A truly great line from “The Ultimate Computer”

  M4 to Daystrom: “I am great. You are great. We are both great.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What do you like better, free speech or right speech?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Free* speech.

  *With purchase of speech of greater or equal value, at participating locations, some terms and conditions apply. Offer void where prohibited. No cash substitutions allowed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If an ear is an icon for sound, and a nose is an icon for smell, what's a good icon for thought?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Finally, the emoji sensory homunculus!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pinball FX Releases Classic ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’ Table DLC⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  My parents did a lot of business trips when I was a kid and it was pretty common that we’d spend time at the airport where they had one of these in the arcade/lounge. I sank a lot of money into those machines. I’ve never really been very good at pinball and don’t generally care much about pinball simulators, but this might convince me to pick this up, just for the sake of nostalgia.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do dinosaurs have big heads and tiny arms?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Their arms are small, but beyond that there’s basically nothing similar between them and an ostrich’s wing. The muscular anchor points are not similar at all to winged creatures, who require significant musculo-skeletal connection to the breastbone even in mostly vestigial wings. You can see this in the ostrich skeleton as the large “blob” of bone in the middle of the rib cage. There is nothing similar in the T-Rex. Even more of a problem with this theory is that the T-Rex’s popularity is in large part due to the fact that we’ve discovered a fairly large number of T-Rex fossils in good condition and not substantially disturbed… It’s why we have famous models like “Sue” and “Black Beauty” that make such good displays in natural history museums. Unless you’re proposing that a dozen different skeletons from several different regions with different ages all had bones shift after death to end up in the same position…

  Our knowledge of what dinosaurs looked like is not perfect, but we’ve also come a very long way from the Magdeburg Unicorn or horned Iguanodons of the 1800s. Paleontology has largely moved past “puzzle piece” biology, where things are just haphazardly thrown together because they kinda look like they fit. There’s comparison to other species - not just reptiles- to see what are comparable modern equivalents or to other contemporary animals. There’s kinematics and musculature considered. Unless some fossil discovery is made that completely upends the evidence we have now, at least in the case of skeletal articulation of well-known and well-studied species like T-Rex, we can be reasonably confident that we’ve got it pretty close when it comes to what their skeletons looked like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Walk on the Moon (clarifications needed)⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There are countless places on earth that I’m sure have seen as few or even fewer visitors - desolate rocks in the middle of the ocean, remote mountain peaks, areas made inaccessible due to vegetation or climate. Going to any of them would be infinitely cheaper and less difficult than going to the moon, and yet no one has, because unless you have a particular reason to spend the money and effort to get there, why would you?

  I’m sure there are scientists who’d love to run some sort of experiment on the moon, but aside from that it’s a lot of work for not much beyond bragging rights, and the US kinda got those by getting there first. There isn’t a lot of political will to spend billions right now to test things on the moon that we can reasonably simulate here much cheaper with computers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's a faction/group/alien race in Star Trek most similar to the Tech Priests / Mechanicus in Warhammer 40,000?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The Aldeans, from TNG’s first season “When The Bough Breaks” are close, though they don’t necessarily treat their advanced technology as “sacred”, though they certainly see it as infallible. The whole setup of the episode is that they would hide the planet away from the universe at large and have only appeared before the Enterprise to steal their children as the now-deteriorating technology is causing the Aldeans to become sterile.

  Try that on a small planet, I guess.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x10 "Hegemony"⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They seem to be bookending the season with flashbacks to Pike’s expedition to Rigel VII. His decision to withdraw there cost people their lives and led to Zak corrupting the local culture. Now he’s back under fire, under seemingly unwinnable odds, and forced to make the call to leave people behind again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x10 "Hegemony"⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ortegas was in the alternate future with Pike at the time of “A Quality of Mercy”, which is not necessarily “plot armour” but if we assume the timeline still hasn’t diverged — Pike not having had his accident yet — then it would seem reasonable she should get through to survive long enough to see the point of divergence and therefore survive long enough to be on the bridge with Pike when he meets the Romulans. However, that’s all very timey-wimey and subject to a lot of “maybes” and “what-ifs”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Strange New Worlds | 2x10 "Hegemony"⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I like the Gorn being legitimately scary, but to me it kind of retroactively highlights how silly “Arena” was. You can’t really compare modern TV with the episodes from the 60s, but stick one of these Gorn on the planet with Kirk and he would have been proper fucked. I can accept it easily enough and take it with a grain of salt that, if we assume they were going to re-shoot the episode today with Paul Wesley and modern cinema techniques that the fight scenes wouldn’t be these silly ponderous things and the episode would probably largely not have Kirk confront the Gorn at all, mostly running away until the big climax with the “cannon”. However, it is kind of an unforced error, where they could have simply introduced the aliens as a totally new species without really losing anything while also not highlighting how silly the rubber suit Gorn was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What Star Trek Mannerism or Phrase Do You Often Use⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Literally, Qapla’! is “Success!”