pimento64
@pimento64@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Assume You Will Be Hacked: AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before. 3 days ago:
???
- Comment on The best answer to "when did Star Trek get woke?" 3 days ago:
Real comments like that always make me think of Douglass Adams’ “rules” on growing old
I would have thought my comment made you think of every digit of pi, because that’s also something you didn’t read all of before replying to me. Seriously, if conservatism were applicable, why would my thesis be trashing Voyager and Enterprise, and pretty explicitly pointing out that Enterprise is overall even worse than Discovery? Shows that came out when I was little, I might add, and about 20 years before I increased my lifetime watching history of Star Trek beyond a single digit number of episodes across all shows.
Plus, I never said older Star Trek shows didn’t have bad writing, but you chose a bad example. Let That be Your Last Battlefield isn’t hamfisted, it’s just a clear narrative about racism, obsession, and hatred that aired before there was any grass growing on Dr. King’s grave, but it admittedly doesn’t resonate with people who are so jaded they consider an objective and unambiguous moral position intrinsically corny and trite. I guess To Kill a Mockingbird is just a hamfisted after-school special too, huh? Do you know what Let That be Your Last Battlefield doesn’t have, though? I do: it doesn’t have an undercurrent of insincerity, nor does it have characters whose narrative function is contradicted by everything they say and do. In that way, DS9’s Meridian is not far from being a Discovery episode.
Star Trek has, at various times, televised episodes that were boring, nonsensical, transparently insincere, objectifying, hamfisted, acted poorly, or rife with grating and unnatural dialog. It wasn’t till Voyager that these became consistent (especially boring and nonsensical, which are rarely absent). Enterprise and Discovery very consistently share most or all of these qualities in abundance, though I will damn Discovery with the faint praise that it doesn’t really have characters whom elderly perverts shoehorned in to add sex appeal, like T’Pol or Seven of Nine (or arguably Troi, though she also got legitimate character moments whenever Gene Roddenberry and/or Rick Berman were distracted by sexually harrassing someone else).
Discovery isn’t the worst Star Trek, that honor goes to absolute trash that is Picard, but it’s still a bad Star Trek. And again, let me be clear because you probably skipped to this paragraph, that’s not because it’s “woke”. It’s not bad because it has LGBT characters (even having a select few who didn’t get killed off as soon as there was enough footage of them being gay to submit during awards season), it’s bad because they don’t have anything recognizable as personalities and still have a closet to come out of. It’s not bad because a the captain is a black woman, it’s bad because they can’t decide whether she’s a Starfleet captain, Jesus Christ, or the Rambo fantasy from UHF. Throwing the public a bone with representation for marginalized minorities is not the act of kindness it should be when what they’re being represented as is incompetent and unprofessional dolts who speak in monologues and act like they have lead poisoning. For wokeness done correctly, see Lower Decks, a show I intensely dislike but recognize is overall good. Discovery isn’t aspirational, it doesn’t have challenging ideas, it doesn’t incite emotion, it doesn’t make you think, and it doesn’t have any heart, at all. It’s still better than Enterprise, Picard, and TAS because the bar is so low it’s in the mantle.
- Comment on Assume You Will Be Hacked: AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before. 3 days ago:
The opps wish they could get the drop on me
- Comment on The best answer to "when did Star Trek get woke?" 5 days ago:
I think the better question is “when did Star Trek start preferring awkward, hamfisted, and cynically inauthentic writing that makes you feel like you’re watching community theater?”
The answer is a toss-up between partway through Voyager and Enterprise, but ENT was definitely the point at which Star Trek was no longer being used to speculate about the possibilities of exploration and discovery in an optimistic future, and instead became an embarrassing soapbox on the part of writers and producers who haven’t had an idea challenged since they were in preschool. The entire 9/11 + War on Terror allegory is very possibly the most cringeworthy Star Trek content ever televised. That’s really saying something considering we also have Discovery, an exercise in why you can’t hire a bunch of hacks who all want to be Joss Whedon, nor give them free rein to produce a version of Star Trek in which every character is a creepy asshole who never shuts up and uses the kind of corny faux slang that only exists in TV commercials.
As with many things, I blame Rick Berman.
- Comment on Assume You Will Be Hacked: AI is enabling a deluge of cyberattacks the likes of which we’ve never seen before. 5 days ago:
You’re right, it’s not, but to be honest your form needs work if recoil bothers you that much.
- Comment on How Do We Actually Know the Big Bang Happened? 2 months ago:
Perfect username for your grasp on theology
- Comment on A Web Revival: the Internet didn't die, you're just not on it 3 months ago:
I did til0 I bought my own domain
- Comment on Why the Star Wars Reviews by RedLetterMedia, Chris Stuckmann etc. are Wrong About Everything. 3 months ago:
Weird ass video, I feel like I need to give my browser a shower
- Comment on Banned Mullvad VPN TV ad criticizing United Kingdom escalating censorship and mass surveillance “And Then?” 3 months ago:
Forbidden reactionary thoughts
- Comment on Video game romances need to evolve beyond lore dumps 4 months ago:
Action games almost never have long, detailed dialog interactions that affect relationships and simulate the interpersonal detail of characters in a book. Then when I play visual novels, they do have all that stuff, but I can’t rocket jump or quickscope. What kind of bullshit is that? I’m so glad this author twisted their trilby on tighter and cranked out some hard-hitting journalism about how different genres of media have different content in them.
- Comment on Smart Homes Are Terrible 4 months ago:
“Umm ackshyually you’re technically inaccurate”
How pathetic that is aside, I’m really not.
- Comment on Smart Homes Are Terrible 4 months ago:
Invalid opinion, 100% of IoT devices are trash. If smart devices aren’t as easy to use as analog devices then they were designed poorly by people who are more concerned with Gee Whiz gimmickry than sitting down to grind through the hard work of real UX design, and who should be working in tollbooths instead. That’s the only skill issue present.
- Comment on GOG now using AI generated images on their store 4 months ago:
Or just making a simple one with surprisingly little required aptitude. Or just using a public domain image and cropping it. Or best of all, using one they already had.
- Comment on Unity launches Walmart SDK to "seamlessly integrate products" into games 4 months ago:
Oddly enough that’s not far from how many Unity games already felt.
- Comment on The Setapp Mobile iOS store is shutting down on February 16th 5 months ago:
Future bagholders
- Comment on The boy who was relentlessly bullied by his uncle 5 months ago:
It really fucked me up when Dumbledore announced that house Slytherin would get one point for “every Irish papist who did not deserve to be killed by British muggle soldiers”, and continued “naturally, the score has not changed”. No idea how J.K. got away with that one.
- Comment on friendship ended with pi, now sigma is my best friend 5 months ago:
Sigma balls
- Comment on Venezuelan Official Says at Least 40 People Were Killed in U.S. Attack 5 months ago:
Caught in 4K: your phone remembers all the times you’ve searched for Rouge the Bat that you left out
- Comment on Venezuelan Official Says at Least 40 People Were Killed in U.S. Attack 5 months ago:
Red paint is attracted to poor people.
- Comment on "No, it's just a reflection! I'm not a flower!" :'-( 5 months ago:
Fun fact from director Jerry Rees:
Okay, the flower. Here’s the way it went.
There’s the night in the thicket. Poor Blanky gets full of stickers and everyone is just cranky. Arguments all around, and the Radio drawing his own “zone” of privacy in the dirt that no one shall cross! And Blanky is feeling like the insecurity blanket even more than usual. He crawls to Lampy seeking snuggles. But Lampy calls him a fuzzball and tells him to get his own place to sleep. Blanky finally tries to snuggle with Toaster. But even the long-suffering, warm Toster is in no mood to cuddle with Blanky and pushes him away. Blanky is left all alone. Vulnerable and unprotected.
Next day in the meadow, there is mayhem. But amidst the mayhem is the flower. The flower is painted exactly the same yellow as Blanky, by the way. Like Blanky, it tries to snuggle with Toaster - the difference being that it sees its own reflection and falls in love with the “other” flower. There is no way Toaster can possibly help the flower. After trying to reason with it, then pushing it away, Toaster retreats, then peers back to see the vulnerable lonely flower wilt. Toaster is at a loss, there was no way to help…
The very next moment, Toaster sees Blanky being pulled down a hole by a bunch of mice. Immediately Toaster jumps to protect the vulnerable Blanky. Last night, Toaster had pushed him away. But now Toaster comes to the rescue - protecting it.
When Lampy teases Blanky, Toaster step up to protect him again.
Blanky returns the kindness by making himself into a tent for the group to use as shelter.
Later, Lampy has noticed that Toaster is being nice to Blanky and asks why.
Toaster does her best to explain. But underneath it all, seeing the vulnerable little yellow flower wilt when she shoved it away has made her feel like never shoving vulnerable little yellow Blanky away again. To keep Blanky safe. To keep Blanky from “wilting”. In the case of the flower, there was no way to help. In the case of the blanket, there is.
This use of two vulnerable characters - both painted the identical color - both seeking cuddles - both being pushed away - one wilting emotionally - one wilting literally - was an emotional path of change for the Toaster.
Also this meme format is trash
- Comment on I hacked mars! 5 months ago:
NASA should let me put a plastic Koi pond on Mars and dump in a ton of algae killer, it’ll cover a hemisphere in a week.
- Comment on "So I started cloning the WiiU gamepad..." 5 months ago:
Fake. This would imply that someone besides me bought a Wii U and I don’t believe that it had multiple units sold
- Comment on We wouldn't listen, anyway. 5 months ago:
Longest non-human primate sentence on record:
Give Orange Me Give Eat Orange Me Eat Orange Give Me Eat Orange Give Me You
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
What’s that got to do with the weirdos who gave them a bad reputation 25+ years ago? This is what happens when you skim instead of reading.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
Also known as the most widely-used sites on the WWW during years that I strongly suspect predate your birth. Try to keep in mind that feeling upset doesn’t mean you’re being lied to, it just means reality sucks.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
Votes are meaningless, people vote emotionally and my instance doesn’t show me post or comment scores unless I use a specific app that I no longer have installed. I’m sorry you don’t have your finger on the pulse of normal socks-and-sandals slobs but for various reasons I do
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
Ask we how I know you got bad grades in textual criticism
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
By my recollection: appreciably felt on 4Chan, SomethingAwful, several Zelda forums, a Lucasarts games forum, at least one Star Wars forum and approximately 50% of all human contact I experienced on IRC and ventrilo. People said the same about IGN and NeoGAF but I wasn’t eligible to post on the former because my head isn’t all the way up my own ass and latter didn’t come online till 2006, a little after I lost interest in forums. I did get TF2 at launch and my impression of the first couple years was that the only way to not see Nazi furry guro shit was to uninstall it.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
“This is what I any many others observed” ≠ “These are the values I hold”
Be attentive to what you read instead of selectively interpreting it to match your emotional reaction to the general idea.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
Sure, so they aren’t the lunatics shitposting all day. I made another comment expanding on it but in brief, whether it’s fair or not (and it’s not), the kind of furries most people came across during the reputation-forming years were the extremely strident ones who actively enjoyed making people hate them, and it stuck.