The “Riker Maneuver” blooper absolutely killed me.

Did they ever open up Civ VI’s code the way they did for IV and V? Prior to VII coming out, they hadn’t left any way for modders to do the kind of deep dive total conversion mods which happened with the older games.

Harry never got promoted because the writers never figured out how to evolve his function on the show.

This one is a bit of a copout, because Kim’s official role as the ship’s operations officer would absolutely have been appropriate for a higher ranking officer. It’s the same job Data held as a Lieutenant Commander on the Enterprise; if anything, the strange bit is that it was given to a green ensign in the first place.

Ultimately, the real explanation is a much sillier bit of bad writing. According to Garret Wang, quoted here:

Kim was probed, beaten, tortured and held the distinction of being the first Voyager crew member to die and come back to life. What more does a guy have to do to get promoted to Lieutenant for frak’s sake? To add further insult to injury, other crew members such as Tuvok (Russ) and Paris were being promoted, demoted and then re- promoted throughout the seven-year run of Voyager.

I’m not trying to be negative here; just saying it like it is. During the fourth season, I called writer/producer Brannon Braga and asked him why my character hadn’t received a promotion yet. His response? “Well, somebody’s gotta be the ensign.” Geez, thanks. Thanks for nothing.

Why it was important that “somebody’s gotta be the ensign” is a mystery to me.

I’ve been running steam on an unsupported OS (osx 10.13.6) for almost a year and a half now, and the only issue is a banner at the stop claiming that steam will stop working in 0 days.

I don’t remember what if anything I did to make this happen, but I’ve had no trouble buying, downloading, or playing games in that time.

Brighter lights

https://explosm.net/rcg/vzyafxanj

Reading the caption before seeing the image definitely weakened today’s comics for me.

Captions of Far Side comics are often effectively punchlines, clarifying whatever weirdness was drawn in the comic. Reading the words and then seeing the image feels disjointed, and loses a lot of the “punch.”

It’s amazing how good 30+ year old Car Talk episodes are, as someone who had never listened while they were on the air and stumbled into the edited NPR rereleases a couple years back.

Civilization 4 was good at launch. Naturally it got even better over time.

Worth a mention that 4 is the most recent of these games released primary on physical hardware. That meant patching was a more difficult process so they actually had to hire a bunch of play testers to test stuff (and fix the problems they found). Contrast that to the approach of the most recent three games, which had their customers pay $70 for the privilege of being beta testers.

This is a shitty way to develop games. We should be mad about it because we deserve better.

It’s also the team anthem of Emglish football team West Ham United FC.

And a well-chosen anthem it is!

You have no idea if China did that. If they had, they would have taken great efforts to cover it up, and could very well have succeeded. It’s a small wonder we know any of the terrible things they did, such as the genocide they are actively engaging in right now.

Sure! Here’s my crude, MS-Paint-esque diagram:

1-6 are pretty obvious, just marked with numbers. 7 and 8 are circled with a line looping back to their number. 8 is just peeking around a corner, while 7 is only barely visible, with part of the top of his head peaking out from behind 5’s neck.

I count eight Kims (two of them only partially visible) in that shot of the prison cell, and there’s a fair bit of room around the corner for more to be hidden. I think it’s also easy to believe there are more cells containing more Kims just down the hall.

It’s reasonable to assume that the Defiant class’s 50 crew compliment is pretty close to a bare minimum already. 16-17 active at any one time is a pretty short list as it is, with roughly half that posted to the bridge during normal operations and most of the rest in engineering, plus a transporter chief, doctor, and other specialists. Having two shifts of reserves is crucial for covering both a long term assignment and for battle situations: you need to keep the crew as fresh as possible in the long run, and in combat you need those people to fill in for casualties and act as damage control, security, and emergency medical personnel. So unless Section 31’s strategic level idiocy extends all the way down to inane meddling in shipboard operations (possible, these guys are morons with dangerously inflated egos!), it should be safe to assume that the Anaximander was supposed to be staffed with about 50 crew.

Are you seriously drawing equivalencies between being imprisoned by the government and getting banned from Twitter by a non-government organization? That’s a whole hell of a lot more than “a little more gentle.”

If the USA is trying to do what China does with regards to censorship, they really suck at it. Past atrocities by the United States government, and current atrocities by current United States allies are well known to United States citizens. US citizens talk about these things, join organizations actively decrying these things, publicly protest against these things, and claim to vote based on what politicians have to say about these things, all with full confidence that they aren’t going to be disappeared (and that if they do somehow get banned from a website for any of this, making a new account is really easy and their real world lives will be unaffected).

Trying to pass these situations off as similar is ludicrous.

Greece is not a major world power, and the event in question (which was awful!) happened in 1974 under a government which is no longer in power. Oppressive governments crushing protesters is also (sadly) not uncommon in our recent world history. There are many other examples out there for you to dig up.

Tiananmen Square is gets such emphasis because it was carried out by the government of one of the most powerful countries in the world (1), which is both still very much in power (2) and which takes active efforts to hide that event from it’s own citizens (3). These in tandem are three very good reasons why it’s important to keep talking about it.

That sidesteps the question of why all of these comically evil people are okay with using this arbitrary contest to determine succession, instead of the usual route of organically murdering each other until someone emerges who is good enough at disposing of potential assassins that they keep the throne for a while?

I didn’t watch the movie, so I’m probably missing something. Did Georgiou also have to deal with a bunch of normal assassination plots after officially gaining the throne? Or are we to assume that by virtue of winning this contest, she is widely seen as too dangerous for anyone to attempt to usurp?

Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Barclay?

Yes?

Lieutenant Barklay and the huge, powerful, and successful paramilitary organization who employs him are exactly who is supposed to guard Federation worlds. Which is what they do.

Trying to enforce anything new right now, just before Trump goes into office, accomplishes nothing and guarantees that Trump will just reverse it. Publicly deciding not to enforce leaves the incoming administration with a less obvious choice PR-wise, and thus the possibility that they might choose to “own the libs” by actually enforcing the ban.

They are largely powerless at this stage, and preparing for an idiot to take over their job. Why not?

That makes quite a bit more sense, and if that was the intention I wish they’d been a little more explicit about it. I didn’t even realize the implant was mucking with his emotional processing? Despite the Episode 1 throwaway line about it being a “Vulcan” implant, he seemed to have pretty normal emotional responses to me.

The showrunners said from a very early point that the two would not get together during the shows run, and I get the distinct impression that they actively enjoy trolling shippers. So this is pretty much exactly what I expected, and I’m perfectly happy with it.

(Also, look at Tendi in that last scene, when she gets a scan of Rutherford during a conversation about them being “just friends”. She saw something on that Tricorder which she didn’t expect, and then when Rutherford gets up and has his back turned, she’s clearly checking him out. Draw your own conclusions.)