I’m very fond of Jack Frost. It’s as corny and delightfully bizare as one could want from a Russian mythology movie made in 1965 USSR, and the riffs are obviously great.

Ahh yes, Civ IV. From ye olden days, when the dev teams cared about such weird and obsolete ideas as testing the game before release, or creating an interface that tells the player what the fuck is actually happening. Or useable asynchronous multiplayer, or an AI with enough of a clue to play the damn game competently… I could go on.

Some people apparently liked V’s whole “don’t build too many cities, we don’t want to have an actual empire here” deal, which definitely isn’t my thing but does create less micro. But most of the mechanics were reasonable and the UI shared more or less enough info to follow along. They also opened up the code after the final expansion so modders could do some really great things.

IV had a lot of really good ideas, and zero polish. The current version of the game is laden with silly bugs, ride with bizarre balancing choices, and hideously opaque with simple questions like “how much research have I put into this tech”, “how much production overflowed off this completed build”, and “how likely is this unit to kill this other unit, vs simply damaging it.” They haven’t opened up the code to modders, nor have they put any effort into fixing these frankly silly errors themselves.

Civ IV is great because of relatively simple mechanics which allow a lot of interesting choices in how to construct and develop your empire. It accentuates this by getting all the boring stuff right: bugs are few and minor, the interface is communicative, etc. it’s not perfect in either regard, and yet somehow it far exceeds its successors in these simple categories. This is how you make a good turn-based 4X game actually fun, even with 2005 graphics.

And yet, V and VI sold extremely well, and VII seemingly will as well, despite inevitably being a grossly inferior product at release which will be dragged most of the way to a truly finished state over five years of patches and DLC.

I guess this is very “stop having fun meme”, but why the hell are the only games in this genre (of all genres) trading balance, bug fixes, and comprehensible interfaces for fancy graphics? Is it really not profitable to make a game like Civ IV in 2024?

From the Washington Post piece:

But the study doesn’t go so far as to say that Russia had no influence on people who voted for President Donald Trump.

• It doesn’t examine other social media, like the much-larger Facebook.
• Nor does it address Russian hack-and-leak operations. Another major study in 2018 by University of Pennsylvania communications professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson suggested those probably played a significant role in the 2016 race’s outcome.
• Lastly, it doesn’t suggest that foreign influence operations aren’t a threat at all.

And

“Despite these consistent findings, it would be a mistake to conclude that simply because the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter was not meaningfully related to individual-level attitudes that other aspects of the campaign did not have any impact on the election, or on faith in American electoral integrity,” the report states.

This is an excellent post.

Varitek?

This is one of the many things that Strange New Worlds (and Lower Decks as well) have got right. Space battles in SNW are beautifully animated, but they aren’t overwhelmed with excess visual spectacles and they tend to be fundamentally simple: you shoot at us, we shoot back or try to find some helpful obstruction to hide behind, etc.

Even Prodigy’s big space battle in their finale manages the task to some degree, despite it’s scale. I remember watching it felt oddly sluggish, as the ratio of ships on screen to weapons being fired was surprisingly low, but it definitely made it easier to keep track of whatever specific event the camera was focussed on.

It’s not the figure that’s the problem, but the fact that Americans have been forced to accept this sort of casual deception in how the price of a standard good is advertised. Why is it okay that getting gas for “$3.50” per gallon (to quote the most visible price, which everyone will mention in conversation and mentally reference for comparison) is actually very slightly less than $3.51 per gallon? Just post the correct bloody price, in a clear and unambiguous manner, without faffing around with extra decimals that everyone mentally filters out anyway. It’s stupid.

Same deal with American businesses consistently citing pre-tax (and where relevant, pre-tup) prices. Just tell people what the fuck they are actually going to pay, instead of agreeing that literally everyone has to make their pricing an exercise in consumer deception or be beaten out by everyone else’s smaller-looking-but-actually-identical prices.

This whole thing is just another tiny window into why unregulated markets suck.

Au contrarie; sports are a fantastic way to get socioeconomic issues (like labor rights) front and center on the minds of people who wouldn’t necessarily be thinking of them the same way. And they create opportunities for people to educate themselves in other areas as well. Not every sports fan is the willfully ignorant meathead you describe, nor do willfully ignorant meatheads exist because of sports.

MLB is not only a state sponsored monopoly, but like every other American sports league a blatant cartel which is constantly squabbling with its own employees over revenue shares (at the expense of the on-field product) and lying about how much money they actually make. Same thing as most other business owners, but people are a lot more willing to listen to the perspective of, say, Shoehi Ohtani than a random McDonald’s employee. I can tell you that I am personally much more clued in on these sorts of societal problems as a result of sportswriters discussing labor issues, on top of being far more statistically savvy and generally more sceptical of oversimplified narratives than I would be if I had never gained an interest in baseball. Nor would I have anywhere near my current understanding of global politics without global football (soccer) creating both a mechanism and incentive for learning about them.

But that’s not even the point: sports are not a “scam”. Sports exist first and foremost because for many people, watching elite athletes play a game is fun. That is the intrinsic value of professional sports, and nothing about that is inherently scammy. Full stop.

Could someone explain the food replicator? I thought they weren’t invented yet? Or were they showing an early beta version that can’t get anything right?

That was a “food synthesizer”, a precursor to the TNG era replicator which is more limited in capabilities.

M’Benga has compiled a hell of a list of justifications for getting demoted already, and (obviously) none of them have actually got him in trouble just yet. Secretly keeping his daughter in the transporter buffer, carrying super soldier serum about his person at all times, killing a Klingon ambassador… suffice to say he’s a bit of a wildcard.

Well, the previously inexplicable “inject a bunch of drugs to fight Klingons” scene in the season opener has suddenly paid off.

I have little to say now except that this episode was a seriously heavy hitter. Just… wow. And ouch.

because apparently Star Trek, unlike every other fantasy and science fiction thing I like, is Forbidden from being treated like a secondary world that should have its own internal consistency.

How many other Science Fiction properties out there sprung out of a low budget TV show from the 60s but are still producing content in the same continuity without some kind of explicit reboot?

Star Wars is the classic comparison in all sorts of ways, and for better or worse Star Wars avoids this problem entirely by 1) having a much higher budget relative to the number of sets and costumes required for it’s initial installment, 2) having picked an aesthetic that is crude, gritty, and seemingly practical which escapes looking dated many years after the fact, and 3) not being set in our future where the advances of modern tech make obviously retro elements look ridiculous.

For me, having them look like TNG Klingons doesn’t even solve the problem because ENT had implied that shouldn’t happen until the TOS movie era.

That Enterprise arc was clearly intended to apply a (totally unnecessary) in-universe explanation for why Kirk’s adversaries were just guys in vaguely asian facial makeup, but there’s no reason we have to extrapolate that the Augment virus was a widespread and incurable until the late 23rd century. It could easily have been a relative blip on the radar; aggressively quarantined and/or cured much earlier than anticipated.

The idea that they also needed to make an explicit reference to the augment virus being cured, or explicitly point out “hey, these guys would look less different if they weren’t shaving their heads!” strikes me as absurd. These are not difficult conclusions to reach for someone motivated to find them, and there were people mentioning those possibilities pretty much immediately after the first Discovery trailer dropped.

I remain amazed that many people insist that T’Kuvma and company are irreconcilably different from the TNG era portrayals. These are big, carnivorous-looking aliens with prominent forehead ridges and significant individual variation in appearance. They’re different in some small details, like the extra nostrils, but outside of the most extreme visually literalist stance, is it really that hard to square these guys against Chang, Martok, and Worf? Replace the shine and detail with a classic rubber mask, silicon makeup, and matte brown body paint in exactly the same head and body shape, stick them at a side table in Quarks circa S6 of DS9, and I challenge you to notice anything amiss.

What this rework did do was make them feel so much more alien, and so much more dangerous. They outright eat people, which was occasionally hinted at but is noted far more literally in Discovery, and very, very easy to believe looking at these guys. I wish they hadn’t backpedalled so hard with a return to the 1980s makeup in SNW 2x01, because I would have loved to see these monsters chumming it up with Spock: that scene would immediately have been slightly more unsettling, bringing the audience closer to what Spock and his crew are likely feeling about their momentary drinking buddies, instead of the much more casual feel we got from Klingons who look just like our old friends from DS9. These guys are still dangerous aliens whose friendliness is tenuous and temporary; they would literally eat Spock if circumstances were slightly different. We shouldn’t forget that.

Poor Christine Chapel! Now she knows what the audience has always known: her relationship with Spock is ultimately doomed. Plus a delightful mix of guilt and fear that she could unwittingly cause Spock to never measure up to the vague but crucial future that Boimler mentioned to her in the turbolift, simply by trying to make the two of them happy.

That suuuuuucks.

You realize that ChatGPT has no concept of “true”, right? It produces output which looks coherent and reasonable and tends to stumble into truthful statements on accident, by virtue of drawing from a dataset of people saying mostly true things. Of course, the bot is equally capable of spouting off outright lies in an equally convincing manner.

This is a very unreliable way to verify a surprising fact. I strongly recommend against it.

This is a major milestone guys. Our first troll!