…? We’re not the producers of the shows, how is that any of our concern? They’ve got plenty of bean counters at Paramount, if a show isn’t hitting their financial goals, they’ll either cancel or retool it. All we can do is watch the shows that get made and express and discuss our opinions about it, there’s no point in the fans engaging in bean-counting themselves.

Well, that’s what the text says, anyway. It describes “Kahiitan” Golovinn as 7 shaku (30.3cm) and 2 sun (1/10 shaku) tall, and whatshisface behind him 7 shaku tall. But it’s most likely an exaggeration.

I looked some things up. This drawing depicts the Golovnin Incident and the person in front is Vasily Golovnin. Not sure how they got “Karoitan” from that, but anyway.
I can’t find anything about his height, but I imagine if he really was 2.18 meters tall, it would be written down everywhere, so it’s probably exaggerated.

EDIT: I misread, it’s not Karoitan, it’s Kahitan, meaning they thought his name was “captain”.

Karoitan (?) and Movoiri (?) here are apparently 2.18 and 2.12 meters tall, which is huge even by modern standards, so if those measurements are accurate, the height difference between them and their captors might not be that much of an embellishment as it looks.

MAGA is an American thing, but there are plenty of people sharing their dumb opinions outside of the US.

Also, MAGA nutters aren’t actually less intelligent than anyone else, just cowardly and resentful. They don’t want to think about what’s causing the problems in the world, because then they might have to reconsider parts of their worldview and that’s scary. So they want someone to just swoop in and fix the problems without fundamentally changing anything, or failing that, gives them the feeling they have permission from society to lash out against anything they consider “abnormal” and is therefore a potential cause of the problems. And so they’ll resent anyone who criticises them for that or tries to undermine that feeling of societal permission they want or already have.

But not wanting to think about certain things is not the same as being unable to, and any intellectual capacity not spent on actually thinking about real problems and how to solve them can then be spent on how to create the impression that their opinion is dominant and therefore they’re not doing anything wrong.

Anyway, the point is that while there are definitely legitimate criticisms to be had about the newer Star Trek shows, your metric isn’t very useful for demonstrating that. To begin with, why hide behind numbers at all? It just makes it look like you’re trying convince people that your criticisms carry more weight because the world agrees with you.

I suppose if a bee collects nectar exclusively from camellia sinensis and bergamot blossoms, it would be an Earl Grey bee.

I think the story reboots every few games, so it’s not like say, the Mega Man games where every game is part of one big continuity. There’s a setting and recurring characters that’s built up over the years and that’s about it; everything else is specific to that game or subseries. Basically, the Bombermen (M/F), who may or may not be siblings, are some kind of space police from the planet Bomber and they have to fight a villain, usually but not always Bagura/Buggler, to protect the peace in the galaxy.

There is a bit of a rabbit hole (puddle, really) you can go into where some of the earlier games have a connection to the Lode Runner games, because Hudson Soft did the Famicom port of Lode Runner. What it boils down to is that Lode Runner used to be Bomber Man. This connection hasn’t really been relevant for a long time, but the fact that Lode Runner is a Galactic Commando may have influenced the current setting.

I have a collapsible silicone bucket with a lid for popcorn making that goes into the microwave. It’s easy to use, doesn’t require any fat, also serves as a bowl and you can just throw it into the dishwasher. Size-wise, it’s probably not that different from an air popper when collapsed, but it’s easier to find a spot for; mine is on top of the stack of roughly bowl-shaped things. And you could also use it as a bowl for other things, so it’s not necessarily single-purpose.

This was in elementary school. It was pretty cold, even inside, so I was blowing into the inside of my elbow to get warm air into my sweater. I’m not sure how, but I messed up the alignment or something and ended up making a loud fart noise. And without getting any opportunity to explain, I was made to stand in the hall.

That sounds more like tinkering around the edges to me. Whipping companies like Twitter into behaving, while it absolutely needs to happen, won’t fundamentally change anything about the dependency of Europe to those companies and the pressure the US can exert through that dependency.

The kind of genetic engineering it would take for humans to be able to transform into other animals is very much in the realm of science-fiction, after all.

It’s an inevitable outcome of its structure. With memes, it’s usually just the low-information image, which is typically visible from the post listing. There’s no article to read, no video to watch (or just a very short one), no question to think about, and you can upvote it straight from the post listing, so there’s not even a link to click. In other words, memes have a very low barrier-to-upvote compared to other types of posts, and as a result, are more likely to get upvotes and end up on the front page.

For serious conversation what you really want is a forum or only join communities on Lemmy where memes are frowned upon.

• Princess Tutu
• Legend of the Galactic Heroes (the original, though the newer Die Neue These is decent too)
• Mahoujin Guru Guru (1994 and 2017)
• King of Braves GaoGaiGar
• Slayers

“But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

Despite the quality of their results going down in recent years and getting worse because of AI slop, the search engines I would miss the most in terms of type of service. Most alternative search engine still use the indices of Google and/or Bing and the ones that don’t, don’t have a very big index. I’m old enough to remember a time when search engines were plentiful, but terrible, and back then I actually made use of web directories, like Yahoo! at the time, more. A still-existant example would be Curlie, an heir to dmoz, and there are also more local sites like the Dutch Startpagina. Being more dependent on things like that would probably make my web usage more exploratory and less about trying to find a specific piece of information quickly. And I would also go directly to specific websites more often when I do need specific information. But there are also a few companies working on making a European search index and this happening would undoubted accelerate their efforts, so depending on how that works out, not much might change at all.

Streaming-wise, there are local streaming services for films and TV shows and they would undoubtedly expand their offerings with the loss of competition from American giants, but also, I never stopped buying BDs and DVDs (in fact I have a backlog). I never understood the appeal of music streaming, so I still buy music, sometimes even on CD. As for something like YouTube, Nebula is America-based, but it’s not “big tech”, so I would watch more of that. Niconico Douga isn’t what it used to be, but that might change without YouTube. And there would probably also be some movement towards federated video streaming.

I don’t actually make use of any of the big social media platforms. Technically, I have a LinkedIn account, but I don’t really use it and wouldn’t miss it. It’s not really social media, but I do use WhatsApp, but that being gone would just make it easier to convince friends and family to switch to something better.

It does have a USB port, but it’s better not to connect any weird devices to your PC. But if you have an old laptop or Raspberry Pi or something that you’re willing to potentially sacrifice (making sure it’s free of any personal data and not connected to any network), you could maybe find out what it’s describing itself as.

You can use a hammer to build a cupboard, or to bash someone’s skull in, but you can’t use it to make cupcakes with (well, not very effectively, anyway, or hygienically). My point is that each tool has a limited set of purposes it can really be used for and there’s no law of nature that states that all things considered “tools” always have more good purposes than bad, or that the benefits of the good purposes always outweigh the problems caused by the bad.

So it’s not good enough to flatten “AI” to the broader category of “tools” and say because something is considered to be generally true about the category as a whole, that means it’s also true for this specific case; you actually have to look critically at the specific case: who does it empower, in what way, to what extent? And frankly, the ability of the current paradigms of generative AI to empower good people to do good has been minimal to non-existent, whereas bad people have been greatly empowered to do bad. People who do not value truth and to whom the end justifies the means now have an infinite propaganda machine, those who do value truth do not. So the intentions of the people who made the AI isn’t even the biggest problem (though it does make things worse), it’s the intentions of the users. A community-made hammer is just as effective at bashing skulls in as one made by a greedy corporation.

I’m not sure I entirely buy that. For cloud gaming to be any good at all, you need a high-speed, low-latency internet connection. Yes, nowadays having an internet connection is pretty much a requirement in the industrialised world and even someone of lesser means will probably have one good enough to watch streaming video at a decent enough quality (unless they live in the middle of nowhere), but that’s not good enough. So with the expensive internet connection and the monthly subscription, cloud gaming doesn’t strike me as a very economical.

We’ve also been living in a period of diminishing returns when it comes to visual fidelity improving as hardware power does for a while now, so you can buy older, more affordable hardware and still have games look great on them. Meanwhile, I don’t think someone who insists on being able to see the surroundings accurately reflected in every window and puddle is going to accept the compression artifacts and latency of cloud gaming.

PNG does not compress photos very well. A photo that is 5 MB when saved as a high-quality JPEG may very well be at least 15 MB as a PNG. Also, a lot of cameras (phone or otherwise) save to JPEG by default.

I do wish more people would use PNG where it makes sense, though. The other day I made an edit to an image containing line art that was purely black and white except for the compression artifacts. I applied a threshold so that all the artifacts became either perfectly black or white and saved it as a monochrome PNG, reducing the file size to less than a third, while containing more information and having a cleaner image. I later remembered that I could reduce the file size even more by using indexed colours. In other words, whoever originally saved it in a lossy format actually made it take up more space than needed while also needlessly reducing image quality.

I fixed the mistake.