Mr. Spock: A Vulcan would face such a loss without tears.

Young Spock: How?

Mr. Spock: By understanding every life comes to an end when time demands it. Loss of life is to be mourned, but only if the life was wasted.

–Star Trek: TAS, Yesteryear

He tells a good story about prank calling Stewart’s wife and convincing her that Patrick was going to be getting home late that night.

It’s not a continuity error as such, but I’m a big fan of all the technologies that by rights should have completely upended galactic civilization but then just get forgotten.

The Genesis device should be an appalling superweapon that would change the face of war.

And then those missiles from Generations that can kill an entire solar system should, too.

And the time on TNG that they stumbled on a weird transporter trick that could make it so no one would ever need to die of old age ever again.

And the Tribble blood that cures death.

And so forth.

I was working on a Shakespeare play one time and I started keeping notes on lines that sounded like episode titles. These are all from the same play:

The Feverous Earth

The Parallel Fellow

The Volume of Time

The Borrower of the Night

A Fruitless Crown

That Which We Destroy

The Tender Eye

The Timely Inn

The Season of All Natures

The Power of Man

His Earth-Bound Root

To Appease an Angry God

In the Tyrant’s Grasp

Blunt Not the Heart

The Seeds of Time

The Golden Round

Honor Unaccompanied

The Serpent and the Flower

Full disclosure: I was thinking of these as Doctor Who titles, but I think the principle is sound.

What does that make us?

Welcome to a deeply weird community!

If you were going to spend a day as a member of a Star Trek crew (other than your current show), which would you choose, and why? Assume it’s going to be a normal and pleasant day, not one of the exceptionally horrifying days where everyone gets space parasites or some such.

I’ve heard arguments for the opposite: women who act should be called actors, not actresses, the logic being that the -ess suffix is diminutive, so all actors should just be actors. It seems like there are perfectly reasonable arguments to be made for either side.

Perhaps you could get AMD to pay you $35 billion for the hypothetical potential of amusement later on.

It’s like a Wimmelbilder of deeply troubling / embarrassing / weird shit. It feels like there should be extra special finds hidden in the details, like a copy of Mein Kampf or a gold statue of Trump holding a smaller gold statue of Trump.

I’m mainly thinking of Tony Blair making the same case for invading Iraq that George W. Bush was, just with the accent.

I’ve got a friend trying to move from the United States to England to escape our current shit show, and I’ve been telling him that England tends to do what America does, just with a posh accent to give it an air of legitimacy.

Rename the ballroom to whatever, but name the restrooms the “Donald J. Trump Shit and Piss Closets”

I never have had to do one of these, and I promise I’m not deliberately trying to ask stupid questions. Would this system be fooled by holding up a mannequin head?

Hold up a photo of any random schmoe?

It seems to me like there’s a lot of talk in the vein of “AI will never be able to meaningfully replace humans at [Task X],” and not enough talk about what we should do to prepare for the possibility of AI replacing humans at those tasks.

Like, right now, AI can create shitty art and write shitty code, but are we prepared for what happens if and when it can do those things well? We’ve got to acknowledge that human lives have inherent value, and not just because they can do things that machines can’t.

I’m out of the loop. Is this ball balancing image a political metaphor with which I’m not familiar, or is this just demonstrating the weird arbitrary limitations put on AI image generators?

Adam Smith does pretty well. I’d say it’s Marxism, mushroom guides, and beekeeping that remain consistently at the top of the rankings. Then you’ve got whatever fiction is currently hot. For a while there it was Where the Crawdads Sing or Demon Copperhead. Sarah J. Maas is currently enjoying an extended streak of very strong sales. The Twilight series went through a bit of a low ebb for a while there but for some reason it’s been selling quite well again lately. Harry Potter used to be a rock solid seller, but one can see that J. K.'s attempts to alienate her fan base have been at least partially successful. It’s interesting to see the trends develop over time.