Captain Aggravated

Software developers are uniquely arrogant in their belief that they have a right to choose when the workers of entire industries or sometimes everyone in the world needs to re-train on the tools they use to do their jobs.

I’m a woodworker. Imagine if I walked into the shop one day to find my table saw replaced with one of those mutant sliding table European things because the manufacturer pushed an update. “We’ve replaced your tool with one that conforms to recently adopted industry norms, buzzwords and trendy design patterns we in the table saw industry have been peer pressuring each other into adopting. You may proceed to suckle upon our genitals in gratitude and worship.”

Meanwhile I’m losing money because the tool I rely on to run my business no longer functions how I was trained to use it. I have to tell my customers that their orders aren’t getting filled because I was visited by the saw fairy and instead of building their furniture for them I have to read manuals, learn how to safely use this thing, find where all the controls went, and then remake all the jigs and tooling I relied on for production and hopefully I can get back to doing actual work before they change it again according to their needs and not mine, on their schedule and not mine.

That’s what it’s like using software in the age of nightly updates or worse cloud-based solutions. You never know when your tools will change out from under you mid-project.

I remember labs full of networked Win 98 machines in middle school, with like Novell software on them for login credentials and whatnot. The computers sat there with a login screen and when students logged into it you would be presented with the Office suite and a restricted web browser and some educational packages. A lot of normal Win 98 stuff wasn’t there though, like any settings menus. But there was some convoluted way where you could bring up a help text and then by navigating deep in the menu system somehow cause it to launch to a “normal” Win 98 desktop.

Wheatley is a great character, he’s just got a minor case of serious brain damage.

“A large data centre” this wasn’t. I saw a couple washing machine-sized vats of oil-soaked computers.

Holy shit, that’s it. GPT is Wheatley from Portal 2. The moron you attach to a computer system to make it into an idiot.

I’ve seen a video of at least one spa that does that. They mine bitcoin on rigs immersed in mineral oil, with a heat exchanger to the spa’s water system. I’m struggling to imagine that’s enough heat, especially piped a distance through the building, to run several hot tubs, and I’m kind of dubious about that particular load, but hey.

Ritchie’s Basilisk.

Did you know they made a Star Trek show all the way back in the early 1960’s? Captain Kirk beamed down to the planet Vulcan years before Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon. Star Trek: The First One Doesn’t Get Subtitles had among its main cast three women, one of them black, an Asian man, and a Jew. That’s not what made the show woke. What made the show woke was “What are you people even fighting over?” “They’re white on the left side.”

In the space year 1962 Gene Roddenberry hired someone to stand in front of a TV camera to be broadcast nationwide saying “Do you people see how fucking stupid racism is now?”

Fast forward 60 years and the first or second thing I hear about a TV show is a list of demographics among the cast. “It’s a Star Trek® sequel and the captain’s a non-binary Australian aborigine and the science officer is a gay Korean and the…” “You’ll call me a xenophobic bastard if I don’t pay to see it just like everything made in Hollywood since 2016. Got it. What do they do?” “What do you mean what do they do? It’s Star Trek®.” “So they engage in a series of morality plays, work together as a team, come to diplomatic solutions to solve problems…?” “No, they bicker like juvenile siblings among each other, talk back to the captain, they scream, they cry, and kill any aliens they come across. But we payed Paramount a lot of money so we’re legally allowed to say the word “phaser.”” “I’m not paying to see this.” “How could you, you xenophobic bastard?!”

I think we had that, it was called SG-1 seasons 9 and 10. John Chrichton and Aeryn Sun vs the turbocatholics.

oh with the monk that speaks in ice cream koans. right.

Which one was Kheb?

Edit: and don’t come back wtih “P9X-434” or whatever. Man I used to watch that show enough to where I used to know some of the planets by those codes.

See I knew someone was going to bring up TNG, that the original show was really Kirk-Spock-McCoy character centric and that was a big criticism aimed at TNG at first. And “Then TNG came out and it was fine” No it wasn’t, the first two seasons are pretty rough, the show really found its footing in the third season.

I think trying to create a new Stargate show would be like trying to create a new show in the Hercules/Xena universe. Because they have basically the same problem: They ran out of ancient gods to kill before the series finale. I think they’ve already kinda proven they milked SG-1’s setting dry because both spinoffs went “Meanwhile in another galaxy, something almost completely unrelated is happening.”

No I don’t think I ultimately would, for a bunch of reasons.

I’ve said it before in this community, the 2 decades of “gritty realistic” heartburn drama ushered in by Battlestar Galactica cured my love of television. I don’t currently subscribe to any streaming service and as they get more numerous, more expensive and worse I don’t think I’m going to pick the habit back up.

I think I’m developing a contact allergy to resurrected IPs. Upon reading this I don’t think “Oh boy a chance for more of my favorite adventures” I think “oh brother, some business suit with a neckhole infection has detected an IP they aren’t monetizing hard enough.” The most recent TV show to catch my eye was The Good Place, which is an original property. It was made because someone had an idea. “Do you think you’d watch a new Stargate show” sounds to me like “would you buy the industrial slop we’re going to churn out anyway if we dye it the color of a thing you liked 20 years ago?” The one thing no one has there is an idea.

It’s also just one of those shows where I don’t know what you’d do with the setting. Star Wars and Star Trek, those settings are open enough to where you could go 90 lightyears to the right and still find cool stories. Shows like Stargate, Farscape and Babylon 5 are so character-centric that I don’t know if I want to watch just another show made in that setting. Like, you could make me a Star Trek show that doesn’t have the Federation in it. Set it on a Romulan warbird or something, it would work. There have been numerous works set in the Star Wars universe that didn’t have to do with the Jedi or Rebels or Empire or whatever. What would you make out of the Farscape universe without Moya and the gang?

No, let it rest on what it achieved.

Side question: SG-2 was Kawalski’s command in the pilot episode, and then I don’t recall ever hearing that number used again. Did they retire the number from the sport?

This makes me want to point out that it is SG-1 canon that a clone of Jack O’Neil in the body of a teenager actually went back to high school, pretty much specifically to hit on teenage girls.

I think that would be the last of very many relevant sounds. Many others would be screams.

I wonder what it would do for those of us who have had dental implants.

I had a tooth removed and replaced with a socket bone grafted into my skull to which a crown is bolted. If I were to lose another tooth, what would happen if I took this drug?

I was an LG customer for years but let’s not pretend they wouldn’t be like this or worse if they were still in the game.

As a small time backyard gardener I can say from experience that 4 plants made more cherry tomatoes than I could reasonably eat. I was giving ziplock bags of cherry tomatoes away to people at work for a couple months. They probably did produce a year’s worth of cherry tomatoes, but they don’t refrigerate or freeze particularly well and they’re not a great choice for making tomato sauce because of their liquid/pulp/skin ratio.

Similarly I’ve found that I can grow a year’s supply of red pepper flakes with a whopping two cayenne plants. The rate at which I consume red pepper flakes, I’m about out by the time this year’s peppers start ripening.

I’m able, in my tiny little garden, to grow more of single kinds of foods than I can reasonably eat. I cannot grow enough to sustain my entire diet; I’d need more land than I own to grow grain.

You know, I think I agree with the spirit of that assertion but not the letter of that assertion.

There are people who are kind of at their limit knowing that on your phone there’s a Facebook app, but you have to use your browser and go to the website on a computer. These folks will hear dial tones and TV static in their heads if you say “secure socket layer” to them. These folks have probably also sat through NordVPN ads and heard words like “secure” and “encrypted” used together, and will probably make understandable mistakes like “how’d someone steal bitcoins? I thought it was encrypted?”