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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • wjrii@kbin.socialtoRisa@startrek.website🐋🚬🕰
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    4 months ago

    Most unrealistic part of the movie, and by god I’m including TIME TRAVEL, is that Scotty would be both dismissive of and insanely good at keyboarding text entry and use of a 1980s computer. Either he’d be pissed off because because there was no way to use this antique, or he’d be delighted at the chance to use his historical reenactment skills.






  • Drawing an imaginary factory- and they wanted kids to do this before teaching them the parts of the cell- isn’t going to help you learn what mitochondria are.

    That sounds like it’s an exercise meant to get the kids thinking about a multi-faceted system existing inside a single structure, with parts that are interconnected but distinct, and will lead into a common metaphor teachers use to teach about biological cells. Not being graded means they’re not judging the kids on what they know or don’t, but want to evaluate where they are with this sort of thinking and figure out what they will focus on. Also, your kid may be smart and already know where they’re going with this, but others in the class may not. If she does, she could probably knock that out in fifteen minutes. Even if you decide that she doesn’t need to do it, I don’t think it’s stupid busy work, at least not necessarily.

    Some teachers are dumb; we need too many of them and pay them too little for each and every one to be a superstar. The ones coming up with curricula and lesson plans usually aren’t, though.



  • I’ve had a fairly decent one with a Canon small-office B&W laser. It needs to be reset every so often, and it doesn’t seem to like my wife (though no printer ever does), but its apps and drivers are mostly business related, so while they are more than happy to help you buy supplies, they don’t force the issue, and the printer doesn’t care what brand of toner you shove in it. 99% of the time it’s just sitting there quietly on its LAN address, ready to print something successfully.

    She just got an HP multi-function from work, and dear god that thing is annoying. It kept claiming that its own demo ink was counterfeit. Also fairly mediocre color prints.





  • I normally use that same coffee in an Ikea French Press and while I won’t say it’s gourmet, it meets my needs for “not particularly bitter caffeine juice”. Honestly, I slowed it down the next time I did a single cup pourover and that took most of the battery acid notes out of it.

    I don’t have a particularly sophisticated palate and still want some sugar and milk in there; I just don’t like Starbucks very much and hate paying a premium for a product that I like less than my homemade half-assery. :-)




  • So it’s not a lawsuit (yet), it’s a complaint to the state attorney general of Washington accusing Starbucks of unfriendly consumer practices related to their gift cards, in part because they can recognize unspent gift cards as revenue, and also because it’s instant cashflow for them even if the accounting revenue lags behind. The need to come up with a calculation for how much deferred revenue to recognize can be abused by execs to nudge the revenue higher (and with no additional costs associated with it, profit as well) and thereby improve stock price and trigger bonuses and whatnot.

    The actual complaint reads as a bit of pearl-clutching (“involuntary subscription” because customers don’t want to leave a balance OR talk to a real human at their local Starbucks!) , but on a the “death by a thousand cuts” model, yeah, I suppose Starbucks is being kinda dickish. The app doesn’t give you as many rewards if you pay with CC, buries the other payment options a couple of layers deep in a menu, doesn’t let you reload gift cards in increments equal to a purchase, doesn’t let you split payment methods, and sets a high default reload so (on iOS at least) it isn’t immediately visible that you even could scroll up to reload in smaller amounts.

    It’s sort of garden variety asshole app design meant to soft-lock customers in, but it’s not really fraud in any meaningful way if someone is motivated. You add money, you get bitter overpriced coffee that your partner really likes for some reason. I prefer CHEAP, ACIDIC coffee because I did the pourover too fast on mediocre store-bought grounds that are too fine, LOL. Still, maybe worth a public scolding or some fines to get them to modify it so people can save a few bucks without diving into the finer nuances of their coffee app.






  • I like The Orville. I’ve watched the entire run of the show. Much like you with LD though, I don’t quite get how people love The Orville. It strikes me as leftover TNG episodes with a Find and Replace, followed by a liberal coat of Seth MacFarlane’s very particular set of Gen X influences. The morality is often pretty clumsy and I can almost imagine Seth and the writers being frustrated by the ambiguity that a good Trek episode can leave you with. Then, the way it had to start with a more Galaxy quest vibe to get a show order from Fox, followed by Seth wanting it to be more serious but also still be a Seth show, it’s kind of all over the place. I also find some of the acting performances to be amateurish to the point of distraction.

    And for all that, I still like it. It scratched an itch and has a lot of heart. On the whole, it’s more than the sum of its parts, but for me it still has a ceiling. I like it about as much as I like Discovery, which I have also watched in its entirety though only once. The two shows’ issues are very different though, with the exception of tonal whiplash.

    I have come around on LD. I think it is a similar love letter to to Gen2 Star Trek but handles the balance of trek-to-humor better, and for all their cartoon antics, I’ve found the characters more compelling than The Orville’s.