Honestly, I feel like we crossed a line at some point where nudity in movies feels unnecessary.
I’m not sure if it’s the proliferation of porn in our society, or being more conscious about everything pandering to the male gaze, or the huge number of rapists in powerful positions, or just being cynical about everything, but I can’t remember the last time I saw nudity in a movie or TV show that didn’t come off as exploitative.
I love Elite and it’s definitely amazing in VR. For everything in a ship I agree with you, NMS is childish in comparison.
However, NMS is attempting a way more multi-cultural galaxy, and I often wish Elite had more diversity in aliens, and more interesting planets similar to NMS. Especially when Elite has so much grind to do rep etc. I wish just once I’d be doing a delivery quest to an acid jungle planet covered in hostile turtles, instead of yet another dead planetoid with a few outposts sticking out of it.
No Man’s Sky is an incredibly uneven experience. The one thing it does better than its peers is the variety of aliens and flora/fauna. There are easily 30 hours of fun in just exploring around and seeing some cool alien vistas and ecosystems, trying to survive on ice or acid planets etc. The game gives you good reason to visit them too.
However, it sort of falls apart after that. The space flight, mining, and combat aren’t nearly as good as (e.g.) Elite, the quests are pretty meh, the base building is okay but it falls down on automating production of anything you actually care about (I.e. it’s mostly aesthetic, but it can be cool to have a home base in a neat spot). Some of the recent updates added things like big carrier ships, and the game contrives to give you one to captain with a quest… But that sort of obliterates the ship progression.
You may have more fun with something like Elite or X4 depending on what you’re looking for, but if you just want to fuck around and see neat stuff on your own timeframe, NMS could definitely justify its price tag.
It’s hard to buy candy for yourself as an adult because you know it’s nothing but love handles and tooth decay in shiny wrappers. But if it comes into your orbit once a year without buying it, it’s tempting.
Of course, when my kid was small he basically didn’t bother eating it at all. He’d get like 100 pieces of candy and they’d linger around until Christmas. When I was a kid we’d get pillowcases full and it’d be gone in days. Not sure if that’s a generational thing or if my son was just not very motivated by sweets.
The current exploit was found with AI and released (after it was found and kept secret by the original dev in the hopes of keeping GTA VI runnable) but the other infrastructure is still basically the same as it ever was. Post jailbreak, running the Linux ELF loader you’re booting a pretty standard Linux kernel and distro.
If you’re interested in PS5 Linux, I wouldn’t let the drama over the exploit get in your way.
That said, until it can reboot without involving another Linux machine to deliver the payload, it’s a fun trick but you might as well just buy the SoC for $250, a Steam Machine, or build a PC to have a better supported Linux flow.
Then you get back to the old way of punching holes in a paper ballot and well… Have you ever heard of a “hanging chad”? That shit has issues too.
Where I vote the paper ballot doesn’t have identifying info and is in your hand for like 10 seconds between the voting machine and the ballot box. Someone would have to be in the polling place accosting me to check how I voted, which would be an issue no matter how the ballot got generated.
I agree, and am not a big fan of Wesley being warp Mozart either, but I think the core difference between those and Discovery is that they were one offs. Plenty of single episodes can be shrugged off (*ahem* Threshold) but in Discovery the spore drive was in every episode, and The Burn was a persistent feature of the future timeline. The show spent seasons dealing with these things.
Totally fair. I honestly didn’t like the mycelial network because it broke the storytelling and the future more than the fact it was unbelievable. Teleportation is way too strong and led to too many situations with Discovery being the only ship “in range” on a show that was already way too action/emergency oriented. It needed episodes that made it feel less like the only ship in the universe.
Discovery could have redeemed a lot of the idea in my mind if they’d destroyed the network. It would have made it obvious why the tech was never pursued more than just spore drive damaging it. Or, you know, by not being a TOS prequel in the first place and taking place after all of the other stories, like it ended up doing anyway…
I agree that was the intent, but I found the show intolerable simply being in their orbit.
Love this fact. A major plot point revolving around characters knowing the spectrum of color an element produces when burned feels very old school Trek, quiet competence grounded in science.
Compare this to all the places that newer shows paid lip service to science being cool and then went back to teleporting around instantly with mushrooms or causing all of the dilithium in the galaxy to explode with emotions or whatever.
There is an element of this, because the people using it for policy or writing headlines always disregard a ton of caveats and qualifications in any field (including actual hard science like physics), but most economics texts I’ve read hide a ton of complexity behind “rationality” that doesn’t exist and are implicitly describing the system that we have (capitalism) without acknowledging that we could do it any other way - which frees them from any ethical conflict with capital/exploitation and lets them pretend they are describing a natural system.
The truth is we are irrational both as individuals and as groups with outside influences, and the economy can function in whatever way we want it to function. In that lens economics quickly turns into psychology, ethics and philosophy. Which, to be clear, would be a useful thing to study in any economic system (all of which have incentives and pitfalls), but it is not nearly as objective or concrete as it currently pretends as it fiddles with interest rates while billionaires run roughshod over our entire society.
Economics is soft science pretending like it is describing fundamental laws of the universe.
Economists don’t know shit, they are describing how the economy could work in certain conditions in a vacuum and sometimes politicians/business people buy into the fantasy to backup doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place.
Oh shit, it’s religion again.
I don’t think it’s directly related to ABV/proof, but it can definitely taste that way. “Drier” drinks tend to not mask the alcohol as much, IMO. For example, the main difference between sweet and dry vermouth is how much sugar is in them, but they tend to be basically the same ABV.
For booze, dry is the opposite of sweet.
I mean, I’m with you but the show is fiction, it’s okay for the writers to have the main character come down on the right side of history and not be a union busting shitbag. If anything I’m just happy the laborers were highlighted as having real grievances and solidarity actually worked…
No more algorithms! Quicksort? Banned. Sieve of Eratosthenes? Banned. Djikstra’s? Super banned!
If you even mention a red black tree, you’re the one that’s gonna be red and black, son.
DS9 is the GOAT.
I actually think SNW does an okay job developing characters (we’ve learned a lot about individuals), but it has some great episodes, some terrible ones and a lot of very mid ones.
Oh shit the third Semiosis came out? Loved the first couple, how did I miss that?
Personally I could do without gore, torture and weapon fetish bullshit as well, but I’ve also never looked at an action extra getting shot in the head or a stuntperson being lit on fire and wondered if they felt exploited or if they felt pressured to sexually gratify some powerful exec that could ruin their career.