#DISCOVERY

[trekkie-polls]

There’s a lot of characters in star trek, and therefore a lot of moms! I often try to include most series, but this time snw, prodigy, and ent didn’t get an example. And, I left one of my own favorites off - K’ehleyr, Alexander’s mom. I’m sorry if I left your favorite off.

Also note that - like real life - sometimes Star Trek parents make bad choices, and it’s ok to have a variety of feelings about that. Some people may find some mistakes understandable and others may not.

[alexibeeart]

Daft Punk animated sprites

One year anniversary of RAM 10 feels like a good time to share this: I've spent the past several weeks making nine (9) unique animated sprites of Daft Punk through the years and editing them into a video project. This is a labor of love and I'm very excited to finally publish it! =)

check it out on my featured projects page

🐝 A Bee 2024 [art tag] [website]

ps there are some easter eggs lemme know if you find them ;-)

[malerfique]

update  lost 20$ billion

update David Zaslav ..fool no one,big moron never  we never seen

[wowwforever]

Mythbusters is great because Adam Savage will be like “Could Sir Arthur have built a surface to air missile with Middle Ages technology? Probably not. Anyway here’s how to make a bomb.” And Jamie will be like “If all goes well this will not blow up instantly and kill us.” And the three other guys are trying to see if you could kill a person by throwing an egg really fast.

[kingof-the-crossroads]

[humanoidhistory]

Inside the Space Shuttle Discovery, 1998.

[soyalexnajera]

It's so sad that HBO, I mean, Warner Bros Discovery doesn't give a single fuck about any of it's creators

[genderfcker]

reasons why it's very frustrating to be someone who wants to work in a creative industry right now:

warner brothers/hbo/discovery decided to scrap the batgirl movie in post-production before anyone outside of its test audiences could actually see the film

the same company also decided to remove 36 titles from its streaming platform hbo max, several of which were hbo max originals and can no longer be viewed outside of pirating sites, which means the creators will no longer be able to get paid for their work

simon & schuster and penguin random house are in the process of merging. if the DOJ trial doesn't stop the merger, we're going down from having a big five to a big four in the publisher world, with the two of the biggest publishing houses merging.

Barnes & Noble recently decided to stop stocking new middle school books unless they know they're going to be major bestsellers, which multiple new authors didn't find out until weeks before their debuts. B&N accounts for a large chunk of publishing sales for said authors, and limiting what books are available there means debuting authors are mostly screwed unless they put together a massive marketing campaign on their own.

[tybarious-ii]

Link

[back-on-my-bullsh-again]

The whole of Star Trek canon makes way more sense of you give it the Xena: Warrior Princess treatment. Within XWP, it is canon that the whole story is being given to us through bits and pieces of Gabrielle's scrolls. So any weirdness can be explained away as this bit was missing, so we filled it in. Or how was Xena at the Trojan War, but also around during Julius Caesar's reign? Gabrielle was trying her hand at fiction (without the cursed scroll this time) and wanted to write a "what if we were in Troy" story.

How does this compare to Star Trek? I hear some of you asking. Well, Star Trek episodes frequently begin with a log entry. The Captain or Chief Engineer or Science Officer or whoever is telling the story. We are watching the events play out as they recount them. And since every crew member is supposed to keep logs, if we piece those logs together, we presumably have a coherent story. But listen to any group of people recount a story and you'll hear the inconsistencies, the bias, the limited perspective. Now couple that with the fact that these stories are being turned into a show at some future date when bits and pieces of the story may be lost and you have a recipe for weirdness.

For me, thinking of it this way explains so many things. Why were there so many encounters with historical and mythological figures on Kirks Enterprise? Well, Janeway said it herself: there's debate about whether or not Kirk was exaggerating his logs. Why does it seem like there's weird one-sided sexual tension between two characters? Because character A is keeping their logs in a way that doesn't hide their unrequited love and longing for the very oblivious character B. Why is this or that character seemingly missing from an event that they'd have a vested interest in? Their log was lost or corrupted or they were so excited to be a part of the mission that they completely forgot to write it down.

I don't know if I'm making any sense. But it makes sense for me and is much more fun to think of Star Trek this way than it is to be overly critical of canon inconsistencies within a franchise that has been around for as long as it has and gone through as many permutations as it has.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An Epic antitrust loss for Google

A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with Epic, maker of Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/technology/epic-games-google-antitrust-ruling.html

The mobile app store world is a duopoly run by Google and Apple. Both use a variety of tactics to prevent their customers from installing third party app stores, which funnels all app makers into their own app stores. Those app stores cream an eye-popping 30% off every purchase made in an app.

This is a shocking amount to charge for payment processing. The payments sector is incredibly monopolized and notorious for its price-gouging – and its standard (wildly inflated) rate is 2-5%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

Now, in theory, Epic doesn't have to sell in Google Play, the official Android app store. Unlike Apple's iOS, Android permit both sideloading (installing an app directly without using an app store) and configuring your device to use a different app store. In practice, Google uses a variety of anticompetitive tricks to prevent these app stores from springing up and to dissuade Android users from sideloading. Proving that Google's actions – like paying Activision $360m as part of "Project Hug" (no, really!) – were intended to prevent new app storesfrom springing up was a big lift for Epic. But they managed it, in large part thanks to Google's own internal communications, wherein executives admitted that this was exactly why Project Hug existed. This is part of a pattern with Big Tech antitrust: many of the charges are theoretically very hard to make stick, but because the companies put their evil plans in writing (think of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, whose top execs all conferred in a groupchat called "Wirefraud"), Big Tech keeps losing in court:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Now, I do like to dunk on Big Tech for this kind of thing, because it's objectively funny and because the companies make so many unforced errors. But in an important sense, this kind of written record is impossible to avoid. Any large institution can only make and enact policy through administrative systems, and those systems leave behind a paper-trail: memos, meeting minutes, etc. Yes, we all know that quote from The Wire: "Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?" But inevitably, any ambitious conspiracy can only exist if someone is taking notes.

What's more, any large conspiracy involving lots of parties will inevitably produce leaks. Think of this as the corollary to the idea that the moon landing can't be a hoax, because there's no way 400,000 co-conspirators could keep the secret. Big Tech's conspiracies required hundreds or even thousands of collaborators to keep their mouths shut, and eventually someone blabs:

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-moon-landing-you-d-need-400000-conspirators

This is part of a wave of antitrust cases being brought against the tech giants. As Matt Stoller writes, the guilty-on-all-counts jury verdict will leak into current and future actions. Remember, Google spent much of this year in court fighting the DoJ, who argued that the company bribed Apple not to make a competing search engine, paying tens of billions every year to keep a competitor from emerging. Now that a jury has convinced Google of doing that to prevent alternative app stores from emerging, claims that it used these pay-for-delay tactics in other sectros get a lot more credible:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

On that note: what about Apple? Epic brought a very similar case against Apple and lost. Both Apple and Epic are appealing that case to the Supreme Court, and now that Google has been convicted in a similar case, it might prompt the Supremes to weigh in and resolve the seeming inconsistencies in the interpretation of federal law.

This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades "training" judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America's antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

There's 40 years' worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we've got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

It's amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That's what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google's insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, "tying" is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary.

The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn't want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of "an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants." They've asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to "crush Google’s control over Android":

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-v-google-trial-verdict-a-win-for-all-developers

Google has sworn to appeal, surprising no one. The Times's expert says that they will have a tough time winning, given how clear the verdict was. Whatever this means for Google and Android, it means a lot for a future free from monopolies.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

[covenawhite66]

Although lactation is a mammalian trait, in recent years several animals have been found to produce milk for their young.

Siphonops annulatus it is amazing to find it has a vent for producing a rich fatty milk with which it feeds its wormlets several times a day.

[astralbondpro]

I really, really like Ethan Peck as Spock. You will never, even with a billion lifetimes be able to top Leonard Nimoy. That version of Spock is a cultural icon, so why bother even trying to be THAT? Go a different direction, and take a different approach. And this version of Spock is one I absolutely am falling in love with the more time we have with him. I know guardians of the precious canon will come in and have a lot of things to say but... fuck 'em. I'm just here to be entertained, and I very much am.

[actordougjones]

Fianl Season Starts Today!

Let’s see where this season 4 epic hand-hold leads us into season 5!!! Star Trek Discovery’s final season begins airing TODAY on Paramount+ . Saru & T’rina (the lovely Tara Rosling).

[fancy-a-dance-brigadier]

Guess who's been watching Discovery

(screencaps from Trek Core)

[phantomstatistician]

Fandom: Star Trek

Sample Size: 81,280 stories

Source: AO3