#I just feel like I'm too quick to commit to a design without exploring all my options you know?

[nyssasatelier]

Surely she won't redesign Poseidon for a third time...right?

(the answer is maybe....who am I kidding it's yes, it's a hard yes) have these quick teaser sketches

[helix-enterprises117]

Halo Reloaded: Dusty

Based on this prompt.

Corporal John "Dusty" Matthews was having what you might call a 'bad day.' One minute, he was on a routine sweep in a supposedly abandoned sector, and the next, he found himself accidentally teleported onto a Sangheili battle-corvette. As far as Dusty was concerned, being aboard an alien ship without so much as a "by your leave" was less than ideal. He wasn't an explorer or a diplomat; he was a marine, better at shooting things than discussing intergalactic relations.

As he tiptoed down a corridor that looked more like an art gallery (if art galleries were designed by giant, war-loving aliens), he hoped his standard-issue boots didn’t squeak too loudly on the sleek metal floor.

Then she appeared. The door at the end of the hall slid open, and out stepped not the hulking warrior he expected but a Sangheili who could only be described as regally striking—tall, with the poise of a dancer and the kind of natural command that made Dusty straighten up without thinking. Her armor was less 'battle-ready' and more 'ceremonial chic,' inlaid with stones that sparkled even in the dim light.

"Is this translator working? Okay, listen," she said, her voice firm but surprisingly melodic. It was the kind of voice that made you want to agree first and ask questions later.

Dusty looked around, half-expecting cameras to reveal this was some bizarre reality show. Finding none, he focused back on her as she continued. "I need you to pretend to be my boyfriend so that my parents can get off my back."

"I’m sorry, what now?" Dusty blurted, his response a mix of confusion and disbelief.

The Sangheili princess sighed, her mandibles flaring slightly in what Dusty guessed was frustration. "It's quite simple. You, a dashing human marine, are my boyfriend. We met during negotiations, fell in love despite our differences, and now you are here to meet my parents. They won’t pressure me into any advantageous but loveless unions if they think I am already committed."

Dusty processed this, his mind racing. "You want me to... help you trick your parents? With all due respect, ma'am, I'm just a marine, not an actor."

Dusty scratched his head. "Just a quick question—why me? And what makes you think I won't just turn tail and run?"She stepped closer, and he instinctively took a step back.

"Perfect!" she clapped her hands together, causing Dusty to jump. "A marine is straightforward, honest. That’s exactly what we need. Less acting, more being yourself. Can you do that?"

"...Sure. But if we're going to do this," he said, adopting a more serious tone, "I need to know your name. Can’t be lovebirds if I don’t know who you are."

"Thelara," she answered quickly, extending a hand, which he shook, noting again the surprising gentleness in her strong grip.

"And how exactly do we sell this fairytale romance?" Dusty asked, trying to ignore the absurdity of his situation.

"Just follow my lead, compliment me often, and look like you're enjoying yourself," Thelara instructed, already walking back towards the way she came, expecting him to follow.

"Compliment you on what, exactly? Your... shining personality?" Dusty quipped, a smirk tugging at his lips.

"That’s a start. Oh, and try to look smitten, will you? Like you can't believe your luck," she added over her shoulder.

Dusty attempted a smitten look, which felt more like a grimace. Thelara glanced back and chuckled. "We might need to work on that."

As they approached what Dusty assumed were the royal quarters, he couldn't help but feel a twinge of excitement bubbling up alongside his apprehension.

Playing the part of a lovesick human in an alien court wasn’t exactly covered in basic training, but then again, neither was accidentally teleporting onto an alien flagship.

"Stick close and let’s not screw this up, okay, Dusty?" Thelara whispered, as they paused before a grand door.

"Lead the way, Princess," Dusty replied, mustering a confidence he didn't feel. He figured if he was going to pretend to be in love, he might as well enjoy the performance. After all, how often does one get to romance an alien princess?

[there-is-only-chaos]

Decided to rewatch Enterprise because I've only watched it once and want to give it a better, more optimistic outlook (I was super critical the first run thru comparing it to tos)

So for no other reason then I feel like it, here's a list of things I love about the series.

Porthos - IMO there's not enough pets on Trek. Humans may decide to give up their blue jeans one day, but I don't see us ever choosing to go without our furry companions. Sure Picard has his fish and O'Brian had a tarantula in an episode of TNG then a cat in Ds9, but Data's cat is the only one with any great scene time. So I love Captain Archer walking the decks with his dog at his heels. It feels right. I also love how he's not just an accessory but a somewhat developed character who loves cheese.

The blue undies. The grey undershirts are always a welcome sight in TNG Ds9 and Voyager but these A-shirt/boxer brief combos are a whole new level of excellence, though I'll leave T'Pol's undies out of this. Can she rub me down with bio gel please ??

Shran, I love Jeffrey Combs, Weyoun downing poisoned Knar will never not be amusing, but Shran is my favorite of his characters. In all honesty he's the reason I decided to rewatch Enterprise. The way he goes from enemy to reluctant ally to trusted ace in the hole is a great trope and I will never grow tired of hearing him call Archer Pink-skin.

Trip. It wasn't long after I started this rewatch that I realized after Shran, Trip is my favorite character. He's committed and loyal, but also quick to crack a joke and seems like just a lot of fun to be around. He's very relatable I think, with his reactions to some situations including the loss of his sister and treatment of Degra. Plus his endless support of Movie Night?? Definitely relatable.

Ship design. Not the outer shape, I'm too partial to Kirk's Enterprise, but internally they did a good job making it look as though it could consivably be a precurser to the Constitution Class. 

I'm not usually one for unneeded romantic subplots, but I enjoy the relationship between Trip and T'Pol. It feels organic and natural, to me anyway.

The creative way they went about explaining the changes in Vulcan society as well and the fact that klingons don't have ridges in TOS. 

Just when you least expected it, SHRAN pops up.

Phlox. Love me an out of place alien [*cough* Neelix *cough, cough* ] that enthusiastically joins the human crew and forms a bond with them through admiring our best qualities while also remaining objective enough to point out our limitations (sexual inhibitions for example) but he's a fun character, with his pets and huge smile, but the doctors are always amung my favorites.

Mirror Universe. Personally CBS can keep its section 31 show, I want a mirror universe series with occasional episodes in ours XD 

Captian's Mess, 1800.

Their fear of the transporter and resistence to using it. It feels very authentic and relatable to be weary of such technology. I'm sure what happens to Hoshi would give Lt. Barclay nightmares 😂

They never seem to get very far. Sure they only have warp 5 and did a fair amount of exploration in the Expanse to find the Xindi, but then they're never too far away to get to Andoria or Vulcan on the double. I like this aspect of the show whether it was intentional or not because it allows TOS the room it needs to be the first manned ship to get most places.

Oh, Did I mention Shran?

[anettrolikova]

A day in my life really depends on what's happening. That said, usually I have themes. For instance, I have a priority list, and I have decision logs that chronicle all the things I am trying to figure out.

I end up trying to insert themes into my days. Like today, for instance, I have a meeting with my small team to begin the week; I reserved my afternoon for product reviews—what we call “greenpathing exercises”—where, oddly, I'm trying to discern how everyone is thinking about the main things we're working on. I do this because oftentimes I feel as though I am the connective tissue combining operations, finance, and more formal business functions with the product itself. This connection helps me to make good decisions.

A lot of this is almost automatic by just having a good color coding system, which is really fun

I made two decisions: one, I'm going to try to learn as much about business as possible. But, if business is very different from software architecture, I'm going to be no good no matter what I do. And so, I ran an experiment to treat engineering principles, software architecture, complex system design, and company building as the same thing. Effectively, we looked for the business equivalent of just turning off servers to see if the system has resiliency. For instance, we used to ask people to use their mouse on their non-dominant hand for a day. We introduced these little nudges to ensure that people didn’t become complacent.

I believe that the job we all have in life is to acquire knowledge and wisdom and then share it. I just don’t know what else there is. This is the bedrock of my belief system.

When I get close to any field, I think about how far I want to go. I'm probably further along with programming. I don’t know if I want to get from 90 to 91% in programming when, with the same amount of work, I could figure out the first 60 to 70% of UX or even something like drawing. There’s a recent book about this called Range, which I really like. The book pushes in this direction and explores this topic a bit more than I do. But I just found myself nodding throughout reading it, because it turns out that very often—really, every field has fundamental wisdom that you discover when you're learning and talking to the people who have mastered it. I find that going wide and learning the best lessons from the people who have dedicated their entire lives to a certain pursuit gets you really, really close to mastery.

people show up with a mastery of certain instruments. Someone ends up being the jazz director and the rest of the band follows

I've always gravitated towards competing against myself in most things.

I really love failing. I feel so good when I do something, and it just doesn't work; especially if I get the feedback about why it didn't work. That gives me a project to work at to improve. And so maybe that's sort of interesting regarding losses.

the major reason why video games are valuable is because of this concept of transfer learning. For instance, people who are good at chess understand when it's time to perform tactics, and when it's time to focus on positional development. Not just in chess, but also in life.

I have found it really, really useful to be able to reason about a relationship without getting egos involved too much. I can have a conversation with someone saying, “Hey, you made a commitment to ship this thing, and you did. That's awesome. That's a super big charge on the trust battery, but you’re actually late for every meeting. Even though that's relatively minor—like it decreases 0.1% on your battery—you should fix that.”

It plays a role like that. That said, it's not useful to talk about trust as a binary thing. People are quick to say, “You don't trust me!” And it's actually more, “Well, no, I trust you to a certain level, but you would like more trust; you want trust at a completely different level.”

if your cell phone is 80% charged, you're not worried about finding a charger. But when your phone in your pocket goes into low battery mode, you're thinking about your phone a lot. What people want to do in a company is get to the 80% or 100% level in the area that they run. You gain full autonomy this way. It’s a process that cannot be given to people by title or something like that.

The reason why it was the best thing for me is because it's almost the perfect counterfactual to how you should run a company. I honestly think that, you know, a coin flip has a batting average of 50%. If you just do the perfect opposite of literally everything about that place, you would probably clock in at 60 to 70% of getting everything right, which would mean you would outperform probably 90% of all companies in the world.

Among other things, almost every incentive system was just wrong. For instance, there was no way you would get a promotion or recognition if you weren't dressed in a suit or if you didn’t use slides in a particular way that resembled the legal profession.

It's infantilization because you literally have a policy about how to dress. If you have a policy on how to dress, that means you don't trust people to dress. It was a pretty stark experience.

We are building hopefully amazing software for absolutely amazing people, like people who are unbelievably brave and really adaptable. Society tries to talk people out of this, like no one wants other people to be successful building companies. Silicon Valley might have gotten to a level of enlightenment where company building is actually encouraged, but the rest of the world isn’t like this.

The learning curve of being a great executive is a lot less like learning the guitar, and a lot more like skydiving. It’s the kind of thing you should not do without an instructor. A coach is probably one of the highest returns on investment anyone can do with their attention. An hour spent with a coach has a 10x, 50x, 100x potential return on time spent.

Our strategy was to hire as many high potential people as we could and have them get to their potential much faster than they actually imagined was possible. Personal growth has no real speed limit. It's more dependent on how often a student is ready, and that often depends on the environment and the norms of a culture around the student. For instance, how often is the teacher appearing when the student is ready? If you can line this up at a fairly high hit rate, then people can go through nearly ten years of career development within a single calendar year. I know the 10x thing is overplayed now, but I have absolutely seen it.

Hey, the reason why you've got this job is not because of everything you know, but because you seem like the kind of person who can figure it out when you need to know something.” That's very basic but also very liberating.

One thing that really makes it work is that we are just extremely different. Almost the only overlap we have is in how much we care about the mission of this company. Outside of that, his skill set is extremely different; his input is extremely different; his life experience is very different. It's very intuitive for us when to go with one of our ideas because this is what a relationship with a 100% trust battery looks like.

I had the source code for Linux, I signed up for the Linux kernel mailing list, and I listened to how they talked about computer architecture. I then spent all my time trying to figure out what these terms meant.

The meaningful thing about this story is that it points at a fallacy. The other important thing is it implies that people in groups end up really cancelling each other's good parts and exposing one another's downsides.

why are technical founders overperforming the market right now? I don't actually think it's because they're technical. I think it's because of a very specific childhood experience that a lot of the people running technology companies have had. Most of us grew up in a world which we knew would change significantly because it was really badly designed given what we knew about the potential coming soon. And this potential coming soon was the march of computers and digitalization. I think that a lot of us, including myself, have leveraged this insight into significant enterprise value.

Norman gave permission to really hate the door instead of hating yourself when you push it instead of pulling it. That is not your fault. No human has ever been at fault for pushing instead of pulling. That has always been the fault of the people who designed the door.

People who learn how to think about how to do things in their environment better, and to understand that the objects in their everyday life have not been designed or created by people who are smarter than they are—they are the people who will become entrepreneurs.