This was a good mix to start with - a serious episode and a fun silly one.

The first acts as a really good introduction for Scotty, giving him a chance to build up his character with some insurmountable engineering problems that, with some coaching, he surmounts. The second is a nice way to round off Spock and Chapel's relationship, poking fun at the mess that following the canon has left us in, using Trelane as a stand-in for the fans.

various thoughts on the plot:

• Ortegas seems to have been left with a bit of trauma, being part digested will do that to you I guess. Hopefully La'an will spot this and help out.
• Una mentions a "couple of litres" of blood. Did she mean pints, and the writers did a find/replace to make it metric and more futurey? Because "a couple of litres" is a lot.
• Camera spin continues to be a big part of the visual language. It gives me a headache and I have to close my eyes whenever they do this. There were quite a few instances of roll in the first episode that were a bit too much for me.
• John de Lancie and Rhys Darby make the perfect duo for these characters.
• Scotty mentions not drinking, but ends up having to take some when he eats something dodgy at the batchelor party. Previously (later?) Scotty has been shown to be a fan of drink, I guess now it's canon that had there not been alien interference, he may have always been teetotal.
• While Chapel is dealing with Batel, the Gorn hatchlings seem to agitate when the ship first goes close to the binary stars. Then, at the end of the episode when the ship has been suspended between the stars for a long time, no real mention is made of this. I guess the blood infusions and operations just kind of negated all that? Feels like Chekov's gun got loaded and then forgotten about.

Netflix's short stint with FMV / chooe-your-own adventure games highlights a perfect case of difficult preservation - all the runtimes are closed source apps, all the data is streamed from a server, and all the logic is held on the server.

In theory (big caveat) with enough time, effort, and determination you could reverse engineer your way around even the worst Denuvo has to throw. For simple streamed content like images and sound you can always analog-hole your way around preserving content.

But for anything where the key thing you want to preserve, like logic, that depends entirely on a server somewhere existing, that's a problem.

I'm surprised VLC fares that badly with CCs encoded this way. Usually it's pretty good. I'm also now wondering if ffmpeg also shares the same problem

Users need to know what this dot means, and some like children or the elderly will likely not understand the ramifications

• No job, grind away the entire waking day with a low paying zero hours contract while filing job applications, No videogames, no relaxation, more stress, costs healthcare providers more

• No job, spend some of the day working while filing job applications, Yes Videogames, relaxation, lower stress, costs healthcare providers less

Yet another case where if the politician seriously thought about the issue for just half a minute they'd realise their attitude makes no sense.

OK, but all the ticks can go die in a fire

This clever pricing system is only available on Itch.io, [...] It is also on sale on Steam until March 7, but that price doesn't fluctuate.

I thought steam had some sort of t&c agreement where you had to price all copies of a game the same no matter the store they were on. surely this would violate those rules. or am I misremembering that?

The solution is clearly to set up sex toy libraries.

...They would never interfere with libraries, right?

If you use Organic Maps you may be interested in https://streetcomplete.app to help fill out the map

At this point the web is about as complex as an operating system in terms of complexity. That needs really strong specific standards in order for it to work, and in turn projects like web browsers are huge and complex.

If someone wanted to build a web browser that only followed the simpler parts of the specifications, it wouldn't work for many websites* and people would not use that browser.

*Whether or not sites need to be so complex is another question entirely, but the reality right now is that they are

Knife Rain? Wasn't expecting an adventure time reference on star trek, but I'll take it!

There's a lot of references linking back to nova squadron here, but I've got no idea how it all fits together. Looking forward to the finale.

This was a top episode

• Story about more a sci-fi concept, and it made sense
• Jokes that landed well
• Characters not being totally dumb for no reason
• Good resolution at the ending

Great finale