wjrii

@wjrii@lemmy.world

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wjrii, (edited )

Something (maybe Alexandrite") borked the link for me. If anyone else has the same issue, here you go:

www.youtube.com/channel/UCaqQJj24yCY_bDQ35jS0Gvw

And yeah, that’s nasty. I had to get my earwax flushed out once. It was unpleasant and super gross, and I’ve used the specialized peroxide solutions a couple of times in the years since. My wife has the dry wax gene, and finds wet wax both gross and confusing.

The only thing I’ll add is that having used a cheap camera earwax cleaner, the magnification makes every normal little waxbooger look like a Star Trek brain slug, so while still dramatic (don’t get me wrong), the videos always look just a touch more dramatic than they really are.

wjrii,

So Hubble has 10 useful years left in its current orbit. I say let the private spaceflight tech bro give it a try… in nine years.

The article goes into a lot of good detail about why it might not make sense to let a Friend of Musk pop on up with an undertrained crew and an under-specced spacecraft and try to bolt on some aftermarket hardware.

wjrii,

If the NSA had an “unused Hubble chassis”, how many were made, and what are the others doing?

It’s secret, but not THAT secret, since it requires sending Hubble-sized telescopes into orbit. Looks like there are 6 of that design still in operation.

wjrii,

Yup. I don’t doubt he has a lot of confidence in his entire team, but NASA really come off as the adults in the room here. “Move fast and break things” only works if it’s easy to fix or replace them or if no one would miss them. Hubble is a useful scientific instrument and would be ungodly expensive and involve not-insignificant danger to replace, so I can completely understand if they ultimately decide it’s not worth risking 5-10 more years of data on the hope that his wanting to play-act Starfleet includes the boring preparation parts.

wjrii,

Why build one when you can build two twenty at twice twenty times the price!

wjrii, (edited )

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Official_Portrait_of_Frank_Forde_by_Joshua_Smith.jpg, the fifteenth prime minister of Australia.

Not sure why the pose, though I wonder if the artist was maybe working from a photograph that would have hit the eye better as a moment in time. It’s not a world apart from this https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Eleanor-Roosevelt-WH-Portrait.jpg though, who must have been real fuckin’ tired of holding that page just so if she was posing real-time.

wjrii,

…people were upset it wasn’t followed up on in Rise of Skywalker.

Fair warning, I am coming at this as a fan of TLJ who found it really worked for me after falling in love with Star Wars as a little kid in 1983, but one of the great sins of TROS is exactly that.

Every movie before that had its retcons, sometimes pretty significant, but no movie simply rolled back the previous one or refused to engage with it like TROS did. I’ve been forced to accept that there is pretty significant contingent who didn’t connect with TLJ like I did, but Disney and JJ took absolutely the wrong lesson from the backlash in how they responded. The fans who care that deeply view an installment they don’t care for as an annoying relative, but one one to be addressed, rehabilitated if possible, explained if not. Dave Filoni built his entire career on this.

wjrii, (edited )

“Mason Classical Academy”

If folks don’t know, in the charter school world, “Classical Academies” are often code for right wing indoctrination. The idea is that if you just focus on the “classics” of western education and their direct descendants, then HEY NOW! Suddenly Rudyard Kipling is your best insight into Indian literature, and Joseph Conrad into African. The American founding fathers were totally into Roman republicanism! The King James Bible is literally poetry! What is a Chinua Achebe anyway?!?!?!?!?!?

It’s an inherently conservative idea that a viable totality of useful knowledge is contained within books that are all part of the western canon circa 1937, so even if a few schools engage in it in good faith, a watered down version offered at the primary and secondary levels is just catnip for those who want to engage in a little brain washing at the public expense.

Edit: This MCA is likely a little less explicitly creepy than some, but it’s an E.D. Hirsch “Core Knowledge Foundation” school that is designed to hammer home a certain set of facts and cultural touchstones, rather than worrying about the emotional well being or broad-based thinking skills that a good modern curriculum will include. It’s basically the old story of “old person sees kids don’t know everything he was taught, lashes out at schools,” if it were from a curmudgeonly English professor. It almost certainly draws the same type of parents and administrators that other Classical Academies do.

wjrii,

THAT’S NOT REALLY HELPFUL!

ZOUNDS!

wjrii,

Oh jeez, this is how we get Disco season 6, isn’t it?

wjrii, (edited )

No, well, yes but not as the main thing (becuz Star Trek), but they do find inspiration for the S5 arc in old TNG stuff.

wjrii,

Admit it… you LOOOOOVE whisper-lectures.

Disco is not really a bad show. It’s a bad show, a good show, a kind of decent not-star-trek show, and sometimes all of that in a single season. The whiplash is real.

wjrii,

It earns a lot of grace with me for its heart, and I also can’t help but be entranced by the neverending meta-drama of the writers and producers trying to figure out what they want it to be and committing to absolutely nothing for more than a season.

wjrii,

LD pulls a bit of The Orville bait-and-switch where the humor never goes away, but there’s clearly Star Trek bones under there and over the course of the first season it commits more to that than to being an anarchic romp. Frankly, while I enjoy both, I like LD a lot more than the Orville, which has some of the worst acting I’ve ever seen on network television, tends to resolve most (though not all) moral dilemmas by just aggressively picking a side, and cannot escape Seth MacFarlane’s obsession with American pop culture, circa 1950-2000.

wjrii,

If you have extended universe stuff, that’s lovely. If you reference it, that’s fine. If you rely on it, that’s troubling. If I only learn about it because I had to google WTF was happening and whether I’d completely missed an episode, that’s bad.

wjrii,

I had to look this up. An indigenous Australian artist, famous by antipodean artworld standards, included an unflattering portrait of the woman who owns the most profitable mining company in Australia and depending on the day, she’s usually calculated to be the richest Australian in the world, and sometimes the richest woman.

The company is infamous for doing as mining companies are wont to do, and also specifically for her late father’s old-school racism on the topic of indigenous Australians, and then her own actions that suggest she was fine with his attitudes. Frankly, the fact that her portrait looks to have been just a bit more exaggerated than the rest should have been viewed as a minor win that she could ride out, but she decided to raise a stink about it and be the biggest Karen in the world, accusing the national gallery of doing the Chinese government’s bidding, even though she is on record saying nice things about them to get their business.

wjrii,

You don’t really need to know anything else about her for this story.

Well, maybe a liiiittle bit more:

Perhaps the most well known controversy in the history of the company centres around the racist views of founder Lang Hancock towards Indigenous Australians. Hancock is quoted as saying,

“Mining in Australia occupies less than one-fifth of one percent of the total surface of our continent and yet it supports 14 million people. Nothing should be sacred from mining whether it’s your ground, my ground, the blackfellow’s ground or anybody else’s. So the question of Aboriginal land rights and things of this nature shouldn’t exist.” In a 1984 television interview, Hancock suggested forcing unemployed indigenous Australians − specifically “the ones that are no good to themselves and who can’t accept things, the half-castes” − to collect their welfare cheques from a central location. And when they had gravitated there, I would dope the water up so that they were sterile and would breed themselves out in the future, and that would solve the problem."

Executive Chairman of Hancock Prospecting, Gina Rinehart, caused controversy in 2022, when she failed to apologise for or denounce comments made by her late father in the 1984 television interview. Hancock Prospecting subsequently withdrew an A$15 million sponsorship from Netball Australia after Indigenous netballer Donnell Wallam voiced concerns about the deal and the impact of the comments, pertaining to a genocide, by “poisoning” and “sterilising” Indigenous Australians to “solve the problem”; as well as concerns about the company’s environmental record.

wjrii,

This quote is from her father in '84, and it was in a televised interview. However, just two years ago she refused to denounce those comments, and pulled millions of dollars from support from Australian Netball’s governing body because an indigenous player raised the issue.

wjrii,

It’s odd, they do seem generally more inclusive and less cliquey, but humans are humans, and that means bullying still happens. The really intense stuff has been empowered by internet anonymity (or short of that, a lack of physical presence and the accompanying repercussions), perfect for your prototypical emotionally damaged coward of a bully.

For those who don’t go nuclear, it seems like the main thing is exclusion, but it can be hard to decide when that moves from them simply associating with the people they want, to passive aggressive bullying. I’m sure the number of people cruelly left off the “new” group text for some bullshit reason is pretty large though.

wjrii,

Though Gerald Ford as his model for presidential behavior certainly tracks.

wjrii,

I believe that Herbert intended it at some level, I just don’t think it was well-considered as world building.

It is fine though, as a way to handwave anything that doesn’t make sense and to underline just how weird this setting and these people’s cultures are going to be. This is not to denigrate it. It’s just more a storyteller’s trope intended to tell the audience to settle in and leave your expectations behind. I guess this show will step in just after the end of the Butlerian Jihad maybe, but the ebbs and flows of human cultural change over 10,000 years means that it’s just one more thing he was intentionally not focusing on, and making a very specific prequel about an era that should be almost lost to the mists of time is inviting questions the “Duneiverse’s” nerd-infrastructure is poorly equipped to handle.

I’m sort of just musing, though. I’ll absolutely watch it, and if they tell a compelling story I will smile and shrug and not let it affect my enjoyment.

wjrii,

I absolutely believe it’s been set down. It’s just a weird number to have picked in the first place, a full 20k years or whatever into the future. It feels more like Frank Herbert originally just wanted to say “all that happened a long god-damned time ago… don’t fixate on it.” Yet here we are, fixating on it. If it’s a good show, I won’t mind at all, but I find it amusing.

wjrii,

Pretty sure. It was a 32 oz bottle on the same shelf as all the cocktails and blends.

Now, to be fair, some people do recommend cutting pure cranberry juice with seltzer or water, but it was not specifically a concentrate.

My 4th grader picked a shirt based on her connection to me, with potentially humorous caveats...

So, my 10yo and I have a pretty great relationship. She’s smart and funny and curious and all the things I might have hoped I could raise a kid to be. That said, she idolizes her mom. As much as she is like me, Daddy is definitely the “boring” parent, because my job is stupider than my wife’s and also much less...

wjrii,

She had a great day, except for tripping in the mud, and according to her, theory #1 was closer to the truth. A Floridaman knows, though. She has Gatorade running through her veins whether she likes it or not. 🤣

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