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Brighter lights

Reading the caption before seeing the image definitely weakened today’s comics for me.

Captions of Far Side comics are often effectively punchlines, clarifying whatever weirdness was drawn in the comic. Reading the words and then seeing the image feels disjointed, and loses a lot of the “punch.”

It’s because citrus at high concentrations kills earthworms. Citrus in compost in normal quantities relative to other compostables seems to be fine, but you shouldn’t be trying to compost a huge pile of just pulp and orange peels in your back yard.

As for why this worked here, I’m sure there are a whole lot of things that aren’t earthworms living in a formerly rainforested spot in Costa Rica which can break that stuff down over 15 years.

Nomadic people don’t just wander around aimlessly, and there are big differences in how desirable different territory is for nomadic hunter-gatherer humans. The principle is the same as with nomadic pastoralists: your group has a territory which can sustain them when hunted on/gathered from/grazed/etc over the course of the year, and your group will wander within that space in a deliberate pattern. If some other group decides to “just move on to” your group’s territory, hunting the animals and foraging the plants that your group knows they are going to need to survive the year, that’s an existential threat to you. And you can’t “just move on” yourself without wandering into the territory of yet more groups whose territory borders yours, and who will react violently to your presence for the same reasons.

Given the choice between fleeing to who knows where and fighting who knows who for the privilege of moving, or staying right where you are and fighting for the land you know your group can survive on, you stay and fight.

Humans spread out across the earth as the losers of these conflicts (those who survived, anyway) fled until they stumbled on new-to-humans territory, often displacing or eradicating groups of more “primitive” hominids they found there. This process continues until just about everywhere which humans can reach and which can support human life has humans in it. But expanding populations, the occasional natural disaster, and normal human frustration that their territory sucks while their neighbors have it great (which was often true; again, not all land is the same to a nomadic hunter/gatherer) meant that these conflicts were constantly reignited.

There was organized violence deployed by groups of humans against other groups of humans long, long before anything we would recognize as warfare. Particularly brutal violence too, because the objective was not to conquer other people (something which only makes sense once agriculture is the dominant mode of sustinence), but to either drive off or exterminate a rival group so you can use their territory for yourself.

And we don’t even need to talk about people here: we have records of chimpanzees fighting small scale wars of harassment and extermination against neighboring groups.

Pre-modern, pre-civilization, pre-aggriculture, pre-you-name-it human life was far more violent than what we deal with today.

It’s amazing how good 30+ year old Car Talk episodes are, as someone who had never listened while they were on the air and stumbled into the edited NPR rereleases a couple years back.

Civilization 4 was good at launch. Naturally it got even better over time.

Worth a mention that 4 is the most recent of these games released primary on physical hardware. That meant patching was a more difficult process so they actually had to hire a bunch of play testers to test stuff (and fix the problems they found). Contrast that to the approach of the most recent three games, which had their customers pay $70 for the privilege of being beta testers.

This is a shitty way to develop games. We should be mad about it because we deserve better.

It’s also the team anthem of Emglish football team West Ham United FC.

And a well-chosen anthem it is!

You have no idea if China did that. If they had, they would have taken great efforts to cover it up, and could very well have succeeded. It’s a small wonder we know any of the terrible things they did, such as the genocide they are actively engaging in right now.

Are you seriously drawing equivalencies between being imprisoned by the government and getting banned from Twitter by a non-government organization? That’s a whole hell of a lot more than “a little more gentle.”

If the USA is trying to do what China does with regards to censorship, they really suck at it. Past atrocities by the United States government, and current atrocities by current United States allies are well known to United States citizens. US citizens talk about these things, join organizations actively decrying these things, publicly protest against these things, and claim to vote based on what politicians have to say about these things, all with full confidence that they aren’t going to be disappeared (and that if they do somehow get banned from a website for any of this, making a new account is really easy and their real world lives will be unaffected).

Trying to pass these situations off as similar is ludicrous.

Greece is not a major world power, and the event in question (which was awful!) happened in 1974 under a government which is no longer in power. Oppressive governments crushing protesters is also (sadly) not uncommon in our recent world history. There are many other examples out there for you to dig up.

Tiananmen Square is gets such emphasis because it was carried out by the government of one of the most powerful countries in the world (1), which is both still very much in power (2) and which takes active efforts to hide that event from it’s own citizens (3). These in tandem are three very good reasons why it’s important to keep talking about it.

Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Lieutenant Barclay?

Yes?

Lieutenant Barklay and the huge, powerful, and successful paramilitary organization who employs him are exactly who is supposed to guard Federation worlds. Which is what they do.

Trying to enforce anything new right now, just before Trump goes into office, accomplishes nothing and guarantees that Trump will just reverse it. Publicly deciding not to enforce leaves the incoming administration with a less obvious choice PR-wise, and thus the possibility that they might choose to “own the libs” by actually enforcing the ban.

They are largely powerless at this stage, and preparing for an idiot to take over their job. Why not?

That makes quite a bit more sense, and if that was the intention I wish they’d been a little more explicit about it. I didn’t even realize the implant was mucking with his emotional processing? Despite the Episode 1 throwaway line about it being a “Vulcan” implant, he seemed to have pretty normal emotional responses to me.

The showrunners said from a very early point that the two would not get together during the shows run, and I get the distinct impression that they actively enjoy trolling shippers. So this is pretty much exactly what I expected, and I’m perfectly happy with it.

(Also, look at Tendi in that last scene, when she gets a scan of Rutherford during a conversation about them being “just friends”. She saw something on that Tricorder which she didn’t expect, and then when Rutherford gets up and has his back turned, she’s clearly checking him out. Draw your own conclusions.)

The overall Rutherford arc was less successful. I guess they seeded it previously, but I always just assumed his implant was on the fritz, so it was odd to see him suddenly blaming the ship.

I am at a loss as to how Rutherford’s implant could be flexible enough to function as part of his brain in day-to-day life, and yet somehow be incapable of helping him solve engineering problems on an old ship? Is there some kind of weird DRM installed that prevents it from opening schematics older than a couple years? Or is all the data on California class systems stored in a file format that they latest and greatest starfleet tech can’t open? Both of which would be rather colossal failures of Federation computer tech.

This was a pretty solid episode with some very good jokes (the thing about creating a warp field with one nacelle was fantastic, for example), but I left feeling underwhelmed because of the bizare “the first officer is two LTJGs” thing. Lower Decks has had a shockingly strong track record of not doing things that strike me as immediately stupid, but this is really silly. “Ransom must be pulling another twisted prank, because he’s not this bad at his job” level silly. I think it’s still better than promoting Tilly to XO, but that’s a bar I had hoped this show would remain well clear of and a close shave is disappointing.

I think I understand why they did this: there’s no obvious non-specialist XO candidate of an appropriate rank in the main cast (arguably Shax, but he’s “only” a LT and does not seem ready for the job), and they didn’t want to just trot out a handwave and say they’ll be picking up the XO at the next starbase or something. I’d also theorize that they had planned to have two more seasons in which to work Mariner and Boimler into positions where they might actually make sense for an XO billet. But they aren’t there yet, and they both know it.

Also, gosh would that alternate universe explorer thing have been useful in DISCO S3. And probably Prodigy too. It’s also a dangerous can of worms to open for future stories, because having reliable access to random slightly different universes, apparently at different points in their timelines, is incredibly useful for both anticipating and solving problems in the “prime” universe. There’s also cool stuff they can do with it and I’m sure they will, so I’m trying to keep an open mind.

Finally, props to them for coming up with a more plausible reason for our heroes to literally save the universe: because someone connected to them got unwittingly thrown into a position of enormous influence, and deliberately picked them. It’s Zeus and company antagonizing Hercules, not Michael Burnham being central to solving five (?) entirely unrelated but galactically significant disasters, apparently by pure chance.

I really liked this one. I think it did a good job making Starbase 80 fit into the universe as more than just a joke (why does starfleet have a starbase that everyone knows just totally sucks? Well, because of a bunch of weird circumstances, and also it’s more complicated than the reputation).

Interesting, although unsurprising, that Mariner apparently didn’t hang around SB80 long enough to figure out that there was more there than met the eye. A lot of the stuff uncovered in this episode should have been noticeable to a new transfer.

How did you do this?