plenipotentprotogod

Sorry in advance for what will probably be a long reply, but I was actually thinking about this recently and I'm taking the excuse to type out my thoughts.

The fact is that Lower Decks does have certain similarities to Rick and Morty, but they're mostly superficial and the show is different where it counts. Aside from the obvious similarities in animation style and the characters' penchant for wacky hijinks, Lower Decks also features frequent bleeped out swearing and occasional jokes based on sexual innuendo or censored nudity. Some people really don't like that stuff in their entertainment. If you're one of those people then it isn't a show for you.

But there's one big way in which Lower Decks is the exact opposite of Rick and Morty. The difference is the thesis of the series. Rick and Morty is at its core very cynical. Morty said it best himself: "Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV" I don't know if it was by accident or on purpose, but I think that line is really the whole show in a nutshell.

Lower decks is not a cynical show. Lower decks is a joyous show. Sure, the characters fight, but they always end the episode as friends. They make mistakes, but they learn from them. They have problems, but, over time, they mature.

I remember seeing an interview with the show creator in which he said that he conceived of it as a story about a group of young adults maturing and figuring out who they really are. I think that's his thesis, and he delivers on it.

So yeah. I guess bottom line is, if adult oriented animation in general turns you off then Lower Decks probably isn't going to change your mind. It inherits a lot of its sensibilities (and a few bad habits) from its predecessors. But if you're mainly concerned that it'll be a Trek skinned Rick and Morty then I would encourage you to look past the superficial similarities and give it a try.

Ya know what? Sure. This website has plenty of posts complaining about AI already. This is now a Casablanca appreciation thread.

I also think it's a great movie which holds up spectacularly well. Despite my efforts, I struggle to appreciate many "classic" films (Vertigo is overrated, and I will die on that hill). However, Casablanca is just perfect. It's a compelling concept, turned into a tight script, and performed by skilled actors. It really is an all-time classic, and I recommend it to everyone.

This one seems like a spiritual successor to my all-time favorite SMBC.

I think that the vast majority of philosophical hair-splitting comes down to the fact that we live in "a universe where all meaningful divisions are arbitrary."

It lends a healthy perspective to a lot of arguments.

Oh no! It's a ~1~ ~2~ ~3~ ~4~ ~5~ ~6~ ~...~~...~~...~~...~~...~~...~~...~ ICOSAHEDRON!

Every episode seems to have one joke that really gets me. In this one it was Mariner stopping mid exclamation to make sure she correctly named the platonic solid that's about to eat her.

If anyone actually manages to get Plasma Bigscreen working decently, please let me know how you did it. I was really excited when I first learned about it, but after considerable time tinkering, I gave up.

My first attempt was to install it on an old laptop. It boots up and looks good, but a large number of the built-in apps hang forever on their splash screen when you try to run them. I also couldn't figure out how to customize what apps appear in the carousels on the homepage. I'm not sure if that's because there truly is no way to do it or if the functionality is locked behind one of the apps that I can't launch.

The Plasma Bigscreen website indicates that it was designed to run on a Raspberry Pi 4, so I gave in and bought one in hopes that using the preferred hardware would work better. I followed the provided links to the latest Manjaro build of Bigscreen (which is over a year old) and installed it on my pi. Unfortunately, that build apparently suffers from a bug that prevents you from even getting past the login screen on first boot up. I don't remember the details, but I think it was some kind of "can't log in without setting a password" / "can't set a password until you log in" loop. Anyway, I found a forum post discussing the problem with no solutions found, so I gave up on the manjaro build.

My final attempt was to install an ordinary desktop Linux distribution on the pi and then use the package manager to install Plasma Bigscreen as an alternative desktop. This got me in, but there were still a bunch of broken apps. It was about this time that I also realized that the original Bigscreen concept seemed to lean heavily into voice control via Mycroft AI. Mycroft has gone through some major changes since the project launched, and I think these changes have resulted in basically all Mycroft related code in Plasma Bigscreen being broken. That may or may not be related to the other problems I had. I never got to experience a fully functional version of the software, so I have a hard time knowing what exactly is broken in what ways.

Anyway, that's my experience with Plasma Bigscreen. I hope this doesn't come across as hating on the project. It should be evident from the amount of effort put in that I really wanted it to work, but in the end I had to conclude that in its current state, it's badly broken with no sign of improvement or repairs.

Helpful tip: there's a setting in Firefox to block all notification requests. It's under Settings > Privacy & Security, then scroll down to the Permissions heading. Click the "Settings..." button next to the the Notifications entry and tick the box for "Block new requests asking to allow notifications".

I assume there's an equivalent in Chrome, but I don't know what it is off the top of my head.

Ninja edit: Removed my attempt to hyperlink directly to the relevant Firefox settings page because it wasn't working.

I don't disagree, but Windows' built in screen casting is hard to find and clunky to use. Linux is even worse off. Until earlier this year there was no real support from any Linux desktop environment. There's a GNOME project that's supposed to be putting together support. It was announced to ship with GNOME 46, but I'm not a GNOME user so I just tried to install the flatpak on my Kubuntu machine. It detects my TV but fails to connect with it. Definitely still needs work.

Some of that focus involves adding features that have become table-stakes in other browsers.

Speaking of this, does anyone else feel like Firefox's lack of ability to wirelessly screencast is a major problem when it comes to convincing others to switch away from chromium browsers? I know chromecast and airplay themselves are both proprietary, and therefore counter to firefox's open source philosophy, but they could at least implement first party support for miracast (or DLNA?) A surprising number of smart TVs work well with those protocols. They just tend not to advertise it because most people don't know what they are.

I admit that I haven't looked much into this since some years ago when I first switched over to firefox as my main browser, but at the time I found that there weren't even any decent addons for screen casting functionality. I've learned to live without it, but I know a lot of people who use that functionality on a daily basis and could (quite justifiably) never be convinced to switch without an equivalent.

Jimmy Eat World continues to he great. Just about every track on their 2019 album Surviving is a banger

It very much depends on your use case. Kodi is great for displaying content from a personal media library, but support for most streaming services is tacked-on at best and non-existent at worst.

There's certainly a discussion to be had about whether maintaining a local media library is a "better" choice than streaming, but the fact remains that for people who want to use streaming services, this project is attempting to fill a very real hole in the FOSS ecosystem.

I agree. The concept is simple, and it's not perfect, but it isn't dumb either. This is basically recreating how coal and oil got in the ground in the first place. Plants absorbed carbon from the air as they grew, then they got buried in a way that prevented them from decomposing and re-releasing it into the atmosphere. My main question here would be whether burying it only 10 feet under ground is really enough for long term storage. The other big elephant in the room with carbon capture is that it can be a convenient excuse for companies to avoid doing work towards actually decarbonizing their operations. If, as the article suggests, this is used primarily by industries like cement making that don't currently have a way to become carbon neutral then it's a good thing. If it's just used as cynical green washing by companies who could be doing better, then it's at best a wash, and arguably a net negative.

This is apparently called "Skywhale" and the title is accurate (although it's worth clarifying that "this year" refers to 2013, which is when the original Imgur post was made.)

A quote from the Wikipedia page:

Wings didn't make sense to Patricia; the creature was too big and the technical limitations of balloon design wouldn't allow them anyway. So she took a cue from the balloon itself, and imagined that the creature might somehow secrete a lighter than air gas. In the place of wings she imagined huge udders that might contain the gas, as well as a huge bulbous body. She imagined the creature with a slightly more human face, with a calm benign expression that would inspire empathy rather than fear. Her aim was to create a being that was massive and wondrous and that exists somewhere between the impossible and the unlikely.