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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 23rd, 2023

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  • Shrug. The closest that real biology allows. I already have children so at least some sense a part of me will live on for at least the duration of their lives.

    Past that I’m with most people on here that immortality sounds horrific. Now I can get behind extended life span especially if medicine and society provide for being actually healthy and able to enjoy it. Just not forever.



  • I’m well aware that across most of the rest of the franchise Stormtroopers generally are bad shots.

    However I argue that it is easy to view the entire original trilogy as Stormtroopers being competent. A New Hope is easy as you already pointed out that they were supposed to let them go. Plus the off screen extremely effective results against the Lars homestead and the Jawas which is both combat and effectively following the droids.

    Empire Strikes Back they are extremely effective with invading the Hoth base. Luke is supposed to get to Vader so that part can be ignored. Then for the rest escaping Lando arranges a lot of surprise trouble for the troops as well as R2D2.

    Then for the Ewoks I think almost everyone has it backwards. They all look at how tiny and low tech they are and draw conclusions from that. The more important thing to look at is their results. Not just the main battle but look before that.

    1. A scout (Wickket) is smart enough to make a reasonable level of basic communication with absolutely zero starting point with Leia.
    2. They successfully trap/ambush a Jedi and a Wookie and a droid with sensors. Ok yea required some stupidity on Chewies part but still incredibly impressive on the Ewoks part.
    3. They were literally planning to eat several of the heroes.
    4. The traps everywhere. They clearly didn’t make the big traps just in the day or two when the heroes showed up. That forest is an absolute death trap and miracle that the trap the heroes triggered didn’t kill them.
    5. Battle morale at large not breaking under attack from mechanized and ranged weapons.
    6. Immediate willingness to ride a speeder and a successful dismount in spite of zero clue how they work.

    That is just what I can think of off the top of my head. I’m sure there is more. Honestly they are closer to facing an army of fantasy dwarfs than what people say they are like.









  • A bunch already here that I like for different reasons but I think my favorite is what they did in the game The Sword of the Stars. Sadly a case of a game with great ideas but only so-so-execution.

    My memory on the mechanics might be wrong as I haven’t played it for years but basically as a strategy game the fun twist is that every species has a fundamentally different approach to FTL.

    You have a Lizard species with basically Star Trek warp drive with fixed speed above light speed from any point to point of their choosing.

    Then you have humans that stumbled across naturally occurring interconnect lines between many stars and can travel faster along those routes by comparison to warp drive but have to travel below light speed off of those lines.

    Then an aquatic species that doesn’t do FTL in the normal sense. They developed teleportation but is it only for short distance. However they are able to get the power requirements down very low and rapidly repeat the process and so they flicker across space and the distance of each step gets longer the farther they are from a gravity well so they travel faster around the outside of something like a galactic cluster than in the middle of it. Reversing the normal pattern of where things get colonized.

    And last was an insect species that developed ship size star gates but travels sub light to anywhere new but as long as they bring a gate ship travel is basically instant after that.

    And the bonus layer is that since the game has direct ship to ship combat also in the mechanics the difference drive types have trade offs as well like the insects having extremely good combat drives since they don’t have ANY FTL systems on their combat ships so it all goes to direction propulsion.

    So far it is the only Sci-fi setting I can think of that has so many different ones overlapping not just something like a newer system replacing an older one.


  • Wouldn’t be a problem. G includes the West Indies places like Trinidad which has plenty of food that originated in India. So not the full list of all Indian food but it is perfectly real and not some crappy fusion restaurant knock off.

    Results of the British colonial era bringing a lot of people from India after ending the official slave trade and still wanting people to work plantations. So they switched from literally slavery to the not quite but still awful indentured service. The British would get the lowest social groups in India that functionally couldn’t own property in India to sign contracts for many years of work in exchange for a 1 room shack and a micro plot of land of their own.




  • Absolutely disagree on this. There is no fundamental reason software must have bugs. However old systems can be their own technical debt because of things like the hardware no longer being produced and therefore unable to be directly repaired if it breaks from age.

    This leaves either reprogramming for a modern device or things like emulation which can create/surface bugs that weren’t present before.

    The most extreme example I have heard of (sadly couldn’t quickly find a link for it) was a disorientation simulator for pilot training that had zero software issues in several decades of use and when the hardware failed they replaced it with an FPGA in a modern system that ran all the old code 1 for 1. PDP stuff originally I think.

    Additional edit - I’ll add that “bug free” software is insanely rare in reality and nearly but not quite impossible to create in practice. I can’t say the software didn’t technically have bugs but if multiple decades of use didn’t have them show up in practice it is functionally bug free.


  • I feel this. Both in terms of driver engagement safety and in how much I loathe traditional automatic transmissions. Still stuck owning one in one of the two vehicles I have at the moment but only because it was all I could afford for the second of two vehicles large enough to fit all my kids.

    I have had several manual transmission vehicles and the other current one is a PHEV and one of the rare models that is a series hybrid so it drives like a true EV.