ThaOGDreamWeaver

One for @Fire Chief... we're gonna do the original version of this song... nice... and easy... Creedence Clearwater Revival - Proud Mary ...then we're gonna do it. Nice. And. Rough. Tina Turner - Proud Mary (Live In Arnhem 2009)

That varies a bit depending on the system used: DogeCoin's authors, despite creating it as a spoof/joke, fixed a lot of the inherently wasteful processes and problems of the original Bitcoin. Thus proving that you have to do things better than the original for comedy, but I digress. As a rough guide: One (1) successfully completed DOGE transaction requires ~0.1kWh of energy. This is about the same as running a gaming laptop for about an hour: it's also equivalent to the total end-to-end energy cost of 8 credit card transactions. So, a fair amount, but not ludicrous. Estimates vary as to how much a BTC transaction costs. According to Statista, it's now over 2,000 kWh - and this will only go up as Bitcoin's built-in artificial scarcity tightens. (Only 10% of the maximum BTC remain to be mined.) Again, for comparison, that's roughly the amount electricity an average household of four would use in six months. So,

So, anyone hungry?

Journey - Separate Ways

Final trailer just dropped, and it looks like the Duffers have not wasted the last 3 years. Season will be in two parts - first part drops May 27th, conclusion 1st July. So, let the wild unfounded speculation and flaming begin!

As is the guy in the below quoted tweet. FWIW, while I'm an entirely unsuitable person to be a judge of any kind, I would also be irritated by this person. Probably without knowing what they did or who they were, just due to the Redolent Aura Of Smug +5. (30' radius, roll d100 to check vs instant grumpiness, murderous rage on Critical Fail) Also, I hadn't run into Gripnr before. That didn't produce rage, just a resigned sigh: you know what kind of folks they're going to be by the fact they have a loose -R on the end of their app, like Flickr, Tumblr, Grindr, Scissr etc-r. I guess they're all just wannabe pirates.

I don't think they started off that way. But it didn't take long to get that way once the sharks moved in. They're obviously far from the only thing crims and 1%ers can use to defraud people or move/hide money - think art, wine, property deeds - but by far the most portable, and a bit more tricky to seize for enforcement purposes.

Edward Shearmur - Back To Earth (Sky Captain OST End Titles)

Barry Adamson - The Big Bamboozle

Phénomenal Club - Il Est Vraiment Phénomenal et aussi, naturellement... Phénomenal Club - Elle Est Vraiment Phénomenale

Bellini - Samba De Janeiro 🔰 #otbc

Public Enemy - Shake Your Booty (He Got Game OST Mix)

Blue Man Group - Shake Your Booty Euphemism (Full Show Version)

With my corporate hat on, if I have a specific worry on behalf of Paramount and its fans, it's security. Recently, there have been a number of threads/jokes/memes (and explainers like the one below) about people getting their apes ripped off... One of the aforementioned less-than-sympathetic tech bros decided to mansplain at a thread author about how "easy" it was to secure a machine ready for NFTs. It went on for about 10-12 tweets, and aside from your basic "don't click stupid links", it included running your Metamask in a sandboxed and sandbagged VM with strictly limited external access, keeping your stuff in a fully secured hardware wallet, scrupulously checking any inbound mail for potentially compromised links - including genuine email from friends, in case of MITM attacks - and a number of other things. I've worked in and around a number of tech environments - mostly media dahlink, but also oil, general industry and a couple of brief stints working with US.mil and intel. None of the above practice the level of security allegedly required, and the last two whinged about having to do even basic opsec. Passwords on Post-Its, that kind of thing. If we don't expect the kind of people who should be practicing Srs Security Stuff to be locking their kit down that strongly, expecting it of casual users is a bit much. On top of that: Paramount should expect their user database, web presence and socials to come under heavy attack. Not just to steal the actual weird fuzzy starships - to target users for other Quarkcoin schemes. In short: this is the worst idea to hit Star Trek tech since Wesley got horny and ran a sentient virused copy of Slaver Queens Of Orion on the holodeck.

Yup - mainly all the sharp/mean kids convincing/bullying the newbies into handing over the rare ones in exchange for worthless ones or ramping the value of specials. Weirdly: one of my many nephews was a shady Pokémon dealer of that nature when he was young. He's now a merchant banker and has been poking me about blockchain and crypto tech. Clearly, it's a gateway drug.😂

Truth. Anything that gets posted on DeviantArt these days is apparently fair game for getting NFTized without the artist's permission, with the usual response being "yah-boo sucks for you you don't understand the technology lol", and/or precisely zip from the sales platform in question. BTW, I forgot one detail. The tokens are required to play a "forthcoming" (...mayyybeeee...) pay-to-earn Trek game, wherein grinding will earn you more of these things. While, incidentally, also grinding your system resources to generate more of the darn things. So, if you don't mind frying a GFX card or two to fly your starship... Massively: Trek announces plans for P2E game

Noted this week that Paramount, in addition to depriving Euro fans of legitimate access to Discovery/Strange New Worlds/Prodigy etc (and I may be attempting Evil Goth Hologram Janeway next time I go to a convention, btw)... ...have gone full Ferengi and launched the Continuum - a line of Trek digital collectibles receipts for dodgy links to things you'll never actually own, have no intrinsic functional use, and which can be easily stolen along with your c****y MSPaint apes if you're not incredibly tooled up on your personal PC/Mac security. The reaction from the fandom has been a) swift b) merciless c) correct. NFTs are - IMnpHO* - a sop for corporations so desperate for punters' money that they can't be bothered to create anything valuable or interesting for them to buy first. I'm also not sure what platform Continuum's built on, but the complexity of NFT transactions means the damn things need to devour whole planets to keep up the power, like some ravaging evil Space Cornetto... ...ahem. I'm expecting some kind of non-humble "we heard you" post from Paramount any minute now as they're wiped from history faster than Tasha Yar. And in general, I'm not an NFT fan, in case you couldn't tell. What do you lot think**, and is there anything that might tempt you or that has put you off completely? *In My (not particularly) Humble Opinion

X-Files: they discover they're both aliens who were abducted and brainwashed by the government. While Mulder falls into a deep paranoiac depression, unable to believe what the Truth turned out to be, the show ends with a montage set to Joan Jett's Light Of Day, as Scully smashes her way into the Oval Office, throws the President out through a window onto the lawn, and declares herself Empress Of Earth, uniting all nations against enemies both alien and domestic... ...wait, that's the happy ending.

TBH, "do NOT mess with the fabric of space-time" should be Lesson 101 at Kamar-Taj, before you get the wifi password and lunchroom dining card. Also, it's odd that you should mention No Way Home: a pic just dropped online of Willem Dafoe visiting the set of Moon Knight. It'd be a slightly mindbending flex in this tale as to how the Goblin might show up, but you do wonder...

It's not connected to MCU proper yet. At the minute it's a bit of a bottle universe - which, when you're telling a fairly complex story people are already going to have a fun time following, is probably a good thing. If MK decides to base himself out of London and is around historical artifacts a lot, the obvious choice is Black Knight, who's down the road at Natural History. (Cue imminent smoulder-off with Kit Harrington.) There are also rumours - there always are, but from reasonably reliable rumour-mongers - that An Actual Avenger will show up at some point. Doc Strange being The Master Of The Mystic Arts and all that, he fits, he'd be fun, and Ep 6 would coincide fairly neatly with the theatrical release of DS:MoM. But to be honest, I don't think it needs a Doc/Hawkeye/Cap/Fonzie guest cameo - the show and the concept stands up fine on its own two neatly bandaged feet.

When you're working with Pets, how do you slot them - and have you noticed anything weird with your experiments? For example: I've tried adding the SBB Overwhelming Force DAM+KD>KB to Singularity - but it still seems to toss people around with Repel every now and again. Is that doing what it's supposed to?

So, Episode 2: One side note: as a Brit, I've just been utterly floored by something. I was today years old when I found out I'm not looking at London - it's all filmed in Budapest. Even down to the shop fronts, banks and an authentically grimy London bus. Huge plaudits for the production crew for pulling that off - then again, the bus being on time should have been a clue.

Well, yes, though being a bit of a luvvie, dahling, I'd say they're seeing what plays in Peoria. Not everything is gonna hit with every audience, even the captive D+ one. But the way folks ate up Wandavision was a surprise to everyone. I mean, c'mon - a surreal, slow-burn, Twilight Zone-ish experience that went WAY high-concept (Classic sitcom tributes? Multiverses? Swapping fights for heavy philosophy? Musical gags? Heavy tragedy? Ralph Boehner?) It's the kind of thing Yank ad execs would have cancelled at birth if they saw it on Autumn Sweeps, and even UK Channel 4 might have thought twice about. But if that can fly, they've got options. Lots of them. Not just on which characters to pick from a cast of thousands, but on what kind of stories they can tell with them. Now they need to figure out how far they can push it and where.

Slightly more cheerful version: I'm taking a couple of days out of Paragon this week to help my niece get married. This would be the third attempt (COVID lockdowns having scrubbed the other two), and she's wrecked her ankle with three days to go. So she's ditching bridal heels for my furry slippers, and I may or may not have to roll her down the aisle on a skateboard if needed but by the power of sweet Freya In Asgard, we're gonna get it done. I missed Sunset after wandering over to ST:O, and the Borg set my old Vaio's GPU on fire. Nasty popping sounds, acrid smoke, screen crash. Whereas a Mac M1 handled the craziest of the mapserver fights without breaking a sweat. /em smugmacowner

I think it's kind of why they picked him. He's well-known to nerds but the average punter in the street's never seen him before. And is very much not what the MCU audience have come to expect in terms of tone, theming or depth. I get the feeling they're not taking the big risky swings with their tentpole cinema audiences (Eternals aside - which did respectable business but didn't smash records.) Feels like they're testing a whole bunch of things out and seeing what flies with a semi-captive audience. Not just comments or socials either. I work in a slightly different field, but when you're delivering streaming VoD or AoD, there's a whole bunch of Big Data about what people watch, where people skip, where people rewind and look/listen to again, or replay whole episodes for things they loved and want to show other people, and what they share externally. It's slightly creepy in concept, but in practice nobody in their right mind is going to dig out how many serial killer shows/pods you're consuming, or worry about your playlist changing towards to dark revenge based mood music, Brad. Surrender yourself to the authorities now. Friend Computer sees all.