ThaOGDreamWeaver

Frankie Goes To Hollywood - Two Tribes

Playing For Change ft. John Paul Jones - When The Levee Breaks

Playing For Change feat. Los Lobos - La Bamba

Kacey Musgraves - Follow Your Arrow💘

Simple Minds - Don't You Forget About Me

One for @ShardWarrior and all fans of elegantly functional capewear: Dreamworks are expanding some of their properties to series. Megamind's Guide To Defending Your City sounds fun and quite COH-friendly, with our erstwhile ex-villain and newbie blue hero being followed around YouTuber style as he tries to work out how to be good. (Hopefully, he works out good and nice are not the same thing.) Also the underrated Abominable gets a show about finding and encountering and helping new creatures, which sounds very Lilo & Stitch: The Series, but I'd never think of that as a bad thing. No word if main cast will return for either, but suspect Ferrell's a little expensive and John DiMaggio... seems to have a hole in his diary. Both will be for Peacock in the US. And while I've puzzled over there being so damn many streaming platforms, NBC have been paying a large chunk of my salary via placing ads for that app lately, so obviously it is a good and wise choice for you to own. Really. And use code DWNEEDSNEWSHOESFOR[--that's enough - Mods] https://deadline.com/2022/02/peacock-bolsters-animated-kids-programming-megamind-abominable-series-more-1234931311/

I'm happy dipping in wherever if I can pick up what's going on, which I can more or less anywhere in Pratchett and in the earlier Dresden Files. Reminds me, I still need to pick up the most recent one. And if Jim winds up reading this, my new toon and possible script idea Wizard Of The West has been accused of aping Harry...

The Borg took out my laptop. I did one of the high-tier endgame Borg raids, took a few hits, and just heard a really unpleasant crackly noise over my headphones. Everything froze, then the machine went SKRREEEEEE. All that was left was a green line across my screen, and my beloved Sony VAIO bit the dust. Wouldn't reboot except in Safe Mode for short periods, and the GFX card had melted. Clearly the Borg have evolved some kind of fiendish anti-graphics-card torpedo. As I was between gigs at the time, I couldn't afford a new one, and my next work laptop was a Mac Air, so it's just been handheld gaming for a while. My slightly aging Mac Pro can handle CoH (though I use a massive heatsink+fan as a keyboard riser, otherwise the keys get hot.)

BBC and ITV Sunday nights were always old folks' comedy, followed by fancy dramas or murder mysteries. The new Branagh Poirot movies seem to be a high-end version of those, with just a scattering of added Hollywood glitter among the roll-call of Brit stalwarts. Not that that's a bad thing, mind. There were some odd and/or ridiculous offerings too: for those who've come to know him as a gunfighter or a god, I give you a young Ian McShane as crimefighting antiques dealer, part-time conman/forger and all-round lovable rogue Lovejoy.

I've always thought the Fermi Paradox skipped the point that the universe is very old, and that our entire civilisation has evolved in the blink of its eye. So regardless of where a civilisation arises or whether they achieve FTL, they have to exist in the same time period we do for us to make contact. We could be walking on the scattered bones of long-dead alien explorers and never know. Hawking held a "Welcome Time Travellers" party with free booze, and nobody showed, though I think this was just a way of getting the faculty to pay for his bar tab. There's also the possibility that they've already been here looking for intelligent life, stopped by for a quick chat with the whales and then wandered off.

On a side note, You might have the right idea but wrong attraction: Doc's court appearance looks to be in the Great Court of the British Museum. Just time-lock him and park him in the Stonehenge exhibition with the Druids and nobody'll have a clue.

Thanks. I don't know enough about the M1 onboard GPU to know how it's going to behave under load, though it can apparently hold its own against mid-range Radeons and GeForces with far less power usage.

While it would take generations to fully adapt to low gravity physically - again, The Expanse has a slightly realistic view of how prospective Martians and Belters would struggle under Earth-weight - training regimens, supplements and such keep existing space station inhabitants pretty healthy, and gravity flywheels have been a feature of SF for years. Scott and Mark Kelly were followed for a year, and showed few differences with one being in space and the other on Earth... https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-s-twins-study-results-published-in-science/ ...except for the telomeres (a DNA strand's protective "handles" - could be gravity, could be radiation?) and their digestion and arteries, which is likely a result of the food. Space food isn't nearly as bad as it used to be, but it's still specialised, and - like airline food - wildly overseasoned to cope with how lower pressures affect your tastebuds. So gravity we can adapt to. Radiation is always going to be a problem. The reason I don't wanna party on Mars is the place has no atmosphere: the magnetosphere isn't strong enough to stop it being stripped by solar wind, which also lets a whole mess of icky sticky nasty cosmic particles down to the surface that would normally bounce off prettily. For comparison: Our lovely home of Earth (that we should cherish and please stop ripping apart for dead dino farts and liquid tree remains) allows you ~2.4 microSieverts (mSv) a year. Easily tolerable. Moreso if you're a mad Californian: less if you're pale, interesting and Scottish like me, and take two weeks of careful tanning to turn white. Mars: make that ~240 mSv a year. Big damn suntan. Survivable, but you'd want to minimise it, and it'd start playing merry hob with sensitive electronics. The ISS: varies. Low end that's been recorded for a six-month tour was 50, high end - if you got caught on the edge of a flare - over 2,000. Even with care and shielding that starts active damage to soft tissues like corneas. The Moon varies between 110 and 380 mSV a year. So if you've seen lots of big, heavy, igloo-like structures and underground chambers on the Moon in classic 60s/70s sci-fi, they had the right idea. The other problem with the Moon and Mars is a little more prosaic: dust. I have problems dusting at the best of times, but it's never tried to eat its way through my clothing, my windows or walls. When I've worked... abroad, shall we say, there's a reason schmancy lasers and laptops don't have a place in extreme environments like deserts - sand gets everywhere - everywhere, trust me. The Apollo suits that went to the Moon are scarred and tattered from simply a few days exposure to the constant grinding of ultrafine silicate particles. But just when you're moving around. It doesn't come after you. Now accelerate that dust to 70mph+ in dust storms that last for months, and you've got the Martian problem. Any equipment out in that is going to get sandblasted. To follow up on Haijinx's post: I'm not being a negative Nelly or misanthropic McCoy about all this. It's all solvable. But, with my practical head on - solve the easier stuff first. Preferably starting with the politics and funding... [blink] ...okay, I'll get to work on the energy shielding and matter-antimatter generation. Now where can I get some Dilithium and a couple of hydrospanners at this hour...

I haven't played ST:O in oh, a Vulcan Pon Farr or two. But if the Firefly Fleet's still running around, tell them Dr. Amy Weaver sent you and there'll be all of hell, half of heaven and me to pay if they mistreat you. AND DON'T TOUCH MY DAMN WHISKEY. I'll be back for it. Sometime. Edit: this is, of course, also from before we knew Joss was quite as much of a verengan Ha'DIbaH as he turned out to be. (Curse his not-particularly-sudden and inexplicable betrayal). But the fleet are still pretty good folks. As are everyone I've met realtime from the Flandom.

One odd thing here - as I've mentioned above, transferring from 2015 Mac Pro running Big Sur to 2021/2022 M1 running Monterey. I ran the Migration Assistant to transfer all of my old files to the new Mac. (Open your Launchpad, start typing Migration into the Search box, and run it. Stick new Mac next to old Mac, make sure they're on the same WiFi network, match the passcodes, and leave them to do their thang for about 90 minutes). Open up new Mac. Found the COH Launcher icon. Just on the off chance, ran it, didn't work. Installed Rosetta as per page 1. (Launchpad > Terminal > softwareupdate --install-rosetta ) Ran COH Launcher again. And lo, with a FREEM! and blasting light, COH lives again! ...or is it a Nemesis Plot? Is it going to unleash terrible tentacled wossnames from dimensions hoomans should not wot of - or worse, fry my new work Mac - if I just run the like for like copy instead of a clean install? Am I just paranoid? Cheers Em

Still gonna argue for a moon rather than free building. Because while the raw mass is out there, it needs refining into steel, cables, chips - and you have to expend fuel to go fetch it. Plus playing pool with asteroids and comets isn't easy - bosmang kapawu of a 'roid hunter seems simultaneously the dullest and most dangerous beltalowda gig I can think of. At least if you find a nice moon with a polar water supply (and potentially subterranean liquid lakes or oceans on the actual Moon), relatively stable geology, sources of power and light (the Moon has a liquid mantle, which could be accessible by drilling as little as 5km down - that's your uninterruptible power source right there), and which isn't regularly bathed by Spock-frying levels of radiation (sorry, Arthur C, Europa's not on the menu)... ...then you have a whole bunch of raw material in one place that you don't have to expend time and fuel to go fetch, room to spread out, and the convenience of gravity without a hefty gravity well. Oh, and apologies to Elon, but Mars is for suckers. At least if you want to wake up with the same number of arms in the morning, though they'll be useful for sweeping layers of corrosive dust off your solar panels.

TBH, I'd rather we didn't turn the one green place have lifeless to start with. Terraforming seems more practical than Dyson Shells or cylinders, or even large scale space stations, since you don't have to move millions of tons of mass into orbit (or, if you have fancy-schmancy energy-based replicator tech, spend power generating it.) But we might not need to. There are some very Earthlike planets starting to crop up now... if we can figure out how to take a trip out there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRAPPIST-1e

Look, not all explorers try to impregnate everything. He's not Kirk, y'know.

Colbie Caillat - Bubbly See you guys after St Val's 💓

Dalida - Histoire d'un Amour

Count Basie - This Love Of Mine

Frank Sinatra - In The Wee Small Hours

Martin Courcy - To The Top Complete soundtrack is here - would quite like it if they released it as an album...

Dave Zabriskie - Theatre Of Magic (Complete Soundtrack)

(Seriously, I just got back into CoH just as my 2015-era Mac Pro is starting to bite the dust. I was most worried about the on-board GPU not being able to work with it, but now Monterey is having its own fun with apps old and new...)