by

A toast, to long awaited endings and beginnings, as we leave CWU behind us, and prepare to leave Ellensburg behind us and rejoin the west side and the Seattle area!

by

Got a good haul of #lego #minifigures today – 12 bags, and no duplicates! Got the ones I wanted the most (highwayman and both retro sci-fi guys), and the ones Prairie wanted (the baker and butterfly girl), plus more.

First Full Star Trek: Discovery Trailer

by

\[embed\]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dxe_ugmIVM[/embed]

First thoughts (copied from a Facebook post, with minor edits):

Definitely looks good visually. I do like the look of the ship in the few glimpses we get. Expecting some snarky comparisons to both the Abramsverse (lens flare!) and Star Wars (blue-tinged holograms).

Grinned at the triplicate chirp of the communicator. Interesting “grid” effect for the transporter (which also sounds right).

Looks like they’re adopting the clear “window” style front viewscreens from the Abramsverse. The bridge is dark…definitely closer to the submarine-style look of ST:ENT or the traditional battle bridges, but not as cramped. One of the bridge crew looks like a Trek version of Lobot from Star Wars (a character on Bespin with a tech gadget wrapped around the back of his head).

Uniforms look okay, definitely expect to see that cosplay popping up pretty quickly. Everyone has the delta shield insignia on their chest, but I’m seeing at least two different symbols within (the starburst and the spiral), so perhaps they’re going with using those to signify departments, rather than ships/posts (as originally used), since everyone seems to have the same blue jumpsuit uniform. The delta shields also appear to be either in gold or silver…rank?

Not sure what I think about the new look for the Klingons just yet…very spiky outfits (seems they took design cues from Dracula’s armor in the Gary Oldman/Winona Ryder film), and the face/head look also looks much more similar to the Abramsverse take.

In addition to Sarek (and it’s weird thinking of James Frain as Sarek; my primary association with him is from The Tudors), we may get a glimpse of a young Spock (but that doesn’t seem right; as this is only 10 years pre-TOS, Spock wouldn’t be that young)?

The corridors do look right (silly thing, sure, but they do!).

Looks like we may be getting a glimpse of a Klingon funeral, complete with “everyone scream at the sky to usher the deceased to Sto-vo-kor” death ritual.

Some interesting very brief glimpses at aliens (including, um, Daft Punk?).

And it ends with the classic fanfare.

I’m looking forward to seeing more!

Linkdump for April 27th through May 17th

by

Sometime between April 27th and May 17th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • The Case of the Stolen Source Code: Last week, for about three days, the macOS video transcoding app HandBrake was compromised. One of the two download servers for HandBrake was serving up a special malware-infested version of the app, that, when launched, would essentially give hackers remote control of your computer. // In a case of extraordinarily bad luck, even for a guy that has a lot of bad computer luck, I happened to download HandBrake in that three day window, and my work Mac got pwned. // Long story short, somebody, somewhere, now has quite a bit of source code to several of our apps.
  • JSON Feed: Announcing JSON Feed: We — Manton Reece and Brent Simmons — have noticed that JSON has become the developers’ choice for APIs, and that developers will often go out of their way to avoid XML. JSON is simpler to read and write, and it’s less prone to bugs. So we developed JSON Feed, a format similar to RSS and Atom but in JSON. It reflects the lessons learned from our years of work reading and publishing feeds.
  • Let’s discuss the Linguistic & Pragmatic use of the [“N-word”]: No matter what your intentions, the word WILL mean something different depending on your relative status. Language is circumstancial.
  • The neural network writes the episode list for next season’s Dr. Who: I’ve trained this open-source neural network framework on a variety of datasets, including recipes, Pokemon, knock-knock jokes, pick up lines, and D&D spells. Now I give you: training a neural network on the complete list of Dr. Who episodes.
  • What we really need is an adaptation of the original 1740 The Beauty and the Beast: So were you aware that the The Beauty and the Beast story we all know is a heavily abridged and rewritten version of a much longer novella by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve?  And that a lot of the plot holes existing in the current versions exist because the 1756 rewrite cut out the second half of the novella, which consisted entirely of the elaborate backstory that explains all the weird shit that happened before?  And that the elaborate backstory is presented in a way that’s kind of boring because the novel had only just been invented in 1740 and no one knew how they worked yet, but contains a bazillion awesome ideas that beg for a modern retelling?  And that you are probably not aware that the modern world needs this story like air but the modern world absolutely needs this story like air?