Indie games are good, but if privacy is a concern be careful of any game developed in a big engine like unity. My firewall pings a warning every time I launch a unity game because they all send analytics data back to unity. If it's single player and you block all outgoing connections by default, you're fine though.

I hadn't made the connection about Sutekh, that's neat

Worth noting that the trendline in that plot would be pointing down anyway, before you include season 4. That tends to happen for every long running TV show.

I did cringe laugh a little at the Doctor and Rose nearly planning our their mortgage repayments.

I think this is the first time we see the orange spacesuits, they've become a pretty iconic way to distinguish Who from other sci-fi series where everything in space is white and clean.

There was some good acting from the guest actors this episode.

I enjoyed this one. There's lots of sci fi elements, good plot points to explore, and it's directed very well. The sound design is pretty good in this one, I like the mournful music when the black hole is on camera contrasted with the jaunty music during shift change before everything starts to go bad. The slow descent into madness as things start breaking apart is well done, even if it does trigger my "why does no one just talk to each other" detector. I enjoyed the use of a language so old even the tardis can't help translate it - it adds to the base feeling like it really is remote, and the designs of the underground cavern are nice, it reminds me a bit of Petra in Jordan. There's a really nice line when the doctor and rose are discussing the black hole - They are gateways to other universes. The doctor replies "not that one", referencing the fact that this black hole isn't a doorway, but also implying there's no way Rose can get back to the other universe where Mickey and Pete are. Finally, actually trapping the doctor without a tardis, rather than handwaving away that it can't be used like in the Madam Pompadour episode, is a much better way to keep things interesting.

There are some very minor bits I think could have been done a better though. I feel the implication is Doctor and Rose have hung around a bit on the base after the tardis was lost, but some more explicit passage of time would have been nicer. Were they there a couple of hours? weeks? The final trapdoor at the end looks pretty small. It's big, sure, but not to the extent that justifies the reaction they have on seeing it. Rose takes on the compassionate friend of the ood role, but is dismissed by everyone, and the doctor seems not to mind it either, and I am reminded of Harry Potter where Hermione's campaign for the house elves is similarly dismised and ignored by everyone. Thankfully we get a follow up of that plotline in a later series, but maybe it was biting a bit too much off at once here.

Overall, really enjoyed this one, and the cliffhanger it ends on feels important, because there's a lot of mystery still left to resolve.

Random nitpick - In the caves, they throw up a "gravity globe". It's a flare. They could have just called it a flare.

It can be a bit difficult to get a read on what Vulcans are thinking as a viewer, It can't be easy to act them out. I did think ethan peck was good in this one

I went into this episode blind, but the moment Scotty mentioned the puppet was going to be the transporter payload I knew we were in for a tuvix situation. I did not realise it would be quite on this scale. I don't hate the premise of the episode. It reminded me a lot of the TNG episode where they all get turned into children, and this is a universe where Tom Paris got turned into a lizard after all. I do absolutely hate the cop-out at the end where it turns out it was all a dream. It means that spock was the only character that had opportunity for development and growth, and no-one else gets to share in that. Either go all in on the zany adventures, or dont, but never waste the audience's time like this.

But hey, you want puppets, I'll judge you on the puppets. I think they were generally well designed. While the "body language" was expressive, I don't think the faces were as good as they could have been - There were only a handful of times where changes in eyes and eyebrows really stood out. I also feel that the writing and voice acting for the puppet character's dialogue was not great, but that gets hand-waved away at the end where we realise as puppets they're not quite the same people The endpoint of letting go and embracing the madness was a nice resolution to the absurd situation, however I did not feel like the cartoon physics played through.

The orion plot was OK, used as the necessary antagonists to drive the plot. But other than some moments from Joe Lo Truglio, who was a perfect choice for an empathetic male orion, the invaders could have been any invading alien species and nothing really specific to orions was needed. I'm also confused by the huge orion vessel, unless I've misread the scale, there should be hundreds at least but at no point did anyone think to help out the 3 or 4 orions actually invading the enterprise. But maybe none of this matters, because hey, it was all a dream.

With some of the other gimmicky episodes, I've instantly wanted to re-watch them once I finished. Here, once was enough, which is not a great indicator for the episode overall.

"high jinks" might be intentional, and meant to be the vulcan's way of being dismissive of the human's nonsense by deliberately pronouncing it as two words.

Bring on the model collapse!

This is a real pet annoyance of mine, and I have seeing apologist posts on the internet about it.

If the actors cant enunciate properly except when they're shouting, that's not adding realism, they're doing bad acting.

If the sound engineers can't get a good audio balance for anything except the loudest moment in a film, that's not a limitation of technology/sound physics, they're bad at mixing.

If the director can't keep all of this in check and make a film that people can actually enjoy, that's not artistic choice, they've made a bad film.

French and Portuguese at the convention, their arms open.

The article is saying the petition is targeting steam, but the actual linked petition is addressing credit card companies. The text of the petition doesn't mention steam or valve. I don't know what the author of the article thinks is happening here, and they've explained it very badly.

They haven't blocked the windows feature, they're using DRM to interfere with it. Microsoft could easily change how the DRM works any time they want, rendering all these hacks useless.

Answer wrong. The more of us humans that answer wrong, the less accurate we need to be to get past these stupid things. If google want me to do work for them, they can pay me.

Sugars and additives are in nearly all foods, maybe we should stop asking manufacturers to disclose it on the ingredients list.

I\ don\'t\ know\ what\ you\ mean,\ I\'ve\ never\ encountered\ any\ annoyances.

Japan has 3 writing systems and this comic seems to be conflating Katakana and Kanji together as "stabby", leaving Hiragana as "adorable". All of them are (long ago) derived from chinese, but only the Kanji still look similar.

I would have introduced Chinese first, and then in the Japanese panel present the stabby and adorable ones both being attacked by flying contraptions. (And a few floating around the korean one, too)

You can't misgender a brand. You can't deadname a brand. You can't befriend a brand.

Absolutely all foreigners - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cly67j35y99o

There's something I'm really struggling to understand when talking about things like Taler, and the "Digital euro" idea which has come up recently as well: What is it actually doing that's new?

Money is distributed digitally already. When you get a paycheck, no-one is actually moving physical paper and metal cash from a business account bank vault to a customer account bank vault, it's just numbers in a spreadsheet. So what's actually new when we're talking about digital currency like this post?

There must be something I'm missing here.