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Episode Discussion | Star Trek: Lower Decks | 4x08 "Caves"

This episode gave me such joy. I feel like Lower Decks leans a lot into the outrageous stories, like last week’s Evil Computer and Peanut Hamper thing. Those episodes are fun, but they lean pretty hard into that Rick and Morty humor.

This episode felt like a Star Trek episode. Mocking the over reliance on cave sets was a great premise, but from there we had a good episode showcasing several minor characters interacting with our main cast. It was a great way to allow them to branch out while sticking to the core relationship between the characters.

On top of that, the jokes were funny. I almost didn’t stop laughing at the subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at cave episodes throughout the years.

Personally, I’d like more episodes like this. It really showcases what is great about this show.

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Question of the week: What was the most clever way you’ve ever used an Apple product to solve a problem?

About ten years ago a dear friend and I started a community radio station. In order to make our FCC license more competitive, we started internet streaming pretty early on.

We had great community buy-in, but we needed to broadcast 24/7 and decided to record and rebroadcast live shows.

We had no money, just a MacMini. So we had to do everything with things that came with MacOS or were free or near free.

We ended up creating a pretty impressive interlinking set of AppleScripts, Automator apps, and iTunes Smart Playlists, all driven by Calendar alarms. Calendar alarms would start recordings, which would use the magic import to iTunes folder to get it into iTunes. This would then move into a smart playlist that was set to look for certain tags and only have the most recent audio file with those tags in it.

When a rebroadcast would come up, it was pretty simple. A calendar alarm would trigger an AppleScript that triggered one of these Smart Playlists.

It all worked well for a long time. Ultimately we got our FCC license, and donations allowed us to improve our IT. But this station ran on iTunes, AudioHijack, AppleScript, Automator, and Calendar alarms for years.

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Great news — social media is falling apart

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I’ve been on the Fediverse for years and I’ve never much encountered this. I curate my timelines very carefully. I don’t look at the Local or Federated timelines in Mastodon, Pixelfed, or Lemmy.

That said, I do the exact same thing with all social media. I don’t go to the subreddits that would have such content, don’t follow users on Twitter who spew this content, etc.

I’m not disputing that it’s there, because of course it is. But it’s also there on every other social media platform, and with far more resources these platforms haven’t been able to do nearly anything about it.

I don’t know what the answer is to this propaganda, and I want to make clear that I think it’s awful. But it’s the fault of social media writ large, not the Fediverse.

In fact, I’ve found the Fediverse to be better about calling it out and encouraging defederating offending instances than I’ve seen on traditional social media, which seems to shrug its shoulders at it at best and actively encourages it at worst.

cfb

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Week 8 c/cfb Poll

Just voted for the first time. I based it on the AP Poll but made a number of changes based on vibes. Basically when it went below the top ten it started feeling like a crapshoot, though.

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Episode Analysis | Star Trek: Lower Decks | 4x04 "Something Borrowed, Something Green”

What made this episode wonderful was finally taking a look at Orion culture. It’s one of the oldest races in cannon, first showing up in TOS, but we know so little about them. It was fun to dig into that a little.

While Tendi is one of my favorite characters, I do find her backstory a little cliched. Having her and Billups with essentially the same backstory seems lazy. I’m happy they called that issue out with a joke, but it feels unnecessary for Tendi.

That said, I did like how they investigated how this impacted her sister, and created good character tension there. I do hope we get more backstory at some point on all of this about why Tendi hated Orion culture so much, and why so few Orions choose starfleet.

All that said, I found this to be a mostly forgettable episode. It had its moments, but the jokes felt a little off and the plot didn’t draw me in like some of the other episodes.

cfb

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c/cfb Week 9 Poll Results

I don’t know what to do with ranking Michigan anymore. I honestly think they are number 1 in the country, but that may not be due to talent, it could be due to unfair competitive advantage.

The next couple of weeks will prove if they’re for real or not.