• 15 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • We’ve tried most of them over time.

    Star Trek Resurgence has consistently excellent reviews. It’s about a 25 hour role play where the player makes choices for two different crew - a senior bridge officer and an NCO in engineering. It’s well done and one of our teens and I are enjoying it a lot. Great value for the sale price. My patience on this one was reinforced by its initial release being exclusive to Epic - but on Steam and on sale it’s worth it.

    Bridge Crew is an older game. I have had it for a couple of years, and took advantage of the sale to pick up copies for each of our kids Steam accounts. One of them got really into it right away.

    Timelines is also older. It held their interest for a bit in middle school but doesn’t seem to be one of the better tie-ins.

    Star Trek Online is a long running massively multiplayer game that starts out free but then can cost a lot for in-game purchases. One of our teens is into it, and got fairly far without purchasing much, but the Steam sale is a good opportunity for them to buy things they’ve had on their wish list.

    As a parent, I find these better than the endless number of Star Wars mods on Roblox that one of ours got into for a while.







  • Looks interesting, and an interesting way to work with nuts. Always looking for other GF options and I do use almond flour in a lot of recipes.

    That said, while can understand not tolerating gluten free grains such as millet, teff, sorghum, rice or corn, I’m not sure why there aren’t other flours and starches you can work with.

    I’m having a hard time understanding why an intolerance would also extend to tubers (potato flour & starch; manioc - cassava flour & tapioca flour; sweet potato flour; arrowroot starch); flower seeds (buckwheat/sarrasin flour) or legumes (Romano, fava or chickpea flour) but not nuts.


  • Clearly, the ability to be outside in appropriate clothing for activities isn’t being mandated. This is where a temperate climate enables ridiculous practices to persist.

    All I can think about when I see this image is how in Ontario, the responsible provincial ministry requires all schools and ‘day nurseries’ (read day and after school care) to put the kids out in the yards twice a day unless the weather conditions are severe (Less than -20 or more than +30 Celsius.).

    Parents are responsible to send their kids with suitable clothing for the cold. One rarely sees little girls in skirts in schools unless they are wearing tunic dresses over leggings.

    In an earlier era, pre 1970s, when skirts were mandatory for girls, that meant switching to pants or snow pants from the skirts 3 times a day to go outside in winter (two breaks and leaving end of day).



  • It’s important to consider the impact and total volume of ultra processed foods, and the chemicals they contribute to the diet.

    There’s increasing evidence that it’s not just a a matter of calorie equations or carb restriction overall that has effects.

    Decades ago, research established that managing the glycemic load was more effective than just calorie counting for persons with diabetes.

    15 years ago there was evidence building that diet drinks actually could contribute to metabolic problems.

    Now studies looking at overall impacts of ultra processed foods suggest they mess up the gut micro biome or at best get taken up into energy much faster than expected.

    The items listed in the article fall into the ultra processed category. The ‘everything in moderation’ approach may not be that successful when too much of the diet flips into the ultra processed categories.







  • My spouse still grumbles that DC Fontana shouldn’t have let Niven get away with adapting his story ‘The Soft Weapon’ to become the TAS episode ‘The Slaver Weapon.’ (They think Niven should have come up with something new for TAS.)

    I think it’s all a great deal of fun, and take delight in Lower Decks giving us Kzinti in Starfleet.

    Whatever fans of either the Man-Kzin Wars books or Trek may feel about it, Niven himself chose to bring the Kzinti into Star Trek canon.

    He continued to own that by writing a piece for the StarTrek.com official site outlining that the Caitian feliniods (M’Ress in TAS, Dr T’Ana in Lower Decks and a background character in Prodigy) are related to the Kzinti. According to Niven, the Caitians split off from the Kzinti and settled on the planet Cait, becoming more scientific in orientation, much like the Romulans and Vulcans separated and diverged.





  • TAS = The Animated Series. It ran for a season and a bit, 22 episodes, on Saturday mornings on NBC. It’s the only Star Trek franchise show to win a series Emmy.

    At the time it was in development, there was also a writers strike. DC Fontana was the supervising producer, and she took advantage of the provision in the contract that allowed writers who have never previously written an animated television script to write one, and only one episode, without violating the strike.

    Larry Niven was one of the science fiction authors whom she reached out to, and he was game to do it. He’s written on the StarTrek.com official site since then, even going so far as to confirm that the Caitians in Star Trek are a related species, much as the Vulcans are related to the Romulans.

    M’Ress was a Caitain officer in TAS. The currently running animated show Lower Decks has a Caitian Chief Medical Officer T’Ana and a Kzinti crew member occasionally appears.



  • While I would have been curious to see a Puppeteer, given the role of the Kzinti aggression in motivating Dr. Keniclius 5 to create the giant Spock (TAS ‘The Infinite Vulcan’), it was important for TAS to show us a direct interaction between Spock and the Kzinti in ‘The Slaver Weapon.’

    Not to mention that Niven may have needed to make some changes for his adaptation of his story “The Soft Weapon” to get the original story credit.

    I’m just glad that the Kzinti are acknowledged as canon in the franchise again.

    Edited: just recalled that the reproductive imperatives of Pierson’s Puppeteer’s are enough to make the biological imperatives of the SNW Gorn seem less monstrous. What was Niven thinking?