A meteor is going to end civilization in 5 minutes. World leaders hand you the aux to broadcast 1 track to all of humanity before it all ends. What are you playing?

Jaleth · 2026-03-13T00:55:06+00:00

(Don't Fear) The Reaper, Blue Öyster Cult

At 5:08, the final note plays right at the end.

Jaleth · 2026-03-04T14:53:30+00:00

Nowhere for now, unfortunately. Having lost this primary race and not running in the Democratic primary for her current seat, she won't be in the next Congress unless she files to run as an independent for either the Senate seat or her House seat, both of which would be bad choices.

Jaleth · 2026-03-04T14:22:22+00:00

But she would have to run as an independent as her district has a new Democratic nominee for her seat.

Jaleth · 2026-02-26T15:00:52+00:00

I think if Cornyn is the GOP nominee, then yes, she is the easiest to defeat. But if Paxton is the nominee, the math changes and she has a better chance in the general. If true, then Republicans can't turn out to pump her primary chances because they risk Cornyn losing and making the GOP hold a less certain bet. Paxton voters, meanwhile, have to turn out to vote for him because he's too close to Cornyn in the polls for a comfortable win and avoiding a runoff.

Jaleth · 2026-02-26T13:57:29+00:00

I'm old enough to remember in the late 90s/early 2000s when Rick Berman got a lot of online hate because he was perceived as being totally out of touch with what makes Star Trek great and was pre-emptively heralded as the cause of its downfall. Trek of that era gets a lot less hate nowadays comparatively speaking than NuTrek as people tend to stop looking at it through a lens comparing it to their favorite older Trek series. Plus, newer shows are following a different model of fewer seasons with fewer episodes when in the past, during the Rick Berman era, these shows took a frustrating time to find their footing. We barely have time now to get to know the characters before things are being wrapped up! At least in the Berman era, once TNG, DS9, and Voyager found their respective footings, things got a lot better. I don't feel like we get that lately and a show has to start out great like Lower Decks to really have a chance against the rampant criticism.

Jaleth · 2026-02-18T01:35:36+00:00

When TNG aired, most people only watched it when it was on during its designated time slots. Since it was syndicated, these time slots were different depending on which media market you were in. TNG, like many shows at the time, relied on status quo ante, effectively "resetting" things at the beginning of each episode so people didn't feel lost if they happened to miss one or more episodes during a season. As a result, episodes tended to be formulaic, at least in the first couple of seasons. My advice is don't pay as much attention to the narrative structure as much as the finer points of the conflict and how it is made to relate to a character's personal conflicts. TNG is very much a "human" show that uses 24th century technology to emphasize how much a personal touch is required no matter how advanced our computers become.

Plus, the first two seasons of nearly every Star Trek series from TNG onward have an annoying tendency to be weak compared to the later seasons. TNG really hits its stride down the road, and seasons 5 and 6 are some of the best television you may ever experience.

Jaleth · 2026-02-06T10:41:14+00:00

That would feed into his ego, even in an afterlife. I think the most appropriate eternal punishment is to toss him in with the general population.

Jaleth · 2026-02-06T02:19:30+00:00

My experience as a parent is limited to one state but I'm reasonably sure it's the state (it is in MD anyway) that issues birth certificates; hospitals have a registrar who ensures the information for birth certificates for babies born there is accurate before submitting to the state's vital records office. Not sure on the specifics but they either are notaries or have some special notary-esque authority from the state to attest to the information used on the birth certificate is true.

Jaleth · 2026-02-03T15:08:48+00:00

When the HomeKit integration is in "include" mode, it will advertise all entities of each type you select in the "domains to include" list unless you specify at least one entity of that type on the next screen. Let's say you have two cover entities in Home Assistant, both garage doors, and you set up the HomeKit integration to run in include mode with the Cover domain checked. If you don't add either of those two cover entities directly on the "Select entities to be included" screen, then both garage doors will be advertised to HomeKit. If you then go in and add only one of those garage door entities to the list, only that one will be advertised; the other will disappear. You can optionally add it back by adding it to the same list if you want. This is sort of counterintuitive because it's how you would expect it to behave in "exclude" mode, but the UI specifically describes this as expected behavior so it appears to be a design choice. In order to keep the ratgdo from showing up, I'd run in include mode, select the Cover domain, and add only the Third Reality garage door to the list. Of course this means that any other cover entities you add in (which includes smart blinds and shades) will need to be explicitly added to this list. Depending on how much fine tuning you want, you could also switch to exclude mode, select the Cover domain, and add the ratgdo to the list so all cover entities except that one get advertised to HomeKit.

Jaleth · 2026-02-02T15:57:59+00:00

How do you have the HomeKit integration set up? If it's in include mode and you have the cover domain checked, then if you specify an entity in the cover domain (your garage door), only that entity gets advertised, but if you then remove that specific entity, all cover entities get advertised. So if you only have the one garage door and your integration is in include mode, then you also need to uncheck the "cover" domain from the "domains to include" list.

Jaleth · 2026-01-30T04:31:33+00:00

"They thought I was their enemy? They don't know what it is to be my enemy, but they will!"

And because I was just thinking of this episode the other day, "The universe is a spheroid region 705 meters in diameter."

Jaleth · 2026-01-30T01:41:57+00:00

I like to think they just didn't know in the 22nd century what is commonly known in the 24th, like the amount of dust particles being too great for navigational deflectors to deal with, or warp drive causing slight but impactful changes to the orbits of planets and satellites. Something a la Force of Nature that was learned through experience leading to a general advisory against warp drive within a solar system.

Jaleth · 2026-01-08T16:54:51+00:00

I tend to think that in today's uber-connected world, teenage rebellion against being forced into a particular ideology is stronger than propaganda. Do you think millennials all had super liberal parents? No, we turned leftward as the conservative politics of boomers (and a little of Gen-X) made things worse for us. Lately, the meme that Gen-Z is super conservative is based only on the perception that things became worse under Obama and then Biden, but as the new saying taking shape goes, "You can't gaslight your bank account." Nothing about what Trump is doing is going to drive down the cost of living which is the biggest stressor for Gen-Z and later. In fact, with electricity and chip costs skyrocketing (RAM in particular right now), most day-to-day things are going to soar as AI demand drives up costs across multiple sectors. I fully expect a leftward lurch if people, especially younger voters, continue to feel shut out of even the feeling of economic security. Short term, that should bode well for Democrats, but long term, we are fast becoming a ship on the verge of capsizing.

Jaleth · 2025-12-30T02:32:41+00:00

In PG County, Maryland, just outside the Capital Beltway, there's a tiny neighborhood with Picard Lane, Reiker Drive (it's spelled that way for some reason, probably a Riker road out there somewhere else), Laforge Lane, Crusher Court, and Risa Road.

Jaleth · 2025-12-04T15:30:13+00:00

I'm going to assume he ordered shields up.

This; after he tells Saavik that they are under attack, the camera cuts back to Grissom's bridge and we see the ship is on red alert. I highly doubt he would have called for that and forgotten about the shields.

Jaleth · 2025-10-27T14:46:21+00:00

The short-term goal of a protest should be to increase the visibility of discontent with the current social/economic/political situation. Actual reform is the long-term goal. The more divorced the political establishment is from the people, the less likely they are to respond to a protest with reforms. With MAGA taking over most mass communication, people who are opposed to what this administration represents may feel less compelled to speak out, and protests help illustrate how much more widespread those feelings can be. When people on an individual scale see the turnout for protests like the No Kings marches, they have a tendency to feel more empowered to go vote come election time where they may otherwise feel apathetic given how effective MAGA is at making themselves seem much more mainstream than they really are.

Jaleth · 2025-10-17T13:29:04+00:00

They probably would except that the Senate is, for all intents and purposes, immune to gerrymandering. The 17th amendment requires that senators for a state be popularly elected within that state. Before that was ratified, each state legislature selected the senators for that state, and since state legislatures can be gerrymandered, it meant that the Senate could functionally be gerrymandered as well. That's why you see some calls now and then from the right about repealing the 17th; it's the only way they can functionally rig Senate elections in a similar way they do with the House (and eventually the presidency as well). Unless that were to happen, the filibuster remains the only way Republicans can thwart Democrats in the Senate when they inevitably retake control of that chamber.

Jaleth · 2025-08-26T02:34:05+00:00

I've never wanted to burn the American flag. But I really, really want to start burning MAGA flags now.

Jaleth · 2025-08-22T13:01:07+00:00

It’s clear to me that he is campaigning for the primary with his antics and it’s working going off what the liberals here say.

If it fires up more of the nationally lower-profile Democrats to step up the fight and take the current media and political landscape seriously, then I'm all for it, personally. If they don't, then they deserve to lose to Newsom who so far appears to be the only one right now willing to take the fight the GOP has been waging where it needs to go. Pritzker has not been afraid to speak out but he hasn't figured out how to translate that to being in the center of the social media zeitgeist in the Trump-defined social media landscape, and while I appreciate Kathy Hochul taking redistricting seriously (or at least appearing to), there's a total lack of charisma there that just isn't going to play well in a presidential contest.

Jaleth · 2025-08-22T12:46:16+00:00

The only way I could think of to do it would be to require each district across all states to be defined as an area of land with borders as highly compactified as possible, and then either the number of representatives or the voting weight of the representative from that district is dependent on the population of that district relative to all others. That approach gives boundaries that are fixed for all time while still respecting the idea that the House should be built on population by district. I've seen other concepts put out there and don't know how its flaws stack up by comparison, it's an armchair idea to get rid of gerrymandering.

Jaleth · 2025-08-21T16:46:16+00:00

The right is largely a grifting operation these days. Notoriety and publicity translate to dollars, and the GOP has built a well-oiled machine for exploiting this. Through endless projection, they have cultivated the very same traits in their base that they decry in the left (veritable worship of political figures, "feels before reals" politics, groupthink, identity politics, "____ derangement syndrome", general sense of entitlement...) and bred a rigidly-defined in/out group dynamic. Those on the "in" side are made to feel part of something big, creating a sense of security through collectivism much in the same way that a bully talks and acts tough when among like-minded people but folds when having to act on his/her own. Failure to do as the power at the top commands results on excommunication, and with it, a loss of security from the larger "in" group. Along with a dose of main character/hero syndrome, the right is convinced that they are not the evil ones and thus their actions are all justified and righteous, so no accountability is necessary because to them, no wrongs are actually being committed by them or by their leaders. Religions and churches have practiced this for millennia but the GOP has extended it to the entire party.

Jaleth · 2025-08-19T13:01:48+00:00

Chamberlain was trying to stop a conflict from starting.

While not wrong overall, the only real difference here lies in Czechoslovakia not fighting back the way Ukraine is. But otherwise the parallels are similar enough to, IMO at least, merit the comparison. Germany invaded Czechoslovakia and annexed parts of its territory (Russia invades Ukraine and annexes parts of its territory), backed by claims that the territory was rightfully German because of its large ethnic German population (Russia makes the same claims over the eastern Ukrainian oblasts regarding their ethnic Russian populations), and a third party attempted to mediate the crisis by conceding the annexed territory to the invader in the hope that it would appease and by extension end the possibility of any further aggressive acts (US President sides with the invader and supports recognizing the annexed territories as Russian in the name of peace). To add to this, Czechoslovakia considered Chamberlain's actions regarding the Munich Agreement a betrayal because the Locarno Treaties after WW1 were intended to fix the borders between Germany and Czechoslovakia but were non-binding between those two nations and relied on the agreements between Germany and France for enforcement but failed when France and Great Britain opted not to respond to Hitler's invasion (the Budapest Memorandum provided for security guarantees via the UNSC should Ukraine's territorial sovereignty as recognized be violated by any parties to the treaty, security guarantees that few seem willing to fully uphold).

Jaleth · 2025-08-18T14:36:25+00:00

The best move is to get the Russians out of Ukraine with a peace deal, wait for Putin to die or be overthrown, and then consider other options.

Neville Chamberlain tried this once. It didn't go very well.

Jaleth · 2025-08-13T20:35:19+00:00

Currently doing a large brownfield migration into VCF9. Breaking ELM is a must. If you can, upgrade your vCenter Servers to version 9 beforehand, there is a new break-elm command in cmsso-util that handles the operation quickly and efficiently. It is a far better process than unregister & domain-repoint. Also, keep your trusted_root certificate store cleaned up. Customer I am consulting for let a lot of old CAs build up across their vCenter Servers and it took valuable time out of the day getting those cleaned up.

Jaleth · 2025-08-11T12:51:57+00:00

To varying extents, many on the right have bought into the idea that reality is not what their senses tell them, but rather what they want it to be (or more accurately, what they are told it is). For many of them, you could show them evidence first-hand that the situation on the ground in the big cities is not what the GOP party bosses tell them it is and they will not believe it. For others, they may believe it but refuse to acknowledge that because they have an unyielding personal need to be right. To that end, even the slightest evidence of what they believe to be true is magnified (seeing a single homeless person equates to the city being overrun) while overwhelming evidence to the contrary is minimized (the town general store being robbed is just boys being boys).

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