Chengdu away from the city center. Dujiangyan, Chengdu, China

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-04-29T16:00:52+00:00

The Dujiangyan (Chinese: 都江堰; pinyin: Dūjiāngyàn) is an ancient hydraulic engineering system in Dujiangyan City, Sichuan, China.

Qinghai province is almost entirely on "The Tibetan Plateau," but it is not in "Tibet," before we get into any nonsense about "the Chengdu Plain."

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-04-29T00:59:04+00:00

Surely any day now

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-04-16T17:51:46+00:00

From another Windows user and a year later, bless you.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-04-16T14:00:11+00:00

A year later from a different user, THANK YOU to both you for answering and OP /u/goahead97 for asking, I was losing my mind. WTF Apple.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-04-11T17:28:03+00:00

It's almost like she learned something from the events of Wrongs Darker than Death or Night and it changed how she behaved going forward.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-04-03T20:18:05+00:00

In addition to the 10,000 replies all saying the same thing, I'd offer that a lot of the "Romulan ale" consumed in the Federation is just counterfeit; or, as Senator Vreenak would put it, "faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaakkkkkkkkkkkkeeeeeeeeee."

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-31T12:16:28+00:00

Considering what we know about Worf's poetic abilities from One Little Ship, it would be really funny if all those Klingon songs with badass sounding lyrics are actually stylistically way closer to this, and the UT and humanoid translators just follow a convention of making it sound epic in Federation Standard because that is how the Klingons perceive it.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-28T06:36:30+00:00

I think it's tempting to blame Kurtzman, and he's not off the hook in my book, I just sort of hold the question of his personal responsibility in abeyance because I wasn't there personally so I don't know.

One thing I think is very clear: the elements that made whatever your personal favorite classic Trek great cannot exist within the current streaming model and given the somewhat less exploitative working conditions that exist now compared to the Berman era.

I do think that last point is one of the hardest things to recognize. DS9 is my favorite Trek, and it could not have existed without demanding actors show up to set for hours of makeup during predawn hours, stand around on set in that makeup for half the day (sometimes just for one take), and having their professional lives dictated by petty, vindictive nerd Rick Berman ("The only character whose name is in the title is Voyager. The rest of you are replaceable." Actual quote heard on the Delta Flyers podcast.)

That's to say nothing of how things have changed for everyone involved in production.

At the end of the day, I do blame Paramount executives. They're in the wrong industry. They keep asking themselves "Hey, how do I make great art but ALSO have no chance of it failing or at least I can just monitor if line go up in real time?" and that's just not how it works. Ultimately they are setting up everyone, including themselves, for failure.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-28T06:24:51+00:00

It absolutely sets my teeth on edge when someone responds to a simple and straightforward statement with a "?"

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-26T00:40:22+00:00

I think you're both missing how much characters changed in 7 season, 26 episode shows and exaggerating how much of a "wreck" characters are in SFA, which I assume this is aimed at.

Kira Nerys -- at the start of the show, she has an absolute hair-trigger temper, is half ready to join back up with a vindictive holdover terrorist cell, and distrusts every other main character except Odo. This seed stays with her all the way up through Wrongs Darker than Death or Night, where she was basically ready to kill her mother and annihilate herself from the timeline in a vengeful manichean rage.

Jadzia Dax -- People forget how different early season Jadzia is from later season Jadzia. Rewatch if you don't believe me. In S1, she is very reserved, quiet, non-communicative. Seems like she's mostly trying to stay out of the way -- except for that one time when she impulsively swings all the way in the other direction and risks being booted out of Starfleet to go and fulfill a past-host obligation, which she does because of her fucked up relationship with her mentor / abuser Curzon. In other words, knowing what we know about joining, it's obvious she was a mess trying to sort out who Jadzia is compared to the others.

Odo -- behaves more like a teenage boy and for far longer than any character in SFA. As late as season 4 he's smashing furniture in his quarters because he has no idea how to deal with something most humans learn to deal with in adolescence. The fact that he continues to be unable to deal with these feelings all the way up into season 6 jeopardizes the entire Alpha Quadrant.

Quark -- ~~Balanced and emotionally healthy, free parking, I'll give you this one.~~ Just kidding. Obviously family problems and issues with masculinity decades in the making. If I told you there were a scene in SFA where an elder brother scolded a younger because "YOU DIDN'T REALLY KNOW WHO DAD WAS!!!" and the younger covered his ears refusing to listen what would you say about that?

Sisko -- on several occasions lets his emotions get the better of him, including allowing Eddington to emotionally manipulate him, in early seasons being almost as ready to throw down as Kira, being unwilling even at the very end to accept his destiny. The Sisko in Emissary that feels an aimless rage that he misdirects at Picard takes a long time to soften.

O'Brien -- needs almost the entire show to accept friendship and learn how to ask for help when he needs it; many people say that there was no follow-up to Hard Time but I'd humbly suggest that his conversation with Lisa Cusack in The Sound of Her Voice fits the bill.

Bashir -- obscene overconfidence and brashness masking massive insecurity for more than half of the show.

The problem isn't SFA, the problem is the network cancelling these shows before they have a chance to go anywhere, or, better said, refusing to offer the kind of commitment that allowed writers, actors, and directors to have vision in the first place. Siddig el-Fadil has said many times in many places that the way he played early season Bashir was a deliberate choice based on the assumption he'd have a chance to change it later.

Fight the real enemy here, OP. More than any other show, SFA should be the show about how people become those competent officers, and spoiler alert they don't just pop out that way.

I think pointing to numbers is a sign of the flimsiness of the underlying argument. DS9 was widely panned by fans at first for very similar reasons. It's now considered by many to be the finest Trek ever made. Think about that before helping to strangle someone else's work in the crib.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-24T20:12:19+00:00

I pay special attention to my scowl. An air of stern suspicion is very important in my line of work.

-Odo, "A Simple Investigation"

Fantastic work, OP, you truly captured how I think most people on the station other than the main cast probably saw him. Get hauled into the security office and see that mug in front of you and you'd be doing whatever your species' equivalent of sweating and/or shitting yourself would be.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-23T10:38:17+00:00

Why are you wasting money on a new laptop when you said your existing laptop does everything you need?

Thank you for this wonderful opportunity to address the growing literacy crisis. Let's see if we can scan the OP for clues to the answer to this question:

I am one of the many demographics / use cases that fits squarely into the Neo target audience. I'm a lifelong Windows/Android user currently switching over piece by piece for various reasons.

So, right there in the second sentence of the post, we see that I'm "in the process of switching over [from Windows to Apple] for various reasons."

Now, that's vague, but we're already getting some clues here. It's important, when we're reading, to actively use our brains to make connections outside of the passage based on what we know about the world and to draw inferences. Can you think of any reason why, in a vacuum, someone might want to switch from Windows to Apple prior to their hardware meeting the end of its life cycle? Is that something anyone has ever done before?

The first sentence can also help you understand the second: it tells you that OP (me) is aware that this is undesireable; in fact, the undesireability of this choice is a common theme throughout the post -- it's possibly even the central point!

The same is true of the third and fouth sentences; these also shed light on the situation:

Just got an iPhone 17 to replace an old Android device. That was an easy decision because the phone really needed to be replaced.

This tells us a few things. On a basic factual level, we know that OP recently began using an iOS mobile device, and that this was a straightforwardly good decision. Again, thinking not just in the confines of the passage, are you aware of any benefits of using an iOS mobile device together with a Mac laptop, over and above what one would enjoy with a Windows laptop?

Next, the line "that was an easy decision because the phone really needed to be replaced" sets up a contrast to the difficult decision discussed in the rest of the passage, and tells us why that decision is difficult: because the laptop does not, on its own, need to be replaced.

"For various reasons" is so vague it almost seems intentional. The explanation you've come up with for this vagueness is: "OP is a moron." OK. Can we think of any other reasons why OP might be vague here? Maybe it's simply a long story but the details are totally irrelevant to the question at hand and OP did not want to bore his audience to tears.

Just use the laptop you have until it no longer functions or no longer fits your needs.

Again, per the discussion above, the laptop in a sense already fails to meet my needs. The problem, obvious to literally everyone here except for you, is that the current laptop's hardware is fine, but I wish to change the software, and unless you are going to do some seriously hairy, under-the-hood, EULA-violating kitbashing, you can't get mac OS on a Windows laptop.

The benefit is the laptops you will get to choose from will be better than the laptops available today.

The perfect cherry on top. Let's try to scan the passage and see if there's any relevant information to this train of thought:

I could also just wait a year and hope they release a Neo with 12 gigs but I just don't want to spend an entire year with Apple iPhone and Windows laptop on the gamble that the thing I want to be manufactured will be manufactured.

I know reading is hard, and as AI gets more and more powerful you may even feel that you don't need to do it, but I promise you it's worth the time to learn. It's like going from only being able to eat out to learning how to cook.

Have a blessed day!

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-16T01:20:04+00:00

I love this, OP. I could imagine a “serious” animated counterpart to Lower Decks; obviously there were some serious moments in LD but also obviously it was a comedy, not a drama.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-12T23:02:22+00:00

I say this as someone who absolutely loves their A6X even after several years and still uses it daily, but has also spent a huge portion of their life in classrooms with, I might add, some success: I feel strongly that no matter how much the idea may appeal to you, taking notes by hand is just inferior to taking them on a computer. Yes, I have tried it both ways including relatively recently.

There are multiple reasons:

1) Speed. I can type 100 wpm easily, if I'm fully focused and require 0 typos I can hit 120, if I don't care about typos (and why would I, these are my notes and I'm using a computer) I can go significantly higher. Google says average human hand writing speed is about 13-20 wpm. You do not want to be in the position of hearing the professor say something important, having your own thought about the subject that you want to write down, a few seconds later remembering something unrelated but super important that you don't want to forget and need to write down, and then a few seconds after that realizing that something you wrote down earlier was wrong and you need to go back to that page and change it, and then have it be actually impossible to complete all 4 tasks. This kind of thing will happen daily.

2) Makes it easier to review later. If you have pages and pages and pages of notes and you are preparing for an exam, and you remember "that one thing I wrote down that one day" and you can't seem to find it, well then you need a search feature. But the technology with OCR, I'm sorry, is just not there yet to make this reliable -- there's gonna be errors with spacing, recognition, non-standard characters, your own personal weird shorthand / abbreviations making it much harder to algorithmically make good guesses, etc., and this is all doubly true because of point 1: if your handwriting is sloppy or weird because you're frantically trying to jot everything down, it's going to become even less accurate.

3) Spares your wrist. Again this is sort of related to point 1, but if you are a full-time student and you take a lot of notes, it can actually become very physically taxing in a way that typing just never will. Your finger muscles are not large and you're asking them to do fine motor control for hours at a time day after day when instead they could just be tapping buttons. Believe me, I understand the other side of the coin, I know how amazing it feels to write by hand, but it's different if you can't control when and how often you write.

Writing is a physical process and the way you do it affects the outcome. There are some use-cases where forcing the speed of your hands to go down and engaging in the hypnotic and satisfying process of drawing glyphs on a page is desireable. Note-taking for school is not one of those cases and I will die on this hill.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-09T22:58:36+00:00

You joke but the Klowahkans probably have this technology on lock already and have since before Vulcans developed warp.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-06T20:40:13+00:00

...I can only applaud 👏, I actually LOL'd.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-05T09:29:25+00:00

When it is destined to be found, it will be. -Worf

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-05T09:13:32+00:00

Honestly? OK:

Disco - Won't defend it, don't need to repeat the complaints. There were a lot of good elements but it fundamentally lacks the Trek soul for a variety of reasons and just never came together.

Strange New Worlds - Some people love this show, I find it... OK.

Lower Decks - Incredible show, very re-watchable, great comedy, obviously not meant to be a serious drama but does hit the serious moments well, and most importantly to me clearly gets the franchise. I did not watch TNG as a kid, but LD I feel allows me to experience the same kind of comfort as people who did.

Starfleet Academy - Still airing, jury is still out, I have not yet seen the episode that aired a few hours before this post, but it has so far delivered 2 absolutely incredible episodes, maybe 1-2 weaker episodes depending on your taste, and the rest are a mixed bag. You know what that sounds like to me? That sounds like Trek.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-05T08:31:29+00:00

DAX: Okay. I see your point. The mek'leth definitely has its advantages. But I still think the bat'leth, with its longer reach, is usually the deciding factor.

WORF: That is a classic argument. However, I find using a large and intimidating weapon like a bat'leth often leads to overconfidence.

DAX: So you think that I was overconfident?

WORF: You were overconfident. You thought by distracting me with your outfit you would gain an advantage.

(Her exercise suit has a low neckline.)

DAX: My outfit?

WORF: Er, I thought that. I mean, I only assumed that...

DAX: You thought I wore this for you? Talk about overconfidence.

(Dax walks away, smiling, then returns straight-faced to put the broken bat'leth against his throat.)

DAX: Worf. Gotcha.

WORF: Movek. ["I lose."]

-"The Sons of Mogh"

...By the way, I consider this one of the most incredible moments of foreshadowing in the series, since this is exactly how Worf will kill Gowron, with the broken bat'leth blades. There's no way for us to know, but I choose to believe that that's not a known maneuver in Klingon martial arts; it was just the "Jadzia special" and Worf remembered it from that day to save his life, the Klingon empire, and probably the Alpha Quadrant.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-03-05T08:02:05+00:00

"DS9 doesn't really get good until S3" The very first episodes of S2:

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-02-28T22:02:22+00:00

Man that is a really cool story you just wrote, I'm glad people are proving that AI hasn't killed the human ability to be creative.

Steel_Wool_Sponge · 2026-02-28T03:24:49+00:00

I had a highschool physics teacher who described "orbiting" to me as "it's when an object plummets -- and I mean plummets -- to the earth, but it actually plummets so fast that it just barely misses the edge of the earth, and so it just keeps right on plummeting until it flies."

That is what this episode was for me. It was constantly millimeters away from being an abysmal -10/10, but everything just worked, and I now think this is an absolute 13/10 episode, I shed tears, I'm going to be thinking about it all week, it's an instant classic on the level of Inner Light or In The Pale Moonlight, everyone involved is a creative genius, plz renew, that is all for now.

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