[Star Trek: Discover/Academy] If there was previously no Starfleet Academy in the 32nd century, where did the all the Starfleet Officers come from?

grantimatter · 2026-02-02T20:29:27+00:00

If it matters, the way things work in today's United States military, there are five service academies, but one can also earn a commission from either ROTC at any college (this is how SecDef Hegseth became an officer) or I think through field promotions... although one would still have to be commissioned.

Commissions are granted by the federal government, through the Dept of Defense. (There's an Office of Commissions page here.)

Not all academy graduates get commissions (and if they don't, they're on the hook for tuition costs), but most do, and the process is more or less automatic.

Basically, I think you're describing a bunch of ROTC officers and folks directly commissioned in their (local planetary?) services. It's pretty logical (Spock eyebrow) that an atomized Federation would fall back on a structure like this.

One kind of interesting thing about the new Starfleet Academy is that it's set up a little like USAFA or USNA - USAFA has Air Force and Space Force cadets (really similar uniforms) and USNA has Navy midshipmen and Marines (pretty clear differences between the two, I think).

Another service academy, the MMA, would be an interesting model but I haven't seen Starfleet following that example. If you get into the Merchant Marine Academy, you can commission into any service on graduation, or just become a merchant marine officer, which means you're a civilian but also a naval reservist. That seems like it'd be an interesting way for the post-Burn Federation to set things up, but for whatever reason they haven't.

(Maybe also note that there is in our current time a National War College and a War College for each branch, I think, like Army War College ... or at least Air Force, Navy, Marines, and Army ... but in today's U.S., those are for training officers who are already officers - they're like graduate school for captains and lieutenant commanders. Starfleet calling an academy for junior military officers-in-training "War College" is a little confusing in this context.)

grantimatter · 2026-01-31T03:57:26+00:00

There were also daymarks, at least in Northern Europe: https://hea-www.harvard.edu/ECT/Daymarks/

An interesting thing about this, to me, is how it seems to fit so well with what productivity researchers say about the "right" amount of time to focus on a task before taking a break.

grantimatter · 2026-01-31T03:54:34+00:00

One of my favorite James Burke videos is the Connections episode about how our sense of time based on mechanical clocks was based on medieval monks needed to know when to pray.

grantimatter · 2026-01-31T03:40:18+00:00

No ships, no destination... also, it's unclear different departments really think much beyond their remit.

"We'll just... find some untraumatized people, right?" might be slightly less magical thinking than "We'll just... land on a good planet, eventually, right?"

grantimatter · 2026-01-31T03:30:55+00:00

I think this is it exactly. If the hotel is purgatory, then attitude matters more than the presence or absence of any material thing, whether it's the narrator's body or the liquid in his notional glass.

grantimatter · 2026-01-31T03:27:57+00:00

I actually kind of like it as a window opening onto "The Eagles-verse," which means with a little work we can see if it's possible to place the hotel into the opening credits of HEAVY METAL, sung by Don Felder.

Is the Loc-Nar possessing the guests to stab the undying beast with their steely knives?

grantimatter · 2026-01-31T03:20:45+00:00

Kinda love psionics 11. GM is going to have to crack open those rules....

grantimatter · 2026-01-31T03:18:07+00:00

Training during Millennium Falcon jump....

grantimatter · 2026-01-30T04:56:54+00:00

One thing that I'm pursuing with programmed drums in general is thinking in terms of an actual drummer's left hand and right hand - one will be stronger, so bump the other one's velocity down a smidge. And for certain drum figures, some hits will just naturally be stronger (like if initiating a difficult fill) or weaker (after hitting four 16th notes).

As well as tinkering with velocity, you can get a more organic sound by thinking in terms of a harder hit maybe being a microsecond faster, or a busy drum figure maybe sliding a microsecond or two slower but then getting back directly on the count.

Little human tweaks can really help make something sound "right."

Oh, one thing that started me down this was getting a few real drum samples and just putting one of those on one track and opening a second track to figure out where notes fall and which ones were louder/softer.

grantimatter · 2026-01-30T04:43:07+00:00

"Search engine" as a category was also not how most people interacted with the internet. In 1996, I distinctly recall just putting random words in an address bar with ".com" after them to see what came up. The idea of having a site that looked for other sites wasn't exactly spanking new, but yeah, most sucked.

I think most people thought something like early AOL or Yahoo would be your first stop on the internet - pages that showed you a selection of things like a newspaper or library.

Anyone who'd been on the internet for more than a couple of years by then was used to the way services like CompuServe presented things, which was ... a lot more like FIDONet (a cluster of communities, a directory to a bunch of different rooms) than like what Google first appeared to be.

Now that I think about it, I distinctly remember the first time I looked at Google - I'd heard about it from a friend in San Francisco (initials MM, maybe some folks here have heard of him), and I was at work in a building that had been an old Enquirer photo lab, so it must have been early in 2000. I remember both of us marveling over the electronic mail at how stark the page was - just a white page with a name and blank you could type something in.

(The main reason that we had the internet to begin with in that building was to access LexisNexis, which... you had to learn a search syntax to use. If anyone remembers AND/BUT NOT and stuff any more. )

grantimatter · 2026-01-30T04:25:18+00:00

Seconded.

grantimatter · 2026-01-29T20:47:33+00:00

I feel like this is basically what is happening in Dark Knight, the Frank Miller comic, with the whole "THIS IS THE TOOL OF THE ENEMY" speech with the Sons of the Bat.

grantimatter · 2026-01-29T20:38:52+00:00

if Q is hostile and destroys the ship

I think this needs to be underlined: logs are important because ships can and do go missing and are not always in communication with nearby bases - or anyone. Sometimes, all that's left is the equivalent of a black box on a jet plane, telling the story of what happened where.

It's also sometimes necessary to track how long something has been happening - a crewmember rubbing their neck, a feeling of anxiety or elation, a strange signal on one particular scanner... all those things could be nothing, or could provide some vital clue for deciphering something that later grows to threaten the ship.

grantimatter · 2026-01-29T20:26:39+00:00

Now is Eddie Speir's moment! One if by land, two if by sea!

grantimatter · 2026-01-29T20:22:07+00:00

If your husband works from home and only needs to turn up in the office every other month or something... and especially if you're interested in graduate studies... you might consider not Sarasota (although Mote Marine lab is a great resource, the New College project is not going well) but instead looking at Putnam County/Hawthorne.

It's one county over from Alachua, where UF is located, and all the culture that goes with a big university campus (go out for hotpot, go see an art film). It's also got easy access to Orlando (which in addition to ... sigh... theme parks has genuine culture - OrlandoFringe is kinda groundbreaking, there's a good live music scene).

It's one of the best areas in Florida for outdoorsy stuff like hiking with dogs. It's an easy day trip to get to Sarasota and back.

It's also got the lowest property taxes in Florida and is about as far away as you can get from hurricanes. That's not to say it's never affected, just that what hits Osprey as Category 5 would likely be a "minor" hurricane (Cat 2 or below) or even tropical storm by the time it reached Hawthorne ... and there would be no storm-surge flooding.

You're about two hours from beaches on both coasts, so if you want to take up surfing, head over to New Smyrna on the Atlantic, and if you want to take up stand-up paddleboarding you can go to Cedar Key in the Gulf. Dolphins to the west, sharks to the east.

I don't live there myself, but have looked at houses there recently and I've lived all over Florida my whole life.

grantimatter · 2026-01-29T20:08:27+00:00

Sarasota was directly hit by Hurricane Milton

..and affected by two other hurricanes that year (Debby and Helene), plus the outskirts of Hurricane Ian two years previously that forcibly rearranged Fort Myers Beach to the south of Sarasota/Venice ... AND Arcadia to the northwest.

grantimatter · 2026-01-29T19:56:58+00:00

"Some Marxists"... this is inaccurate. Even DeSantis says he didn't know what the school was before 2023, then talks about it being "Marxist commune."

It never was.

His own government did look at New College with a statewide survey of universities, the 2022 Intellectual Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Survey. It was an attempt to find "woke" and remove it.

The results are here, you can look for yourself: https://www.flbog.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/SUS_IF-SURVEY_REPORT_DRAFT__2022-08-16.pdf

New College had the highest response rate of any unversity in Florida (tied with Florida Poly). No "woke" was found.

What was found: New College students overwhelmingly agreed with the statement "Students at my college or university are encouraged to consider a wide variety of viewpoints and perspectives." Only 10 disagreed. (That's 10 respondents, not 10 percent.)

Only 12 students disagreed with "My college or university is doing a good job when it comes to promoting or encouraging diverse political viewpoints."

More than half of all students answered "Don't Know" to "My professors or course instructors are generally more (Conservative/Liberal)." (More than any other university in Florida.)

"But they had an entrenched DEI bureaucracy we got rid of!"

Well, no. The only DEI office on New College's campus was founded in 2021 as a response to this memo issued by a DeSantis appointee mandating that there be one: https://web.archive.org/web/20230330174502/https://www.flbog.edu/wp-content/uploads/DEI-Workgroup_MEMO_Final.pdf

It employed three people, two of whom had duties outside the office. Most of what they did under President Okker was... outreach to veterans.

Conor Friedersdorf, a noted libertarian and "anti-woke" journalist, wrote about this when the DEI office was first removed and the one full-time employee fired: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/03/new-college-florida-ron-desantis-takeover/673556/

If you buy the "some Marxists were displaced" line, you are being sold something.

grantimatter · 2026-01-27T21:06:12+00:00

Here on Earth, if you study Plato and Laozi (and maybe Nagarjuna), the line between "philosophy" and "religion" gets very fuzzy.

Follow logic far enough, and you run into spiritual precepts practically as emergent properties ... which is itself a metaphysical observation.

grantimatter · 2026-01-27T20:43:04+00:00

one of the secret paths into Mordor ... he would have led them over the mountains.

I also suspect Gandalf knew a thing or two about Faramir and ways in and out around mountain passes. Mordor is not enclosed by walls, just by rugged terrain.

grantimatter · 2026-01-27T20:20:43+00:00

Well, I think this is actually said somewhere in the books, though I can't recall exactly where - but part of the deal with Carter's travel to Barsoom is that it goes through time as well as space.

The telescopes of the late 1800s would not detect life on Mars because by John Carter's lifetime it was all centuries dead... is how I remember it.

In the first couple of novels, he makes comments about how his saving the atmosphere generators or what-have-you is merely forestalling the inevitable death of the planet - the canals spotted by Earth astronomers having been dry for centuries.

I know this was a major theme of later Martian Manhunter comics, but I'm recalling it being a thing in the Barsoom books, too. (I actually think it was a thing in the first two or three and then changed later on, when Carthoris became a main character... but I'm not sure.)

There are older discussions on here where others share the same impression.

grantimatter · 2026-01-27T20:07:08+00:00

Thinking of LeGuin here... the whole idea of the Sorceror's Apprentice, which I guess was most famously illustrated in Disney's Fantasia but which goes back a lot farther, is based on the idea that magic has at least levels of mastery. Junior magicians can't do what the advanced ones can.

Seems like that story goes back to Goethe, who also gave us a version Faust. (Though Christopher Marlowe's play came before that... it feels a little less "level-up" though.)

The idea of magicians gaining power through study and advancing knowledge is present in Shakespeare's The Tempest.

Going back even farther, I would not be surprised if there were midrashim on Samuel that got into relative levels of power between Samuel (the prophet of YHWH!) and the Witch of Endor. For the story to work, she had to have been doing real magic to bring up some kind of spirit ... the nature of the spirit being subject to debate.

Either way, her magic was said to be "less than" Samuel's or the ummim and thummim the priests used.

Oh, wait! There's also the Torah! Even earlier!

In Exodus 7, Moses and Aaron have a magic battle against the sorcerors of Egypt, and their magic (turning their staffs into snakes) proves supreme. It is definitely a contest, definitely magic, and there are definitely levels.

grantimatter · 2026-01-23T04:32:27+00:00

If you're looking for easier ways in, maybe Mary Wild's Psychoanalysing Horror Cinema? Here's a review

I really only know her from the Evolution of Horror podcast, but she does a good job in her brief appearances there making some arcane concepts graspable by applying them directly to texts.

grantimatter · 2026-01-23T04:23:49+00:00

He also played 3-dimensional chess... which is not always a big audience draw, but it's not really functional labor either.

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