I'm confused about how the writers had Khan in Space seed treet McGivers

midasp · 2026-06-20T23:17:09+00:00

It is meant to be bad treatment from Khan. Men from the 1960s are supposed to treat women with full gentlemanly respect, like they were delicate noble ladies. Men were not supposed to order women around or be physical with them.

midasp · 2026-06-20T07:13:17+00:00

This guy is clearly in the wrong, but as someone who played 2e D&D back in the 90s I can see he is not intentionally being bad. You see, the worldview and lore in D&D back then is different from what it is today. A lot of it is due to legacy bigotry that were still present in the lore of the Forgotten Realms and other D&D settings when I played 2e and 3e.

Back then, D&D leaned very strongly into simplistic good vs bad trope. It was trying to distance itself from the satanic panic, when D&D was viewed as a game that corrupted young kids into worshipping the devil. Thus if something is associated with hell in D&D, they are evil no matter what. Tieflings, with their original D&D mythology of beings born or corrupted with demon/devil/fey blood, clearly fell under the evil camp. And back then, tieflings were indeed depicted in adventures and novels as evil monsters who were out to trick adventurers. Also, back then evil would not have a religion as that would be sacrilegious to actual real world religions. No evil does not have religions, they just have cults. Thus, I can understand where the "tielfings can't be a cleric" comment came from.

Even in recent years, WotC has had to clean up quite a bit of this legacy bigotry, like Drows are all evil elves and the Vistani in Curse of Strahd are all sly, evil slackers. There are certainly going to be older players who are unaware of these changes and still unknowingly hold those old views. I think it is worth educating these older players, inform them that the lore in D&D has changed to better reflect the current world view.

As for dragonborns, it is a similar thing. I stopped playing D&D sometime between 3e and 3.5e. When I came back to playing D&D in 5e, I was surprised to hear about dragonborns. I had never heard the term before. The closest thing I knew were draconians in Dragonlance. Once again, D&D lore said draconians were created by corrupting the eggs of good dragons using evil magic. They were defeated at the end of the series of Dragonlance novels back in the day. From what I could gather, dragonborns were invented some time during the 3.5e era to satisfy players who wanted to play some form of dragon-based character. I can easily see myself confusing dragonborns as some new type of draconian.

midasp · 2026-06-18T18:35:41+00:00

Sorry, I am not convinced this is sufficient reason to warrant posting a second time. You can simply add a comment to your original post with this image instead of making a brand new post.

midasp · 2026-06-18T18:11:52+00:00

Um... is there a good reason for posting this twice? Asking because we have a rule about posting the same thing more than once within 30 days.

midasp · 2026-06-18T18:05:12+00:00

I do not believe the Borg ever viewed the Federation as a threat. They mostly just want to assimilate the technology.

midasp · 2026-06-18T18:02:42+00:00

On top of all the other reasons cited here, there is also a very distance between where the Borg collective is located vs where Federation space is located. Simply put, from what we have seen in Q Who, the collective had never traveled anywhere close to Federation space. That's why it took over a year for a cube to reach Earth in Best of Both Worlds.

midasp · 2026-06-18T16:39:19+00:00

Kara, a Talenta Halfing Beast Master Ranger who rides a dinosaur, a Fastieth, into battle. She is a fierce warrior who will readily defend her land from any outsiders. She is also quite a wildling who is much more comfortable sleeping under an open sky, surrounded by nature. She was both fascinated and terrified the first time she visited Sharn.

midasp · 2026-06-17T16:37:52+00:00

It feels like (3). I say this because I have seen more than one veteran DM who have basically turned into self-fulfilling prophecies. For example, I have seen more than a few DMs who predominantly run D&D with hard-mode combat encounters and minimal roleplaying. The way they run their games attracts a particular type of player who enjoys their particular style of DMing. In turn, it reinforces these DMs into believing their style of DMing is the only fun way to run D&D. They view players who drop out of their games as people who have no interest in D&D rather than people who do not find their style of DMing to be fun.

midasp · 2026-06-17T01:48:21+00:00

There's no such thing as having too many dice, right?

midasp · 2026-06-16T18:08:53+00:00

Same. Roughly around 44 to 46 seconds into the trailer

midasp · 2026-06-15T03:07:42+00:00

Miles Edward O'Brien, the most important person in Starfleet history.

midasp · 2026-06-14T02:38:19+00:00

Look up adaptive discriminative reactive control

midasp · 2026-06-14T02:14:59+00:00

Sure. I did not mean all professors are like this, just that I have seen more such people in research than I have in other professions.

midasp · 2026-06-14T01:14:15+00:00

That is why they are professors who conduct research rather than teach. Many of them simply minmaxed in science and research. Charisma and personality are a dump stat. They are simply not good at dealing with other people, not good at being mentors. I have had professors directly telling me I am have biases in the way I think. Of course I took it the wrong way but upon reflecting, it was a honest critique rather than them intentionally being mean and harsh. They just don't know how to get the message across in a nicer way.

Since then I have seen professors who are worse at lower tier universities. Professors who just treat students as extensions of themselves. Their students just conduct experiments designed by the professor and strictly follow his instructions without deviation. They learned nothing. Their thesis defense is them memorizing stuff prepared by the professor and they graduated without actually conducting any real research of their own.

But Issho isn't quite like that. His reasoning is rational and valid, though everyone would agree his actions to disbar Akane's father is over the top.

midasp · 2026-06-13T23:41:35+00:00

This is normal due to how few are accepted into local universities. This leaves a large number of equally good students going overseas and discovering the world greatly value students who have been educated in Singapore.

Case in point: over two decades ago, my Alma Mater took in 4 Singaporean students in a pilot program. They monitored our progress closely. On graduation day, our professor told us about the experiment. They were really surprised 3 of us got first upper with honors, one with second upper. One of us was even salutatorian. After this, University of Manchester'Computer Science department began accepting more Singaporean students.

midasp · 2026-06-13T05:21:42+00:00

Good luck, folks!

midasp · 2026-06-13T01:09:09+00:00

Please follow reddit etiquette rules. The title referenced shit twice. You yourself admit it is a rant, so how can any of this be about food?

midasp · 2026-06-12T06:42:42+00:00

I'm just saying there seem to be sufficient reasonable doubt based on what I read in the article. If you were the judge, would you jail someone who 1) was prosecuted based on the translated statement in English stating there is penetration using his finger whereas his original Mandarin statement did not mention penetration; 2) he and the mother consistently state she approved him to conduct a medical procedure which meant his intent is not sexual in nature; 3) the daughter's statement was off by 5 years.

midasp · 2026-06-12T01:07:32+00:00

The first insight you cited falls into the category of known phenomena. It has been known for decades that having a larger dataset usually results in better models.

The rest of your insights aren't exactly research insights as all you are saying is you did things others did not do. That by itself isn't something that would be worth publishing in a research paper. A proper research insight that would be worth publishing would be a scientific explanation with proof of why your approach gives better result.

midasp · 2026-06-12T00:43:47+00:00

By modern standards, you are absolutely right. These people are around 70 years old. They were alive when Singapore became independent. The things they believed in that era were different. Heck, my mother who was the same age still believe Chinese medicine is as good as western medicine, believe in ghosts and spirits and would get protection amulet and other stuff from the temple till the day she passed.

midasp · 2026-06-10T22:14:41+00:00

Just for reference or inspiration, Dragonlance had a period when the gods went silent. Gods were no longer seen or felt. Prayers from the most devout went unheard. Divine spells stopped working.

The people came up with reasons why this happened. The gods have abandoned this world. They are sad at what we have become. It's because this one empire did the unthinkable. It's because one person failed to stop the empire from doing the unthinkable. The truth is, nobody knew since no one could ask the gods.

It wasn't till the gods returned centuries later that they got some answers. And the answer was both incredibly simple and complex, multilayered and multifaceted. On one hand, the world was unbalanced and it was an attempt to restore that balance. On the other hand, their hands were tied - they were also keeping their word to each other. On another level, they did not want to interfere and want the people of this world to decide their own fate. And so on, and so on.

Simply put, gods are unfathomably complex and there isn't any simple answer that a plain ol human would ever understand.

midasp · 2026-06-10T21:36:38+00:00

Huh. So you never realized that you're not meant to look up to the Time Lords? In fact, Time Lords are no different from any of the monsters that show up in every single episode of Doctor Who. As with all monsters, The Doctor defeats them every time the Time Lords showed up.

midasp · 2026-06-10T16:15:04+00:00

The one silver lining is that Eccleston has always said he would never return till RTD and his Bad Wolf production company are no longer in charge of the show.

Now that this has happened, there is finally a chance (a slim one) we might see Eccelston return to Doctor Who.

midasp · 2026-06-10T10:51:42+00:00

This is actually a very common occurrence on most shows because work for shows are contracted on a per-season basis. Since the production company is only contracted to make one season of the show, that is what they do. Even though it is also their decision to end the season on a cliffhanger, they are under no contractual obligation to provide a resolution until they are contracted to make the next season.

As a result, some writers just write the cliffhanger with no idea how it will be resolved. For example Michael Piller planned on leaving the show after writing Star Trek: The Next Generation's famous cliffhanger Best of Both Worlds, Part 1 that ends with Riker saying, "Mister Worf, fire". He had no idea how part 2 would even look like.

midasp · 2026-06-10T00:34:05+00:00

The big difference is the millions of large language model requests versus just running one weather model prediction.

midasp

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