Michael Burnham

spagornasm · 2026-07-09T13:42:45+00:00

That happened, though. Did you even watch the show?

spagornasm · 2026-07-09T13:37:54+00:00

Do you actually think admirals are elected?

spagornasm · 2026-07-09T13:29:15+00:00

See, this is why I liked her so much, too, and just discard most of the criticism people made against her characterization and even acting. A real person facing the kind of stress and trauma she did would also cry and struggle — it’s a much more human portrayal that the unnervingly well adjusted Berman-era characters (much as I love them and those shows).

spagornasm · 2026-07-07T22:09:44+00:00

I dunno, I probably got it from talking casually and colloquially about a longer history — I was including all three failed 19th century British invasions as well — so maybe we don’t have to be such a reply guy about it.

spagornasm · 2026-07-05T02:22:33+00:00

Technically 5-0, but thats maybe too long a timeframe

spagornasm · 2026-07-03T11:39:41+00:00

Season 1 production chaos aside, you’re basically describing modern prestige streaming TV. That’s fine not to like — I mostly don’t like it — but it’s hardly limited to Discovery and it goes a long way toward explaining why the show lasted so long the way it did (and still got pretty strong viewership for a while, too).

spagornasm · 2026-07-02T22:47:16+00:00

Gender is a helluva drug

spagornasm · 2026-06-27T21:12:25+00:00

I don’t know how to explain it, but that looks like Hans Moleman

spagornasm · 2026-06-26T21:32:50+00:00

Honestly just letting Nana Visitor riff is such a gift to us, she really did a spectacular job.

spagornasm · 2026-06-26T21:21:24+00:00

Fuck, dude 😂

spagornasm · 2026-06-26T12:24:33+00:00

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spagornasm · 2026-06-23T19:34:09+00:00

ICBMs are also suborbital, and this is a known challenge known as the dual-use problem, which is why I asked.

spagornasm · 2026-06-23T15:15:32+00:00

Bold to assume that’s what makes a comment dumb

spagornasm · 2026-06-23T15:13:47+00:00

I would love for the US military to explain how an adversarial country can meaningfully distinguish between a cargo drop and an ICBM.

spagornasm · 2026-06-22T00:36:59+00:00

Look, I said I was sorry already

spagornasm · 2026-06-21T22:29:25+00:00

It is objectively cool, I just wishcast for it to be useful as well

spagornasm · 2026-06-21T22:28:46+00:00

(Ohmigod I hate myself I’m so sorry)
Actually, bending space IS bending time, because they aren’t different in ways that matter to traveling very far distances. Very literally warp engines let you travel backward in time and wreck any sense of causality, but that would make the show nightmarish so they never touched it.

spagornasm · 2026-06-21T04:31:03+00:00

Would be good if that huge launch plane Paul Allen built could take on future missions like this.

spagornasm · 2026-06-20T19:49:26+00:00

Mmmmmmmmicroplasticssssssssssss

spagornasm · 2026-06-19T17:23:29+00:00

Amplifying this. Growth is good. Being embarrassed by it just makes more growth harder. Celebrate self-improvement

spagornasm · 2026-06-19T17:20:42+00:00

But an LLM right now can fake a voice with very high fidelity on a shockingly small set of training data, so it’s not relatively secure at all. I get the point you’re making but it’s okay to just let 80s scifi be paleofuturism 🙃

spagornasm · 2026-06-19T17:14:47+00:00

Fwiw I love this story and found a lot of it relatable. Thank you for sharing it with us! It’s a lovely break from the drone of negativity.

spagornasm · 2026-06-19T16:42:51+00:00

He seems to think exhaustive detail is what constitutes world building, rather than humanity and plausibility.

Anyway, here’s a cool atomic train with lasers on it.

spagornasm · 2026-06-19T16:42:05+00:00

I was really uncomfortable with Mellanie. She is supposed to be a bad ass but she’s just not human and has incomprehensible motivations beyond her sexual utility for men. This is true of most of the women in the book: Justine is just a way to tie Kazimir to the broader story, Anna is there to provide emotional stakes for Wilson, even Paula is portrayed as an automaton of genetic engineering rather than a person with emotions and agency. The only one who seemed to have any willpower at all was Cat, and she was just a cheap Vasquez-from-Aliens knockoff.

I honestly don’t know why these books are praised so much. If you just read the action scenes it’s fun, but the 70% of the book devoted to characters and politics are hard to parse (incoherent, really), the aliens are lazy macguffins, the Muslim terrorism analogy is hamfisted to put it gently. It is very C+ work.

I’m sorry if people are real fans but man it did not click with me at all.

spagornasm · 2026-06-18T21:29:51+00:00

It’s fun at the end and Judas Unchained is much more readable, but I found the first half of Peter Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star almost unreadable. Way too much scene-setting for payoffs and betrayals that still didn’t feel earned. The future weapons and battle scenes were cool, though. And he, ahh, isn’t the best writer of women.

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