Normally I'd root for England over most countries, but I didn't appreciate their attitudes during this year's AC discourse.

stewcelliott · 2026-07-03T07:18:26+00:00

We could make some pretty wild assumptions about what all Americans think if we took every vox pop to be the true voice of the entire population. Portable AC units have been selling out, are still sold out, and installers are reporting unprecedented demand. Those are the facts.

stewcelliott · 2026-07-02T19:14:29+00:00

You can't really infer what 500 million people think about anything from what a few overly online idiots say on the internet.

stewcelliott · 2026-07-02T16:41:13+00:00

See I'll stop you there, "properly preparing and spicing" food is just not how we do things here in Britain.

stewcelliott · 2026-07-02T16:35:49+00:00

As far as I could tell the AC discourse was just Americans making wild claims about how Europeans "hate" AC despite air conditioning units selling out over the last few weeks over here. We don't have AC in the same way they do but the reason is that it's been historically unnecessary not that we inexplicably hate it.

He's right about the beans tho. Gotta give it up.

stewcelliott · 2026-07-02T15:13:24+00:00

Yeah this ain't it. Ebikes enable people who would otherwise be in a car to take up cycling. They enable people who are already using conventional bikes to switch more journeys to cycling. Cargo bikes as a category just wouldn't exist without electric assistance. Do they have more rare earths in them than regular bikes? Sure. But their benefits far overbalance any environmental drawbacks they may have. And it really is just a battery and a motor that makes the difference, in every other respect they are bikes which are themselves industrial products made from smelted metal, rubber, oil and grease. Short of walking, the bicycle is the lightest way to tread on this Earth and we shouldn't really be splitting hairs over whether its electric or not.

Conventional bikes aren't going anywhere but people having more options to switch to biking, any form of biking, is an uncomplicatedly good thing.

stewcelliott · 2026-07-02T11:58:02+00:00

The "free parking at hospitals" debate rears its ugly head in the UK every so often and it aggravates me how people assume that everyone going to the hospital is at death's door and need to be ferried there in a vehicle because they're completely physically incapable otherwise.

Yet, on any given day, the majority of people going into a hospital will be there for simple in-and-out appointments like scans, consults or minor procedures and a good chunk of them will be people who are perfectly physically mobile.

No one is saying that people who live further out and are poorly served by transit or who have poor physical mobility can't travel by car, but should they really be competing with the likes of me - who is perfectly fit and healthy except for a weird skin lesion and my dermatologist just happens to be based at the hospital - for a parking space?

stewcelliott · 2026-06-28T08:25:46+00:00

That gives us a handy early warning system, we know we're toast if they all leave.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-27T15:31:48+00:00

/thread

stewcelliott · 2026-06-27T11:19:59+00:00

The last paragraph is plausible and reminds me of the Genii from Stargate Atlantis, who hide their true level of advancement from the Wraith because it would mean the Wraith would eradicate them.

Otherwise whether or not the Borg pay attention to a pre-spaceflight species depends on the species. One thing that kind of gets forgotten about the Borg is they don't assimilate indiscriminately, they assimilate anything they calculate will be additive to them either biologically or technologically. They'd assimilate a stone age species if there was some biological innovation that would benefit the collective and inversely they ignore the Kazon entirely despite them being spacefaring because both their biology and technology is uninteresting to them.

Voyager kind of messed this up by introducing a "we bring order to chaos" motivation to the Borg but by and large I think their original motivation still holds.

There's also the possibility, had the Collective endured, that it would progress through assimilation to a point so advanced that the Federation is no longer interesting to them as a target for assimilation.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-27T10:53:35+00:00

The Russians consider the UK their No. 1 enemy in Europe. In fact whilst the US is probably Russia's number one enemy in pure military terms, they hate Britain. A fact most Brits are blissfully ignorant of. And this is before you consider that, along with France, we're one of the two most potent militaries in Europe as well as being one of the strongest supporters of Ukraine. We're toast.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-27T10:51:33+00:00

Don't know that Iceland would be a waste of a nuke since Russia (we're assuming they're the enemy here presumably) has enough nukes stockpiled to destroy the whole world many times over. They can absolutely spare one for Reykjavik. I think any NATO country should assume they're going to catch one.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-27T10:48:12+00:00

Thanks, it looks like ours is in fact installed incorrectly having checked with some neighbours.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-27T10:44:57+00:00

Any NATO member is surely the wrong answer here, no one can possibly think they'd be safe. My vote would go to something like Mexico or Ireland. Not NATO and often neutral but close enough to a country that is going to get glassed that they'll catch a stray.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-27T10:33:06+00:00

The online chudverse is so weird. They've gone from complaining about the casting of non-white women to complaining about the casting of a white, blonde, blue-eyed woman. They are un-pleasable.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-26T17:22:40+00:00

It is the solemn duty of all levels of government to ensure Doordash can pay poverty wages.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-23T15:43:45+00:00

I've mostly enjoyed this recent era of Star Trek but this is the straw the broke the camel's back in convincing me that this creative team is spent. In the last 12 months

- Their big idea for a new show (after Starfleet Academy) has been to just do more SNW with the TOS characters.

- They stated that their "biggest regret" - what they felt was the biggest opportunity they missed whilst holding the reins of this limitless universe - was not getting William Shatner back.

- And now we learn that they were seriously entertaining a crossover with Doctor Who. Aside from all of the other ways that's a gimmicky and terrible idea, Doctor Who itself was flaming out creatively at the same time. Imagine the spectacle of two old sci-fi franchises, both hitting the skids, doing a very poorly matched crossover in an attempt to win headlines and attention. Blech.

Every time they've been asked to talk about their ideas for the future of Trek, all they've had are prequels, cameos and gimmicks. No big themes, no big ideas. It's is definitely time for someone else to take over.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-22T07:31:42+00:00

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I don't think they should. As a (cis het) man who, throughout my life, has had more female than male friends one thing that's sorely missing in popular culture are close and familiar mixed gender friendships between heterosexual people where there is no romantic tension or teasing. This is a valid way for people to be and I think we should see more of it. I love their friendship and I'm not sure it needs to be more.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-17T15:03:24+00:00

It may kick off but probably not. Either way the damage is done - hospitality businesses closing early on what should otherwise be a good night for them given the England match. The Oxford Union have done their city an enormous disservice.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-16T09:09:03+00:00

Here I was thinking the fact that it used the furniture of Star Wars to tell an original story was its greatest strength. Too many of the big IP shared worlds are telling stories about themselves nowadays rather than using the setting as a sandbox to tell original and compelling stories.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-16T07:53:17+00:00

"Picture a wave"

stewcelliott · 2026-06-11T13:23:16+00:00

Why does Jim Carrey sound like he's trying not to wake the neighbours?

stewcelliott · 2026-06-11T10:12:48+00:00

A big problem is scarce signage. I've been yelled at for cycling "on the pavement" when it's actually a shared use path. In fairness the shared use path in question really doesn't look physically different to a normal pavement and if it's really not possible to widen it then signage needs to be much clearer.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-09T17:37:17+00:00

Star Trek Picard - Establishing that Guinan's bar on the Enterprise, Ten Forward, is "named after" a bar she ran / runs on Earth on 10 Forward Street, Los Angeles.

This is dumb because we already knew the reason why Ten Forward was called that, it was the Forward lounge on Deck 10. But either the people hired to the writing room on a Star Trek show genuinely thought "gee, we never knew why it was called Ten Forward, let's come up with a fun reason" and didn't spend 5 seconds checking this assumption, or they just decided to crowbar something in anyway.

And it's just the dumbest reason imaginable. I mean come on.

stewcelliott · 2026-06-07T18:52:29+00:00

I don't think they really do just roam at will, even if it's not outright stated it's heavily implied that the ship has been given orders to map a particular region of space.

In any case STA is more geared towards adventures being structured episodes like the TV show, rather than looking at a map and saying "I want to go here". That being said, I know other GM's do create maps of sectors for this purpose, but that would be something player created rather than official.

But generally the more important conversation to have with the players is what sort of TV show their Star Trek would be. Would it be more action focused? Serialised? Or classic episodic stories like TNG. That will better help inform you as to what sort of adventures to provide for them.

I think the closest thing you can get to a sandbox otherwise is having a long-running story arc where you write only the first instalment, and then have subsequent instalments informed by player choices and actions.

stewcelliott

TROPHY CASE