rjshae

Paradise on Hulu. Decent thus far. The setting reminds me of the cosy apocalypse genre. It could just as easily be a generation ship. Why hasn't there been a generation ship drama series? It seems a natural for a human experiment drama; a modest population of people trapped on an isolated, self-sufficient ship for the rest of their lives. They could throw in the Fallout-style mad science experiments.

Yep, well that's one of my expectations for this administration: more people are going to die. Culling the herd, I suppose they'll call it.

Since USA military aid is ending, does that mean Ukraine is no longer under the combat constraints required under Biden?

Musk wants to take on 8th dan black belt judo master Vladimir Putin in a physical contest? That should be fun. More likely though, Musk would be slipped a neurotoxin.

I was more or less expecting that at some point we'd be forming a North American economic union, similar to the EU. Seems like we're heading in the opposite direction, but perhaps once this circus level event (CLE, pronounced silly) has passed its course...

It was a pretty good series, but by the final episode it was getting rather confusing, what with all the time travel and overlapping time loops. The motivation for the project director was pretty good though: with the development of true time travel, all bets were off. I.e. true time travel is the ultimate power and there was no saving everything if it fell in the wrong hands. That's a good reason for preventing it from ever being developed. I've got this crazy conjecture that time travel is impossible. It's not that the physics can't make it work, but rather that any civilization that develops time travel ultimately ends up wiping itself from existence. (This also includes any civilization that makes contact with a time travelling civilization, ad infinitum.) That's why we'll never develop a time machine, because doing so would create a paradox that would wipe out the time machine. Have fun with that one...

The Next COVID Vaccine Could Come in Pill Form Pretty cool technology. I'll bet it will be popular with those who dislike injections. That is, if it can get past RFK Jr. Multimillion-dollar Biden-era COVID-19 vax project halted by Trump’s HHS

On a related note, sales of Tesla have suddenly plummeted in Europe. It's either a political comment or just a random fluctuation; time will tell. Meanwhile, one wag called the Tesla Truck a Swasticar (in reference to Musk's hand salute gesture).

Bird flu has led to mass deaths of egg-laying chickens in the USA, which is part of the reason the cost is sky-rocketing. (Chicken meat isn't though, since it can be cooked.) The ultimate irony of this is the White House is considering a mass vaccination program to deal with the issue. Side effects don't matter when it's just an animal... but good luck when it breaks out among humans.

Doing another play-through, this time with an aasimar crusader cleric. At this point I'm a little bummed that I never got to have Woljif rejoin the party. I thought I did everything right, but he never showed up. I took the Legend route of giving up the Angel levels, so I'm at cleric 20/ranger demon hunter 16. The character now does a cr*p-tonne of damage even to heavy-duty demons, almost rivalling and sometimes surpassing Lann. Hopefully I can complete the end game without having the Angel levels. I love the Fortress of the Faithful spell, which I apparently got when I was treading the Angel path, then didn't get taken away when I switched to Legend. Hmm... a bug perhaps? With that spell active my party often barely gets a scratch, and it lasts for hours too. Another favorite is Storm of Justice, which often does heavy damage to multiple buffed out demons.

A Spiral Found at the Solar System’s Edge—And It’s Full of Surprises

The Russian economy isn't all that large these days, and their primary trade partners (as of 2017) were China, India, and... Germany. Hence, not much of a win. USA trade with Canada (752 billion) is vastly greater than it ever was with Russia (26 billion), and DJT is working to tank the former. Stable genius is in.

I'd say he's more likely to hear objections from Congress than from Europe. The US troop force in Europe has already shrunk from a peak of 300,000. It's going to be costly to redeploy the remaining forces, and even more so if we ever need to return. But, whatever, we're in stupid mode so par for the course.

Personally I'd like to see a PoE: Tactics game. I.e. something akin to Fallout Tactics, but with the Eora lore and character builds. Maybe include prior companions with a new protagonist, dealing with the conflicts that followed the outcome of PoE 2. If they made it moldable and extensible, that'd be even better.

One bird flu over the cuckoo's nest... yeah, sloppy work indeed. I was expecting gross mistakes to be made, and I wasn't disappointed.

Here's an upcoming movie I'm looking forward to watching: The concept is a bit reminiscent of Moon (2009), except on an interstellar scale. So maybe Moon: TNG.

I'm suggest the Gulf of Amexica... just sayin'.

Pretty cool shamanism f/x

We had another light dusting of snow here, but it cleared up after a day. Looks like we're in for a warming trend, so hopefully it's back to normal now.

Hulu -- Lazarus Project. It's been pretty good so far, being about a time loop setting in a sci-fi, mission-oriented context. The team is working to prevent mass extinction events by setting up a loop baseline then jumping back to repeat events when things don't go right.

Trump officials signal potential changes at NOAA, the weather and climate agency Speculating on what happens next: anybody and anything reporting climate change information will be scrubbed. Poof, just like that, climate change goes away. What a time to be alive...

It is still mandated by a few private colleges, which shouldn't be impacted by the order. But I'd be more worried about orders impacting hospitals.

Blowing what's left of my right mind

KM3NeT Telescope Detects Most Energetic Cosmic Neutrino Yet A particle that rarely interacts with normal matter yet its "energy was roughly a 100 million billion times the energy of visible light photons..." Whoa. It's something called a cosmogenic neutrino.