From Community to House of Cosbys to Rick and Morty, Dan Harmon made a name for himself as a comedy genius. IDK much about Justin Rowland, but I assume he's at least partly responsible for some of the most brilliant moments of Rick and Morty, and I'm not just talking about the jokes. Among other episodes, The Wedding Squanchers, The Rickshank Redemption, Pickle Rick, Rickmancing the Stone and Look Who's Purging Now show great mastering of how action scenes are supposed to work. They ally irreverence, great rhythm and creative use of violence to make delicious gory spectacles. Unlike the increasingly incomprehensible movie brawls of today (I'm looking at you, Marvel...), their battles can be just as fast, but their choreographs are dramatic and easy to follow while retaining a great degree of complexity.

Dan Harmon and his team have a lot to teach to Hollywood.

Kitchen knives are frequently used to stab people. This results in serious injury or often death. Most stabbing murders are perpetrated with kitchen knives, reflecting the huge numbers of knives available (most homes have one), and where most murders happen (in the home). (I'm talking about UK here).

Kitchen knives have a cutting edge and usually a sharp piercing point. There's nothing that can be done to make the cutting edge safer. But we can look at the pointy tip.

Pointy tips are useful, but we tend to find that only professional chefs or experienced home cooks use them. Most people cooking at home don't use or need such a pointy tip.

There are some companies releasing knives without the pointy tip, and I'm interested to know what you think.

https://twitter.com/JohnHMCrichton/status/1209095901102387200?s=20

So someone asked about which themes are used the most, and I went to check this
survey and then realized it was deleted and that no new surveys have been done since.

So are most of us interested in this becoming a formal and regular thing?

The Mandalorian is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order. We follow the travails of a lone gunfighter in the outer reaches of the galaxy far from the authority of the New Republic.

Previous:

• S01E01+2
• S01E03
• S01E04

My use case:
I watch videos (YouTube) and listen to audio (Podcasts) as a major part of my weekly media intake. I would love some sort of generated Tildes Playlist . IANADev, but it sure would be nice if Tildes was able to parse, scrape, and categorize media posted as topics and in comments. Then present them to me with a date filter, and allow separating audio only and video media. Maybe something like tildes.net/?tag= but at tildes.net/playlist. I guess it would be nice to be able to sort media by tag as well.

Possible other use case:
Accessibility?

I see that some videos are already being tagged "videos." So there already is some organic interest in this special category, right?

What do you all think, is this useful?

From a dev perspective, is getting that correct enough difficult? Does Embedly categorize audio only and video?

edit: in the playlist view, there should of course be a link back to the topic or comment where the media was found. Also, @Deimos, I certainly don't want to take Tildes away from the text-first/only direction of the site, but sometimes I am doing stuff conducive to audio/video media intake like cooking, driving, etc. It would be cool to be able to easily consume it then, and come back to comment later.

Admittedly highly unlikely ... but also becoming less inconceivable by the day. She is 2nd in line after Pence.

So, let's just say, 3-5 months from now, They swear in Pelosi as the next POTUS. What does that do to both Repub and Dem Primaries? What does it mean for the next election? Does the US keep itself together long enough to have an election?

Heck, while I'm asking, what about a President Pence in 3-5 months. That's at least an order of magnitude less unlikely. How would that play out?

PS: Somebody recently started a 'what do you daydream about' thread ... so, you-know ... this.

From time to time I see people on the internet who remember Google Reader fondly, and miss it. At the time, I didn't have much use for something like it, so I never used it.
But a common theme in these conversations about Google Reader is that no other feed reader ever offered everything Google Reader could, but I can't seem to find details.

So what was it? Does anyone here remember Google Reader, or even still wishes it was available? Why did nothing come from the Open Source community that could replace it?

This question has been going through my head for quite some time. UBI has been talked about quite a bit now, and usually the question is if it should be introduced and if yes, how much should everyone get?

But how would you stop UBI from inflating the economy? If everyone suddenly gets 1000€/month purely because they exist, how do you stop rent from suddenly going up 1000€/month? How do you stop it from going up gradually?

Apple has spent a lot of money on The Morning Show for its new tv service. It has a bunch of actors that I love. In particular I'm excited to see Anniston, Duplas, Carell, and Crudup in this.

Metacritic gives it only 60. https://www.metacritic.com/tv/the-morning-show Sometimes a single terrible review can drag that number down, but that doesn't appear to be the case here. There are a few bad reviews, and lots of mixed reviews.

I don't know much about critique or how reviewing works, so I'm curious: is The Morning Show bad, or are critics terrible at reviewing, or is something else going on?

This is what you get when you search VUDU for free science fiction movies. The plot is banal enough. A spacecraft is discovered in Colorado that is 14,000 years old. A linguist and her lover are hired to read an inscription and then summarily paid and told to go home by the mysterious and unlikeable head of the project, Richard Kontral.

This description in no way does justice to how bad the script is. My first theory was that a rich father gave his fourteen year old son a chance to create a movie for his birthday present. But it's really just a low budget sequel to an obscure cult film called Moontrap.

The lead character, Scout, is played by Sarah Butler who evidently rose to wordly fame in I Spit on Your Grave. Every line that Scout says to the villain includes adolescent sexual insults. The villain is I believe a washed up actor from an old sitcom called The Nanny. This guy is really hard to watch, the acting is as bad as the script.

There's a scene of robots fighting that looks like it was choreographed with Rockem Sockem Robots, a toy from my childhood. If you're a collector of bad movies, this is a true gem.

It was tough to watch, but our free streaming was slim pickings that night. I wanted to watch Day of the Triffids a classic bad movie from the '60's , but got outvoted. At least that movie was based on an interesting SF novel by John Wyndham. Maybe tomorrow night.

We would most likely use a service like archive.org for it but I'm not sure if we should so before making an issue, I thought I'd ask for opinions.

It'd be useful to make sure old topics don't become obsolete but it could also be undesirable behaviour for privacy reasons.

If so, any thoughts before, during or after the race?

If not, feel free to ask any questions about the sport or motor racing in general, if you'd like to beef up the ole knowledges.

( Discord server invite for more action : https://discordapp.com/invite/dCnYaSw )

IMO one of the major issues with online debates, arguments and heated discussions is that they often tend to escalate rather steadily over time, and as each side gets more frustrated with the other they also tend to slowly get more personal as well. I am admittedly guilty of falling into this trap occasionally myself too, which has got me thinking about ways that Tildes (the site and the users here) can potentially help deescalate unproductive arguments and allow people to disengage more effectively from them. To this end I thought it might be a good idea to have a brainstorming session regarding that.

To start things off, here are most of the ideas I could find related to this issue that have previously been proposed and are already on Tildes Gitlab (click ▶ to read the full details):

Feel free to voice your support or criticism regarding the above suggestions, offer up ideas to potentially improve them, or even propose your own brand new ideas related to this issue in the comments here as well.

p.s. Once again, the point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week #1, #2

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

Despite me still being a little distracted thanks to WoW Classic and somewhat absent from Tildes lately as a result, since it's been a few weeks since the last Unofficial Weekly Discussion topic, I wanted to make sure to get one posted this week. And since it's been a while, I wanted to try something a bit more lighthearted and fun than usual to get things flowing again. So here it is:

What is your most "thinking outside the box", "pie in the sky" and/or "out there" idea for Tildes?

It doesn't matter whether you think it's really a good idea or not, it will work or not, it would ultimately have a net positive or negative effect, or how impossible it might be to implement; Let's just get the creative juices flowing and start throwing out our "craziest" ideas for the site!

p.s. Once again, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week #1, #2, #3

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

@gergir mentioned the idea, and I thought, why not give it a try?

I'm a young adult from Turkey, lived up until now in Istanbul. Whether specific to that city or not, and whether about life, tourist attractions, politics, culture, etc., just AmA.

If you have anything you don't want to publicly ask, I'l love to help if you PM me your question.

The Apple Keynote is on September 10th, at 10am Pacific Daylight Time (daylight savings is in effect). I'm making this thread as a place to discuss the announcements here on ~tech.

TIme:

• 10:00am PDT (California / Apple time)
• 5:00pm GMT (Greenwich time)

Livestream Links

• Apple's website stream -- requires a browser that supports both HLS and HEVC (safari and edge)
• Apple's Youtube stream -- first time Apple is streaming on youtube. Should work anywhere that Youtube works :) They'll probably break the stream record.

Tl;Dr of actual announcements (updating right now)

• Apple Arcade announced
  • $4.99 / month and one month free.
  • 100 indie exclusives on launch
• Apple TV+ announced
  • $4.99 / month, launching November 1
  • New originals every month! 100 countries at launch
  • Including 1 year free with device (iPhone, iPad, or mac) purchases starting today.
• New base model iPad
  • 10.2 inch display, Runs A10 Fusion chip, (optional) smart keyboard
  • New iPad is made from 100% recycled aluminum (like the new MacBook air)
  • Starts at $399 (competing with chrome books). $299 for education customers.
  • includes Apple Pencil support
• Apple Watch Series 5!!!!
  • Health and Fitness video
  • 3 New health studies!!!
    - Apple Hearing Study
    - Apple Women's Health Study (How cycles affect various health conditions)
    - Apple Heart Study
    - Enrollment is voluntary. OPT-IN by downloading the app and getting enrolled.
  • Apple Watch Series 5
    - ALWAYS ON LTPO OLED display, with Dynamic Refresh Rate (1Hz - 60Hz VRR)
    - Same 18 hour battery life
    - International Emergency Calling on all cellular models
    - 100% recycled aluminum.
    - Stainless Steel, Titanium, Ceramic
    - Series 3 watch starts at $199, Series 5 starts at $499
• iPhone 11!
  • Aluminum and Glass, comes in a bunch of colors
  • Spatial audio + Dolby Atmos for next level smartphone sound
  • New Camera -- 120º FOV Wide angle camera, 12MP with 100% Focus Pixels
    - 0.5x Optical Zoom out :)
    - New Image processing pipelines, with semantic rendering and adaptive tone mapping
    - Portrait mode improvements (wider portraits, and more) (yay, now for pets!)
    - Night Mode has adaptive image slicing and fusion for reducing blur in long exposure.
    - 4K HDR video at 60fps (was previously 30fps!)
    - Front Camera is now 12MP wide angle
    - 4K 30fps HDR video, Slowmotion Video for front facing camera! :)
  • A13 Bionic processor
    - fastest GPU and CPU ever in a smartphone
    - Game demo showing off Metal 2 Shaders, Bloom, and AA in realtime at 60fps
    - Battery is now 1 hr longer than the previous XR
    - U1 Chip? (on slide, not mentioned)
  • Wifi 6 support!
  • 2m water resistance for 30 minutes
  • 6.1 inch Liquid Retina display
  • Priced sanely at $699
• iPhone 11 Pro
  • 3 camera array
  • Matte Textured Glass
  • Super Retina XDR Display.
    - 2,000,000:1 contrast ratio
    - 1200 nits of brightness
    - 426 ppi
    - Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos
  • A13 Bionic Chip Design
    - Machine Learning Matrix Multiplier Accelerators make matrix operations 6x faster on iPhone
    - Best ML platform of any Smartphone
    - Lower power design using 7nm+ lithography
    - 8.5 Billion Transistors
    - 4 High Efficiency CPU cores
    - Hundreds of Voltage domains and clock domains
    - Each region of the chip is at least 20% faster, and uses at least 20% less power
  • 3 camera system
    - 4x zoom range (0.5 to 2x)
    - 53-13mm focal lengths, and f1.8 to f2.4
    - Deep Fusion camera system - stitches together burst photos + long exposure to maximize detail and reduce noise.
    - Filmic Pro demo -- allowing multiple camera use at the same time.
  • iPhone 11 Pro at $999, Pro Max at $1099
  • iPhone 11 at $699 and XR at $599 and iPhone 8 at $499 to complete the lineup.
• Apple Store Updates
  • Apple Watch Studio - pair any watch with any band of your choice. Configure as you want
  • iPhone trade ins can now be used for a lower monthly rate if you buy an iPhone, rather than simply taking off the purchase price.
  • 5th Ave Store is being redesigned and re-opening Sept 20th!

Other miscellaneous / fun stuff

• Apple Keynote Bingo Card -- 5 in a row to win! :)
• Upgrade Podcast Draft Card -- the hosts have predicted what they should see at the event. Person with the most points wins.

Edits:

• fixed part about browsers with HLS support, and added a table showing compatible browsers.
• remved "what we're expecting" section, and started updating the event live feed.

Let's talk about recently released Neon Genesis Evangelion Astral Chain game. Developed by Platinum this Nintendo Switch exclusive had been a highlight for recent Nintendo Directs and gotten favorable reviews by critics and by the public.

Have you played it?
How do like it?
What do you think about the Legion gameplay?

Let's dive into it and try keeping spoilersto a minimum!

The thread about The Wizard of Oz helped me realize there were other musical fans here, and rather than go offtopic in that thread I figured I'd make a whole new one for discussion.

Topic is: musicals. Anything and everything. Tell me about your favorites, the shows you've been to, the songs that make you cry, the numbers you've performed at karaoke, what a talent Sarah Brightman is, how much you had to pay for Hamilton tickets -- whatever! It's all fair game!

Josha Stradowski is Rand al'Thor

Barney Harris is Mat Cauthon

Marcus Rutherford is Perrin Aybara

Zoë Robins is Nynaeve al'Meara

Madeleine Madden is Egwene al'Vere

There's a fair amount of excitement and discussion around the choices on Reddit.

Previously, Rosamund Pike was announced as Moiraine Damodred.

Inspired by @Lawrencium265's suggestion from a few days ago on advanced topic tag filtering:

After the discussion the other day on expanding groups into sub groups I had an idea about topic tags, advanced tag filtering rules. The main argument against sub groups is that it would sequester people away from each other. By allowing more advanced tag rules you could subscribe to topics that you're interested in, but further filter those if they include topics you don't like or allow certain threads that would get filtered out unless they contain a tag you are interested in or are within a certain group. I think this would attract different people to threads that wouldn't normally be and allow more diverse discussion and insight. So instead of having gaming.tabletop you would use the tabletop tag under gaming and those who are not interested in it can filter it out and those who are solely interested in it can subscribe to it, and then if a topic gets tagged in an unrelated group that you otherwise wouldn't be interested inyou will know about. This also has the side benefit if preventing cross posting or duplicates.

I have decided that the topic of this week's unofficial discussion is going to be on the Tildes topic tag system. But rather than make it specifically on topic tag filtering and that idea in particular, I figured we could open the discussion up a bit more and have a community brainstorming session on the topic tag system in general. I.e. Anything related to tag browsing, tag filtering, tag organization/standardization, etc.

Feel free to comment on any of the open "topic tag" related issues on Tildes Gitlab that pique your interest and you would like to discuss more in depth, propose your own new ideas related to topic tags, or even just spitball.

The point here is to open up the conversation and get ideas flowing freely, so with that in mind, let's please try to keep things positive, and keep any criticism purely constructive and friendly so as not to discourage people from participating.

Previous Unofficial Weekly Discussions:

Week - #1

Other relevant links:
Donate to Tildes - Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board - Tildes Official Docs

Since @Deimos has stated he will likely not be restarting the tradition of the Official Daily Tildes Discussions, which is something I and a number of other users greatly enjoyed and miss, I have decided to attempt to take on the responsibility of continuing them unofficially (with his blessing). And since these are not official (so won't be in ~tildes.official, which everyone is subscribed to and probably shouldn't unsubscribe from), I will only be doing them weekly instead of daily, and we now have topic tag filtering (so unofficial weekly discussion can be filtered out), hopefully the people who found the official daily discussions annoying can more easily ignore/hide these unofficial ones.

With the explanation out of the way, on to the topic for this week:

Suggestions/ideas/concerns for future unofficial weekly discussions

I thought it would be appropriate to have the first one of these be a bit of an open-ended, meta-meta discussion on the future of these topics. And to kick things off:

• What would everyone here like to see discussed in these topics in the future? Are there any particular site features (planned, suggested or theoretical), policies (tagging, moderation, etc), or other meta issues/subjects you would like to be the topic in future discussions?

• What would you like us to try to achieve with these discussions? Should we have any specific goals in mind, or should they just be fun brainstorming/theory-crafting/naval-gazing sessions?

• Does anyone have any suggestions for me with regards to how I should handle these discussions? Is there anyone out there who would like to help me with these in some capacity going forwards?

• Does anyone have any concerns regarding these unofficial discussions, and if so, can you think of any ways we can try to address them?

The floor is open, and I am all ears. :)

Tildes Official Docs : Donate to Tildes | Tildes Gitlab : Issues Board

One thing I really like about Tildes is the exemplary tags for comments. I love being able to let someone know I thought they had a great post, and I especially like that it's anonymous (though I realize some people like signing theirs, which I'm fine with too).

One thing I've found myself wanting to be able to do is give someone an exemplary label not for any one individual comment but for their contributions to the community at large. Maybe they're consistently thoughtful and insightful; maybe they go out of their way to post a lot of content for the community; maybe they're contributing code to the platform. It's less that any one particular thing they've done is amazing (though they often have individually great contributions too) and more that they've demonstrated a noteworthy and consistent pattern of good behavior.

As such, I think having something similar to the exemplary tag but applicable to a particular user could be very beneficial. I realize privately PMing a given user can currently accomplish this, but those are not anonymous, and I really like the idea of supporting others without revealing who I am, since I don't want my praise of others to influence their opinion of me. Furthermore, for the community at large, I think there's a benefit to praise of that type coming from "a voice in the crowd" rather than specific identifiable users, as it promotes community goodwill rather than person-to-person cheer.

Of course, with any type of anonymous feedback the thing to consider will be the potential for misuse. Someone could easily target/harass someone using an exemplary user feature by writing a nasty message, but this is also currently possible with exemplary tags and I don't know if it's been a problem? Nevertheless, it's something to consider. Perhaps a built-in report feature should something cross a line?

Furthermore, if such an appreciation mechanism were to be implemented, I would strongly advocate against any sort of publicly visual indicator on the site (like the blue stripe on comments). I think applying differences to that at the user level can create an appearance of user hierarchy, which is undesirable for a variety of reasons. Instead, I feel like it should be invisible to everyone except the recipient--basically an anonymous PM that they can't respond to, letting them know that they're awesome and why. I also think a similar "cooldown" system would benefit it. In fact, I'd probably advocate that it be longer than the one for comment tags.

Thoughts?

It's no secret that social media is used by a large amount of people. The Pew Research Center has a social media fact sheet if you'd like to see the numbers.

• They claim that 72% of the American population uses some form of social media.
• In 2018 twitter reported 326 million active monthly users.
• Facebook posted record number profits last year.
• Reddit had 330 million users in 2018
• One of the most amazing parts of social media's rise is how quickly that it happened. As stated in the Pew Research article:
  when Pew Research Center began tracking social media adoption in 2005, just 5% of American adults used at least one of these platforms. By 2011 that share had risen to half of all Americans

With no signs of slowing down, social media is certainly going to be part of our lives for the foreseeable future. What sort of impact do you think it has had upon our society? Has it connected the people of the world, or disconnected them? Do the positive aspects outweigh the negative? If you believe social media's impact has been negative, do you think it can be fixed? How do you see social media evolving?

If you're like me, you have tons of various projects/companies/organizations that you like to keep up with. I have a few different methods I use to keep track of everything, but they all seem fragmented. Here are the methods I use:

• An RSS reader with the blogs of projects I follow
• Following the project on social media
  • Mastodon
  • Twitter
  • Reddit

The RSS feeds work, but I almost always miss the social media posts. Is there a better way to do this? What do you Tildians do?

Here in 2019 the overwhelming majority of all currency is virtual and commerce on any appreciable scale occurs electronically. But consider a sci-fi/space opera setting where reasonably fast FTL is commonplace, but FTL communications are not possible. Obviously one could still "communicate" at FTL with a courier, but you would still be limited to the speed of the courier ship. You certainly wouldn't have instantaneous communication between star systems, meaning there can be no interstellar electronic banking: transactions would take years to complete.

The Traveller tabletop RPG uses exactly this setup: FTL travel is common, FTL communication does not exist. In Traveller you have the Third Imperium minting currency that is accepted essentially everywhere, the currency is Imperial Credits and they're printed on polymer bills. The result is an effectively cash-only economy.

But what if your setting has no centralized government? Do people revert to using gold? Are there fleets of merchant ships schlepping precious metals around the cosmos, as if the American Old West has been transplanted into space? Would they come up with a cryptographic solution? Could something like a blockchain work without instantaneous communication cross the entire network that accepts the cryptocurrency?

What if quantum computing is widespread in your setting, rendering most forms of encryption obsolete? That would seem to eliminate the blockchain based option, FTL comms or not, and once again send us back to needing a fiat currency, or a gold standard.

Given a movie with ambiguous story, you have multiple options to base your interpretation upon: you have the movie itself, the screenplay if available, what the author said in interviews or books, etc... Now, if we take a video game, you also have additional tools: the source code, the installed file names, unused resources, etc. There are of course a few games that expect the player to check these files but that isn't what I want to focus on.

Would you say that all these files have the same authority as the game itself when it comes to interpretations?

I'd like to take an example with SPOILERS FOR LIFE IS STRANGE 1, as this is the game that sparked this topic for me:

The blue butterfly has a special place in this game, it is what starts the whole journey when Max takes a picture of it and Chloe gets shot. It also shown again in the 'Sacrifice Chloe' ending during that same scene. And later during Chloe's burial that butterfly is shown to land on the coffin in front of Max and fly away. There are some scenes that imply that spirit animals are a thing in the in-game universe. After finishing the game my interpretation was that the blue butterfly was Chloe's spirit animal. Now what a surprise to see in the game wiki that the texture file for that butterfly is named 'Spirit_animal_Chloe' !

Is there any room left for interpretation when the source makes it explicit text? Or can the source be reasonably be pushed aside?

I was thinking about this question recently because I finished watching Game of Thrones and it made me want to play a game where I get to be a badass dragon. Unfortunately, it turns out there are surprisingly few games that tackle that experience.

I also recently played a game called 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, which attempts to inform the player about a real event in history through Telltale-style adventure gameplay. Though it's fictionalized, I realized while playing that it's as close to a documentary as I've come in gaming, which I would argue is another unexplored area.

That said, I'm curious to see what people here think.

• What are some ideas/experiences that games haven't tackled, or have hardly scratched the surface of?
• Why do you think this area has gone untouched for so long? Oversight? Tough to design around? Unfeasible? Unfun?
• Are there any games that do fit your bill? Are they any good?
• If you had to design a game to fill the niche you identified, what might it be like?

I'm in too much of a left-wing echo chamber, to the point where anything conservative or right wing appears to be 'evil' or not necessarily purely right-wing. For example, conservatives generally promote family values and the family as the foundational unit of a society. But this too often gets grouped together with same/opposite sex marriage arguments. Another point is small government, but that often manifests in deregulation in areas where regulation is now necessary (e.g. environment).

So, what does it mean to be an ethical right-winger today and in the next decade?

I Am Mother is a sci fi movie centered in a dystopian future with a novel twist.

If you prefer neat, predictable endings, then this movie is probably not for you.

What is particularly interesting, is the movie is almost deliberately ambiguous, and it constantly challenges the usual assumptions you might make.

The final reveal subtly explains away some of the elements that at first seemed a little jarring or confusing. Other aspects are not fully explained. This creates enough space to construct some very interesting back story theories, while ultimately leaving you guessing.

Spoilers for all seasons of both The Orville and Star Trek: Discovery.

The Orville isn't bad, but it's not the worthy successor to pre-Abrams Star Trek that a lot of people on /r/startrek—and increasingly on /r/DaystromInstitute—make it out to be, and honestly I struggle to understand how people are even reaching that conclusion.

I should start, I suppose, with what I like about this show. First, I like the characters—with two exceptions, I'll get to that later. Dr. Finn, in particular, is a delight: Penny Johnson Jerald is a very talented actress and it's really great to see her in a role where the rest of the cast draws on her character's wisdom. She plays it well. The rest of the bridge crew is great, too: Gordon, LaMarr, and Bortas are all lots of fun, and Jessica Szohr is a great addition for season 2: Halston Sage didn't quite have the skill to pull her character off.

The show looks great. Union vessels are distinct from Federation vessels and they're not just ISO Human Standard Spaceships either, which is commendable. Kaylon spheres are neat play on Borg cubes, and my only real complaint in this regard is that Moclan and Krill vessels look oddly similar. The engine effects, the depiction of celestial objects, the overall Union aesthetic, it's all very pleasing to the eye.

The worldbuilding is great. This is the one place that I think I would even go as far to say The Orville has a clear edge over Star Trek. Trek has built up loads of cruft over the years and sometimes struggles to keep it all together. For example, The Orville has swept away the inconsistent depiction of enlisted personnel that Trek fouls up seemingly very chance it gets by just depicting officers, which makes sense for a highly automated vessel. I fundamentally "buy" the Planetary Union as a human-centric interstellar polity in the same way I buy the UFP. (My one complaint in this department is that there does not appear to be any bureaucratic distinction between the Union government and the Union fleet, i.e. it lacks the distinction between The Federation and Starfleet. That seems like an oddity I hope they correct in season 3.) McFarlane is a nerd, he's fastidious about detail, and you just know he's has to have pages upon pages of worldbuilding details which helps him keep it consistent. It shows.

But the show falls flat on its face in two key ways which, unfortunately, appear to be baked into the concept.

Shortfall one: I just can't seem to warm up to either Mercer or Grayson, which for obvious reasons is a huge problem, because the show is now on record as indicating that their romantic relationship is The Key To Saving The Galaxy™. The Orville is an episodic throwback, but if it has a "main arc," that main arc is Ed & Kelly's relationship, and it just feels awkward and out of place.

I don't really dislike Grayson, but I can't find anything to really like about her either. She's just kinda there, and her story never diverges from Mercer's. Which brings me to Mercer... which... just... ugh. Never in my life have I seen a more egregious case of a show creator playing out his fantasy on camera. I cannot tell you the number of times I've seen someone make a statement which boils down to "I don't like Discovery because Burnham is a Mary Sue, and that's why I prefer The Orville" as if Mercer is not the most blatant case of a Marty Stu to ever grace network television and get renewed for a second season. I mean, come on. He's the perfect captain, he always makes the right call, yet for some reason the show keeps trying to sell us on the notion that he's damaged goods and out-of-favor with the Admiralty. It's not believable, and it irks me endlessly that anyone would lob this criticism at Discovery when The Orville is an order of magnitude more guilty of this conceit.

And that brings me to the elephant in the room: the direct Star Trek comparison. I seem to recall Season 1 having a novel episode here and there, even if they were snoozefests. Season 1 also bothered to draw from other sources of inspiration, even if those sources were Trek-adjacent shows like Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone. But on the other hand, some episodes from season 1 were straight rips from old Trek. "If the Stars Should Appear"? Straight remake of "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky." "Mad Idolatry"? Straight remake of "Blink of an Eye."

And Season 2? Season 2 doubled down on the Trek remake approach. No other sources, no novel concepts: almost every episode is a remake of a previous episode of Star Trek. Sometimes The Orville at least bothered to remix a pair of episodes, and sometimes a lot of the details got changed, but with one exception, every episode was a Trek episode remake.

The degree to which a given The Orville episode is a remake of the Trek episode I've listed varies. "Home" is only similar if you look at the broad strokes: the officer on loan from the scientifically advanced Earth ally goes home where her family disparages her for spending all that time with humans. The home invasion plot from that episode was original, but it was also kinda weird and contrived. The flipside of this constant borrowing from Trek is that when The Orville does go off the beaten path, it's inevitably flat out boring. "Ja'loja" was an utterly forgettable episode because it largely focused on Ed & Kelly relationship drama.

And even if we look at "Ja'loja," there's a bit of "Amok Time" in there with the whole "returning to the desert homeworld" for the Moclan urination ceremony. Sometimes it's bits and pieces into a blender, but other times it's a basically a straight rip, like it is with "All the World Is Birthday Cake" and "Blood of Patriots." Perhaps the most blatant "homage" was introducing a surgically altered Klingon Krill to infiltrate the hero ship, right down to the name and rank of the infiltrator!

I know, everything's a remix, and I know, it's a fine line between "ripoff" and "homage," but the problem with this level of "borrowing" is that when you've seen every episode of Star Trek as many times as I have, each episode of The Orville just becomes an exercise in "I wonder which Star Trek episode this will be," and once you figure it out, it just saps all the urgency and tension out of the viewing experience. It gets boring.

I didn't get bored with Discovery. I mean, sure, Discovery has its problems. In many ways its problems are the inverse of The Orville's strengths: I struggle to care all that much about any of the characters, the show is rife with dark sets and quick shots which just isn't that visually appealing, and the worldbuilding is at times really difficult to reconcile with established Trek lore. (The Spore drive is classified? That's why we never see it again? Ummm... OK, then.) And the story, while chaotic and poorly paced & planned due to constant showrunner turmoil, is at the very least interesting and novel.

The perfect Star Trek would be a synthesis of these two shows, but apart, each show pretty much breaks even when you take the strengths and weaknesses on the merits. Which brings me to my title: I cannot for the life of me get into the mindset of the fans who see this as the True Trek of our time. It's just remakes of old Trek, and while the visuals have been updated for 2019, the stories have not.

The bottom line is that while it's great that we have two Trek-style shows on the air at the same time for the first time since the 90's, neither show is great, or even good. They're both just OK, and the huge disparity between how they've been received doesn't make much sense to me.

I normally never take reports of ufos seriously, but major news outlets are reporting on videos taken by Navy pilots and the news anchors seem to take it as a joke. Even if these ufos are just high tech government drones or weather balloons, you'd think people would at least be curious in finding out what these things are.

Around the office normally I hear chatter about the news and current events, but nothing about these ufos. Nobody brings them up. On discussion forums, talk about the ufos seems really sparse as well. Even subreddits dedicated to ufos seem to not care very much about these videos being on the mainstream news. Now with legitimate proof that there is something strange in the air, why does nobody seem to care?

What are the leading explanations to what these things are? One explanation I've heard for at least one of the videos is that it's a stationary weather balloon that only appears to be moving due to the camera on the plane moving. I can accept this explanation for that video, but what about the other videos? And what about the navy pilot testimonies? Is this all just a publicity stunt for History Channel's new show?

Vancouver @ NYRB
LA Galaxy @ Orlando
Atlanta @ RSL
Montreal @ LAFC
NYCFC @ Chicago
FC Dallas @ Vancouver
DC United @ New England
Portland @ Philadelphia
NYRB @ FC Cincinnati
Houston @ MNUFC
Columbus @ Colorado
Seattle @ Sporting KC
San Jose @ Toronto

DC United @ Toronto FC
Portland Timbers @ Houston Dynamo
Atlanta United @ Vancouver Whitecaps
Orlando SC @ Seattle Sounders
FC Dallas @ LAFC
New England Revs @ Montreal Impact
Toronto FC @ Real Salt Lake
Chicago Fire @ San Jose Earthquakes
Seattle Sounders @ Philadelphia Union
Columbus Crew @ MNUFC
Vancouver Whitecaps @ Sporting KC
DC Unived @ Houston Dynamo
FC Cincinnati @ Orlando SC
Atlanta United @ NYRB
LAFC @ FC Dallas
Colorado Rapids @ LA Galaxy

I wasn't too sure whether that movie warranted a Discussion Thread, given only Endgame got one here so far but… hey, I really liked the movie.

The pokemon CGI was amazing. Storyline was not half-bad (not great tho); somewhat predictable although with a nice twist I personally didn't see coming.

I'm not even a huge pokemon fan or anything, but this took me back to my childhood quite a bit. I really like how they mostly featured pokemon from the original 151, which made the movie very approachable to old-timers.

It also didn't feel awkward or childish or cringey or anything you might expect from, well, a pokemon movie. Loved hearing the theme music in the TV background early on. Loved pikachu's singing, that was pretty hilarious, felt like a nice place for the movie to poke some fun towards itself.

Coming out, I was reminded of how I felt after seeing the Warcraft movie: Seeing characters that have played such a special part in my life, being brought to a full-feature live-action. It's really a unique feeling. I guess that's why I'm looking forward to both Aladdin and The Lion King coming out this year; even though neither were as special as Warcraft/Pokemon, I still get chills thinking about the unbelievable CGI quality we get for what a few years ago we'd never have thought would go beyond plain animation.

I tried to keep the post body mostly spoilerfree but this is tagged spoiler so I guess go nuts in the comments.

Toronto @ Atlanta
LA Galaxy @ Columbus
New England @ Chicago Fire
Montreal @ NYRB
Portland Timbers @ Vancouver Whitecaps
Montreal @ FC Cincinnati
NYRB @ FC Dallas
Philadelphia @ Toronto
NYCFC @ LA Galaxy
LAFC @ Columbus
San Jose @ New England
MNUFC @ Chicago Fire
Real Salt Lake @ Colorado
Houston @ Seattle
Orlando @ Atlanta
Sporting Kansas City @ DC United

Behind a 4-0 rout at Anfield to put down Barcelona and a 95th minute miracle by Lucas Moura the stage is set for the Champions League finals. I think this thread could be useful just to open up discussion on ~sports. What are your guys' thoughts on the finals or semi-finals? Any predictions?

In my opinion this is one of the greatest semi rounds I could remember, absolutely insane performances by all the teams and nail biting football all the way through.

EDIT : On the 1st of July the Tottenham Hotspurs will play Liverpool at the Estadio Wanda Metropolitano

FC Cincinnati @ Philadelphia Union
Vancouver Whitecaps @ Colorado Rapids
LA Galaxy @ NY Red Bulls
FC Dallas @ Houston Dynamo
Toronto FC @ Orlando City FC
NYCFC @ Montreal Impact
New England Revolution @ Philadelphia Union
Columbus Crew @ DC United
Seattle Sounders @ MNUFC
Portland Timbers @ Real Salt Lake
FC Cincinnati @ San Jose Earthquakes
Chicago Fire @ LAFC
Atlanta United @ Sporting Kansas City

Public Transportation should be free. Or near free, like a library. The same way we tax or want to tax pollution, we should fully subside public and ecological transports.

I was thinking about this earlier and was disappointed to find very few examples of pollution tax being put to funding public transports. Even fewer of public transportation being free. It's a bit underwhelming that this isn't talked about more in environmental policies.

DC United @ Columbus
Montreal @ New England
LA Galaxy @ MNUFC
San Jose @ Seattle
Orlando @ NYCFC
Portland Timbers @ Toronto
San Jose @ FC Dallas
Philadelphia @ Vancouver
Colorado @ Atlanta
FC Cincinnati @ NYRB
Columbus @ Houston
New England @ Sporting Kansas City
Chicago @ Montreal
DC United @ MNUFC
LAFC @ Seattle
Real Salt Lake @ LA Galaxy