I just moved into a new apartment, and am using a 32" tv in the living room. The TV is already way too small, but I'd rather prioritize spending on the speakers first.

I thought I could live with the TV speakers, but have quickly realized that they have made watching movies impossible. The dialogue is impossible to hear without cranking up the volume. And then if there is anything other than dialogue, it's way too loud.

The walls in the apartment are fairly thin, so I'm pretty sure a subwoofer is out of the question. So I was looking at soundbars but keep seeing conflicting advice. There are articles like this that make them sound fine, yet when you go to place like /r/hometheater, everyone despises them.

So my next step was to look at powered bookshelf speakers. They seemed like a pretty good option, until I went to best buy to listen to them. I'm not sure if they just weren't set up properly or what, but none of them sounded that great. Especially when compared to the tower speakers they had.

So now I'm at a loss. Should I go with a soundbar, bookshelf, or tower speakers? My budget is under $500.

So, I am far from the most experienced, or the most knowledgeable, or the most active amateur radio operator out there, but it is something that has piqued my interest none the less. Before I got into the hobby, I always assumed that the FCC just game amateurs a small bucket of useless spectrum and that was it. Maybe you could fly an RC plane, but surely that is about as cool as it gets.

It turns out I was dead wrong. Amateurs are allocated bands all across the RF spectrum - more or less. Bands from way below the AM broadcast frequency to way above the microwave frequencies used by our cell phones and wireless routers. Also, you are allowed to legally transmit at up to 1.5 kilowatts of power! That's 3,000 times as much power as your average walkie talkie! :) Also, importantly, the license exam only costs $15.

At many of the lower frequencies, the signals bounce off the ionosphere and you can make contact with people all over the world (propagation gods permitting). At the higher frequencies, you lose that "skip propagation," but more bandwidth is available. There are analog voice repeater networks, digital packet networks, mesh networks running on modified commercial WiFi gear, and even a handful of old school packet BBSes. There are some LEO satellites which run voice repeaters which allow you make international contacts, and sometimes even the International Space Station will participate in events. Lots of cool stuff going on. This hobby is kind of a bottomless rabbit hole of possibilities.

I got my technician license about a year ago, and I have been most interested in the data networking end of the hobby. Despite being a pile of hacks, APRS is still very cool, and sometime soon I hope to set up an AREDN node of my own. Every once in a while I'll call into the local repeaters and shoot the breeze.

So there's my story. Are there any other hams out there?

My laptop is showing sings of death, and I know I will need a new one soon. Also, I am planning to get a tablet and ditch my smartphone, and to stop using the laptop for browsing content: I'll do most of that to the phone/tablet, and use the laptop as an authoring tool: writing and coding.

So I am looking for a laptop that is cheap, light, and can keep running for at least 3-5hrs under mild Debian+Emacs load. Ideally around 11"-13".

Does anyone have a business subscriber Internet connection? Is it worth it?

I just spoke with my ISP, and for an extra $40/mo I can get a static IP address with 100mbps that I can host my own website on. I have a virtualization server, and I've been thinking about hosting my own hobby-scale website for a while. I haven't had any luck finding rack hosting space that I'd feel comfortable using so I'm thinking about just going rogue, and operating solo. If I had a static IP address with a pipe that would allow me to host then all I'd need to do is stand up a server, register a domain, and point it at my IP address.

Other than the typical security risks, what do I need to worry about? Would the experience be worth it?

Long story, but I've ended up becoming the admin of a group on Facebook (the previous admin stepped down in a rush, and added me as he left). And the group has an existing group chat associated with it.

Is it possible to "moderate" this group chat? Specifically, as an admin of the group, can I remove unsavoury/unwanted messages from the chat associated with the group? It looks like I can't.

Can even the creator of a group chat do this? If I close the group chat and create a new one, will I (as its creator) be able to remove unsavoury/unwanted messages from that new chat?

I've done some searching via Google, and I'm not finding anything to indicate that this is possible. If someone posts something unsavoury in a group chat, it looks like the only option is to remove the person from the chat - but the unsavoury messages can't be deleted.

Please tell me that's wrong!

Hey Tildes!

I've got a static, basic website, HTML and CSS. It's one page only. But I'd like to create a second page with some more private content that is password protected.

I know that I can accomplish this via .htaccess but what I don't like about this method is that when the user navigates to the page, they get a pop up asking for a username and password. What I would like is having the user navigate to the page, and then they are met with a simple form asking for just a password (no username). After they enter the password, the "veil" lifts or the page forwards and they get the private content.

Here's the thing... the content really only needs to seem private. It's not super secret, personal information. I don't want it indexed by search engines (nofollow), and I want it basically hidden, but the password is only there to make the user feel exclusive. If some tech-minded person encountered this page and jumped through a bunch of hoops to get in without the password, it's not a big deal to me. In reality, 99.9% of people accessing this page will not be able to bypass the password.

I'm guessing this can be accomplished easily in Javascript, but I don't really know much Javascript apart from finding code snippets and plunking them in. I also want to be able to fully design the password entry page so that it looks branded, so a code snippet plunked down into my HTML doc would be great for this.

If there is an easy way to actually protect the content behind the password, that would be excellent. In this case, I imagine it would be much like a news site with an ad-blocker-blocker. Just some kind of pop-up that blocks all the content. Enter the password, and you're in.

Anyhow, I hope I've described what I'm looking for accurately enough. Anybody have any easy and quick ways to accomplish this?

I try to be privacy focused. I don't use social media, I use Firefox with adblock and tracker protection, with duck duck go as my search engine. I also pay for proton vpn. My question is, when should I use it? I use it when I'm on open networks on my phone, but that's about it. Do you guys run it 24/7 on your computer?

I hope this is the right place to post my question.
About me: I am 23, currently studying computer science in a university and failing it hard. I have finished school with pretty good grades, found school easy and didn't really put any effort into learning. After getting my fancy sheet of paper with my grades I applied to compsci studies. Fast forward to now, I am in my last semester with only 30% of credits I need to graduate. It is really hard, I have zero friends to work with at unversity, I make plans and detailed lists of work I have to do but always fail to follow them. I feel like I cannot control myself, one week I will do my work, next week I will struggle to get out of bed and do anything, I can spend whole day laying in bed and doing nothing. My personal life did not progress upwards too, I do not feel any joy in reading, communicating with people or doing basically anything. Everything feels like one big boring game of get a degree, work, make kids and die. My parents are disappointed, since I am failing uni, got fat and basically became a complete opposite of who I was at school. If I dont have anything to do I will just sit at home and stare at my computer, I dont even play games or watch movies, just mindlesly browse reddit or some forum without posting or commenting.

Maybe someone out here has faced a similar situation and give me a hint/tip to start with, I feel hopeless and useless. This situation seems like an endless void to me, maybe there is a way out that I cannot see?

I'm having some problems with a notebook I want to set up for a friend. And its the first time in a long time I'm not able to solve it just by myself. So I tried asking at #manjaro and #archlinux-newbies but I got no answer at all. It just seems that IRC changed a lot in the last 15 years. Or maybe my IRC manners are not up to date?
Anyway, do you know a place where there is a nice Linux-crowd? What are your favourite Places to get help? (besides the archwiki) ;-) I'm out of the loop for 10-15 years now because most places got pretty toxic.

Has anybody had much experience playing DnD or other tabletops with children? I've been toying with the idea of making a fairly straightforward and simplified RPG using Story Cubes and GURPS that kids can get involved with easily and have fun playing. I'm specifically aiming to play with my daughter (8) and my niece (5) on a big family holiday in August, though I see no real reason that this couldn't work with adults as well.
Essentially, the conceit would go along the lines of each player rolling a limited number of story dice to help with character creation and such. I'd ask the players a few simple questions about their powers (for example, are you more of a wizard or more of a warrior?) to get some basic stats stats together (STR, DEX, INT, CON), and then use story dice myself to quickly improvise a short one-shot session.

Does anyone have experience playing with kids, and if so - any pointers? Am I being too ambitious about children's ability to imagine stuff in this way? If so, are there any good systems out there that are good for young people to pick up and get stuck into roleplaying with?

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Notes: I am aiming to make a list of all the books mentioned in toplevel comments in these threads, see this wiki page. If you want to help with that, that'd really be appreciated, PM me please.

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9 · Week #10 · Week #11 · Week #12 · Week #13 · Week #14 · Week #15 · Week #16 · Week #17 · Week #18 · Week #19 · Week #20

I was thinking about how I can get caught in negative/critical thought patterns and fail to give gratitude to the people and things in my life that I love and spend time with. I end up taking a lot for granted or spending too much of my mental energy critiquing small flaws instead of appreciating the bigger, better picture.

As such, I'm curious to hear about stuff in your life. It can be big or small. It can be a person or a thing, or a person behind a thing (e.g. I'm grateful to the people that grow and roast the beans in my favorite coffee). What deserves more love and admiration in your life?

I have had a varied work history for the last decade but it has all been W-2. I now find myself doing consulting engagements and I am wondering if I should setup an LLC for this work. My main concern is actually limiting liability, and of course I am interested in possible tax advantages.

Has anyone else done this? If so, what’s the best way to set this up? Stripe has a program, I imagine legalzoom does as well..

I should start by saying that I, generally, hate animes. However, for some reason, One Punch Man (OPM) is fucking awesome! I like everything about it. I find myself laughing while watching it, Saitama is hilarious.

Can you suggest me animes similar to OPM, or animes that you think I would enjoy watching?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

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?

For example:
I remember that I had a really short fuse when I was in highschool. One day, I was having a bad day anyway, and a friend of mine made a comment about my appearance. I slapped him. I don't know why I thought it was a good idea. We then got into a fight which ended our friendship. I didn't apologize and haven't had the chance to do so since.

I am still thinking what the friend feels about the situation today and I am ashamed that this happened.

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?

This very impressive video for Weval's Someday, done by Páraic Mc Gloughlin (warning, possible seizure-inducing imagery), got me thinking. It's a great track in and of itself, but the sheer quality of the work on the video just wowed me. It came from a totally different angle than I envisioned in my mind when just listening to the song... yet when I read his take on it, it made perfect sense.

Otherwise, the White Stripes' I Fell In Love With A Girl and Alt-J's NSFW-ish vids for Every Other Freckle also come to mind, both the male and female versions. Also, This Is America by Childish Gambino. I'm struggling to think of other videos that really struck me, but that might just be my poor memory. Any suggestions?

Edit: Forgot some classics!

The Spike Jonze-directed Drop from The Pharcyde, with a nice peek behind the curtain here. A (Canadian?) rapper named Shad did a really cool tribute to that video with his own Rose Garden that put a nice spin on it.
Jamiroquai's Virtual Insanity (and another peek behind the curtain here)
Hype Williams + Busta Rhymes was always a gold combination, and their best collab was probably Gimme Some More
A-ha - Take On Me
Another NSFW one, D'Angelo's Untitled.

I also just remembered coming across Sour's Hibi no Neiro a few years ago and thinking it was such a really cool concept to essentially crowdsource a music video... reminds me of what Youtube used to be like.

One of my favorites from the new school is A$AP Mob - Yamborghini High, so trippy.
Another is Vince Staples - Señorita.

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.

Whenever I search for information about something - especially about a news event - Google returns me a lot of results from Australian sites. Any foreign sites come further down the list, sometimes even on the second page of results. I've never really paid much attention to this behaviour, beyond some occasional mild frustration at not being able to find local sources.

However, this came to a head this week when I was searching for a local US-based news article about something I'd read in an Australian news site, so I could post that local US article here on Tildes (I always try to get as close to the source as possible). But, try as I might, I just could not find any good non-Australian articles about this news! It was almost like Google was deliberately blocking my attempts to read non-Australian sites. I mean, it's possible that this news wasn't reported outside Australia, but that's unlikely, seeing as it was Uber's announcement about trialling electric aircraft in Texas and Victoria. That had to get American coverage. But I struggled to find it in my searches.

I then noticed something I've never noticed before: at the bottom of my Google searches, there's a small line which tells me my current location. It's as specific as my local council area, not just my state or the country.

Is this location affecting what Google shows me in my searches? If so, how do I remove this restriction?

For context: I use Chrome, but I only sign in when I'm accessing a Google service (usually the Calendar). After I've finished with the service, I sign out. So Google isn't tracking me as a person, it's just tracking my browser's search activity.

EDIT: Thank you all. I've already set up DuckDuckGo as my default search engine, and am trying it out.

• Who are the LGBTQ individuals you look up to or admire?
• In what ways do you find them inspiring or admirable?
• Has their example and influence helped you in your own life? If so, how?

Don't feel like you have to talk about someone famous: plenty of LGBTQ heroes are the people we know personally, and I would love to hear those kinds of stories. Also, feel free to include people who don't identify as LGBTQ but who still fit the criteria of a role model/hero for the community (e.g. Judy Shepard, Jonathan Larson, a supportive straight sibling, etc.).

What is the programming language you enjoy the most, or otherwise define as your favourite? Why is that particular language your favourite?

Bonus: add just a little bit of code in it that you think exposes its beauty.

What have you been watching and reading this week? You don't need to give us a whole essay if you don't want to, but please write something! Feel free to talk about something you saw that was cool, something that was bad, ask for recommendations, or anything else you can think of.

If you want to, feel free to find the thing you're talking about and link to its pages on Anilist, MAL, or any other database you use!

I'm a pretty regular YouTube watcher but if I accidentally glance down at the comments section, I know my night is going to be ruined.

I wondered if there is any kind of YouTube app or service that lets you watch and search for videos (even access my subscribed channels) but with less of the crap, ie. the comments and related videos, which just take you down a YouTube rabbit hole that you won't get out of for hours.

Cheers!

Like the title says, every Christmas when my family gets together we play board games traditionally Monopoly. Last year I got tired of playing it and after some research I found Concordia and we had a blast playing it. I'm trying to jump the gun and researching ahead for this year, what are ~games recommendations for a good 2+ player game that isn't too convoluted to pick up and is a good time?

You know, something that, by all accounts, really shouldn't bother you that much but for some reason does. Like when the toilet paper roll is hanging the wrong way. Or when somebody doesn't use multiples of 5 on the timer for the microwave.

• What are your pet peeves?
• Why do you think they bother you so much?
• Can you get past them?
• When other people find out about them do they use them to pester you?

Also, feel free to think past IRL stuff and into online stuff and media. Maybe there's something authors do that rubs you the wrong way, or you're weirdly bothered by a particular TV trope.

Have any of you done these degrees? I'm switching disciplines for my MA, and I want to collect information on this alternative method should I fail that this summer. I'd have a more complete grasp of the field and proceed to a PhD equipped with better knowledge. The price to pay being some time, but I'll probably already have to do my MA---if I manage---in three years b/c the school might want me to take an extra preparatory year going through some undergrad classes.

So, any experiences, any comments, any links highly appreciated!

P.S.: EU information appreciated, that's been significantly harder to get at.

It can be your favorite for any reason: interesting subject, extremely in depth and well written, funny details, “branching potential” (it links to a lot of interesting topics you can branch off to), etc.

Some questions to consider:

• How do you feel about it as a whole?
• What is your experience with it like? Do you go out, celebrate, march, get involved? Does it connect you to others or affirm your identity?
• What positives does it bring to the table?
• What critiques do you have of it?

This last one can be treated as hypothetical but might apply to some real experiences as well--either are valid:

• If you chose to march in a parade to bring awareness to an issue, what cause would you represent? How would you show it, or what would your sign say? Who would you want there alongside you?

What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)

Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.

You can make a chart if you use last.fm:

http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/

Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.

I’m down to just Hacker News and Tildes for my daily digest. I think using link aggregators is a great way to gain exposure to outside perspectives.

Occasionally, I check the Wikipedia main page for juicy world news and featured articles.

This is of course the age old debate, which on other sites has been known to quickly devolve (one of the Internet ‘holy wars’ of yore). Nonetheless, I am curious.

I personally use vim. Part of the reason is surely that it is just the first one of the two that I happened to use, and thus by the time I tried emacs I was used to vim. But more broadly, I enjoy using vim because once you get over the hump of ‘weird’ commands and modes, I feel that vim most closely emulates the feelings and thought process that you have when building something with your hands. You can pick up different tools, yank pieces out and rearrange them, turn the object around in your hands to see different parts, etc etc. Once you internalize the movement and editing you really start flying around. At that point the interface seems less like a barrier between you and the text and more like a way to ‘hold’ it.

Of course, people have different preferences.

I practiced and studied Zen meditation in many periods of my life, and it helped me immensely.

I find it's philosophy reasonable and compelling: the basic idea of simply doing what's in front of you. If you have to do the dishes, do the dishes and nothing else. Be full in the act of doing the dishes.

Zen writing and meditation reduce my anxiety by helping me look at life in a more positive and expontaneous way. Paradoxically, worrying less about results usually gets much better results.

With that said, I ask:

• Do you practice any form of meditation? Which one?
• What was your initial purpose for practicing meditation?
• Are you still doing it? Why?
• Do you study the philosophical, scientifical or religious aspects behind your practice?

The recent topic about vote counts being removed has sprung up some discussion about the nature of validation. Given that the comments over there seem to address the idea in the context of Tildes specifically, I figured I'd create an offshoot thread for a more philosophical discussion of the question at large.

• When is validation a good or bad thing?
• Is seeking validation fundamentally a bad thing?
• Is receiving validation for something great you've done fundamentally a good thing?
• What is your own relationship like with validation?
• Should platforms structurally encourage/discourage/balance methods for validation?

What are you reading currently? Fiction or non-fiction, any genre, any language! Tell us what you're reading, and talk a bit about it.

Notes: I'm starting this a couple days earlier because I will not be able to do it on Friday this time round. This is a one-time deviation from the usual schedule. Sorry for the inconvenience if it causes any trouble to anybody. Have a nice time!

Past weeks: Week #1 · Week #2 · Week #3 · Week #4 · Week #5 · Week #6 · Week #7 · Week #8 · Week #9 · Week #10 · Week #11 · Week #12 · Week #13 · Week #14 · Week #15 · Week #16 · Week #17 · Week #18 · Week #19

I was watching this video and at the linked time I was wondering if there was any technique being used because it looks almost random but sounds quite good. The only thing I could see is he was using only the white keys.

I'm (re)watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, and after a few episodes I started to tune out every time they detail how some specific solution is possible. There's little care with consistency, everything is bent to fit the story. "Oh, I get it, if I reverse the trusters and focus the beams using a microwaved non-Euclidian logarithmic abstraction, we can get the shields back and fix the time distillation!".

I know Star Trek is soft sci-fi, but come on! If it's all meaningless, at least keep it to a minimum. Focus on the interesting bits: the politics, the culture, the philosophical exploration, the juicy paradoxes.

I still love Star Trek and I definitely don't want it to become hard sci-fi, but sometimes it feels like /r/VXJunkies/...

I'm interested in what applications people use, maybe I can discover some better alternatives.

Music: Spotify for streaming, Dopamine for local music.

Cloud: OneDrive. As a student, I get 1 TB of space for free.

Email: Mailspring, though I'm eyeing eM Client as an alternative right now.

Text Processors: Mostly VS Code with LaTeX, but I do sometimes use good old MS Office.

Code: VS Code again, and also IntelliJ IDEA and CLion for the respective languages. VS Code for anything that isn't C or Java related. I'm also watching the development of Oni Vim 2.

PDF: On my laptop with a touch display, I use Drawboard. On my PC at home I use Nitro PDF.

Browser: Firefox, ever since the quantum update it's nice and snappy. Though maybe I'd switch to Vivaldi when they add Sync at some point.

I missed the Witcher, Harry Potter, and Game of Thrones boats-- what's the next big fantasy series that's starting right now? Like one book's been recently released and it was a shock how good it was, and all of its readers want more?

I want to hop on a train that'll take me into a fantasy land when the getting's good.

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.

Maybe it was an unexpected new piece of information you learned. Maybe someone you've known for a long time did something very out of character for them. Maybe you came across a giant spider right above your head in your basement while you were doing laundry and it caused you to spill the hamper and hit your head on a pipe.

Whatever the surprise--good or bad, big or small, meaningful or throwaway--I'm curious to hear about it.

Someone asked me this recently, and I wasn't sure how to answer. Not because I can't self-identify things I've accomplished, but because it can seem boastful to openly express them.

For this thread, I want to remove any and all social restrictions on boasting. Talk yourself up! Be loud and proud! Navel-gazing is not only allowed, but encouraged!

I chose the title based off how the question was phrased to me, but I'm really interested in what you consider to be your most positive achievements and characteristics. As such, consider the following series of questions as a jumping off point:

• What are you most proud of in your life?
• What are your biggest accomplishments/successes in life?
• What are you good at?
• What are your unique talents and skills?
• What makes you individually awesome and stand out from others?
• What significant hardships have you overcome?
• How you have you changed your life, others' lives, or the world for the better?