This is seriously the most adorable cat I have ever seen!

Just curious because I’m only half-remembering how it’s determined - Would a clone of the kitten have the same colorations?

The great thing is that when you get with one of them you don’t have to worry about wearing protection. You’re going to get Vulcanized.

I’m calling 1 year on the over/under for the introduction of blue check marks.

Worst. Episode. Ever.

The traditional hand sign indicates that Vulcan culture is primarily straight, but kinky.

Fair point. If I get the itch to play something old, I’ll usually just check gog to see if it’s been ported. It’s probably been about ten years ago now, but I finally went through my old software box that had been sitting in a closet forever and tossed games like Wasteland on 3.5” floppies. Oddly, one of the toughest ones to toss was Darklands, which I would never play again but which at the time sucked me in like few other games ever had.

And now apparently it’s available on Steam and works on the Deck, so I might actually try it out again…

But, again, that’s my point.

I see this argument a lot.

I’m someone who has been gaming since the C-64 days (load “*”,8,1), and honestly I think I’ve lost more games through data corruption on the physical media, simply losing a disk, having a compatible operating system go away, or having the physical media hardware no longer be supported. I actually like the fact that I can just re-download a game whenever I want to play it.

I’ve had a bit less luck with streaming audio, where a service will have licenses for some but not all of the tracks of an album (that’s really annoying), but the trade off there is that I’m not actually buying it, and as a result I have access to god knows how many artists and albums.

The one that really gets me is the fragmentation of video content among a dozen or more services, but hopefully we will start to see a move back towards consolidation there.

I hadn’t really been coming at it from that perspective, but your post got me thinking. I’ve been in the business one way or another since then in multiple capacities - hobbyist, military, government, academia, and commercial.

Back in the 70s, there was barely a major called “computer science” at most colleges. Most people writing software were largely self-taught, and software companies were a couple of dozen people. Going into the 80s, as the industry expanded, more computers were being sold (mid-sized and mainframes, with a small but growing PC market. Being a programmer would give you a solid middle class career. These were the days when Donald Knuth wrote the cost complete and comprehensive software for laying out text and equations available (TeX, now used via LaTeX) because such a thing wasn’t available and he wanted it to be. He was a professor at Stanford, meaning he had a salary already, so he just released it for free. Those were the days when people argued that software couldn’t be copyrighted because any piece of software is really just a mathematical equation, and you cannot copyright math. Anyway, many of the people writing software had a day job, “programmers” included a large proportion of people who wrote COBOL in tiny chunks for not very much money. There was a large chunk of people whose greatest dream was getting paid to do software for a living, and it was seen kind of people whose dream it was to be a professional librarian. Very few were in it for the money.

It all took off in the mid-late 90s when the industry got financialized. Fast forward to today, and no one on my team has less than a six figure salary, I make more than most MDs, and my bosses make far more than that. Because of our age demographic, few if any of them have even a bachelor’s degree, much less one in computer science. It was really that 90s transition when it started to be about money.

But I wouldn’t use the word greedy. The industry just changed, and so did the social relationships. I still have nostalgia for the days when it was more like Wargames and Real Genius than like Black Mirror, but I would never say it’s a result of the folks writing an app that want to do it for a living on their own terms. I think people like Christian Sellig (the author of Reddit client Apollo) represents the best of that earlier mindset, and I sincerely hope he made fuck-you money off of his app before spez shut him down. If anything, it’s people like Spez who are at fault.

Anyway, that was just a rant, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I saw James Cromwell, the actor who portrayed Zefram Cochrane, on a flight into Albuquerque about a decade or so ago. He was wearing a colorful kufi hat, and he’s so god damned tall I could easily see him from like three rows back. I was 99% sure it was him, and when I saw him again picking up his luggage I became 100% sure. He’s a freaking giant.

I have a very strong introvert aspect to myself. I very badly wanted to tell him how much his portrayal of Cochrane influenced my life and my career, but I chickened out. For the record, I am a research scientist who now works in big tech.

I think what I loved about him was his flaws. I especially loved how his self-awareness of the chasm between the person he saw himself to be and the legend that grew around him caused him to freak out and panic. I also really understood his whole self-destructive and self-sabotaging stage. And despite all of that, he won through, and Starfleet was the end product.

I love what you’ve written and I think it speaks to the ethos Roddenberry built into his universe to show us what is possible, but I really loved the idea that it grew from this flawed human before it blossomed.

That’s not to say the vroom vroom person was correct. Quite the opposite. A mirror universe Cochrane reimagined as Elon Musk would have lead to… probably the mirror universe but worse. It was more about the struggle possibly being worth it, despite how you feel about yourself and even if the end is something you can’t even imagine.

Back in the olden days, there used to be a variety of free software called postcard-ware. It was free to distribute and use, but if you wanted to you could send the author a postcard.