Well, since you say Christmas or not, my favorite show any time is Babylon 5.

But for Christmas stuff, Hogfather is my favorite tradition. Also Die Hard, and the Christmas episode of Justice League.

It’s like using literally to add emphasis to something that you are saying figuratively. It’s not objectively “wrong” to do it, but the practice is adding uncertainty where there didn’t need to be any, and thus slightly diminishes our ability to communicate clearly.

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Whenever this happens in a call at work I drop this in the chat:

Taking preorders today. First unmanned set up mission to be launched in 18 months. First manned colony ship full of technicians to launch in 24 months. First luxury Starship™ to launch in 36 months.

12 years later

The first ship full of semi-functional robots and temporary shelters (engineered to nanometer level tolerances) blows up on launch pad.

Musk announces that it was a very successful test. During the next investor call, Musk explains that they are on track for the manned mission sometime next year. He says that preorders have slowed but not stopped, that the premium nonrefundable Space Marine™ and Starfighter™ packages have continued to increase revenues, and that they are in negotiations with Disney to offer Jedi™ packages that come in Padawan™, Knight™, and Master™ levels (the knight package will include simulated telekinesis on day one, while the master packages should be able to deliver ESP sometime after wave 1 of colonists reach X city on Planet X, formerly known as Mars).

Musk goes on to explain that the switch to only taking payment through the X app is actually saving them money. Musk’s line is “accidentally” muted while he is responding to a follow up question about X refusing to comply with investigations related to banking regulations that he claims it is exempt from.

Tesla stock plummets the next day, and yet, somehow, is still overvalued.

Arctic creature here. I wear a kilt and t-shirt all year round. Sandals too, unless snow is recent enough that it won’t have been cleared from wherever I’ll be walking.

If every halfway respectable news outlet sounded the alarm and made Trump’s threats to democracy and the rule of law the dominant story from now until election day, he’d still have 85% of his supporters. Some would be OK with it. Some would say he’s still better than Biden. Most would never see it because they live in a media bubble that tells them what they want to hear. And more than a few would call those stories hit pieces and climb into the bubble to be safe and comfortable.

We do need the media and everyone else to sound the alarm. And even a small shift could be enough to make the difference. But as long a large portion of the population is listening to outlets that unabashedly spew extremist propaganda, we’re going to continue have this problem.

Old.reddit is reddit from a time when it was designed with user experience in mind, rather than trend chasing and maximizing ad placement.

I’ve heard that the reason old.reddit is still supported is because new reddit can’t run without it. I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if the developers of new reddit were pushed to rush something out to meet demands from higher up, and therefore didn’t make something clean and severable. I mean, we’re talking about a site whose video player wants to load every resolution at once on every video you scroll past in an infinite feed, my expectations aren’t terribly high.

She is a poorly written character whose powers are frequently ignored or forgotten by scripts. It’s established that she can sense emotions, intent, honesty, deception, danger, and so on. Yet, even after establishing this, a conman can lie to her face and she won’t notice. She can be surrounded by people who are preparing pull weapons and take the crew hostage, and she doesn’t sense a thing.

Yeah, for some reason she can sense emotions through the viewscreen despite the person on the other end being lightyears away. But even then, her role is mostly to state the obvious, letting us know that the scowling guy who was been yelling at them is upset.

On a more fundamental level, her entire concept is at odds with the rules governing the show. It’s the enlightened future where people are more evolved and we aren’t allowed to have interpersonal conflict or psychological issues. To the point that they were forced to rewrite a script about a kid trying to cope with the death of his mother, because Gene insisted that in the future, people don’t grieve. And of course none of this was enforced consistently, but it did mean that they couldn’t focus too closely on the crew dealing with the kinds of issues that would actually require some kind of psychological help.

At the same time, they also gave a lot of the advice giving duties to Guinan, some of which goes way beyond the stuff a bartender should handle. They even gave Guinan mental powers to further the needed advice in one episode, which makes Troi that much more superfluous.

Part of the problem here has as a lot to do with pacing and expectations. Guinan, being a guest character, gets to pop into existence when someone needs to have their perspective altered with an anecdote or keen observation, possibly while they look miserable at a bar. And then, having prepared our heroes for the climax of the story, she exits the script with another tally in the win column.

Troi, whose official job is providing guidance and therapy, is going to be the first person you talk to when her skills are needed. So sessions with Troi tend to be early enough in the script that we can’t have them solving the problem. Therefore, her advice can’t actually work, so she either misreads the situation (looks bad for an empath), or she just gives very bad advice. For fuck sake, her response to being told “I think the only emotion I feel is anger, and killing gives me pleasure” was to suggest that the patient go explore these emotions on his own, without guidance or supervision.

What we’re left with is a character who mostly states the obvious, who forgets she’s psychic when it would actually matter, who is terrible at her job, and for bonus points, who spends most of the series in her pajamas when everyone else wears the damn uniform.

I can go with either extreme or anything in the middle, depending on what fits the story, tone and aesthetic.

At the same time, either one can look stupid when there’s no thought put into it. We don’t necessarily need to know how any futuristic stuff works, but it helps if the people designing it have some vague idea of why things are there and what they are supposed to do. It doesn’t have to be realistic, but it can help it stay internally consistent. And it helps avoid the pitfalls of lazy or obviously impractical designs that can plague sci-fi. It can be very distracting when the set is a bunch of random plastic tubes, half the contents of a Spencer’s Gifts, and recycled props that have been bouncing around for decades despite having no apparent function.