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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Cobbling together data from a couple sources…

    Install each bulb, and toggle it on/off five times with the wall switch. Make sure to wait 10 seconds between each toggle. (Edit: like on for ten, then off for a couple seconds, repeat)

    Unsure whether there’s any visual feedback once this process is complete - I would assume it may go into some pairing indication mode like a dim/brighten cycle to indicate it’s ready to pair.



  • I will be forever mad about Voyager. Everything was set up to succeed: crew conflict! Unknown location! Some good actors! Voyager was a nice looking ship!

    And then, famously, the actors playing humans were told to be blah and less dynamic to let the alien characters stand out more, and the series had to follow a more stagnant TNG style (they tried to serialize certain plot threads which I appreciate but were confined to episodes of the week a lot of the time).

    Like, I can just imagine a mirror universe where the entirety of season 1 was the Starfleet and Maquis crews learning to work together, and conflict and drama as they’re brought together by even more hostile external forces, and also the actors were allowed to actually act and stuff.






  • IMPORTANT EDIT: I have learned that Unity is going to charge for games already released now. This is a scummy move. I have still not found info on whether devs will be back-charged, like suddenly a huge bill will show up for games which already have a million downloads and a lot of revenue. I was previously in tentative favor of this change only so long as:

    1. it would apply to newly-released games after the change (no longer valid)
    2. the first 200,000 installs would not be back-charged even after the change over (still unknown to me)

    Scummy move, Unity.

    ORIGINAL POST:

    I’m seeing a couple pieces of misinformation in here so I just wanted to clarify:

    • This applies to the free Unity and Unity Plus - the enterprise version has different thresholds.
    • The fee will apply to games that have made $200,000 USD or more in the last 12 months AND have at least 200,000 per-game lifetime installs.
    • Even then, the costs are different depending on which country you are in - “emerging market” is only $0.02 vs $0.20 for other countries.

    Essentially it looks to me like you have to have made a significant amount of money already to be charged these fees - someone releasing a free game that goes viral won’t be charged. One thing I haven’t found is whether those first 200,000 installs will or won’t be back-charged. If the initial installs aren’t back-charged then I would consider this very reasonable, frankly, and cheaper than Unreal provided the game you release costs more than $4.00 (since Unreal takes a flat 5% of revenue I believe).

    Unity does need to make money to be able to keep developing their engine, and right now as far as I understand it they aren’t making money.


  • ryan@the.coolest.zonetoRisa@startrek.websiteProudly a nerd
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    1 year ago

    You know, I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone judge me for my love of Star Trek. Sci-fi and nerddom is a lot more mainstream than it used to be.

    However… If someone were to flip to BBC America and watch one episode of TNG, and that episode was The Royale, I wouldn’t even mind if they judged me for all eternity.





  • So we know Gorn capture other species, pit them against the Gorn and each other ala the strongest M&M copypasta, and then send the strongest M&M back to M&M Mars space. La’an was the strongest M&M, for example.

    Maybe, originally on the Gorn home planet, the strongest just keep growing to fend off an ever increasing wave of hostile baby Gorn, becoming more cunning and intelligent on each subsequent generation. Maybe the spacefaring stuff was originally some Gorn thinking “wow this planet sucks, I need to get away from it so I’m not eaten by my own young.”

    And now, perhaps the Gorn do the same for their terrible cannibal babies - they get pitted against each other in the Baby Gorn Fighting Arena, Sponsored by M&M Mars, and the strongest are kept to become adult Gorn and to be used for breeding purposes and also for spacefaring stuff.

    Maybe the Gorn are just trying to help other species become stronger. They are helping to select for the strongest M&M to send back to the factory for breeding purposes, and we just don’t understand - cultural differences and all that.





  • Jira is a customizable ticketing platform. I manage a different ticketing platform at my company (ServiceNow), and I see a lot of crossover in system complaints.

    • People ask for a tightly controlled workflow and then get mad when they can’t freely move between states. There will always be exception cases so don’t lock down your states in Jira unless it’s for some audit reason.
    • Too many custom mandatory fields to enforce some sort of process compliance. If you have a process you want people to follow, do your job and educate and have recurring trainings on the damn process. The system can’t do the educating for you, and if everything is locked down and mandatory all the time it means the ticket can’t even be worked on in phases, or the requester responded to quickly, without having to spend five minutes on data entry - for every ticket.
    • People try to use a particular ticket type for something it’s not meant to be used for and get mad when it doesn’t work. This seems to be less of a concern on Jira than ServiceNow but use the correct ticket types for what you’re doing and you won’t have a problem.
    • People hate the underlying processes put in place, and blame the system. This is what the article is addressing.

    I do have to agree with this article as a whole. There are a lot of managers who see what Jira can do and expect employees to do it all without considering whether it will be worthwhile. Especially if you’re not running agile and sprints, Jira isn’t the tool for everyone. Most companies have a Microsoft 365 license and Planner works well for team task tracking in general (and it’s integrated with Teams).

    At the same time, some employees just hate the idea of ticketing at all and rage against the idea of being held accountable for their tasks, and sucks to be them I guess.


  • I’d say Kirk being here for multiple episodes was necessary to resolve La’an’s growth as a person. Whether it needed to be Kirk himself, obviously not, but since they started that thread they had to complete it. I do hope he doesn’t just continue hanging around next season, though. He has a post on the Farragut to attend to.



  • Agreed. If you set aside the comedy bits for just one second and examine the plots, they’re very standard Star Trek, and I love how LD is able to simultaneously be funny and also good Trek.

    Frankly, I’m thrilled that it’s something different. Especially now that Prodigy has apparently been canned, and I was fascinated by that one because it felt Star Trek but also like they were bringing in some Star Wars-esque character designs and villain…

    I do think the key to making Star Trek the “expanded universe” Paramount wanted is to make various different subgenres of shows, but make sure they all adhere to core Star Trek values. (I still want my Starfleet Medical Drama, dammit. I want Star Trek Law and Order where every episode is a courtroom drama. Maybe an anthology series where they just kind of throw ideas at the wall and see what sticks for new shows.)

    I don’t know what’s going on with the Starfleet Academy series but, frankly, I don’t care if it’s Riverdale level trash as long as the actual Star Trek bits are authentic. Let the teenagers enjoy things.