The Adversary #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 3, Episode 22) A Changeling saboteur uses the Defiant to provoke a war with a Federation ally
Rewatching ST:DS9 The cold opening has Jake gearing up to say something dramatic, which turns out to be celebrating his dad’s promotion to captain. During the festivities, Ambassador Krajensky injects some exposition about joining the Defiant on a patrol of the volatile Federation-Tzenkethi border. In the Defiant engine room, O’Brien hears a noise, but dismisses…
Bing’s AI chatbot helped me solve a technical problem, then showed me manatees, then denied showing me manatees
I was searching for how to change the default font in the WordPress editor, but the answers I was getting were overwhelmingly for how to change what the user sees in published posts, which I already know how to do. Bing’s response was right on target. It probably helped that I knew the specific name…
Facets #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 3, Episode 21) Dax’s colleagues channel the personalities of her previous hosts
Rewatching ST:DS9 The lead characters channel the personalities of Dax’s previous hosts, in a low-stakes episode that gives the cast some acting challenges and advances Nog’s character arc, but as a stand-alone episode this was just okay. I hadn’t seen it since it originally aired ~30 years ago, and I think I must have bailed…
Hospice/Honeymoon
“Hospice.” Once the word is uttered aloud, there is a seismic shift. You will feel it. Like a (very short) thread through the eye of a needle, swiftly in and swiftly out. The air itself becomes thin, steely. At the periphery of your vision, an immediate dimming. The penumbra begins to shrink. In time, it…
Trouble importing UMA clothes from Blender 3.6
In Blender3D, I created a jumpsuit, rigged and weighted it with the UMA_Male_Rig, and created a simple animation (right). From within Unity3D, I can see the animation just fine, which seems to tell me the model is properly weighted (lower left). I’ve carefully watched every second of Secret Anorak’s “UMA 201 – Part 5: Converting…
Twitter was locked in a chaotic doom loop. Now it’s on the verge of collapse | Siva Vaidhyanathan
I joined Twitter for the first time during a session at an academic conference, and since then have mostly used it to keep in touch with academics who share my professional interests. But many of those professional contacts feel about Twitter the way I do, and have moved much (though not all) of their activity…
Every day on my fantasy #neovictorian interplanetary cruiser features glowing green ether fireworks to celebrate the United States of Britannia. #Blender3D #blender3dart #Unity3D
In the backstory for the interactive bedtime stories I told my kids from about 2007-2012, a young Benjamin Franklin discovered glowing green aether (which expands & glows when exposed to radiation), used it to power his printing press and light the streets of Philadelphia. When he threatened to share it with France, King George reluctantly…
Shakaar #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 3, Episode 20) Winn asks Kira to reclaim macguffins from the leader of her former resistance cell
Rewatching ST:DS9 After losing to O’Brien at darts, Sisko visits Kira in her quarters (where she is praying before a memorial for Bareil) to report that the scheming Kai Winn, already the spiritual leader of Bajor, has been elevated to First Minister. During a routine meeting with Odo, a distracted Kira vents about her recent…
"No, no, the drink, the drink,–O my dear Hamlet,– The drink, the drink! I am poison'd." She got applause for her death scene tonight.
The exposition officer needs instant access to a pencil case, logbook and mission-critical reference texts. (Hair can wait.) #Blender3D #design #aesthetics #blender3dart #neovictorian #steampunk
On my fantasy #steampunk cruiser, every uniform is a parade dress uniform. #Blender3D #blender3dart #aesthetics #design
The first few weeks of June were very busy for me. I spent a week leveling up my skill in ChoiceScript, I pivoted to marking AP English papers for a week, then I prepped a workshop for the Computers and Writing 2023 conference, which I attended remotely last weekend. The other day I returned to…
Wall display by the talented Jess Lohr, interpreting an infographic by Norton (textbook publisher).
Getting ready to run a ChoiceScript workshop for Computers and Writing 2023. #cwcon #cwcon23
Humans Aren’t Mentally Ready for an AI-Saturated ‘Post-Truth World’
How is AI going to change individuals and society in the not-too-distant future? AI will obviously make it easier to produce disinformation—from fake images to deepfakes to fake news. That will affect people’s sense of trust as they’re scrolling on social media. AI can also allow someone to imitate your loved ones, which further erodes people’s…
Who's ready for some free outdoor Hamlet?
It appears there may be some audience participation in this outdoor production of Richard III.
Influencers overtaking journalists as news source: report
TikTok influencers and celebrities are increasingly taking over from journalists as the main source of news for young people, according to a report published Wednesday by the Britain-based Reuters Institute. The figures were based on interviews with some 94,000 people across 46 countries, conducted for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, part of…
ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is…
Proofreading matters. (For the record, Blanche actually said, “We most certainly enter a plea of not guilty.”)
I make mistakes on my blog all the time. But I’m not CNN. (Check out the line under the photo.) Yes, that’s right… that blue box is missing an important word.