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Rewatching ST:TNG Data plays poker with holodeck simulations of a crabby Isaac Newton, a genial Albert Einstein, and a grinning Stephen Hawking (playing himself). The Enterprise-D follows a distress call to an outpost, where they find a Borg task force. But everything seems off… not only did these Borg seem to be hiding, the drones…
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I think this #denoising filter makes my #CGI scene look a bit like a hand-illustrated children’s book. #Blender3D #cyclesrender The fruit bowl and some of the base textures (like the cloth for the potholders, or the wallpaper) are from free kits. Similar:Memories of Toronto Yonge Street EncountersI arrived in Toronto in 1992 as a…
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Pandemic living can make it much more difficult to form a memory at all, let alone call it back when we need it, said Yassa, director of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the University of California, Irvine. “Sometimes we’re a little bit harder on ourselves. We think, ‘Oh, how…
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In February, 2002, I was blogging about Robert E. McElwaine was a conspiracy theorist who had a habit of spamming multiple newsgroups with his political, religious, and social ideas. He used an account at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire, and was very active until around the time I started teaching at that school. Animator…
Rewatching ST:TNG Picard, Data, Troi and LaForge are lounging in the back section of a runabout (seen only in this episode), reflecting on a conference they just attended, when they start running into pockets of space where time moves at different rates. They find the Enterprise-D and a Romulan Warbird frozen in time, apparently in…
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Clearly influenced by Kubrick’s 1969 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1975-1977 British TV show Space:1999 features our protagonist riding a gleaming off-white almost empty shuttle to a gleaming off-white space station and then on to a gleaming off-white moonbase. A delightfully consistent design ethic created a seamless connection between the sets where the actors…
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Rewatching ST:TNG Worf is uncharacteristically late for a shift because he was distracted by a ritual to invoke the fabled warrior Kahless. He tells Picard that since meeting the young Klingons who grew up with no knowledge of their heritage (s6e16&17 “Birthright“), he has felt “empty,” and feels the need to test his faith. Picard…
Great writing and great photography in this story about a small Minnesota town where conservative Lutheran pastor Jason Wolter denies that COVID-19 vaccines work. “You’re lying to people,” he says, “You flat-out lie about things.” Wolter is speaking of Reed Anfinson, his next-door neighbor, who is the editor of the Swift County Monitor-News, “[a] contemplative man…
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A history of the beginning of the pandemic, oragnized around emotions. More recently, the Museum of Contemporary Emotions—a project of the Finnish government’s Finland Forward pandemic communications initiative—picked up Ekman’s work as its scaffolding. The Museum, really an interactive website, is a kind of digital archive of experience during the Covid-19 pandemic, styled with the sans-serif…
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