Content Tagged “scifi”

• The Unbalanced Centrifuge

  So, I watched Project Hail Mary last night. Best movie I’ve seen in ages. What a spirited, funny but also very tense ride! I loved it!

  One of the funniest bits was my wife getting annoyed at the main character, who like her is a biologist, loading a centrifuge. The dude has two samples and puts them right next to each other in the centrifuge, instead of opposite each other to balance out the centrifugal forces — as any real scientist would do. It annoyed her so much that, after waking up this morning, the first thing she did — from bed, mind you — was to go on the internet to find out if she was the only person who noticed this. Of course, she wasn’t. There are quite a few annoyed biologists and chemists out there.

  Yeah — the unbalanced centrifuge took me totally out of the movie. I won’t say it ruined the movie for me but the first thing I did when I got home was search for someone else grumbling about this. He had two tubes! I can understand not balancing it when you have one tube, who among us hasn’t done that? But when you have two tubes and you don’t balance them? That’s crazy.

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• One of the Best 4X Games Ever for 3 Bucks

  I just learned that Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri with the Alien Crossfire expansion is on sale for $ 2.99 (currently € 2.70) at GOG. This is my favourite Civilization game of all time! I loved that game back in the day! The intro cinematic alone is so amazing at establishing an atmosphere. There really is nothing like this 1990s sci-fi anymore. It was a golden age …

  

  If you have issues with the resolution the game is running in, which seems to be common on Windows 10 and 11, edit the Alpha Centauri.Ini file in the game’s directory to have these two lines to disable the intro movie (with its resolution change) and have the game run in your native desktop resolution:

  DirectDraw=0
  DisableOpeningMovie=1
  

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• Black Library Kills Its Website

  Backing up my past Black Library purchases

  The enshittification of all things Warhammer continues, as Games Workshop has decided to close the website of its publishing arm Black Library and replace it with a mobile app. This means an end to the sale of DRM-free ebooks on their site. You have until the morning of 18 March to buy the last of these from the current offerings on the site. And then you have until the morning of 31 August to download your past purchases. So better back up what you bought there in the past as soon as possible. I just did that myself.

  I am with most of the internet in that I see this as a pure move towards bigger lock-in by GW and away from what their customers actually want. I will definitely not be using their app. I've been desperately trying to use less apps for years.

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• It's Dead, Jim

  

  I think I'm with The Drinker here: Star Trek needs to die. We had a good run there for a while, but it seems that all good things must come to an end. These Kurtzman shows are horrible. They are dumb, one-dimensional and an obvious attempt to plaster over slop writing by appealing to the political Zeitgeist. Kurtzman and his team are all about showing how good and decent they are, while being completely oblivious to their own utter incompetence.

  As Roger Avery said on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience:

  Kurtzman's production company is called Secret Hideout. And, man, he's gonna need a secret hideout after what he's done to Star Trek!

  

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• Angela Collier on “Star Trek: Picard”

  I’ve written a lot about how Star Trek: Picard is a horrible show — yes, all three seasons of it — and how I regret watching even a single minute of it. So, I’m not going to get into this again here.

  Rather than doing that, I want to direct your attention to this very good video by Angela Collier, who I recently discovered from several videos she did on ChatGPT. As it turns out, not only does she have a PhD in astrophysics, she also got into science because of TNG and is totally happy to nerd out for four hours about Star Trek. I agree with a lot of what she says in this video. It’s definitely worth a watch!

  → Angela Collier: How Star Trek: Picard Ruins Star Trek

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