let his family live and instead have written a story about living in diasporas

Given that Discovery had plenty of Afrofuturism themes at this point in the story, this really seems like an obvious go-to for where to go next. Booker’s homeworld wasn’t perfect, but it was more perfect than anything else going at the time; losing it was a tragedy that really needed a better epilogue. Rebuilding that place, or helping his people find a new home (probably with the Trills), is a very compelling arc and would have seen the character come unto their own. We really should have seen Booker find a place among the Federation delegates by the end of the series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism

due to some strange quirk of their time travel.

While that’s kind of a trope all by itself, I agree that would have been far superior to the apocalypse crybaby reveal.

I agree. Another smart move would be to rapidly write their names down all in one go. Make it look like the act of an angry god (because it kinda/sorta is), then sit back and watch the world’s elite panic.

I mean, it wouldn’t make much of a show, but still.

drawing boars

Typeo (drawing board) or is that a pun, insinuating that she’s working with pigs?

I’m unaware of the timeline, and if this quote came before or after, but our guy here was up against literal fascists in his day. I think this makes the quote even more pithy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot

Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general, testified under oath that wealthy businessmen were plotting to create a fascist veterans’ organization with him as its leader and use it in a coup d’état to overthrow Roosevelt.

As far as labors of love go, Stardew Valley is probably the most current example. People paid for this thing years ago, but Concerned Ape keeps adding new features anyway. The retro graphics give this thing a timeless quality out of the box, so it already looks “dated” - this hasn’t stopped the robust player community around it. We’ll probably see this game stay relevant for a long time.

Unusually long development time

No joke, I installed the open-beta/pre-release years ago, played for a bit, and uninstalled it. When the actual release dropped, I had the most intense déjà vu about it all because I forgot that had even happened. I had to go back to my Steam library to puzzle it all back together.

If only there was a better way…

RoboCop and Starship Troopers (by the same director, no less) are other examples of people completely missing the point, and taking the film at face value.

Renfield.

I know it’s violent, campy, and corny, but it’s a damn good lesson in what Narcissistic Personality Disorder is and what it does to people. It helped me frame my own abuse and trauma at the hands of abuser’s NPD, in ways that helped me break free from those people later on. Moreover, once you’ve been victimized this way, one has a tendency to fall back into bad habits with abusers. The film just gave me something profound to recall when exercising mindfulness around this cycle, and how to exit quickly.

The added layer to this joke is, as someone that works with engineers, this is exactly the kind of response Sisko should expect.

In a pipe, apparently. The article goes on to describe what it feels like, but cautions that inhaling smoke from anything is going to be bad for you.

including those monitoring changes to sea ice extent in the polar regions

Ah, there it is. Kicking climate change under the carpet again, I see.

Exactly. Access was a dirt-cheap rapid application design (RAD) tool in disguise, and very easily could have been shaped into a smooth on-ramp to ASP, ASPX, IIS, and SqlServer solutions. In short: a hypothetical “Access.NET” would have been really something.

On the other hand, now we have a super easy jumping point for anyone in a large business who can program a little to spin up a new startup. Find a business process that’s currently a spreadsheet/on paper, write a database frontend to easily handle that then sell your solution to businesses looking to remove load bearing paperwork and spreadsheets

You just described most of my career, and how a lot of contracting shops get their start. Managers need reports, and someone has to program them. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve replaced Excel with custom software; a faster way to do this is usually welcome. That said, the cloud “Data” space is doing a lot right now to reduce this kind of task to Jupyter notebooks and some other proprietary solutions.

Hah! I suggested almost the same thing before reading your comment. I agree.

Anyway, that in particular story would never happen in the visual mediums.

I dunno. The SFX crew would probably love to kitbash the ship more and more each season. Meanwhile, the merchandising opportunities would be off the chart. “Voyager? Yes, which season/version of the ship are we talking about? There are seven.”

but that what made it home was the Federation culture that the original crew embodied.

That’s pretty much the core theme behind Prodigy, so we know that would have worked as a narrative device. Too bad they didn’t give that a shot back then.

I get the impression that this is hard to do right. I am so incredibly thankful that the Battlestar Galactica reboot went there for pretty much the entire series, and did a great job. Heck, I even cared about the ship by the time it was all done. Meanwhile, Stargate:Universe screwed it up at every opportunity.

IMO Voyager, as both a crew and as a ship, should have been unrecognizable by the end of the voyage. I’m talking all sorts of exotic tech bolted to the hull, a greater Delta Quadrant crew compliment, crew diet of hydroponics from very distant worlds, and maybe even a few additional ships in formation. They even bothered to mention the bio-electronic ship systems in the flippin’ pilot, which could have turned into a sentient starship or something. It could have been epic.

Captain Jackson: I recognize that Starfleet has made a decision, but given that’s a stupid-ass decision, I’ve elected to ignore it.

Once, I actually had my hands on a German WWII-era infrared targeting… wand? Scope? … It was a huge shoulder-mounted flashlight with optics that were used to illuminate aircraft using IR. VERY sophisticated for the time. According to the declassified doc that came with it, the power requirements were insane. Basically it had to be plugged into a mobile generator - probably on a truck or half-track - or the grid, to use it.

So it’s not out of the question. G.I. Joe in an alternate WWII timeline could have had laser sights on machine guns, provided they were tethered to a “mobile” power supply like that.

Access let you build visual apps, usually data-entry workflows, around its internal SQL database. You could build small apps with it using Visual Basic and a visual UI editor. Plus, all your work ships as a single file, provided the user also has Access installed. In many ways, it was like Apple’s Hypercard, but also way easier to write than webpages with the same capability. Oh, and you don’t need a server anywhere to make it work; it’s 100% local. It was also the next logical step to take after the most complex things you can do in Excel.

That said, it was crippled from the start - still very useful, but not for heavyweight stuff. It’s limited to a fixed number of UI, pages, database rows, etc, so it wouldn’t compete with more expensive MS solutions (this thing came with Office). I don’t think it got a lot of love because of that, but I personally used it to solve some real problems in the workplace, without need of any (official) developer resources.

In the present day, it would actually compete with a lot of simple business cases that are served in the cloud at some cost.

Excel-sior!