Getting rid of Twitter and Reddit has been productive. I read the Expanse (and the novella collection) as well as Project Hail Mary, and the first book of the Three Body Problem.

Also, from flying probably sub orbital shuttles once in a while, to flying high performance combat craft in an actual battle.

Making the pee more expensive, yes.

The Dark Saber training from Kanan explicitly showed her not having Force powers. Yes, there was considerable emotional energy tied up wit the Dark Saber, and going with that energy, but not Force powers. Particularly, she used Mandalorian tricks against Kanan (and later on against Gar Saxon) and didn’t deflect blaster bolts with the saber.

Ah, yes, Little Bobby DROP TABLES;

What Ahsoka said – the Force resides in all living beings – is more akin to Empire Strikes Back Yoda’s statements. Some people naturally have more ability to access it than others.

The implication of what Huyang says is that no one would have bothered taking Sabine to the Jedi Temple to begin training. She has minimal natural ability with the Force. Ahsoka, in a way, is working with what she has.

Perhaps it was because Sabine inherited Ezra’s saber, so that’s why Ahsoka began her training. She has a light saber, may as well teach her how to use it properly.

I love this bit from the description:

While currently located within the Princeton Public School district, the municipality where the house is moved will determine where students will attend public schools.

As if some people may assume the school zoning would follow the physical house where ever it gets relocated. It’s one of those lines that gets added to the description because someone asked that question in the past.

And the BBC.

Frankly, all news organizations should run their own Mastodon servers as authoritative sources for their news articles and their reporters. Right now, with the ever changing badges on Twitter, they’re just Star-bellied Sneetches.

As a former sysadmin who hopped around to different machines to do stuff, I would hate it when I had to type on some developers’ computers, because they had set it up as Dvorak (vi on Dvorak is a special hell). Yes, it’s a more efficient keyboard as long as that’s the only machine you’re on. If you have to use different machines where most of the users are on QWERTY, you just use QWERTY.

Should that not be properly, “Oi, cunt!” ?

“OK, how can we make a web interface more difficult to use?”

We can call everyone “Colonel”, a la Col. Sanders.

I think The Expanse, while an amazing series that should be read anyway, doesn’t fit the bill of “humans are more advanced than the aliens”, since the Protomolecule and everything created by the Romans are essentially in the “tech as high level magic” category. Humans can’t even understand the technology, often saying things like, the Protomolecule just changed the laws of physics.

Well, it could be that the tech tree for intersteller travel is a road not taken by humans

There’s also “Children of the Sky”, which focuses on the humans on the Tines world.

The Honor Harrington series actually has some interesting tech disparities, besides being pretty good/exciting military science fiction.

In the first book, there are Bronze-Age-ish aboriginals.

In the second book, you see several human polities. Harrington interacts with less technologically/culturally developed groups of humans, and there are frictions and opportunities coming from the more advanced polity.

Harrington’s polity generally remains the most technologically advanced group. There’s later interaction with human polities who had thought they were the top dog, in terms of military power.

Just to note, it’s a big series that gets somewhat too sprawling in the later books. The earlier books are Age of Sail (IN SPACE!!!) adventures, which transforms into a wide-ranging interstellar war driven by technology change. Weber’s analogy is sailing ships -> steam ironclads -> Dreadnaught battleships -> WW2 radar directed gunnery / aircraft carriers. Not everyone is at the same tech level.

“In your nightmare, you urgently have to go, but the toilet keeps receding away from you…”

I need to point out that “aliens communicating in memes” was done by ST:TNG, in the Darmok episode.

Alien: “Shaka, when the walls fell” (essentially Disappointed Guy meme)

Picard: …

Eh, it depends on priorities. I can tell you that studio is within two minutes walking of about half a dozen different ethnicities for cuisines (many of them cheap and excellent), spread over more dining establishments than are within 50 miles of you. It’s also about 20 minutes travel time to world class theater and museums.

Kramer?