We’ve tried most of them over time.

Star Trek Resurgence has consistently excellent reviews. It’s about a 25 hour role play where the player makes choices for two different crew - a senior bridge officer and an NCO in engineering. It’s well done and one of our teens and I are enjoying it a lot. Great value for the sale price. My patience on this one was reinforced by its initial release being exclusive to Epic - but on Steam and on sale it’s worth it.

Bridge Crew is an older game. I have had it for a couple of years, and took advantage of the sale to pick up copies for each of our kids Steam accounts. One of them got really into it right away.

Timelines is also older. It held their interest for a bit in middle school but doesn’t seem to be one of the better tie-ins.

Star Trek Online is a long running massively multiplayer game that starts out free but then can cost a lot for in-game purchases. One of our teens is into it, and got fairly far without purchasing much, but the Steam sale is a good opportunity for them to buy things they’ve had on their wish list.

As a parent, I find these better than the endless number of Star Wars mods on Roblox that one of ours got into for a while.

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This is also raising questions of foreign interference/influence in democratic process.

In Canada, the federal Elections Commissioner has been called on to investigate the source of bot campaigns for the leading opposition party: Online bot campaign backing Pierre Pollievre prompts call for probe.

I’m still seeing this as an active posting, linked on other UN pages e.g.,

https://dppa.un.org/en/gazas-new-terror-booby-trapped-cans-of-food-unwary

However, a similar claim in January was found to be false by fact checking news orgs.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/feb/01/instagram-posts/no-viral-footage-doesnt-show-explosives-disguised/

Looks interesting, and an interesting way to work with nuts. Always looking for other GF options and I do use almond flour in a lot of recipes.

That said, while can understand not tolerating gluten free grains such as millet, teff, sorghum, rice or corn, I’m not sure why there aren’t other flours and starches you can work with.

I’m having a hard time understanding why an intolerance would also extend to tubers (potato flour & starch; manioc - cassava flour & tapioca flour; sweet potato flour; arrowroot starch); flower seeds (buckwheat/sarrasin flour) or legumes (Romano, fava or chickpea flour) but not nuts.

So the childhood favourite ‘Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh’ was onto something.

Startide Rising is the best of them all.

Sundiver is quite good too.

The later books were deeply marred by Brin’s giving into pressure from his editors to centre them on a group of adolescent males of diverse species because his publisher was of the view that the average scientific fiction reader was a 14 year old male. Brin has written about this and how difficult it was for him to write outside his natural quite adult style. His fantastic characters from Startide Rising are pushed into the background and only get to step forward and shine again at the very end.

Clearly, the ability to be outside in appropriate clothing for activities isn’t being mandated. This is where a temperate climate enables ridiculous practices to persist.

All I can think about when I see this image is how in Ontario, the responsible provincial ministry requires all schools and ‘day nurseries’ (read day and after school care) to put the kids out in the yards twice a day unless the weather conditions are severe (Less than -20 or more than +30 Celsius.).

Parents are responsible to send their kids with suitable clothing for the cold. One rarely sees little girls in skirts in schools unless they are wearing tunic dresses over leggings.

In an earlier era, pre 1970s, when skirts were mandatory for girls, that meant switching to pants or snow pants from the skirts 3 times a day to go outside in winter (two breaks and leaving end of day).

Any social media crowdsourced rating is going to be vulnerable to review bombing/brigading.

You can get some sense of the perspectives with IMDb if you look at not just the score but the distribution of scores (available in the app). A huge spike of 1/10s tells the story.

It’s not that bona fide statisticians can’t get useful data out of crowdsourced surveys, but a public platform like those ones attracts brigading and the score is not adjusted for demographic balance.

Why does the OP think that She-Hulk ‘got bad ratings’ when it was one of the two most viewed Marvel shows on Disney last year?

That’s right, more people spent more minutes watching She-Hulk than anything other than Loki, including content from other Disney franchises.

Social media outrage & negative review brigading on IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes from a demographic that is mainly male, a certain age & American doesn’t actually represent the majority of those of us paying for Disney+.

Women subsidize content designed for that market all the time,why the outrage when the rest of the market gets something to their tastes?

It doesn’t seem like you’ve read any She-Hulk comics.

The show is the most comic-accurate Marvel TV series ever. It leans heavily on both Slott and original Byrne runs - written by men but definitely heavily leaning into the sexism experienced by the character, not to mention breaking the fourth wall before Deadpool.

You may have your views, but please let them be informed.

I took this as commentary not advertising.

I thought Mobius’ enthusiasm for the hot apple pies was consistent with his adoring better-living-through-chemistry lime pie or machine made hot chocolate in the TVA.

He’s been stuck in the limited palate options of the TVA, his memory of a richer, real-life stripped from him. Of course 80s McDonald’s is a taste sensation.

I’ve recently become aware of mulesing, an appalling practice used on Merino sheep in Australia and NZ due to a specific fly problem. The problem is that most merino wool is from those countries.

Also, most fabric generically labeled ‘wool’ is mostly merino from mulesinged sheep.

Ethics conscious knitters, crocheters and weavers are aware, and merino yarns certified as mulesing-free are on the market now.

Knowing country of origin and wool type is another reliable way to avoid endorsing this practice, but again most manufactured clothing or even fabrics will not give the necessary information.

Yoon Ha Lee really plays with fun math concepts. Great stuff. The Ninefox trilogy was a real entry point for me to begin to appreciate Korean mythology.

Yup, lack of advanced science concepts and an accumulation of errors despite a pretension to working problems for the audience.

Even some basic geography errors - early in the book, he claims that the sample had to be landed in Saskatchewan for a high latitude to match the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Baikonur is at 45 N latitude, about the same as the border between North and South Dakota. Everywhere in Saskatchewan is North of the 49th parallel and south of 60. Sigh.

I have to say that I just don’t get the hype about this book.

Project Hail Mary is really targeted at a middle grade reading and maturity level. I would have happily given it to our kids to read in middle grade (as I did The Martian).

It’s a Robinson Crusoe meets a buddy in space boys-own-adventure tale (although Weir insists on male gendering a hermaphrodite when ‘they/them’ is well understood). There are clear indications that the story was told to pull in immature readers - starting with the ludicrous scene where Grace has spent days waiting for zero G without stowing any of his lab equipment or supplies.

It’s a compellingly written ‘work the problem’ read but anything beyond high school science concepts isn’t really there. Once again, I feel like we’re seeing more overhyped STEM based on concepts that haven’t advanced beyond what a mid 20th century bachelors degree would cover.

It held my attention as an easy read while fighting a bug, I can’t see picking up another of his books for myself.

There are a few very odd ‘too much information’ references to sexual relationships and use of alcohol that seem almost awkwardly placed to bump up the level, but there’s not really enough in there to even warrant the ‘school edition’ treatment that ‘The Martian’ got. Otherwise nothing stretches past middle grade emotional maturity.

All told, I was expecting more.

Working through ‘Ten Low’ by Stark Holburn now. My partner is through the sequel already and recommended.

Love Scalzi but wish he could vary his voice more. I find I have to spread out reading his books as the snark will all blur after a while.

The orgy in The Diamond Age isn’t much better.

Stephenson got a pass on a lot of his weird stuff.

I found The Sea of Tranquility a bit dry but whimsical nonetheless.

In a genre overburdened by books with two dimensional characters and core dumps of exposition, it was an interesting puzzle but it also isn’t making me want to reread it either. 7.5 or 8.