Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

  • 4 Posts
  • 71 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • not every Western country was on the same side of WW2, and not all of them had the fighting happen in their territory, which means not all of them were levelled. And not all of them were Marshall planned after.

    This isn’t actually relevant to my point. They didn’t have the same experience as other Boomers (or whichever generation) in other countries, but did have a notably different experience from Xers (or whatever) in their own country. Because it may not have been in identical ways, but yes, every western country was affected by WWII in some ways. Even those like my own that never saw conflict at home. So the experience of being born in the immediate aftermath of the war is a handy generation-defining experience, even if what that experience translates into is different for a German compared to a Brit, or to an Australian.

    Of course, it’s also fair to say that there’s a much bigger difference between a German born in 1946 and one born in 1963 than there is between two Germans born in 1963 and 1965, even though one case has two “boomers” and the other a boomer and gen X. And in either case, the experience of someone in West Berlin is probably extremely different from someone from Hamburg, from someone born in the small town of Deesdorf. And for someone born to wealthy parents or poor. Generations help categorise, and the rough boundaries we use are roughly useful, but that’s a lot of rough.


  • I don’t think the names are particularly relevant, but the idea that people born in those years have done shared experience notably different from other times is—to the extent it can ever be true for any specified dates (which is a very low extent)—fairly consistent across at least western countries and their colonies.



  • There was a lot left to explain in that dimensional prison

    Agree.

    using it as a finale to neatly wrap a lot of different plot threads was great

    Sort of?

    IMO it felt very hamfisted in the way it tried to wrap those plot threads. And it felt like it should have been the culmination of a large number of episodes scattered across multiple seasons. Not a follow-up to a single episode earlier this same season. But if they had spent more time laying the groundwork to explain how the gorn Alien impregnation relates to the Great Cosmic Evil (and why the Great Cosmic Evil is even a relevant theme to explore in this world), then choosing to wrap that all up in a dramatic finale could perhaps have been awesome.

    there’s two massive red lasers with the same power as a star beaming in through the balcony and none of the natives there were bothered by it enough to get out of their seats

    All the scenes on the planet gave me that sense. It really felt obvious they were acting in front of the Volume. When the main characters just walk up and assault the portal guards, nobody reacts. When they discuss what to do next right there, nobody reacts. When the giant lasers shoot down, nobody reacts.

    The planet design was really cool

    Agree! I wish we could have explored more about them and their culture, and how it links to the culture of the previous planet the Great Cosmic Evil was on.

    It’s interesting that the planet has no warp travel but still makes contact with alien races

    I got the sense (sadly, the episode wasn’t interested in exploring these aspects at all) that it’s because they were contacted by the Orions, who don’t follow the Prime Directive.


  • I’ve gotta be honest, I’m not completely sure what actually happened here. What was actually happening to allow that time-skipping future? It felt like a cross between The Inner Light and All Good Things, but in both of those the cause was pretty clear. Here, it felt like just something that they wanted to insert, so they did.

    Which, tbh, is how the whole premise of the episode felt. Why is Batel suddenly magically connected to this Cosmic Evil? The last episode we had with them didn’t really feel like she was especially key to it. Not to mention that using what seemed like a one-off villain to return in the season finale in a way that felt like it would be more appropriate for an established recurring big bad really dragged the episode down.

    Pelia’s Dr Who joke was funny, I’ll grant her that. But I really don’t like the idea that Dr Who and Star Trek could be in the same universe. Both have explored far too much of space for me to accept that, for example, The Federation has never encountered the Daleks, and Dr Who himself has never before encountered the Borg. The fact that the joke came from the most insanely irritating character the franchise has ever introduced (and I already hated Neelix enough that I would have thought nobody could take that role off him) certainly didn’t help there. Seriously, wtf are the writers and actor even doing with that character? She might have been ok as a one-off comic guest appearance…which is what she seemed like when she first showed up. Then they just…made her a member of the core cast?




  • This doesn’t have anything to do with sort ordering though, which is based on time and votes. Text search is just a filter on top of sorting.

    That doesn’t feel like how search should work. It should be ranking results that fit the search query better higher than ones that fit it less. Regardless of how the search is done, that should remain true. So if you’re using trigram matching, instead of a binary “does the comment contain 80% of the trigrams in the search query”, it should be “if it contains 100% of the trigrams from the search query, rank it higher than something with 90% match, which is higher than 80%.” Or maybe not that precisely, but something so that more relevant results appear above less relevant ones.

    Without doing something like that, it’s just…not very useful. Which is the observed behaviour of search on Lemmy right now which started this whole conversation.


  • Eh, I don’t think it’s that surprising. Getting a list of comments on a post vs getting them from a search term are very similar operations, so it doesn’t make too much sense for these to have different queries in the backend

    Sure, but one would have thought that the ordering in a search is fundamentally different from the ordering in other places. Because you want something that contains the words you’ve searched for near each other to appear ahead of a post that has those words scattered at random because it’s a 500 word essay. You want exact word matches prioritised ahead of entirely unrelated words that include the same characters. Like “enum” should turn up your comment, but rank a comment that contains the text “renumbers” much more lowly. A particularly smart search page might keep “enumerate” high while rejecting “renumbers”, though.

    Of course, it’s true that at least in the current latest release, Lemmy fails at all of this. I hope 1.0 is at least fixing some of it?