Notices by TheWholeTruthXX ? ❤️ (adwright@mastodon.social)

So yesterday Russia hit Ukraine with a multi-head nuclear missile with the nuclear warheads removed.

They intended to show the world they are prepared to use nuclear weapons.

The weapon launch was indistinguishable from that of a real nuclear weapon.

They intended to strike fear into the entire Western world who would have detected the launch.

They're making the case for a First Strike on Russia. Or telling the world to acquiesce.

Fold or Call?

We are here now.

I say Call.

So it was only a hundred years ago - 1924 - when someone figured out the Sun, and all the rest of the stars, were made mostly of hydrogen with some helium. All the other elements were in trace amounts.

She was a student at Harvard named Cecilia Payne.

At the time the consensus was stars were made up of pretty much what Earth was made of.

It took 4 more years for a man to confirm the discovery before it was widely accepted, with him as discoverer.

It's all hers now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin

Fucking ow.

@JoscelynTransient

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c51yyq0g5x3o

Watching a library burn is tragedy. It's loss. Lots of things are mass-market, replaceable but every library will hold some things there are very few of. Maybe no others. And when things are gone it can be impossible to bring it back. I know, I just spent 5 years of my life on a project that as good as it is can likely never be complete.

Watching a library burn because the fire was deliberately set is a straight-up obscenity. That it was set by fascists makes my blood boil.

War never changes.

Poilievre today, to the Calgary Herald:

“I’m the normal guy. Trudeau and the NDP are the wackos. They are the extremists. I’m the normal centrist mainstream leader, the only one running. The other guys are absolute raving wackos."

Congrats to his media team getting him to stop using the 'r' word but this guy's Trump-lite world view is just plain toxic.

This is what the Canadian press expects us to buy, that everybody except hair-gel here are the crazy ones.

Those monster polls can't be real.

LOL

The Telegraph is reporting how British PM Sunak is likely to oversee the Conservatives being wiped out at the polls, even losing his own seat.

This would make him the first sitting Prime Minister in history to do that.

It's kind of fitting; he is barely a real PM anyways. He's more like a vulture venture firm office manager put in as CEO of their latest acquisition to chop shop the thing for parts and milk the brand name subbing out cheap shit for valuable assets.

Like our guy Poilievre.

/2

So to set the stage, it's 1982. "Wrath of Khan" was about to come out, Roddenberry had just flown to Nova Scotia from Alaska and he was kinda beat.

Halifax media asked him the same questions about the show we've all heard a million times over and over during their times while I waited my turn.

Did he know how popular the show would become? Why did Spock have pointed ears? What was the reason it kept coming back?

He gamely answered each one.

/5

So he starts describing the system to me, and for the first time his eyes started to light up.

He says it's inhouse, just on the Paramount lot, no remote access. Like some kind of local network.

He says the thing was encyclopedic. He said, you type in goldfish and you get pictures and text with all the details about goldfish. 1982. He said you could look up anything with it and it was great.

No one has clue one wtf that system was. I wish to hell I'd followed up on it with more questions.

/4

So we got to talking about Wrath of Khan. He was telling me how he was less involved with the production of it, that he hated the new red serge Starfleet uniforms, they were foolish, a starship is a shirtsleeves environment.

Then we get to the 1982 mystery no one has been able to answer including William Shatner and Mike Okuda.

Roddenberry's liking my questions. He starts telling me the main benefit he's getting is his own office on the Paramount lot.

He says it comes with info access.

/3

So I'm homeless like two years then, a 2nd year student; late student loan money and no available paying jobs sunk me.

I'm writing for the Dal Gazette, hoping practical journalism experience might translate into paying work somewhere down the road.

That didn't happen, I'd be homeless another 3 years, ain't life grand?

But I'd be buggered if I was going to look as stunned as the other reporters to someone I was in awe of already and I knew nothing about the bad-assery and tech chops then.

/epilogue

I didn't get my degree, I got half a decade of homelessness and many dark nights scrounging for food but I also got 15 minutes with Gene Roddenberry, had a couple hours including the drinking with Graham Chapman, was blown away when I met Timothy Leary, who had total recall as I've never seen before or since outside fiction and had a nice sit-in with Fran Lebowitz.

In hindsight, that was a hella year, warts and all.

/7

Since then there've been a library's worth of tell-all books and articles about every conceivable aspect of the production of the original series and Trek exploded into the multi-billion dollar franchise of today that still, like a magic thing, offers promises of a better humanity building a better future to a world that's lost faith in one.

And no one knows anything about any 1982 inhouse studio data systems.

/end

/6

I was getting near the end of my time and I mis-stepped.

I asked about the portrayal of women in the series and the light went back out in his eyes and he gave me the canned response about resistance to a female first officer in the original pilot with women in particular hostile to the idea. Product of its time.

And my time was up.

Long thread warning.

Header: Homeless #StarTrek fan with press credentials gets 15 minutes with Gene Roddenberry.

Classic case of I wish I knew then all that I know now.

I didn't pooch the article but by gum I'd nail that thing today.

So I went in knowing all one could know of Trek in 1982. I'd replaced three worn-out paperback copies of The Making of Star Trek.

What I didn't know was he was a genuine fucking badass:

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/plane

who wrote his own disk operating systems.

If you've updated to Mozilla #Firefox 117, there's now an un-enabled translation option built in to the browser.

It works locally on your computer so you're not leaking data to any giant corporations as may be expected with the other major browsers.

It's beta so caveat emptor.

Available languages:

Bulgarian
Dutch
French
German
Italian
Polish
Portuguese
Spanish

Go to about:config
Set browser.translations.enable
to TRUE

Go to Settings
Under Translations
Install offline language packs

ICYMI Mozilla #Firefox 117 has a built-in translation mode that can be manually enabled.

Unlike Chrome and Edge, the Firefox translations are all done locally on your own computer, not sent to Google or Microsoft for their files.

Dunno about you but that suits my ass to a 'T'. I hate it when soulless corporations read over my shoulder.

I wrote a post with how to enable this here:

https://mastodon.social/@adwright/110987973582339164

@curtisysmith

The first episode I saw was "The Enemy Within". Mum said there was this space show she thought I might enjoy. I was the kid used to write NASA and they'd treat me like an adult and send me these huge press release packs full of tech. That shit was like blood transfusions to middle of Hell me.

So I watched evil and good Kirk duke it out and I wasn't sure what to make of it but I was there next week. I built the AMT Enterprise model not long after. :)

57 years ago, a Thursday, NBC aired the first episode of a new space show that would go on to transform society in ways big and small, inspire 11 spin-off series, several movie franchises and whole reams of novels, models, tie-ins and more.

It started as a pitch for " 'Wagon Train' to the stars" but became whole detailed fictional universes inspiring our own real one with a promise that we'll figure this all out and we'll be the better for it. That there's a whole universe out there.

#StarTrek

On this day, 60 years ago, a junkyard with an old police utility shed sitting in it became the most amazing place anyone had ever seen.

The shed would go on to thousands of adventures and become more famous and more widely known than any other shed ever. Even its signature tune and sound was like nothing anyone had ever heard before.

It would travel further and see more things than any other shed before or since.

It travels still.

#DoctorWho