Seer of the tapes! Knower of the episodes!

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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I want Roland Emmerich to make a movie out of the short story A Pail of Air.

    tl;dr/spoiler: ~20 years ago, a black hole passed through the solar system and captured the Earth, dragging it inexorably away from the Sun. This causes great earthquakes, tsunami, and other immediate civilization-ending catastrophes, but the real disaster comes when the atmosphere freezes and falls like snow to the ground. The original story follows a young boy born after the cataclysm whose chores include collecting buckets of frozen air.







  • Your replicator is probably too small to replicate larger components, which would be a major inconvenience at best or a showstopper at worst. And industrial replicators are even harder to come by than starships.

    Then there’s getting access to the replicator patterns for sensitive or dangerous components. Dilithium chambers, weapons, Mercassium composite for shield generators, etc. are classified by Starfleet.

    Then there are substances that can’t be replicated, such as verterium cortenide for the warp coils. I don’t think it’s explicitly stated that VC can’t be replicated, but we know that Voyager had to find some to refit their warp coils, they couldn’t just replicate it. Also dilithium.

    And finally, there’s antimatter. Building a starship won’t do you much good if you don’t have gas for the tank. Antimatter does not occur in large quantities in nature, and probably can’t be replicated (or at least not safely.) So you’d need some sort of industrial base to produce it, further complicating your plans.











  • From his war memoir Crusade in Europe:

    The same day [April 12, 1945] I saw my first horror camp. It was near the town of Gotha. I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock.

    I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that ‘the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.’

    Some members of the visiting party were unable to through the ordeal. I not only did so but as soon as I returned to Patton’s headquarters that evening I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion that would leave no room for cynical doubt.