stra-tek

allstartrekgames

Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury

Original Release: N/A (Cancelled 1999)
Developer: Interplay
Publisher: Interplay
Original Platform: PC
Not played: No leaked prototypes.

A point and click adventure game that boasted some very interesting graphics. It featured the whole cast from The Original Series (although due to declining health, Maurice LaMarche took over from DeForest Kelly part way through development). It was going to have six chapters, each focusing on a different member of the crew with an interconnected plot. It revolved around peace talks on Vulcan between them and Romulans, with the Romulan ambassador being murdered.

There are a few videos of cutscenes and a couple of trailers, but this YouTube video shows how the game would have played:

stra-tek

The holy grail of Star Trek videogames

Source: djcube.co.uk

antzonian

spidersvice

D'vana Tendi from Star Trek Lower Decks!

headcanonsandmore

beemovieerotica

PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3

The above examples have been provided with the authors' permission to demonstrate what these look like.

Basic rundown:

They are all 3 sentences long
Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation
Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever
No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story
The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post

Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly

There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate

headcanonsandmore

noirandchocolateeggs

The thing that gets me the most about critics of Terry Pratchett’s novels who say they’re not important or “literature” because they’re “not realistic” is this:

By what yardstick are we supposed to be measuring “realism”?

See, I’m willing to bet that the yardstick these critics use is that oh so popular model of “the real world is really a terrible place, so the world of this piece of media is full of barbarism and grotesque cruelty.”* And Terry Pratchett never, ever fell into that dismal trope. He didn’t hunt his characters for sport. There’s no gratuitous sexual violence (no sexual violence at all, that I can think of). Even if a death or an act of evil is senseless from an in-world point of view, it isn’t random and senseless from a narrative perspective, thrown in to shock or to remind readers/viewers that “that’s reality.” The Discworld isn’t a happy rainbow place all the time. But it’s not a bleak pit of despair, either. There are bad people of all stripes, from literal torturers and megalomaniacs to regular folk who perpetuate the kind of small mundane badness pretty much every human is guilty of at one time or another. But there are good people too. And sometimes some of them die along the way, but ultimately the good people win and the world is changed for the better or at least doesn’t get any worse. Is that really “unrealistic”?

Terry Pratchett didn’t write a bunch of books about people being brutal to each other because “that’s human nature.” Terry Pratchett acknowledged–often, even–that humanity is prone to base acts. But what his books are really about, is humanity’s ability to rise above that. Terry Pratchett wrote about protagonists who are imperfect, doing good in the world often against their first instincts. He wrote about situations where it is hard to be good, but where his protagonists choose it anyway.

Rincewind is a coward who craves only boredom, but he steps up to the plate and saves the world whenever it turns out no one else can.
Sam Vimes is a bitter, cynical recovering alcoholic who is desperate to be a better man and to do what’s just for everyone.
Granny Weatherwax is an aloof, blunt loner who finds “being the good one” a burden, but she works tirelessly to protect and serve her steading, just so everyone else can be free to go about their normal little everyday lives.
Brutha starts off blindly believing that “purifying” sinners is necessary, but he learns to think for himself and when later on he has the chance to kill the worst of the Quisition’s torturers? He carries him through a desert, instead, and ends up reforming a religion.

These are just a few of so many examples. And are they “unrealistic”? Is the idea that imperfect beings can choose to do good even if it is difficult “fantasy”? Is it really too hard to believe that maybe even if the nature of humanity inclines toward selfishness and greed and all that terrible stuff, humanity can also do better than that, if individuals choose to?

Because, wow, to me that’s an awfully uninspiring view of “reality”. It’s kind of a boring one, too, when it comes to media. If all you’re going to show me is a series of escalating cruelty for shock value, because “in the real world good people suffer” or whatever edgy thing you think is “realistic”, I’m not interested, sorry.

Give me Terry Pratchett’s world, where readers can think that if a screwup like Rincewind or someone as bad-tempered as Granny can do good maybe they, the readers, can do good too. That if Vimes can turn his life around and work for justice, and if Brutha can question authority and stand up to oppression, maybe they could help change things, too. Give me that “fantasy” any day.

That’s the kind of “literature” I want.

*Either that or they just see books where magic is real and immediately put on their “I’m a grown up, grown ups don’t believe in magic” hats and roll their eyes, sure in the knowledge of their superiority, because what value could there ever be in having a little imagination, right?

aenramsden

But more to the point… I mean… the Discworld is hella realistic. The world makes sense. People act like people. Imps with a good eye and perfect memory are used in cameras and watches. The clacks rapidly goes multi-national after being invented and is soon a part of everyday life. What’s that quote from Night Watch…

Keep reading

diseonfire

The thing is that there are a lot of extremely dark themes in the books but the way it’s written is so funny you don’t realise how screwed up it is until you stop and think about what is actually going on. The Nightwatch series? Made my skin crawl.

But what I love about the books is that Pratchett doesn’t glorify abuse or violence and cruelty. It’s there or implied to be there and doesn’t shy away from acknowledging horrible things exist and horrible things happen - but never is it described in loving, intimate gory detail as it is so often in other novels by other authors.

It’s often spoken in the language of the powerless. The people who know exactly what is going on but cannot speak their minds, or cannot speak freely. It’s the language of the rabble, the underclass, often people who by class or station cannot confront the crime or injustice directly.

fizzgigfurball

Just because it’s not shoved down your throat like certain other authors, doesn’t mean there’s nothing dark or gritty about Terry Pratchett’s work. Often I think the people who can’t work out where the darkness is are the the people who would be the ones causing it both in the Discworld universe and this one. Reality comes in many forms, and there are plenty of tales of (real or imagined) heroes besting their base natures to do the right thing, even when it demands massive sacrifice. It is an underappreciated method to somehow make a world beautiful and terrible and make it seem as ordinary as the vast grocery lists and mechanical routines he describes alongside it all. GNU Terry Pratchett.

noirandchocolate

These last two reblogs make another really really good point so I want them on my blog. I agree completely–PTerry absolutely did NOT leave out the darkness from his worldbuilding, and it is highly realistic darkness. It’s such a testament to his skill as a writer that he included those themes without either reveling in them or making them seem like they originate from some Other Place. From some Evil, Monstrous source as opposed to just from plain old humans (and fantasy sapient species) doing plain old mundane human things that real people in the real world do.

Pratchett’s books aren’t ultimately about Defeating the Eldritch Bad Guy or Destroying the Evil Artifact or Stopping Villains from Destroying the World, even IF those tropes are sometimes present in a given story. They’re about facing the fundamentally human failings that give rise to more everyday evil, looking them square in the face even if that means looking into a very uncomfortable mirror, and choosing–and this was the point of my OP!–to change things for the better, whether for a whole society, or even for just one person.

petermorwood

Unlike certain other authors who appear incapable of showing any bright side to their world and who seem to think that the presence of a bright side and, oh, let’s say tax policy or the lack of it, is a good yardstick with which to judge - or beat the author of - a completed and eminently re-readable novel, Terry Pratchett not only paid attention to tax policy and fiscal policy and diplomacy and currency reform and religious reform and printing and journalism and postal delivery, he made funny, complex, thought-provoking, completed and eminently re-readable novels out of them.

isagrimorie

phoenixyfriend

Reminder that there are currently no workarounds to following a reblog chain back.

"Prev tags" is not going to work. It was always inconvenient and controversial, but it is now impossible.

If someone brings up the "click the empty space next to it" thing, they are mistaken. Here's an example:

If I click "sergeant-angels-trashcan" I will go to the top of that blog. If I click the white space below the username, I will go to this post on that blog.

If I click fucklestat, I will go to the top of that blog. If I click the white space next to that username, I will go to this post, at that specific comment, on that blog. This is how we avoid additional comments we don't want, like when you have three people in a row that were just tagging another person or going 'omg this' and you want to cut back on

(That doesn't apply to this specific post, where the dedalvs addition is actually super cool, but the fact that I have multiple reblogs in a single post was important for the example.)

However, if sergeant-angels-trashcan were to tag this as "prev tags," with no additional information, then the reading is "sarge appreciates the tags from rainbowwificonnection. I need to find this post on that person's blog.

Previously, I would click on their name up here, and it would take me to that exact post on their blog:

It does not do that anymore.

Like the other 'click on the username' situations, it takes me to the top of this person's blog. However, clicking the white space above, below, or next to them will take me to Sarge's post, not rainbowwificonnection's.

Can I open up the notes and dig through the tags? Sure, maybe. If it's a post that's gone viral, though, and it's a few days out of date, it will be next to impossible to find the specific post and specific tags. Could I go to their post and scroll down until I find the post? Sure, if this isn't a queued post, and the post is from the last day or two instead of a few weeks. Remember, searches don't work consistently on this site.

And beyond that, if the previous person has reblogged a post multiple times, you can't be sure you've found the correct one.

"Prev tags" only has meaning to the person you reblogged from, unless you copy the tags out and include them in the body of the post or into your tags with "<< prev tags" as an indicator.

So yeah. Stop using prev tags. They've gone from inconvenient to downright impossible.

isagrimorie

mysticalchildkore

eames-with-a-rose

Fact

blackwidownat2814

That’s not a controversial opinion…it’s the truth.

isagrimorie

vaspider

I have never felt so validated in never having given up on Tumblr.

an Elon musk tweet To address extreme levels of data scraping & system manipulation, we’ve applied the following temporary limits: - Verified accounts are limited to reading 6000 posts/day - Unverified accounts to 600 posts/day - New unverified accounts to 300/day

vaspider

IT GETS WORSE!

Sheldon Chang 🇺🇸 (@sysop408@sfba.social)

Attached: 2 images This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself. The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this mornin

SFBA.social

"This is hilarious. It appears that Twitter is DDOSing itself.

The Twitter home feed's been down for most of this morning. Even though nothing loads, the Twitter website never stops trying and trying.

In the first video, notice the error message that I'm being rate limited. Then notice the jiggling scrollbar on the right.

The second video shows why it's jiggling. Twitter is firing off about 10 requests a second to itself to try and fetch content that never arrives because Elon's latest genius innovation is to block people from being able to read Twitter without logging in.

This likely created some hellish conditions that the engineers never envisioned and so we get this comedy of errors resulting in the most epic of self-owns, the self-DDOS.

Unbelievable. It's amateur hour."

So he artificially limited the number of tweets you can see per day with a "free" account.

Once you hit your limit, it stops you from loading the page. But it also doesn't know WHY it isn't loading, so it keeps TRYING.

Twitter is literally hitting itself in the face ten times per second per user.

This is so completely amateurish it's unbelievable. It's like putting your car in neutral and slamming your foot on the gas until your engine redlines and then wondering why it's making a horrible noise and a terrible smell but not going anywhere.

end-of-pizza

It gets worse

circusm0us3

This is so comically bad I don’t how to explain it to people who aren’t chronically online l😂😂😂

end-of-pizza

I mean people of a certain age use Twitter for everything from talking to friends to getting news

Its like, imagine if your tv just turned off after you watched it for two hours and couldn't be turned back on from 24 hours

vaspider

No it's absolutely terrible. There are people who freelance and are artists who do most of their finding of work on Twitter.

It really sucks for those people.

isagrimorie

pencilcat

ayellowbirds

linklethehistorian

I just wanted to make a PSA to anyone who has a Twitter, that now anyone who isn’t on Twitter will not be able to see your posts anymore, on desktop or mobile, even if your tweets aren’t private.

I have been watching it lock down from the outside for some time now:

First, it started out with the inability to infinitely scroll someone’s page without getting a pop up like in the first pic, but then if you pressed the x, you could continue.

Then the x disappeared and had no easy workarounds. So scrolling was permanently limited.

Then, you could no longer search for terms without getting a pop up; you could still search for people, but that was it. If you pressed the x on the pop up that happened while searching for terms, it would either infinitely spin and never take you anywhere, or throw you back to your previous page.

Then, the search bar ceased to exist except to take you to trending, and you could not search for either people or terms.

Now, you simply can’t view any post or page on Twitter at all unless you have an account.

If you want a social media account that all your fans and friends can access and view whether or not they have an account, do not choose Twitter as your main location. No one but other Twitter users will be able to see it.

isagrimorie

txttletale

bilionaires are so cool. this guy founded venmo by the way

txttletale

the so-called blood boy stigma

telltaletypist

headcanonsandmore

somanywips

I hate that planned obsolescence is starting to reach fandoms. I hate that fandoms are starting to die after two, three years, I hate that whenever you stop getting content that means the fandom will die and be gone.

I need people to stop trying to brush off old interests as being 'cringe' as soon as you lose interest, or worse: make it seem like it's imoral to like something that they themselves held so dear before.

Fandoms are meant to last for years and years, the moment content stops being created is the moment we truly thrive because we keep creating the content ourselves the way we love it and expand on the things that are already there for us.

I don't care if you lost interest on something, it's fine and normal even, but stop trying to blame and make fun of people who still do love the fandom and the content and the things we can create.

I need people to enjoy fandom again

headcanonsandmore

dankmemeuniversity

runicbinary

I love this, though, because my favorite thing about Superman is he isn’t Batman. I love Batman too, but Superman isn’t a dude who decided to live his life in pursuit of a vendetta against society when he was eight and then just did nothing for the next two decades but get super jacked, become the world’s greatest detective, and memorize every strategy used by every winner in every field of competition in history. Superman is a very good-hearted person who knows how to bale hay, use AP Stylebook, and break meteors into manageable bite-sized pieces by hitting them real hard. And I’m not saying Superman isn’t smart. He’s a bright guy, he’s just not like, one of the celebrated geniuses of the DC Universe. The best thing about Superman is he is basically a normal dude who happens to be orders of magnitude stronger than anyone else. Normal dudes have brain farts. Normal dudes are presented with a life-or-death situation they have less than four seconds to resolve and make a decision that is not optimal. Normal dudes aren’t typically asked to rescue a child from a 10,000 ton machine bearing down on him at 85mph, but if they were, they would probably sometimes panic a little and do dumb shit like ruin a train when they could have just whisked the child to safety.

I think sometimes Superman makes the wrong decision, not necessarily to the result of extreme catastrophe, but something like this, where everyone is standing around clapping and cheering and the kid’s parents are weeping in gratitude and they want to pose for a picture for the 6 o’ clock news with Superman and the conductor, and in the crowd someone is like “Why didn’t he fly the kid out of the way?” and rather than rolling with the fact that the emperor is naked his friend just says “Shut up, Drew, it’s Superman.”

And then, because I also love Batman for very different reasons, I imagine that later on the same day Bruce Wayne gets a phone call and Clark Kent is like “Hey, Wayne, I uh, need a favor.”

“Do you now.”

“Yeah, I, uh, kind of owe the Union Pacific Railroad $60,000.”

“Oh, and why’s that?”

“Come on, don’t do this to me. It was all over the news.”

“I’m prepared to write you a no-strings-attached check for the full amount on the condition that you explain your entire thought process from beginning to end.”

Anyway, that’s why I like Superman.

zombolouge

I think this is very accurate. One time a tree fell on me in the forest and while it would have made more sense to simply jump to the side and avoid it my idiot brain went through the fight-or-flight options and apparently chose fight, so I reached out my hand and caught the tree, then dropped it on the ground beside me. Ended up fracturing my wrist and wondering why the fuck my brain thought that was the best option for survival. I don’t think people are good at really weighing the optimal choices in moments of crisis.

sandsbuisle

Bruce: “New Justice League policy. I am willing to pay for whatever damages you guys do in the name of justice and saving lives, but you have to write up a report detailing how the damage occured, including your thought process. Every once in a while, I will complie them into a presentation that we will go through as a whole to determine how you could have mitigated the collateral damage.”

Clark: “This is going to be a ‘name and shame’ type of thing, isn’t it?”

Bruce, lying through his teeth: “Of course not, don’t be ridiculous. This is to improve ourselves.”

batfamscreaming

The ones who admit “I don’t know what happened here” get a pass on shaming but they still get the alternative suggestions list

vbartilucci

And on nights when he really needs a break, Bruce pulls those presentations out, watches the video, and laughs his tits off.

uberguber89

Forget the edgy “batman contingency: here’s how I’d kill all my friends” that’s all over YouTube Shorts, THIS is the series I want to see!

Angelus Lupus

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury

PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3

Disney raised concerns about a same-sex kiss in the unreleased animated movie 'Nimona,' former Blue Sky staffers say

IT GETS WORSE!