HEV MK.IV'S NUMBER ONE FAN

the concept of star-eating microbes causing a crisis and the solution being the introduction of space wolves to space yellowstone to control the space elk population. i love a good trophic cascade

dr ryland grace immediately pitching "turn the spaceship into a giant centrifuge to generate gravity" and then not balancing his actual centrifuge later on

the entire "life is reason" scene really

grace forgetting to open the mystery alien container in a fume hood AND immediately sticking his nose in it. if we did this in chemistry lab we were executed on the spot

academia drama being one of the cornerstones of grace's character

grace switching through every spectrum setting on the microscope to try to see into the astrophages and not being able to (relatable)

also: the astrophage dying and grace going "ohhh it died..." (very relatable)

grace having his not-scientist buddy Carl to give him frank solutions when he's overthinking. yes, often the solution is just to put the box in another box

copious duct tape usage

just sticking a filter into the path of the petrova line to collect astrophage goop

eva going "so it's alive" when grace tells them the astrophage are moving, and him being like "WELL ok that could be for a lot of reasons" in the tone of someone who doesn't even know where to start explaining why that's a hasty assumption

grace referring to the first new astrophage as his and carl's baby multiple times (HIGHLY relatable)

A family of core memories for me is playing with whatever the latest chatbot on the web was and they were all crap! Smartbot was useless! There was a Sony cross-promotional event with one of the James Bonds where you used an NLP bot to direct an agent through a simulated scenario and it would lose track of your meaning if you were even slightly indirect.

A language model that runs on your phone can, in a few seconds, translate an entire webpage. This is how Firefox translation works! It's not going to the cloud, it's like 300MB of machine learning model that lives on your phone and runs incredibly quickly. It takes them 15 days and a few thousand dollars to train a translator that beats any prior on device translation by a huge margin. Simply not possible to do it this well 10 years ago.

This is a small example, but I GM a D&D campaign over Zoom and we have auto-captions turned on, because some players find it difficult to keep track of live audio. The transcription used to be dogshit, but they've improved drastically over time. Here you can see:

Correctly using commas and hyphens to transcribe filler words

Adding a question mark for rising inflection at the end of a sentence

Capitalizing Vampire: the Masquerade, though it didn't get the :

like all we really knew about the master back then was that he’s the doctor’s intellectual equal and that they were former friends. and this immediately gave their relationship a specific context that set them apart from other villains in the show. like we can just see that despite them being enemies, there’s always respect for each other and it feels like they don’t truly want to kill each other, they just enjoy the challenge of the fight. we can see they are similar in many ways and the remains of their friendship are still there. the master asks the doctor to rule the galaxy together. the doctor visits the master in prison even after all the bad things he’s done purely because the doctor is worried about him and wants to see him. the master wasn’t just another random evil alien, this person meant something to the doctor and that informed all their encounters.

discovered by sufis who decided it was a miracle from Allah since it allowed them to stay up late into the night for night worship

miracle beans = UNLIMITED DHIKR

cue scholars debating for years about whether it’s haram or halal and if it should be classified as an ‘intoxicant’ or not

fast forward to 16th century ottoman empire, where a woman had the legal right to divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with enough coffee

europeans called it the “mohammaden gruel” or “devil’s drink” bc they believed it to be a “bitter invention of satan and his followers”

fast forward to pope clement viii finally giving in and tasting it to see what the hype is about and then stating: “This Satan’s drink is so delicious that it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it.”