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"And I act like I have faith, and that faith never ends.... but I really just have friends." -- Dar Williams
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@thetriggereffect
On Friendship.
@changelingfangs
"And I act like I have faith, and that faith never ends.... but I really just have friends." -- Dar Williams

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can't stop thinking about bee movie
there was a free screening 2 days ago and i watched it
it's atrocious and the jerry seinfeld bee was creepy and weird
it also features an attraction, almost relationship, between a bee and a human woman
*nodding* she fucked the bee.
they should have leaned into the bee fucking
then instead of a 3 out of 5 stars cheap-looking kids movie they could have groundbreaking cinema, perhaps including children who have human bodies and bee heads and vice versa. it could have been like cronenberg but more extreme
the crazy thing is Jerry Seinfeld is a well known and hugely successful comedian/actor, right? but his biggest film is Bee Movie.
I would not call him a successful actor. I would call him a successful comedian. He has 29 credits as an actor, and 21 of them are "Jerry" or "Jerry Seinfeld." Of the eight remaining, only four are in this century and two of those are The Bee Movie and its spinoff video game.
"I’m very concerned about my client’s right to a fair trial in this case. He’s being prejudiced by some statements that are being made by government officials. Like every other defendant, he’s entitled to a presumption of innocence. But unfortunately the way this has been handled so far his rights are being violated. And as you know, Your Honor, there’s a wealth of case law guaranteeing his rights to a fair trial, but none of the safeguards have been put in place yet here — in fact it’s just the opposite of what’s been happening.
He’s a young man, and he is being treated like a human pingpong ball between two warring jurisdictions here.
These federal and state prosecutors are coordinating with one another at the expense of him. They have conflicting theories in their indictment, and they are literally treating him like he is some sort of political fodder, like some sort of spectacle.
He was on display for everyone to see in the biggest staged perp walk I’ve ever seen in my career. It was absolutely unnecessary. He’s been cooperative with law enforcement. He’d been in custody for over a week. He waived extradition. He was cooperative at all accounts. There was no reason for the NYPD and everybody to have these big assault rifles — that frankly I had no idea it was in their arsenal — and to have all the press there the media there. It was perfectly choreographed.
And what was the New York City Mayor doing at this press conference, Your Honor? That just made it utterly political. And as your honor knows under Loro v. Charles, the Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has held it to be clearly established that these staged perp walks to the media unrelated to a legitimate law enforcement objective is unconstitutional. And I submit that there was zero law enforcement objective to do that sort of perp walk. There’s absolutely no need for that whatsoever.
And frankly, Your Honor, the mayor should know more than anyone about the presumption of innocence that he, too, is afforded dealing with his own issues. And, frankly, I submit that he was just trying to detract from those issues by making a spectacle of Mr. Mangione.
And there are consequences to this.
He has a right to a fair trial. And I just want to put on the record statements that the mayor made publicly about my client. Nothing saying “alleged” for example. And he said “I wanted to send a strong message with the police commissioner that we’re leading from the front. I’m not just going to allow him to come into our city. I wanted to look him in the eye and state ‘You carried out this terrorist act in my city, the city of New York that I love.’” And he wanted to show symbolism.
Your Honor, he’s not a symbol. He’s somebody who is afforded the right to a fair trial. He’s innocent until proven guilty. And the mayor was talking to jurors — future potential jurors that elected him. Those are the people that elected him that he is talking to and calling this man a terrorist.
So, Your Honor, I just want to make a record of this and put everyone on notice that this has to stop, and my client is entitled to a fair trial and the presumption of innocence."
It's kinda fucking weird how there are three cops looming over the two of them. Kinda feels like that might get in the way of his ability to speak freely to counsel. 🤔
What's absolutely ridiculous is that-- assuming they didn't lie about what was found in his possession when he was arrested-- none of this is necessary. The only way this dude escapes conviction is Jury Nullification... or the state fucking up like this and making it impossible for him to have a fair trial.
BREAKING: Matt Gaetz is threatening that if his sexual misconduct gets revealed, he’ll call out all the other pervert Republicans in Congress.
do it matt, give us a christmas we wont forget
Tammy and the T-Rex (1994) dir. Stewart Raffill
An evil scientist implants the brain of Michael (Paul Walker), a murdered high school student, into a Tyrannosaurus. He escapes, wreaks vengeance on his high school tormentors, and is reunited with his sweetheart Tammy (Denise Richards).
…..I’m sorry what?
This movie was literally thrown together as it was being filmed because they had access to a T-Rex for two weeks.

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Them: “Autistic People are bad at communicating”
My Autistic Reality: I am good at communication if I’m able to communicate in a way that’s suited to my needs, like in writing, or if I have been given time to prepare or if I am communicating about something I’m deeply interested in/knowledgeable on
My autistic reality: I'd be able to communicate just fine if you'd shut the fuck up and stop interrupting to respond to what you wanted me to say, rather than what I said.
It's also worth noting that, like a lot of the problems autistic people face, the problems we have with communication are also faced by people who are not autistic.
At my last job, I rapidly realized that my boss was not very good at communication, and I developed the habit of asking for clarity if I saw a possibility of misunderstanding. Much to said boss' annoyance, the rest of the team began doing the same thing, because they were also sick of hearing "You should have known that--"
when I said X it included Y and Z
when I said X it didn't include Y and Z
X was a figure of speech
X was literal
I mean this X and not that X
I didn't mean every X
I meant every X
I meant that X was a lower/equal/higher priority to other tasks you are responsible for
How many spaces were you taught to put after the end of a sentence?
I was taught to put 1 space, and I still do
I was taught to put 1 space, but now I put more
I was taught to put 2 spaces, but now I put 1
I was taught to put 2 spaces, and I still do
I was taught to put 2 spaces, but now I put 3 or more (?)
I was taught to put 3 spaces, but now I put 1
I was taught to put 3 spaces, but now I put 2
I was taught to put 3 spaces, and I still do
I was taught something else (4 or more spaces? None?)
I was never taught any specific rule for this
We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.
I need to note this poll is going to skew dramatically because this is very explicitly about WHAT KIND OF MACHINE WAS COMMON WHEN YOU LEARNED. Typewriters didn't always have even kerning (actually I suspect they USUALLY didn't have even kerning) and a worn machine could do funny things with letters, so you'd double-space to make it clear it was a deliberate ending and not your typewriter being a diva. The double-space provided clarity.
Once we moved away from manual typewriters, there was no need for this--a computer will always have even kerning unless you've deliberately picked a font that mimics a typewriter (or is really badly designed), and computers don't have platens to wear down. I took keyboarding in 1998 and my teacher was still teaching two spaces, but many of us instinctively used one, and by the time I graduated high school they were teaching one space (although probably not entirely consistently yet).
I would argue for the continued utility of the second space, but I must admit my primary reason is that, having learned to type on a manual typewriter, a double space after a period is automatic and I will probably continue to do it until the day I die.
Black Christmas (1974)
*movie trailer announcer voice*
"From Bob Clark, director of 'A Christmas Story,' comes a tale of Christmas Terror."
"It's not just putting out your eye you'll be worrying about."
Man, Bob Clark's filmography is something else. This, Porky's, A Christmas Story, and that movie where Dolly Parton turns Sylvester Stallone into a country singer.
The best thing about the Matt Gaetz withdrawal is that he already resigned from his House seat expecting he'd get confirmed as AG. So now he's just. Done.
AAAAAAAAND IT'S OFFICIAL! Good riddance!
Former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who withdrew from consideration as President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general on Thursday, sai
He can take more time to Venmo with his family and get more and more plastic surgery to make himself look even more like a children's cartoon villain, I guess
He can't depend on Trump to kill the investigation and/or charges, either... because this whole debacle has embarrassed him.
The smart thing for him to do, at this point, is get the hell out of the country.
Nothing About the Stargate Is Intelligent
Don't get me wrong, I love all three Stargate shows, and I regard them as some of the best science fiction on television.
But the Stargate itself is a mass of technobabble whose operation is not just ridiculous, but impossible. And I don't mean technically, I mean logistically.
A standard Milky Way Stargate has 39 glyphs. Each glyph represents a constellation. A standard Stargate address involves seven of these glyphs-- six of them identify the location in three dimensional space, and the seventh is the point of origin.
This is several entirely distinct flavors of stupid.
Constellations are not points. One of the stars in Orion's belt, for example, is more than a thousand light years from either of the others.
Even if this weren't the case, the Stargates are millions of years old. Stellar drift has changed the constellations in the ~10,000 years that mankind has been aware of them.
You only need three points to identify a location in three dimensional space. Requiring a second position for each axis does nothing except for drastically limit the locations that can be addressed.
If every address requires the same seventh symbol at a given gate, there's no reason not to make the gate automatically supply it.
If you can identify the point of origin with a single glyph, why can't you identify the destination with one? (There is actually a bit in the original movie where Daniel tells the natives, "we're from here" and shows the symbol that corresponds to earth and they get it.)
Also, if the point of origin is one symbol.... there can be a maximum of 39 total gates. There is no such limit in the shows.
Of course, there is also the magic eight-symbol address that somehow, despite being made up of coordinates in the milky way galaxy, points to the Pegasus Galaxy. Or the nine-symbol address that can only be dialed from one gate (that apparently isn't even in the right place, affecting its ability to dial), which points to Destiny, which doesn't even have a fixed location.
And while we're on the subject of Destiny, how does THAT gate work? If the glyphs on a gate are constellations, how does that work on a ship that moves between galaxies?
How does dialing even work? The whole spinny thing is just our gate, because we don't have a DHD, but, like... why does spinning it even work? And how is it that, by the end of the show, we've developed the technology to build our own gates, but we're still dialing the main gate with the equivalent of a hotwire?
That's not even getting into the physics of the "wormhole" itself, or, rather, the lack thereof.
An incoming wormhole spits out a vortex that, in a violation of all known laws of physics, completely destroys everything it comes into contact with.
Unless it's the iris, which is just really close to the event horizon.
Or you just bury it, but that seems to have only worked the once.
The iris that we built, because the ancients who created them didn't seem to think anyone would need to be able to lock the goddamn door (until they got to the Pegasus Galaxy).
The iris that nonetheless seems to be completely integrated into the gate so seamlessly that you can't see the mechanism or where the parts go when not in use.
Wormhole travel is one-way. Except, of course, for radio waves.
It is an explicit plot point in several episodes that an object passing through a stargate is de-materialized as it passes through the event horizon, and is not re-materialized until (and unless) the entire object passes through.
Which begs the question-- how can you step through? Once your front foot is through the horizon, it can't bear weight. How is your back foot lifted up?
You are correct that constellations are not points --from the perspective of being inside the constellation. But looking up at what ancient man used to call the celestial sphere, from Earth's perspective (which is the perspective the Ancients who built the milky way stargates would have used) the constellations can be used to draw lines of intersection.
Yes stellar drift is a thing and the constellations on the gate should be what they appeared as millions of years ago when the ancients first built the gate system. I'm going to give a little leeway on this because we know the Goa'uld took over the gate system when they took over the galaxy. And since the gates are made of naquada (with no proof that the pegasus gates are made of naquada) im gonna handwave this as the goa'uld repairing or replacing broken hardware.
You need three points to triangulate using radio waves like my cell phone can be geo-located via my pings to the nearest three cell towers. But if the way Daniel drew the box in the stargate movie is the correct canon interpretation (and we have no reason to doubt it, just because it doesnt make sense IRL because this isnt a sci-fact show) then the six points are used to draw intersecting lines to pointpoint a spot in space.
The seventh symbol contrivance is stupid. While there are an infinite option of symbols for planets, there is only one option of placement on the stargate ring itself, in the point-of-origin slot. Its like you can put whatever keycap you want on your computer's E key it will still type an E. As long as the traveler has all 38 static symbols memorized, the traveller will always be able to type the point of origin symbol. This would solve the whole movie plot of "oh noes they are trapped on Abydos until Skarra accidentally shows Daniel the seventh symbol."
The whole stargate device works a lot better, mentally, if you think of it as a computer, with a 39 symbol keyboard. And no GUI. A normal desktop computer has a static keyboard that always has the same symbols, but depending on the program running, the keys can write a document, run excel calculations, play video games, dial a phone number etc. Its the same with the stargate. The default is 'wormhole-mode' but we see in SG1 that Felger and Ba'al is able to access 'update mode'.
Thus the eighth and later ninth symbol, while explained as an area code, is just accessing a different operating program.
The milky way stargates are able to be manually dialled as long as they are plugged into power. Its not just the sgc. We see it on Lanea's prison planet and in 1969. What the dialling computer does is automate the system. The SGC is still manually dialling the gate via a hidden spinny thing controlled by the computers. The DHD bypasses that. The DHD acts as an external keyboard and sends the button presses. The DHD also acts as a systemcheck and makes sure the gate is functioning properly. The sgc computer cant read all the error codes and that comes back to bite them several times.
Now the iris idea comes from the movie, there a deleted scene where O'Neil looks at the backside of the coverstone and sees a fossilied Ra Guard who integrated into the stone. The SGC iris is so close that it stops anyone from integrating, they just become atoms on a windshield.
The kawoosh is problematic and inconsistent. I have no explanation.
One way matter transport could be a function of the matter to energy conversion equation. It might only balance one way. Two way radio transport is problematic because once the SGC gets asguard beaming technology whats to stop them from beaming someone into energy and then transmitting it the wrong way through the wormhole.
-------
Of course this whole thing is unimportant. The showrunners (not movierunners) always intended for the gate to be a vehicle for stories. Like the enterprise or the tardis or the impala or the time tunnel.
Its the magic door. Its the closet to Narnia. Its supposed to lead to the adventure and if its own rules have to be broken to tell a good story then so be it.
Of course this whole thing is unimportant. The showrunners (not movierunners) always intended for the gate to be a vehicle for stories. Like the enterprise or the tardis or the impala or the time tunnel.
I mean yes, but this is blog where I pick things apart. :)
Also, the movierunners are guilty of a worse sin. They went on record, when the show started, saying that they never intended the Stargate to connect to more than one destination. Which raises the question of why the fuck an address was needed in the first place.
"The location as seen in the sky from Earth" is not a three-dimensional coordinate. It's a two dimensional coordinate on the surface of a sphere, and even then it's wildly imprecise, given that even with the third dimension taken out of the equation, those stars are light-years apart.
But even if we assume that it is a precise 3D coordinate, the six-coordinate system is pants-shittingly inefficient, as it only allows you to locate planets that lie directly between three sets of these points.
Given the four-dimensional nature of a galaxy, a seven-coordinate system actually would be ideal. Just.... not those seven coordinates.
Your first three coordinates would be the x, y, and z, where 0,0,0 is the center of the galaxy. (Alternately, they could express vertical and horizontal angle, plus distance, from a particular view from galactic center-- think "look forty-three degrees to your left, and eighteen degrees up, then it's 16 light years in that direction" but expressed with better math.)
You next three coordinates would be pitch, yaw, and velocity. (These measurements would need to account for the fact that the movement would be circular, which is easier to do that explain in words.)
Your final coordinate would be the point at time in which the measurement was made. This allows you to update the address to account for the kind of fuckery that happens at cosmic scales; it's reasonable to assume that a species advanced enough to travel to a location and put a stargate there would be able to keep track of where it was and simply recalculate those values.
Of course, the other thing that gets glossed over is that the Stargates are all connected via some kind of network, and have an operating system that can be modified. Which means that the most efficient way of doing it would be to just give each gate a numerical address.
And the gate spinning thing is entirely a Looks Cool factor. It doesn't even make sense for it to be there, considering that if you're working the gate without a DHD, you also don't have a power supply. And it especially doesn't make sense in the SGC after the first season, considering that they found a functioning DHD in Antarctica.
(Don't get me started on the whole "two gates in proximity to each other conflict" because that's just bad design.)
Oh. My. God. How did i forget the Antarctica dhd? Its always been the russian DHD but that was stolen from the giza expedition. Did the showrunners forget the Antarctica gate had a dhd or did they assume they wrote it broken when the fault was really carter trying to dial her own phone number?
I'm assuming they forgot about it. But I just rewatched the episode and, like, Carter got it working, and the failure to connect caused the "busy signal" that led Daniel to find them.

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If you go on this site and say something like "I'm broke right now, I'll have rice instead of steak for dinner" then somebody will come into your notes with the most condescending tone possible and say "EXCUSE ME but rice is FAR more expensive than steak", and if you disagree with them then they'll be like "Fancy gourmet rice cooked for you by a professional chef is much more costly than if your parents give you the steak that they won in a raffle" and act like this is a reasonable reading of your original post and they've successfully corrected you
Okay, but those raffle tickets were $850 each, and your parents bought three, so really.....
Currently ripping SG-1 apart, but, like, watching an episode to check a fact and there's this episode where Sam just basically curls up with Jack to die and goddamn.
Of course it's absolutely ridiculous that she looks at the outside world and goes "ICE PLANET" considering that she's from a planet that has Antarctica. I'm not saying she should have known she was there, but "ice planet" is just... not a thing.
But I've always been amused by the Jack/Sam dynamic where it's not a question of will they or won't they, because they won't, it would get in the way of their careers, but they want to soooo badly that they manage to hook up in every other dimension and timeline.
Nothing About the Stargate Is Intelligent
Don't get me wrong, I love all three Stargate shows, and I regard them as some of the best science fiction on television.
But the Stargate itself is a mass of technobabble whose operation is not just ridiculous, but impossible. And I don't mean technically, I mean logistically.
A standard Milky Way Stargate has 39 glyphs. Each glyph represents a constellation. A standard Stargate address involves seven of these glyphs-- six of them identify the location in three dimensional space, and the seventh is the point of origin.
This is several entirely distinct flavors of stupid.
Constellations are not points. One of the stars in Orion's belt, for example, is more than a thousand light years from either of the others.
Even if this weren't the case, the Stargates are millions of years old. Stellar drift has changed the constellations in the ~10,000 years that mankind has been aware of them.
You only need three points to identify a location in three dimensional space. Requiring a second position for each axis does nothing except for drastically limit the locations that can be addressed.
If every address requires the same seventh symbol at a given gate, there's no reason not to make the gate automatically supply it.
If you can identify the point of origin with a single glyph, why can't you identify the destination with one? (There is actually a bit in the original movie where Daniel tells the natives, "we're from here" and shows the symbol that corresponds to earth and they get it.)
Also, if the point of origin is one symbol.... there can be a maximum of 39 total gates. There is no such limit in the shows.
Of course, there is also the magic eight-symbol address that somehow, despite being made up of coordinates in the milky way galaxy, points to the Pegasus Galaxy. Or the nine-symbol address that can only be dialed from one gate (that apparently isn't even in the right place, affecting its ability to dial), which points to Destiny, which doesn't even have a fixed location.
And while we're on the subject of Destiny, how does THAT gate work? If the glyphs on a gate are constellations, how does that work on a ship that moves between galaxies?
How does dialing even work? The whole spinny thing is just our gate, because we don't have a DHD, but, like... why does spinning it even work? And how is it that, by the end of the show, we've developed the technology to build our own gates, but we're still dialing the main gate with the equivalent of a hotwire?
That's not even getting into the physics of the "wormhole" itself, or, rather, the lack thereof.
An incoming wormhole spits out a vortex that, in a violation of all known laws of physics, completely destroys everything it comes into contact with.
Unless it's the iris, which is just really close to the event horizon.
Or you just bury it, but that seems to have only worked the once.
The iris that we built, because the ancients who created them didn't seem to think anyone would need to be able to lock the goddamn door (until they got to the Pegasus Galaxy).
The iris that nonetheless seems to be completely integrated into the gate so seamlessly that you can't see the mechanism or where the parts go when not in use.
Wormhole travel is one-way. Except, of course, for radio waves.
It is an explicit plot point in several episodes that an object passing through a stargate is de-materialized as it passes through the event horizon, and is not re-materialized until (and unless) the entire object passes through.
Which begs the question-- how can you step through? Once your front foot is through the horizon, it can't bear weight. How is your back foot lifted up?
You are correct that constellations are not points --from the perspective of being inside the constellation. But looking up at what ancient man used to call the celestial sphere, from Earth's perspective (which is the perspective the Ancients who built the milky way stargates would have used) the constellations can be used to draw lines of intersection.
Yes stellar drift is a thing and the constellations on the gate should be what they appeared as millions of years ago when the ancients first built the gate system. I'm going to give a little leeway on this because we know the Goa'uld took over the gate system when they took over the galaxy. And since the gates are made of naquada (with no proof that the pegasus gates are made of naquada) im gonna handwave this as the goa'uld repairing or replacing broken hardware.
You need three points to triangulate using radio waves like my cell phone can be geo-located via my pings to the nearest three cell towers. But if the way Daniel drew the box in the stargate movie is the correct canon interpretation (and we have no reason to doubt it, just because it doesnt make sense IRL because this isnt a sci-fact show) then the six points are used to draw intersecting lines to pointpoint a spot in space.
The seventh symbol contrivance is stupid. While there are an infinite option of symbols for planets, there is only one option of placement on the stargate ring itself, in the point-of-origin slot. Its like you can put whatever keycap you want on your computer's E key it will still type an E. As long as the traveler has all 38 static symbols memorized, the traveller will always be able to type the point of origin symbol. This would solve the whole movie plot of "oh noes they are trapped on Abydos until Skarra accidentally shows Daniel the seventh symbol."
The whole stargate device works a lot better, mentally, if you think of it as a computer, with a 39 symbol keyboard. And no GUI. A normal desktop computer has a static keyboard that always has the same symbols, but depending on the program running, the keys can write a document, run excel calculations, play video games, dial a phone number etc. Its the same with the stargate. The default is 'wormhole-mode' but we see in SG1 that Felger and Ba'al is able to access 'update mode'.
Thus the eighth and later ninth symbol, while explained as an area code, is just accessing a different operating program.
The milky way stargates are able to be manually dialled as long as they are plugged into power. Its not just the sgc. We see it on Lanea's prison planet and in 1969. What the dialling computer does is automate the system. The SGC is still manually dialling the gate via a hidden spinny thing controlled by the computers. The DHD bypasses that. The DHD acts as an external keyboard and sends the button presses. The DHD also acts as a systemcheck and makes sure the gate is functioning properly. The sgc computer cant read all the error codes and that comes back to bite them several times.
Now the iris idea comes from the movie, there a deleted scene where O'Neil looks at the backside of the coverstone and sees a fossilied Ra Guard who integrated into the stone. The SGC iris is so close that it stops anyone from integrating, they just become atoms on a windshield.
The kawoosh is problematic and inconsistent. I have no explanation.
One way matter transport could be a function of the matter to energy conversion equation. It might only balance one way. Two way radio transport is problematic because once the SGC gets asguard beaming technology whats to stop them from beaming someone into energy and then transmitting it the wrong way through the wormhole.
-------
Of course this whole thing is unimportant. The showrunners (not movierunners) always intended for the gate to be a vehicle for stories. Like the enterprise or the tardis or the impala or the time tunnel.
Its the magic door. Its the closet to Narnia. Its supposed to lead to the adventure and if its own rules have to be broken to tell a good story then so be it.
Of course this whole thing is unimportant. The showrunners (not movierunners) always intended for the gate to be a vehicle for stories. Like the enterprise or the tardis or the impala or the time tunnel.
I mean yes, but this is blog where I pick things apart. :)
Also, the movierunners are guilty of a worse sin. They went on record, when the show started, saying that they never intended the Stargate to connect to more than one destination. Which raises the question of why the fuck an address was needed in the first place.
"The location as seen in the sky from Earth" is not a three-dimensional coordinate. It's a two dimensional coordinate on the surface of a sphere, and even then it's wildly imprecise, given that even with the third dimension taken out of the equation, those stars are light-years apart.
But even if we assume that it is a precise 3D coordinate, the six-coordinate system is pants-shittingly inefficient, as it only allows you to locate planets that lie directly between three sets of these points.
Given the four-dimensional nature of a galaxy, a seven-coordinate system actually would be ideal. Just.... not those seven coordinates.
Your first three coordinates would be the x, y, and z, where 0,0,0 is the center of the galaxy. (Alternately, they could express vertical and horizontal angle, plus distance, from a particular view from galactic center-- think "look forty-three degrees to your left, and eighteen degrees up, then it's 16 light years in that direction" but expressed with better math.)
You next three coordinates would be pitch, yaw, and velocity. (These measurements would need to account for the fact that the movement would be circular, which is easier to do that explain in words.)
Your final coordinate would be the point at time in which the measurement was made. This allows you to update the address to account for the kind of fuckery that happens at cosmic scales; it's reasonable to assume that a species advanced enough to travel to a location and put a stargate there would be able to keep track of where it was and simply recalculate those values.
Of course, the other thing that gets glossed over is that the Stargates are all connected via some kind of network, and have an operating system that can be modified. Which means that the most efficient way of doing it would be to just give each gate a numerical address.
And the gate spinning thing is entirely a Looks Cool factor. It doesn't even make sense for it to be there, considering that if you're working the gate without a DHD, you also don't have a power supply. And it especially doesn't make sense in the SGC after the first season, considering that they found a functioning DHD in Antarctica.
(Don't get me started on the whole "two gates in proximity to each other conflict" because that's just bad design.)
Have been thinking a lot lately about how, when a new technology emerges, people who were born after the shift have trouble picturing exactly what The Before was like (example, the fanfic writer who described the looping menu on a VHS tape), and even people who were there have a tendency to look back and go "Wow, that was... wild."
Today's topic: The landline. A lot of people still have them, but as it's not the only game in town, it's an entirely different thing now.
(Credit to @punk-de-l-escalier who I was talking to about this and made some contributions)
for most of the heyday of the landline, there was no caller ID of any kind. Then it was a premium service, and unless you had a phone with Caller ID capability-- and you didn't-- you had to buy a special box for it. (It was slightly smaller than a pack of cigarettes.)
Starting in the early nineties, there WAS a way to get the last number dialed, and if desired, call it back. It cost 50 cents. I shit you not, the way you did it was dialing "*69". There's no way that was an accident.
If you moved, unless it was in the same city-- and in larger cities, the same PART of the city-- you had to change phone numbers.
As populations grew, it was often necessary to take a whole bunch of people and say "Guess what? You have a new area code now."
The older the house, the fewer phone jacks it had. When I was a kid, the average middle-class house had a phone jack in the kitchen, and one in the master bedroom. Putting in a new phone jack was expensive... but setting up a splitter and running a long phone cord under the carpet, through the basement or attic, or just along the wall and into the next room was actually pretty cheap.
Even so, long phone cords were pretty much a thing on every phone that could be conveniently picked up and carried.
The first cordless phones were incredibly stupid. Ask the cop from my hometown who was talking to his girlfriend on a cordless phone about the illegal shit he was doing, and his wife could hear the whole thing through her radio.
For most of the heyday of the landline, there was no contact list. Every number was dialed manually. Starting in the mid-eighties, you could get a phone with speed dial buttons, but I cannot stress how much they sucked, because you had to label them with a goddamn pencil, you only had ten or twenty numbers, reprogramming them was a bitch, and every once in a while would lose all of the number in its memory.
All of the phone numbers in your city or metro area were delivered to you once a year in The Phone Book, which was divided between the White Pages (Alphabetic), the Yellow Pages (Businesses, by type, then alphabetic), and the Blue Pages (any government offices in your calling area (which we will get to in a moment)).
Listing in the white pages was automatic; to get an unlisted number cost extra.
Since people would grab the yellow pages, find the service they need, and start calling down the list, a lot of local business names where chosen because they started with "A", and "Aardvark" was a popular name.
Yes, a fair chunk of the numbers in it were disconnected or changed between the time it was printed and it got to your door, much less when you actually looked it up.
One phone line per family was the norm.
Lots and lots and LOTS of kids got in trouble because their parents eavesdropped on the conversation by picking up another phone connected to the same line.
A fair number of boys with similar voices to their father got in trouble because one of their friends didn't realize who they were talking to.
And of course, there were the times where you couldn't leave the house, because you were expecting an important phone call.
Or when you were in a hotel and had to pay a dollar per call. (I imagine those charges haven't gone away, but who pays them?)
Since you can't do secondary bullet points, I'll break a couple of these items out to their own lists, starting with Answering Machines.
these precursors to voicemail were a fucking nightmare.
The first generation of consumer answering machines didn't reach the market until the mid-eighties. They recorded both the outgoing message and the incoming calls onto audio cassettes.
due to linear nature of the audio cassette, the only way to save an incoming call was to physically remove the cassette and replace it with a new one.
they were prone to spectacular malfunction; if the power went out, rather than simply fail to turn back on, they would often rewind the cassette for the incoming messages to the beginning, because it no longer knew where the messages were, or how many there were.
Another way they could go wrong was to start playing the last incoming call as the outgoing message.
Most people, rather than trying to remember to turn it on each time they went out and turn it off when they got back, would just leave it on, particularly when they discovered that you could screen incoming calls with it.
Rather a lot of people got themselves in trouble because they either didn't get to the phone before the answering machine, or picked up when they heard who was calling, and forgot that the answering machine was going-- thus recording some or all of the phone call.
Eventually the implemented a feature where you could call your answering machine, enter a code, and retrieve your messages. The problem was that most people couldn't figure out how to change their default code, and those that did didn't know it reset anytime the power went out. A guy I went to college with would call his ex-girlfriend's machine-- and her current boyfriend's-- and erase all the messages. He finally got busted when she skipped class and heard the call come in.
And, of course, there's the nightmare that was long-distance.
Calls within your local calling area were free. (Well, part of the monthly charge.) This usually meant the city you lived in and its suburbs. Anything outside this calling area was an extra per-minute charge.
This charge varied by time of day and day of the week, which made things extra fun when your friend on the west coast waited until 9pm for the lower charges, but you were on the east coast and it was midnight.
Depending on your phone company, and your long distance plan, the way your long distance work varied wildly. Usually in-state was cheaper-- with zones within the state that varied by price, and out of state had its own zones.
Your long distance plan came in lots and lots of distracting packages, and was billed to your phone bill.
At one point, when I was living in North Carolina, a scammer set themselves up as a long distance company and notified the phone company that a shitload of people had switched to their service. They got caught fairly quickly, but I was annoyed because they were actually charging less than AT&T.
"Would you like to change your long distance plan" was the 80's and 90's equivalent of "We have important news about your car insurance."
Had a friend who lived at the edge of a suburb in Birmingham, and for her to call her friend two miles down the street was long-distance, because the boundary of the calling area was right between them.
Next tell them about calling "collect" and the commercials it spawned in the 90s.
Oh, right.
If you needed to call someone from a payphone and didn't have the quarter, or you needed to call someone long distance and not pay for it yourself, you could place a collect call. Originally, this meant talking to the operator, who would call the person, ask if they would accept the charges on THEIR bill, and if they did, put the call through.
Eventually, this got automated-- you'd call a number, punch in the number you wanted to dial, and record your name, and a computer would call the other person.
Charges for a collect call were higher than if you paid them directly.
Even before this was automated, people had ways of getting around the charges-- "If I give my name as 'Charlie' it means I arrived okay, but if I give my name as 'Chuck', decline the charges and call me back." Once it was automated, you could actually give a two-second message.
Oh, yeah, and payphones. Until the early aughts, there were phones everywhere that you could put in coins and make a phone call. The phrase "It's your dime" is left over from when it cost ten cents, and continued well into the age where the call cost a quarter. (In that age, we developed "Here's a quarter. Call someone who cares.")
Payphones were everywhere and completely unmonitored, making them the method of choice for lots of illegal or just annoying activities, since you could trace the call to the phone and still have no idea who placed the call.
Originally, payphones were enclosed in a booth for privacy, but between the fact that these booths got used for non-phone activities-- sex, drugs, changing into superhero costumes*-- and the fact that, with such privacy, people would tie up the payphone for extended periods of times, the concept of the "phone booth" got redefined to what we would call a kiosk today.
*this was a staple of Superman comics. I can't remember which movie it was, but there was a scene where Clark pulled at his tie then suddenly realized it was a MODERN phone booth-- a kiosk-- and that wouldn't work.
Landlines were household numbers, not individual numbers the way cellphones are. (occasionally a teen might have their own line but this was rare)
Kids were expected to be able to answer the household phone reasonably politely from a young age.
As a kid, I got drilled on "I'm sorry, she can't come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?" to obscure the difference between Mom is busy, Mom is in the bathroom, and I am home alone and thus at risk.
Managing the long curly phone cord took skill. If you stretched it around a corner, it would sweep things off tables. The spiral would invert in places, making it look ugly and move less predictably.
Kids were expected to memorize their home phone number from a fairly early age. (not as much to call themselves as to tell an adult if they got lost or otherwise needed help)
You could have an unlisted (not in the phone book) number in most places. Single women sometimes put their first initial instead of their first name.
Schools sometimes made phone trees for efficient spreading of information like snow days (for schools too small to have that information on the radio). They were written-out paper trees where one person would call the next two or three, and each of them would call the next two, and so on.
Babysitters were sometimes left with the number of the restaurant the parents would be at, for emergencies.
And all of this is for later landlines, from the 60s-90s. Before then, things were different!
Party lines. The first several decades of phones being common, they did not have a single dedicated phone line to each individual house, because that would have been too expensive. Instead, there was a single phone line that went to every house on the street. Every house had a different ring pattern so you could tell which house was being called, but anybody who misheard it (or was nosy) could pick up their phone and listen to anybody else's phone conversations any time they wanted to. There was usually a slight click sound as they picked it up, but you might not be able to tell. This was another reason for using phone booths for any sensitive conversation.
Calls were connected by a living person (almost always a woman). You told the operator who you wanted to call (which might be a name, and might be a word+number, like "Pensylvannia 6-5000" of the famous song) and they would physically plug in a cable to the phone line you wanted to reach. There were automatic switching machines starting in the 1880s, but most places didn't have them until fairly late--the last manual switchboard in the UK wasn't replaced with a mechanical one until 1960. And even if your area had automated calls for local numbers, a long-distance call would require an operator. On early phones, you got the operator by picking up the phone; once you had an automatic switching machine, you had to dial zero, but there was always an operator on duty and easy to reach.
Operators, redux. A large apartment building or office building might have separate lines for each apartment or major office. But they didn't have separate phone numbers for all of those different extensions! Instead, they would have an operator for the building whose job was to connect people. This led to answering services. If a person lived in such a building, they could pay to have the operator take messages for them when they weren't home.
Monopoly. Pretty much all telephone lines in a country would be owned by a single company, in the US it was AT&T, sometimes called "Ma Bell," because it had originally been called the Bell Telephone Company. AT&T was forced to de-monopolize in 1982, leading to the development of competing phone companies.
Billing. Local calls were included as part of your monthly bill, but long-distance calls were billed as separate line items, so you could look at your bill and tell every single long-distance call from your phone that month. And it added up, so people did look a lot of letter-writing. You'd call long-distance for an emergency or big news, but people rarely called long-distance just to talk. Instead, they would write letters.
International calls. International calls were crazy expensive.
For quite a good run of time there, the phone lines were their own distinct thing, which ran along the same poles as the power. So quite often, the power to your house would go out, but your landline could still make calls. You could in fact call the power company about the outage.
A lot of that wiring is still physically there afaik, but modern landlines are VOIP and generally run through your modem, so when you lose power you also lose phone, which has definitely given cell phones a clear utility boost.
You can see the characters in the Andy Griffith show using the Party Line to eavesdrop on their neighbors conversations, and everyone there was aware that their neighbors might be listening in. Most were okay with it, but if it was something very private or important they would specifically tell anybody else on the line to hang up. They anticipated their neighbors being nosy and not announcing that they'd joined the call.
The neighbors could eavesdrop on each other without getting caught by putting their finger on the receiver before raising the phone off of it, and then slowly releasing it afterwards. This prevented the other people on the line from hearing the telltale click of them picking up the phone. In order to remain stealthy they would have to carefully and slowly lower the phone back down when hanging up as well.
Oh, and let's not forget that the first internet access for residential folks was *through the land-line phone*. The very very first ones, you had to physically pick up the receiver handset and put it on a separate device which had its own microphone and speaker so that it was literally making a phone call to another modulator-demodulator (thus "modem"). Literally, the two computers would scream at each other over the phone line.
Fairly quickly, they invented devices which you could plug into the phone jack and then into your computer (plus a separate power cord), so that nobody had to physically pick up the phone for the screaming to connect. Eventually, they invented modems that you could install inside your desktop, just like video cards, and eventually after that ones that slotted into special slots on some laptops.
Of course, since this was literally just a phone call where computers squealed instead of humans talking, it *tied up the phone line*. And, naturally, if someone else picked up the "regular" phone, it would fuck up the delicate balance of computer squeals and you'd lose connection.
The speeds, BTW, were slow as hell and nobody was streaming anything but text.
And when they gave us house modems they would still, for some reason, audibly scream. Not just down the phone like but the computer would scream at us as well. They didn't have to make us hear that, they chose to.
I could have missed it above but I don't think I saw anyone mention calling cards. In the 80s and 90s especially least in the 90s, long distance/international phone calls were often made using a prepaid card. You dialed the number on the card, and entered the pin, and the charge went to the card instead of on the phone bill. As far as I remember you didn't need to be any particular age to buy them, and at least where I was, it was a popular way to call outside your area code without getting caught by your parents. It also was paid by minutes usually, so you couldn't lose track of time making a long distance call. They're still available today, afaik, though I haven't noticed them at any stores I frequent. But I remember using them even into the very early aughts to make international calls before dial up instant messenger services online started doing absolutely terrible (but free) voice calls.
In addition to what has already been mentioned:
Ads for long distance calling services were frequently sappy. I’ve seen the phrase “cries at long distance television commercials” used to describe emotional characters.
Example:
Commercials for various collect calling services were everywhere in the 1990s/early 2000s. A lot of them had Mr. T:
And finally this isn’t a phone commercial, but it’s a good example of how we used to use the collect call message to tell our parents to pick us up without them having to accept the charges:
My first laptop, aka my first "proper/real" computer was an Acer that came with wifi and early Bluetooth, as well as a jack for not only a direct ethernet connection... But a phone jack for dial-up, WHICH I actually did have to use for a while before finally switching to broadband a bit later.
You may ask; what did I use before this laptop, if I was on the internet before I got a "real" computer? A little thing called WebTV. Yeah. Look it up sometime and marvel at my oldness.
I remember seeing WebTV. I didn't think anyone actually USED it.
Nothing About the Stargate Is Intelligent
Don't get me wrong, I love all three Stargate shows, and I regard them as some of the best science fiction on television.
But the Stargate itself is a mass of technobabble whose operation is not just ridiculous, but impossible. And I don't mean technically, I mean logistically.
A standard Milky Way Stargate has 39 glyphs. Each glyph represents a constellation. A standard Stargate address involves seven of these glyphs-- six of them identify the location in three dimensional space, and the seventh is the point of origin.
This is several entirely distinct flavors of stupid.
Constellations are not points. One of the stars in Orion's belt, for example, is more than a thousand light years from either of the others.
Even if this weren't the case, the Stargates are millions of years old. Stellar drift has changed the constellations in the ~10,000 years that mankind has been aware of them.
You only need three points to identify a location in three dimensional space. Requiring a second position for each axis does nothing except for drastically limit the locations that can be addressed.
If every address requires the same seventh symbol at a given gate, there's no reason not to make the gate automatically supply it.
If you can identify the point of origin with a single glyph, why can't you identify the destination with one? (There is actually a bit in the original movie where Daniel tells the natives, "we're from here" and shows the symbol that corresponds to earth and they get it.)
Also, if the point of origin is one symbol.... there can be a maximum of 39 total gates. There is no such limit in the shows.
Of course, there is also the magic eight-symbol address that somehow, despite being made up of coordinates in the milky way galaxy, points to the Pegasus Galaxy. Or the nine-symbol address that can only be dialed from one gate (that apparently isn't even in the right place, affecting its ability to dial), which points to Destiny, which doesn't even have a fixed location.
And while we're on the subject of Destiny, how does THAT gate work? If the glyphs on a gate are constellations, how does that work on a ship that moves between galaxies?
How does dialing even work? The whole spinny thing is just our gate, because we don't have a DHD, but, like... why does spinning it even work? And how is it that, by the end of the show, we've developed the technology to build our own gates, but we're still dialing the main gate with the equivalent of a hotwire?
That's not even getting into the physics of the "wormhole" itself, or, rather, the lack thereof.
An incoming wormhole spits out a vortex that, in a violation of all known laws of physics, completely destroys everything it comes into contact with.
Unless it's the iris, which is just really close to the event horizon.
Or you just bury it, but that seems to have only worked the once.
The iris that we built, because the ancients who created them didn't seem to think anyone would need to be able to lock the goddamn door (until they got to the Pegasus Galaxy).
The iris that nonetheless seems to be completely integrated into the gate so seamlessly that you can't see the mechanism or where the parts go when not in use.
Wormhole travel is one-way. Except, of course, for radio waves.
It is an explicit plot point in several episodes that an object passing through a stargate is de-materialized as it passes through the event horizon, and is not re-materialized until (and unless) the entire object passes through.
Which begs the question-- how can you step through? Once your front foot is through the horizon, it can't bear weight. How is your back foot lifted up?
I don't disagree about any of this, but I've watched through it enough times by now I can see (irrelevant) errors
The glyphs aren't earth 'constellations' that's just how they were attempting to rationalize them during the initial translation attempts
They couldn't successfully dial anything other than abbydos until Sam Carters program that calculated the stellar drift variance
The 6 point address system supposedly keeps you from traveling through other stars, because that does timey-wimey junk
Different gates have different glyphs, and as they start traveling further, they build that mid-point gate on a space station to shorten multi gate trips and make the power demands more reasonable
The destiny's gate works like that because Voyager did well a few years before so "trapped on a ship far from home" was a viable concept
Partial things travel through frequently, I'm positive they've severed baddies this way in the past
Gravity waves are also inexplicably a 2 way force
Momentum, I guess
They have in fact severed baddies-- most notable in the second episode-- but the back of the guy's head didn't appear anywhere. There's a plot point in Atlantis where a puddlejumper is wedged in the gate, and if they can't get the whole ship through, then everyone who's in the cockpit will remain in a state of "not currently existing."
The Gravity waves were actually coming from the other planet that had dialed us, but otherwise do NOT get me started on the physics of that episode, but... oh yeah... there's no way to turn off a gate from the remote side.

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Nothing About the Stargate Is Intelligent
Don't get me wrong, I love all three Stargate shows, and I regard them as some of the best science fiction on television.
But the Stargate itself is a mass of technobabble whose operation is not just ridiculous, but impossible. And I don't mean technically, I mean logistically.
A standard Milky Way Stargate has 39 glyphs. Each glyph represents a constellation. A standard Stargate address involves seven of these glyphs-- six of them identify the location in three dimensional space, and the seventh is the point of origin.
This is several entirely distinct flavors of stupid.
Constellations are not points. One of the stars in Orion's belt, for example, is more than a thousand light years from either of the others.
Even if this weren't the case, the Stargates are millions of years old. Stellar drift has changed the constellations in the ~10,000 years that mankind has been aware of them.
You only need three points to identify a location in three dimensional space. Requiring a second position for each axis does nothing except for drastically limit the locations that can be addressed.
If every address requires the same seventh symbol at a given gate, there's no reason not to make the gate automatically supply it.
If you can identify the point of origin with a single glyph, why can't you identify the destination with one? (There is actually a bit in the original movie where Daniel tells the natives, "we're from here" and shows the symbol that corresponds to earth and they get it.)
Also, if the point of origin is one symbol.... there can be a maximum of 39 total gates. There is no such limit in the shows.
Of course, there is also the magic eight-symbol address that somehow, despite being made up of coordinates in the milky way galaxy, points to the Pegasus Galaxy. Or the nine-symbol address that can only be dialed from one gate (that apparently isn't even in the right place, affecting its ability to dial), which points to Destiny, which doesn't even have a fixed location.
And while we're on the subject of Destiny, how does THAT gate work? If the glyphs on a gate are constellations, how does that work on a ship that moves between galaxies?
How does dialing even work? The whole spinny thing is just our gate, because we don't have a DHD, but, like... why does spinning it even work? And how is it that, by the end of the show, we've developed the technology to build our own gates, but we're still dialing the main gate with the equivalent of a hotwire?
That's not even getting into the physics of the "wormhole" itself, or, rather, the lack thereof.
An incoming wormhole spits out a vortex that, in a violation of all known laws of physics, completely destroys everything it comes into contact with.
Unless it's the iris, which is just really close to the event horizon.
Or you just bury it, but that seems to have only worked the once.
The iris that we built, because the ancients who created them didn't seem to think anyone would need to be able to lock the goddamn door (until they got to the Pegasus Galaxy).
The iris that nonetheless seems to be completely integrated into the gate so seamlessly that you can't see the mechanism or where the parts go when not in use.
Wormhole travel is one-way. Except, of course, for radio waves.
It is an explicit plot point in several episodes that an object passing through a stargate is de-materialized as it passes through the event horizon, and is not re-materialized until (and unless) the entire object passes through.
Which begs the question-- how can you step through? Once your front foot is through the horizon, it can't bear weight. How is your back foot lifted up?
True Blood - The Medical Advancement With No Medical Applications
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed True Blood, but I was always annoyed about one thing in particular: The whole setup is that scientists came up with a way to make artificial blood, but the only time we see this miracle advancement is in a bottle marketed to vampires. This is incredibly myopic, as this would be one of the most significant medical advances in history.
First of all, the Red Cross spends $2 billion a year collecting blood-- a majority of its operating budget. That money would no longer be needed, and would be spent on other causes. The Red Cross itself would become a considerably less influential power, which would probably be good for everyone (including the Red Cross).
In a world where blood is available by the keg, the average human lifespan would probably spike by 20 years. There are plenty of ailments, illnesses, and conditions that can be treated quite effectively with blood transfusion, but aren't, because blood isn't really available on that type of scale.
Every ambulance would be carrying a couple of gallons of O positive. In large hospitals they'd be working out of 50 gallon barrels. (This sounds like an exaggeration, but you'd be amazed how many different fluids are used in medicine because you just can't have that kind of blood on hand-- and because they're NOT blood, they have limits that unlimited transfusions would not.)
You would literally have a new class of licensed medical professional-- a transfusionist, falling somewhere between a phlebotomist, a paramedic, and a nurse. And they would be in incredibly high demand, because oh, buddy, we now have a world with elective blood transfusions.
Getting an "oil change" would be part of the spa experience. There would be teams doing housecalls out of a van ambulance, and blood boutiques in every shopping mall. Wealthy people would get transfusions the morning after a night of extreme partying.
And, I know, that's not the story they wanted to tell, but there would have been impact on the vampires as well, because the availability of True Blood would make real blood more readily obtainable, because humans could donate large quantities with no ill effects. (Hell, get a license as a transfusionist, go around in a van, and trade housewives a couple pints of True Blood for their natural blood... they'll PAY YOU to do it, and you can sell the blood or (if you're a vampire) drink it yourself.)
@uniquecrash5 - It was a medical advancement; its wasn't invented for vampires. Once it became public, Vampires went "oh, hey, we can use this, and now we can pretend we aren't going to eat people anymore".