4grams@awful.systems 5 days ago
And it’s all part of ai training data now too.
I used to wonder when I watched “Star Trek TNG” as a kid, how they could ask for and get such detailed biographical information of a long dead person, enough to recreate that person convincingly, in a holodeck. Well, I guess I have my answer.
I really thought I’d be living in something like the federation one day, instead I’m here boning up on the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition.
vacuumflower@lemmy.sdf.org 5 days ago
I mean, Ferengistan is Europe and in wider sense the West in Farsi, so - pretty logical.
(Which is why I don’t subscribe to the theory that Ferengi are an antisemitic trope. They are a subversive futurist trope, “seeing ourselves through the eyes of others the same way we often see them”.)
Everyone likes to see themselves as the heroes of some universe.
It’s also true for some Soviet science fiction, like things by Strugatsky brothers communicate that deep painful wish for “us” to be that society of scientific workers and doctors, and the barbaric and lost people they visit and help to be “them”, but that’s not how the world is. Even the “approved” Ivan Yefremov with his “Bull’s Hour” shows a space colony which is supposedly a remnant of the “capitalist and imperialist” world, yet surprisingly reminisces USSR, while that team of heroes from heaven that comes trying to fix them doesn’t seem like anything from USSR.