captain_aggravated

The answer they give you is “If you want it written, YOU write it.” Which…it’s no wonder open source software doesn’t hold up, right? It’s made by idiots who think it’s up to end users to write the manual.

I haven’t used it in awhile, but OnShape I think had the best UI, for being in a browser.

There are some macros out there I’ve found that make FreeCAD a lot better. I kinda wish they had a half-decent reference for macro writing; they’ll point you to their unfinished out of date wiki if you ask.

Look up how to use FreeCAD’s spreadsheet.

No, all CAD software sucks. I use FreeCAD myself and just got used to the jank.

I think my favorite single moment, a personal anecdote, relating to video game manuals is from Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego for Windows 95. Which came with a full copy of the 1995 World Almanac. I was about 8 or 9 at the time. One of the clues was “I heard he was leaving Lesotho by car.” I went, “Wait, is that the little nation in the middle of South Africa?” I looked it up in the book, it was, and I won that round of the game based on that clue.

I think my overall favorite video game manual has to be the one from A Link to the Past. A lot of manuals had maybe a prologue or backstory in the manual, A Link to the Past has like three, including the creation myth of the in-game religion. Go read ALttP’s manual and tell me it hasn’t been the design document of the entire series since.

One more: For some reason, Illusion of Gaia for the SNES includes a full walkthrough right in the manual. They just outright spoil the entire game in the manual. Not sure why they did that.

I’m from North Carolina. No West Coast echo chamber here. Lemme splain.

The first thing we have to do is acknowledge this: Republicans are racist, sexist and homophobic. Their god has told them over and over again that black people are evil, women are inferior and gays deserve to die. The people who disagree with them on that are their enemy, that they are currently fighting and winning a holy war against.

“The Left” are their enemy. Back during the Obama administration, The Left would self-describe with the term “woke.” So The Right started using this as a slur for The Left. Being okay with black people is woke. Being okay with gays is woke. Being okay with trans is a whole new flavor of woke. These same kinds of people tend to also be into environmentalism and such. That is also woke, of their enemy. Hence giant pickup trucks and performative fuel wasting.

“But these people you’re talking about tend to like old Star Trek, and it’s been progressive since the 1960’s!” Yeah they mostly don’t see that. Because in both TOS and TNG, a white man is in charge, even if there are women and blacks on the crew. Old Trek tends to devolve into feats of military badassery or at the very least brinksmanship. Picard had a habit of out-badassing Romulans over the telephone. What about DS9? Didn’t watch it; stars a black man. Don’t like that show. What about Voyager? Watched a few episodes when Jeri Ryan joined the cast, didn’t get into it. Enterprise? Wasn’t on any channels I could get at the time.

Meanwhile, there has been a decline in Star Trek’s maturity level. TNG was a very mature show, and not in the Game of Thrones “They get their tits out” sense of the word. TNG is a show about high functioning grownups. I’ve heard it called “competency porn.” There’s an episode where Data is acting Captain of the ship, with Worf as his acting FO. Worf acts impatient with Data, and Data asks to speak with him in the ready room, and delivers a reprimand. He speaks in a stern but not raised voice. There is no shouting. Worf accepts his reprimand, comes to agree with Data’s way of thinking. Data dismisses him, and then checks in on a personal note, regretting if having to reprimand him has damaged their friendship, and Worf replies that he acknowledges he was out of line and that he’d like to remain friends. They behave like the kind of professional adults that should be in command of a warship.

That started slipping in the later shows, ENT went kind of sophomoric with all the attempts at sex appeal. JJ Abrams made a couple movies, during one Uhura tells Kirk during a critical shuttle flight to wait so that she could have a lover’s spat with Spock. On Discovery, they gossiped and backtalked like high schoolers, and then there’s a gag on Starfleet Academy where a cadet sheepishly admits to having swallowed her combadge. Apparently she put it in her mouth like a teething toddler.

Funny thing about the right wing, a lot of them have served in the military, or if they haven’t, they fetishize it. Old Trek was made by WWII veterans; Roddenberry flew B-17s for the USAAF and Doohan stormed Juno Beach on D-Day. Starfleet is a space navy, one that has gone more and less military over time but it’s still a military setting. Another aspect that makes Trek interesting and palatable to the right. Military service and especially combat makes one a “real man.”

There is no shortage of Hollywood types doing interviews listing off all the various “progressive” messages they intend to shoehorn into their works, Alex Kurtzman is among them. The thing is…they’re not delivering a message. Old Trek delivered messages. New Trek virtue signals. In the same way The Right tunes their trucks to run rich, “rolling coal” to performatively waste fuel, to be seen doing something The Enemy doesn’t like, New Trek (and indeed most of what Hollywood has done over the last decade) have been full of performative faggotry. “The cast is mostly female, trans and brown and practically all of them are gay except for one token white dude whose job it is to be always wrong.” The Left likes it because they think The Right won’t.

I want you to think about this: The Left is depicting themselves in these shows, yeah? By making all the characters brown and gay and retarded? No seriously, the more “Progressive messaging” and “representation” they cram into these shows, the characters get dumber and more childish. They’re depicting themselves as stupid pathetic children. Which makes it very easy for The Right to demonize them as dumbass manbabies who never grew up and shouldn’t be in charge of anything important.

Explain to me why they’re doing that.

TNG’s naysayers in the 80’s were upset they weren’t going to get to see more of their favorite characters. Imagine being told now in 2026 that they’re gonna reboot Friends with none of the original actors. It almost doesn’t make sense because the six friends WERE the show; just make another sitcom. And the first two seasons of TNG were pretty bad; in 1989 it was pretty easy for those naysayers to say told ya so.

The thing is, TNG had a solid premise, which was broadly the same premise as the proven original series. There were glimmers of greatness, diamonds in the rough, like Picard proving in court that Data is a person. It just had to exhaust obsolete old plots and executive producers and find its footing as its own show; by season 4 they had made some of the best television ever broadcast.

ENT had a different problem. It was the fifth series made in the franchise, fans were used to meeting new crews in new situations by now. But ENT came out and told us it “wasn’t our father’s Star Trek.” For the first two seasons, the show was just titled “Enterprise” and not “Star Trek: Enterprise.” It eschewed the traditional orchestral intro music for a pop ballad with vocals. And…the show’s values are worse. I think I just convinced myself that they set it as a prequel so they had an excuse to make the crew worse people. Archer would definitely have killed the Gorn. Could you imagine on TNG Geordi and Worf sitting around in a damaged shuttlecraft drinking whiskey and discussing how hot Troi’s ass is? That happened on ENT. Not only did they bring on another hyperintelligent but emotionally stunted hot chick with huge tits in a catsuit having learned the wrong lesson from Seven of Nine, but the entire crew spent at least some time in their skivvies, often rubbing baby oil on each other.

So ENT declared an intent to return the franchise to its classic premise after DS9 and Voyager in one hand, while masturbating half erect in with the other. Trek fans who watched the show for Kirk refusing to kill the Gorn, or offering his hand to the Klingon Captain on Genesis, or…list two Picard speeches here. Weren’t going to get it from Enterprise. You’d get Hoshi holding her tits in her hands though.

TNG had naysayers before it launched, who were proved wrong. ENT started out with the audience on board and lost people along the way.

So now we arrive at the present and they’re canceling Starfleet Academy. Trekkies seem torn into two factions about this:

There’s the diversity fetishists who are angry that a demographic list show was canceled. I remember once upon a time how, gay people for example, would ask to see more realistic, positive, nuanced gay characters in media and not just Straight Female Protagonist’s Flamboyantly Gay Friend. Now there is media made to pander to that audience, and it boils down to “there’s a woman and a gay and a brown and a fat and an autistic and a…” Elsewhere on Lemmy there was a thread about how mecha anime tended to feature gay characters and about half of the thread was like “What? GAY? WHERE!!! I want to see gay!” Them. The people who do not care if there’s a story or not, they just want to have the colors of the pride flag listed out loud.

Then there’s the folks who liked old Star Trek. Who remember Starfleet Academy depicted as a prestigious military academy that expected excellence in all fields out of their students. Wrath of Kahn opens up with Lieutenant Saavik being taught a lesson about facing death at Starfleet Academy. As a cadet, Wesley Crusher is involved in a fatal accident flying a banned maneuver and a cover-up about said accident, and he receives a strong dressing down, not only about the importance of following regulations but about integrity. The graduates of Starfleet Academy are not only extremely capable military officers, technicians that can operate and maintain the highly advanced systems of a starship, are adept at combat at any scale from hand to hand to theater naval engagement, they’re accomplished athletes, published scientists, many are classically trained musicians, they spend their free time playing 3D chess, cosplaying as Sherlock Holmes and putting on stage plays.

And then here comes the new TV show where a fat young woman walks up to Robert Picardo and sheepishly admits to having swallowed her combadge, and he replies “What, already?!” and you think “Oh, this is a show made by retards, about retards, for retards.”

Actions have consequences. And these lead addled limp dick obsoletes have dodged the consequences of their actions for 6 or 7 too many decades.