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R.L. DaneR.L. Dane R.L. Dane About I (again) want Star Trek to be real Sun 11 May 2025 When I was in High School, I fell madly in love with Star Trek: The Next Generation. The fascinating characters, the (at the time) amazing special effects, the stories, the optimism, but most of all, the technology. My eyes dazzled seeing huge touchscreens, digital tablets, and incredible spacefaring vessels every Thursday night. Star Trek was incredibly cool, not just because it gave a somewhat realistic depiction of very advanced tech, but also of a very advanced and liberated society. In the 35 years since that one summer watching ST:TNG reruns every evening, I've watched our technology slowly catch up, but our society has only stagnated since then, and indeed greatly relapsed. On the technology side, we now have incredibly advanced computers, somewhat convincing "Artificial Intelligence," digital tablets, some basic energy weapons, some basic medical scanning, and a stable, long-term human base of operations in orbit. On the society front, we had the end of the cold war, the stability of the 90s, and then Bush Jr.'s questionable 2000 electoral victory, 9/11 and our horrid responses to it, endless wars in the Mideast, the erosion of Constitutional Rights in the U.S. in the name of "safety from terrorism," then the fanatical and racist reaction to Obama, Republican entrenchment and the rise of the Tea Party, total governmental gridlock, and of course, the orange-tinted mini-Antichrist. I don't much care about new technology anymore. I followed tech advancements with keen excitement from the early 1980s through the 2000s, but lost interest sometime in the mid-2010s. I think the infamous new MacBook of 2015 with no USB-A ports and its terrible keyboard was a signal that not only had Apple fallen from "grace," but tech itself was no longer exciting. There are modern design elements that I find exciting, like the industrial design of the recent iPads and their keyboards, the folding phones and folding all-screen laptops (making a little sandwich with a thin, detachable keyboard that rests between the two screens when closed). Those physical/industrial designs are really neat, but they're merely beautiful window dressing for a caustic soup of bad UI design, bloated software, and privacy invasion on the OS front. Hard pass. But back to Star Trek, I don't really care if — no, I honestly don't want humanity to develop phasers, warp drive, or necessarily even super-advanced medical tech within my lifetime. What's the point of buying a bulldozer if you're going to give the keys to a toddler? That's a horrible idea! Humanity is still very much that toddler. (Dang, I guess that means that Q was kinda right all along!) Every time I see some new advance in A.I. or Quantum Buzzwording, I just honestly feel a kind of disgust, because every single advancement is just more ammunition in the hands of people who are happy to allow the kind awful injustices we're seeing every day to go on in the earth for the sake of their own enjoyment and enrichment. What I yearned for mostly out of fear-of-the-unknown as a youngster, I now yearn for out of hope as someone increasingly advancing through middle age: a society that is just. The Just Society is exactly the kind of society that ST:TNG described. Even if it utterly failed to realistically describe how such a state of civic grace was attained, at the very least it gave some hope that it was theoretically possible. 100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 29Category: Ethics Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Entertainment Ethics Life Non-technical post Philosophy Science Fiction I really wish the Fediverse had more permanence Sat 10 May 2025 One of the things I hear people on the Fediverse celebrate is its incredible transience. There's no one big central network, so posts have nebulous reach throughout the network, depending on how well-"connected" your instance is, and many people set posts to auto-delete after a set period of time …Category: Life Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Beauty FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Federated Services Life Linux Loss Non-religious post Non-technical post Philosophy Social Media Read More Gathering Hashtags from the Fediverse Thu 08 May 2025 Background One minor foible of the fediverse instance I'm on is that searching (for accounts or hashtags) can be quite slow. As a workaround for now, I've saved a list of accounts I've followed for easy reference, but I also wanted some way of saving a list of hashtags to …Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Content Warning Federated Services FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Linux Non-religious post Productivity Social Media Read More Device mini-review: One by Wacom Wed 07 May 2025 Partially for the sake of my daily doodles, which I've been posting to the Fediverse, and also because I've been learning the Persian alphabet, I recently purchased a small USB pen digitizer, the "One by Wacom," by Wacom (great branding 😄). For those of you not familiar with digitizers, think of …Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Linux Non-religious post Read More A Toast to the Prolific ones Tue 06 May 2025 I wanted to take some time out today to acknowledge some folks on the fediverse that are remarkably prolific, just for fun. Prolific blogger — Rubenerd Oh holy moly. This fella has words. Lots of words. Many very fine words. Just look at bro's output for 2024: ~ $ curl -s https://rubenerd …Category: Life Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Beauty Computing Entertainment Federated Services FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Productivity Social Media Writing Read More Blog Questions Challenge: Ten Pointless Facts About Me Mon 05 May 2025 Thanks to my fedifriend Joel for nominating me for this challenge (after I had pestered him 😄). Do you floss your teeth Before I answer this, you must understand something about me: I strongly believe in truthfulness as a core virtue. Inasmuch as I am able, I never lie or purposefully …Category: Humor Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Bible Christianity Entertainment Humor Life Non-technical post Philosophy Read More Used laptops are wonderful... except when you need batteries Sun 04 May 2025 When I was a kid, a new computer cost the equivalent of $3,000 in today's money, and a five year old computer was basically a dinosaur. Nowadays you can get a brand new computer for $200 or less, and a ten-year-old computer can still be a viable daily-driver. You …Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload BSD Computing Hobbies Humor Linux Non-religious post Retrocomputing Read More I Miss RC Tue 22 April 2025 I was on a Signal video chat with my siblings today, and when I mentioned something about RC flight as an analogy for a person's health (being "three mistakes high"), my brother looked confused and then amused when I explained what I was talking about. Oh, quick explainer, I'm not …Category: Life Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Hobbies Humor Life Non-religious post Non-technical post Social Media Video Read More Blog Questions Challenge: TV Shows Edition Sat 12 April 2025 I keep finding more of these blog challenge questions, and I totally love them. This one comes courtesy of Andreas' blog. Like Andreas, I'm not a big TV watcher. I think I formally quit watching TV in 2003. I did watch a few things on Netflix and Amazon Prime over …Category: Entertainment Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Beauty Bible Christianity Entertainment Life Non-technical post Philosophy Science Fiction Video Read More Why I love Markdown Fri 11 April 2025 ... ... ... Because it's cool! But first, a brief history of writing in the digital age! Some History, or: I have ADHD and we're all aboard the unnecessary detail traaaaaainnnn!...... The very first computer I had at home was an Apple ][+ that my mom rented for a computer class in university. The …Category: Tech Tagged: 100DaysToOffload ADHD Computing FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) Hobbies Humor Linux Non-religious post Philosophy Productivity Retrocomputing UNIX Read More Page 1 of 12 Next » Site Archives Tags Atom feed Categories Entertainment Ethics Ethics, Philosophy, Tech Humor Life Philosophy Prose QuickPost Tech Writing Links Site built with Pelican, Python, and Jinja2. Social Follow me on the Fediverse! R.L. Dane by R.L. Danehttps://rldane.space