From the article: “Tesla began delivering the Blade Runner-inspired truck in November 2023”

Me: Fuck you. That is an insult to Syd Mead’s legacy.

I hope that, at some point in the series, they reference his prized bottle of Chateau Picard that he’s been saving for a special occasion.

Yeah, Blucifer has killed and will kill again.

I always thought Troi should have been more of a goth princess. The real kind, the in-a-black-hoodie-screeching-for-snacks-writing-bad-poetry-on-the-living-room-floor kind, not the dressed-up-for-a-show-in-black-fishnet-and-lace-finery kind.

Yeah, like, we’ve got a fairly nice sporty-ish sedan that’s approaching 300k and since we’ve only got one car we kinda have to be ready to buy a new one quickly, I’ve done some of the thought process based on our needs and where we are in life. And the thing is, I like a nice car but I’m unclear on exactly how nice of a car I would actually appreciate driving, given that I don’t like to die or hurt other people, so I’m not going to go 3x the speed limit on some backroad and have never gotten a speeding ticket just that the upgrade from a 1.8L engine ecomony-ish sedan to a 2.5L engine sporty-ish sedan did feel real nice.

Meanwhile, one in-law got a Porsche so another in-law on the same side of the family had to trade in his Audi SUV for roughly the same SUV on the Porsche side and it’s all some douchebag power fantasy.

But, yeah, I like seeing actual-car-persons nerd out because I know enough to get at what they are nerding out about. Joy is much funner than douchebaggery.

There’s a lot about the hatred of Bambu that’s just sinophobic. Which is too bad because there’s plenty of completely rational reasons to avoid Bambu printers.

I have a pile of hobbies and I guess one common thread is obnoxious dude shit. And I say this as a male type person.

3D printing is a weird one because 3D printers are hella good for all kinds of stuff, from the more “femme” coded hobbies to the “dude” hobbies. But somehow the not-male people I know engage with some of the same communities as I do and for some reason I always get a lot more useful answers to my questions. There’s a certain aesthetic to homebrew open source 3D printers and it’s kinda industrial.

Electronics hackery is worse because it’s a lot more “masc” coded. Even software stuff isn’t quite as bad because at least there there’s been concerted social pressure.

Photography is sad because if I work with a female model I have to go through a whole process for her to make sure that she’s going to be safe during our shoot, some of which I didn’t even fully realize that was part of the process for a while. And pretty much all of the semi-pro-to-pro experienced models have at least one story and sometimes Names Are Named and it’s someone I’ve met, so I have to be constantly on guard.

Oh yeah I feel a weird version of this, ugh. See, I’m a big fan of going places and I like complicated mechanical toys and I guess I actually know a lot of deep down details about cars especially after a year or so stint doing car-related tech things, but I’m also an environmentalist who hates cars.

So, like, goofy engine swap projects, actually racing the damn sports car, actually taking the SUV off road to see something cool, details required to engineer a V12 sports car that doesn’t spin out, et al are all interesting to me but then literally everything to do with car culture seems like folks who are driving their super-fancy tuned vehicle in a traffic jam wasting gas spouting right wing BS.

Cool, I’m building up a Voron Zero although I will get started on a Trident after I’m done with the Zero probably.

Yah, I have to say that the appeal of a unique car, plus the appeal of the “FEATURE” license plate that was almost certainly already taken, and the possibility of eliciting violence all makes me sad that I’ve never owned one.

I feel like your two line description bear-ly scratches the surface of possibilities here.

A WipeoutXL-esque hover racing game, maybe with open-world-racing-game vibes, with the deep technological complexity of a flight simulator like X-Plane.

I spent a bit of time in college tooling around with it, actually, even though it turns out that years later I’m really glad I didn’t end up in the game development industry.

Way I figure it, it would require you to think about systems-level issues. It’s a Formula-One styled thing so if you end up exceeding the altitude limit in competition, ten second penalty to your time. Do you want to use a lifting-body styled groundplane? Or lift-fans, knowing that that comes out of your power budget but will do a better job of keeping you away from the altitude limit, less susceptible to other people’s wing vorticies, and avoid needing sturdy wheels? Etc.

As open world games have gotten more open world and popular these days, I suspect that the difference between then and now is that it might be funner with tune codes a la Forza Horizon so that you could play it without being quite as much of an expert. And maybe a lot of the more complicated mechanisms might actually be a little less intrusive when you can spend a bunch of time tooling around the landscape running into trees without the strain of competition before you actually get going.

There’s a lot of flight simulator players and frankly part of the joy seems to be that, when it is really really complicated and accurate, you are learning skills that might be useless-ish but there’s still that joy of learning and also of playing around with a large dangerous object that could kill a lot of people and not being worried about that when you flip an airliner upside down. And/or the “I could be an airliner/stunt pilot if the FAA wasn’t so damn restrictive on the medical” vibes.