FlatFootFox

It’s pickled! Had to get it extra purple! 🙌

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary for the original Game Boy had some shoot ‘em up segments like this. (The Klingons were smaller and in their own ships.) It’s not really worth going back and playing, but they managed to include some very Star Trek gameplay elements despite being a 1992 licensed handheld game.

Instead of power ups, you could pause the game to reroute your ship’s power. You started off with a balance of engines (how fast you could move), shields (how much damage you’d take if you got hit), and weapons (how far your phasers would travel across the screen and how much damage they’d do.)

It was pretty neat being able to go, “Oh no, asteroids!”, and then set your weapons to their absolute minimum and use those resources for your engines. Your phasers would only go two pixels in front of your ship, but you could zoom around the obstacles. Then when enemy ships show up you’d crank up the weapons and shields and blow them out of ~~the sky~~ space before they managed to square up a shot at you.

But mostly you just keep everything roughly balanced, hit a random obstacle and instantly died. I don’t think I even saw the away mission segments without Game Genie codes.

The first time they use the transporter is to save Archer during the pilot. Its second use is two episodes later when Archer himself orders a crewman to be beamed up for the first time. That person instantly gets fused with the local flora and dies. The captain has plenty of reasons to be skittish about the tech.

I like how Relics portrayed Montgomery Scott‘s use of the transport buffer for long term storage as novel, only to have every other show dabble in it in one way or another. Voyager used it to hide psychic refugees, Discovery hid the crew from galactic radiation for 10 minutes, Strange New Worlds used the pattern buffer to delay medical issues multiple times, etc. Even the Elite Force video game used pattern buffers to explain FPS protagonist inventories. It’s just too interesting a concept for writers to resist.

I like how the center panel is big enough to show both their ships.

A third of those screenshots is the Favorites Bar. Is that turned on by default these days? Turning that off helps slims things down a bit.

It’s not a big power user feature, and one typically doesn’t sit there using the touch screen for minutes on end. It’s more useful for dismissing alerts or quickly focusing IM windows. It’s just nice in small moments where you’re juggling multiple things at your desk or just sitting back down. Being able to not think and jab your browser window to scroll down a bit is a natural gesture, even on a laptop.

Rule of Acquisition #57: Good customers are as rare as latinum. ~~Treasure~~ Honor them.

Complaining about it is a meme at this point, but I think a large part of the original pushback was how over played it became in retail settings. If you step foot outside in December it’s basically playing on the PA.

I’m not fond of the DAX workstations. They seem to have a completely new UI every time I try them.

Honestly your pizza looks great. Less can be more toppings wise if you’re making smaller pizzas at home.

Since you’re already fooling around with cast iron, maybe give this thin-crust tortilla “pizza” a try. https://www.seriouseats.com/extra-crispy-bar-style-tortilla-pizza-recipe It checks all the pizza craving boxes while being something a bit closer to a home kitchen fool proof recipe.

Keychron has some good entry points for getting into the mechanical keyboard scene. Lots of layout options, some open source keyboard firmware support, and you can buy a lot of them barebones if you want to bring your own keys and caps.