Lorindól

Generally the subtitles here used to be exceptionally good, but nowadays the quality varies wildly. The broadcast companies used to have their own in-house experts who did the translations extremely well, translating even the proverbs and cultural idioms to a form that made perfect sense in the context. Those old school translators were highly respected.

But then the companies started skimming money off everything to increase their profits and started buying the translations from the cheapest provider, which led to the drastic drop of quality consistency.

I learned English by watching subtitled films and series since I was 4, we had a VHS-system which I used extensively. At the time there was very little domestic production aimed for children and almost 100% of imported material was subtitled, so that kids would have an extra incentive to learn how to read. I remember that the Disney films my friends had were always dubbed, but my parents considered them too expensive to buy.

My kids are now in the lower grades of elementary school and I’ve watched a lot of new subtitled films with them. The translations aren’t downright bad, but they are clearly “lazy”. If there is something difficult to translate directly, mostly they just skip it if it’s not important to the plot. And many of them are done by only listening to the audio track, missing the visual cues that would indicate the correct meaning of the words. As in use of “a drill” as a tool, when it should be about a training excersize.

Legion is simply amazing. I still do not understand how they got it made.

This young woman is an exceptional writer. Not many her age can achieve such coherency and well laid structure in longer essays.

I hope she will continue using her skills and keep fighting against this new rise of misogyny.

We’re about the same age. If I had a penny every time I discovered that something we were taught as the truth was later discovered to be completely wrong, I’d have a LOT of pennies.

Do you have a source for this claim? I remember reading an article where a mosquito researcher claimed that eradicating mosquitoes would have basically zero effect on any ecosystem. While they provide an additional food source for several species, no other species is dependent on them. If they would disappear, their predators would just eat something else.

One could argue that if the mosquitoe’s predators switched their cuisine, it could have an effect on other insect species. But the reseacher was adamant that this would be neglicible, since in many regions mosquitoes don’t even hatch until mid-June and the birds do just fine without them.

A clipshow episode. These were used as cheap fillers when the shows still had 20+ episode seasons, if the production needed to save money this was the easiest way to do it.

My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don’t, nothing in-between. They work or they don’t.

Around the time when HDMI was released my friend bought some "super-high-end "cable that cost over 200$, since he wanted the "best possible performance " out of his system. I tried to explain that the cheapest cables would give the exact same results if they’re not faulty from the start. We had a loud argument about this, even though the guy is a goddamn tech PhD. He just could not admit he got scammed and tried to give me a lecture about “how the gold plated connectors make all the difference”.

This. I’ve been using a 2 Gen 8GB iPod Nano since 2008. They’re not hard to find and installing a new battery is not that hard, if you have any experience at soldering.

I also have a Sansa Clip+, it has a far better DAC than iPods and can take a 32GB SD card. Runs Rockbox without any problems.

There’s one for Firefox, too:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/microslop/

I felt the same. The actual detention got postponed for several weeks, since she had more important duties to attend to. When it finally happened, we played chess together and talked about movies.

She made me promise I wouldn’t tell anyone, but since she passed away over 25 years ago I don’t feel binded by it anymore ;)

In the sixth grade I got my first detention ever because I picked up my baseball cap.

We were on a field trip and we went to visit some museum in the capital by train. While we walked back to the train station, our teacher stated that “no one is to step out of the train before her permission or they will get detention”. I was the last to get on the train and my cap hit the backpack of the classmate in front of me and fell out of the train doors. I instinctively turned around, leaned out whist holding onto a safety bar and picked my cap. And stepped back on board.

I was a calm kid and had never broken any school rules or gotten into any trouble whatsoever. So when my classmates saw me putting one feet outside the train they simply flipped: “TEACHER, LORINDÓL STEPPED OUT OF THE TRAIN! YOU’RE GETTING A DETENTION!”

I was utterly dumbfounded. My “friends” had betrayed me and the teacher was approaching and looking angry. With tears in my eyes I explained what had happened and reminded her that we still had more than 10 minutes until the train doors would even close. Her face went from angry to sad and she silenced my heckling classmates with a few strict words. She told me that we would discuss this when we were back at school.

When we got back, everyone else got to go home and the teacher asked me to our classroom with her. “Lorindól, I’m very sorry. I have to give you detention because you did step out of the train, even if it was for all the right reasons. I understand you acted instinctively and did not mean to break any rules. But I must keep my word or it will lose it’s meaning. As stupid as this sounds, the purpose of this detention is not to punish you. It’s purpose is to show the others that my word is the law in this classroom, with no exceptions. I hope you can understand why I must do this.” I thought about it for a while and said that I did.

When I told my parents about the detention my dad couldn’t stop laughing. “You finally get a detention and it’s for NOTHING!”

Mom was so angry that she wanted to call the teacher and make her call the detention off. I managed to talk her out of it and didn’t hold any grudge against the teacher. I learned a lot about the world of adults that day.

TOS had the “Eugenics Wars” / WW III start in the 1990’s, but the later series made alterations to the original timeline due to several time travel shenannigans. An easy way for the writers to explain why we aren’t currently living in a post-apocalyptic hell. All the major events will happen, just delayed accordingly.

Star Trek is supposed to happen in our future, so it’s hard to address our modern problems if they had to skip everything that happened after mid 90’s. Especially when the last 25 years have had a lot of mental stuff happening almost non-stop.