vaguerant

https://cad-comic.com/comic/will-it-blend/

The for-profit childcare system in Australia is profoundly broken. They're chronically understaffed and the pay is awful to boot, so there's tons of burnout and staff turnaround as people move around trying to get hours at different locations, etc. I don't know that 27 different gigs over a decade is actually that unusual in the sector.

If you're interested, ABC News Australia did an article on it:

• In Australia's childcare centres profit comes before safety - ABC News

Fair warning, there are some pretty unpleasant descriptions in the article of things that have been done to kids in the system.

Same here basically, cross-eyed viewing is super easy for me but I have to work for minutes to perform wall-eyed viewing. I was really excited to see a post with cross-eyed stereograms.

Occasionally they take the "investigation bungled by police" angle, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

There was a poll last month asking if politics and schadenfreude posts should be banned: https://lemmings.world/post/26744357

The result was overwhelmingly yes: https://lemmy.world/post/30918729

I'm not sure whether this story counts as either of those. Mods?

Technically, the charges against X don't sound "political" as such:

The Paris Public Prosecutor's Office has opened a criminal investigation into the platform. In the official filing, X stands accused of the “alteration of the functioning of an automated data processing system by an organized group” as well as the "fraudulent extraction of data from an automated data processing system by an organized group.”

According to French newspaper Le Monde, these are considered “major computer hacking offenses,” which can carry sentences of up to 10 years in prison and a €300,000 (roughly $350,000) fine under French law.

However, the purpose of X gaming the algorithm is almost certainly at least partially for political benefit. I think you could technically upvote this because you find it uplifting that sketchy big tech practices are facing pushback without enjoying it as schadenfreude, but personally this story doesn't really feel "uplifting" to me.

Oh, I forgot to mention, a cut scene from this episode would have involved an in-universe puppet show where the First Healing was re-enacted for children. It was cut because they didn't feel it worked within the episode, but the puppeteers did show off the Kelly and ... head-cut-girl puppets on Instagram (Imginn mirror link). It's a shame these weren't ever on-screen, they look great. I've attached one of the Instagram photos to this comment.

This episode finally answers the question raised by Futurama: "Is the Space Pope reptilian?" Apparently not, but he's pretty cold-blooded.

And we come to our--First? Second?--major breach of the unofficial Planetary Union Prime Directive. As I mentioned when we watched "If the Stars Should Appear", Seth MacFarlane said early on that there wasn't any formal equivalent to the United Federation of Planets' Prime Directive from Star Trek:

There's no Prime Directive per se, more of a case-by-case analysis among the Admiralty when those situations arise in the show.

However, Commander Grayson gets in Big Trouble™ for causing cultural contamination in this episode. There's clearly some sort of formalized rule against this kind of interference. This episode aired some three months after MacFarlane made that comment. In addition to being the final episode of the season to air, this was also the final one produced, not being completed until two weeks before broadcast. However, the episode had already been both written and filmed by the time MacFarlane made the comment above, which somewhat confuses the timeline.

Getting back to the episode's plot, Captain Mercer takes an oddly cavalier approach to finding clothes, casually causing a second contamination. It's not at all clear how seriously the not-quite-Prime Directive is taken by the Planetary Union and crew of the Orville. Maybe it was just necessary to move the plot forward, but it feels a little bit confused. I think the way to reconcile MacFarlane's explanation is that they have a hard rule against contamination but no precise statutes for how to deliberately manage first contact, and the Orville crew are just a bit lax.

One more thing: It's nice to know that Perd Hapley's reporting career continues all the way into our spacefaring future.

While I'm mostly nitpicking the point of what exactly the rules are, I do very much like this episode and its exploration of how religion impacts a developing human-ish culture over the course of 2,100 years. The episode takes a fairly dim view, with it being something which some take comfort in while others use it to oppress them and eventually everybody grows out of it. But you know ... yeah, that's pretty much it. All human cultures seem to develop a religious belief system at some point, so maybe Kelly's contamination didn't actually change much in the scheme of things beyond the specific subject and terminology of worship.

It's great that the season doesn't end on a big bombastic space battle or anything. It doesn't even really feel like an ending of any kind, just another solid episode. It leaves a nice aftertaste that I think does a better job of getting across what The Orville is about than an action sequence would. It leaves us wanting more just because the show is very fucking good, not because we're left worrying about a dramatic cliffhanger. I really like that.

I AM THE PARK!

Thank you for loving her.

I finished up Poker Face (US: Peacock, CA: Citytv+, UK: Sky/Now, AU: Stan) and Murderbot (Apple TV+) this week.

Poker Face is simply the best time I've had watching TV in recent memory. It's currently two seasons in and consistently has me smiling and laughing. It's not "premium TV" in the way that a Breaking Bad or Severance is; instead, it's very much a throwback to '70s murder mysteries and especially Columbo. While there is some serialization, it's mostly episodic in nature. If you like Rian Johnson's Knives Out trilogy, Columbo, Natasha Lyonne in general, or even the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series, you should have a good time with it.

The basic concept is that Natasha Lyonne's Charlie Cale is a drifter with the innate ability to detect lies. Broadly she is reading people's involuntary physiological responses to being deceptive, but as Cale says when asked how her ability works, "I'm not exactly sure, but that's not really the point." She travels the country, getting tangled up with a different set of guest stars, one of whom inevitably gets murdered. The structure of Poker Face is such that the week's guest stars get a ton of screen time, which means they're able to cast big in every episode. There's at least a couple of heavy-hitters turning up in every mystery, which often skew toward the comical end of the murder spectrum.

I'm always impressed that they're consistently able to write murder mysteries for a character who has the X-Men mutant superpower of being a perfect lie detector, which in theory should break the entire genre. The perp-of-the-week doesn't just walk into a scene and say "I did not commit any murders recently" and set off Cale's ability. Rather, she catches them in some small innocuous lie that leads her to spiral into figuring out why they would lie about something so outwardly meaningless.

Lyonne is great in it, as are the handful of recurring cast we get besides her, but most of all, getting a star-studded miniature murder-mystery film once a week has just been fantastic. I don't necessarily want to give the impression that these are Knives Out-quality movies, but I don't really want to give the impression that they're not, either. It's kind of damning the show with faint praise to say that it is relentlessly so much fun while not really offering the kind of deep meditation on human nature that is the hallmark of "premium TV", but I can't fault a show where I am consistently having a great time.

No season 3 pick-up yet. I imagine the show is pretty expensive given the names attached, but as far as I know it's Peacock's biggest hit by far, so hopefully they see the benefit of having a show people seem to care about.

Murderbot was also pretty fun. It's a relatively straight retelling of the first book in Martha Wells's The Murderbot Diaries, All Systems Red. Alexander Skarsgård plays a very autistically-coded security android who is deeply uncomfortable with social interaction and self-soothes with futuristic sci-fi soap opera TV. It's a pretty different take on the "android learns how to be human" trope, because his behavior is already very human at the outset. For anybody worried, he doesn't adapt by masking or curing his autism-coded behavior. People do remark on his awkwardness, but it's mostly just accepted as part of his nature.

My one problem with the show is that to me it felt like one long movie cut into 22-minute episodes. The plot of each episode felt unsatisfying on its own. There just weren't enough plot elements introduced and resolved in any individual episode to tell a meaningful story within that episode. I don't have this problem with any other heavily serialized shows, as even then they usually have the standard three-act play structure where some specific event is the focus of the episode. I don't know what it was about Murderbot, but many of the episodes just felt like they were built to serve only the season-long arc.

Obviously, this comes from the fact that the original book is one book, not 10 episodes of television, and the show basically just splits the book into segments of roughly equal length. Now that the series (which released weekly) is complete, I'm thinking about rewatching from the beginning without having to deal with the arbitrary delay to get the next section of one overall story, because I did enjoy basically everything else about it. Generally, I like the slower pace of weekly episode releases, I just don't think that format suited this show at all; it should have gone up all at once as a binge show.

Murderbot has been picked up for a second season and I'm 100% going to continue watching. Maybe I'll wait for the full season to be out before watching, though.

I loved this show! Watched it a month ago or so. Another reference point I'd give is an underwater version of Firefly or Farscape: a rag-tag team of misfits with hearts of gold on the run in a ship that's not quite qualified for what they're up against. For more Farscape-ism, it was shot in Australia and the cast are mostly from there and pretending not to be.

The production was kind of a mess: the show was ordered by Disney+ but dropped again before it became available to stream, so where it's available to watch in any given country is a crapshoot. AMC+ in the US and Canada, Amazon Prime Video in the UK, Stan in Australia. Given the awkward production history, I suspect it will remain a single-season show (hello again, Firefly).

For people who don't like a series that ends abruptly, I'll give some very generic "vibe" spoilers: I thought it was a perfectly satisfying ending, especially given the show is a prequel to the original novel, so we know or can find out where the story is going. There are absolutely some plot threads left untied which would be followed up in a hypothetical season 2, but personally I didn't leave the series frustrated by them.

It's only a 10-episode show, so it's a very easy watch. I'd love it if they got the opportunity to make more, but I had a ton of fun either way.

In fairness, space is as far away from the subway as anybody's ever been.