macOS 26.1 (and toasters)

It appears that the UK was spared the awful sequel series, Galactica 1980. Their finding of Earth was OK, and the finale ep on Starbuck’s fate was really good; equivalent to the better original episodes.

:heart::heart::heart:Farscape!!!:heart::heart::heart:

I had to look it up on Wikipedia because I remember seeing Troy and Dillon land on Earth in a BSG movie. It turns out that Galactica 1980 was stitched together into the film Conquest of the Earth and released at cinemas in Europe. I was pretty young when I first saw it, so when I rewatched it years later I was shocked that it wasn’t Starbuck and Apollo, as I’d misremember it as starring them.

I have in fact seen the episode of Starbuck stuck on that planet (which reminded me of the film Enemy Mine), so it must have been shown in the UK at some point, but I think it was much later.

I rewatched the entire series for the third time earlier this year and I still love it. That and Firefly have to be my favourite SF series.

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I’m still undecided if the last season saved BSG or killed it. The open-endedness (in terms of seasons planned) increasingly felt directionless and started to drag.

Could have been awesome with that deadline looming from the beginning, though. Usually constraints work in favor of the result. GoT was constrained in a different way when the showrunners ran out of source material.

Still both shows had their moments right up to the end. And then felt somehow wrong.

Exactly. I remember being blown away when they revealed the star chart thing in maybe series one or two, and wondering how they were going to explain such a cool mystery. But then it just turned out that, as was the fashion in TV at the time, they were just making things up as they went along and had no idea how to resolve any of the mysteries they’d introduced.

“Head Six” was a particularly egregious corner they painted themselves into. The whole idea was pretty much ripped off from Farscape (which I think had been cancelled to make way for BSG), where John had a chip implanted in his brain that made him see the villain. Then BSG had a whole episode where they checked for a chip in Baltar’s brain to see if that was the cause of him seeing Six, but there was nothing there… durn-durn-durn. So what was it? Turns out the writers had no idea so just did a bit of handwaving at the end and leaned into the religious themes of the series as a maybe-explanation for everything the writers had no answers to. (Ironic in a series whose intro states “They have a plan.”)

The silly thing is that they didn’t even need to introduce any these Lost-like mysteries, because the series was at its best as a sort of sci-fi political thriller, with sleeper agents and suicide bombers and the question of how the Cylons had been treated.

Argh, I was trying not to get started, really I was.

Oh definitely. Both provided some of the best TV of their time, and my ongoing annoyance at where BSG ended is only proportional to how great a show it was.

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Oh, and an uncharacteristically on-topic observation:

macOS 26.1 mostly fixed the macOS 26 bug whereby inspector dividers disappear. Now they only disappear when the window is in the background. :slight_smile:

I even had notifications that five or six of the sixty-odd Tahoe bugs I filed were fixed. Although most were just automated notifications that seem to be triggered occasionally in the hope that something has been fixed, and one of them hadn’t been fixed at all. But some were!

TextEdit is a bit broken in 26.1, though - text scrolls off the side of the window so that you can’t see a whole paragraph without scrolling horizontally back and forth.

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I assume you worked around that in Scrivener, right?

Fortunately it’s not a problem in Scrivener because it’s not a TextKit bug but something specific to TextEdit. I imagine it’s down to the zoom code they use, since that dissociates the text width from the view width (even though the bug is happening at 100% zoom).

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Getting back to the more interesting off-topic observations, :wink: one reason I preferred the original BSG was that the moral compass in the reboot was spinning every which way: by early second season (or series as per UK parlance) I was rooting for the Cylons. In fact, next time it’s on one of my streaming services, I’ll do a rewatch with the notion that the Cylons are the protagonists.

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Which ones? The good or the bad Cylons? Might seem like a silly question, but didn’t they start a civil war because they couldn’t to get back on the same page? Not to mention the overarching theme, all of it happened before and so on…

I think I decided before the schism became apparent. In retrospect, probably the “good” Cylons, but even the “bad” at least had reasons to launch the final attacks to destroy the Colonies (the secret Colonial mission to probe beyond the Armistice Line.) Not that genocide is ever a legitimate option… (I’d have suggested not using nukes, limit the attack to conventional weapons.)

To what end? If the idea was to eliminate the “human threat” for good, how would this approach not inevitably lead to a larger-scale New Caprica situation? :thinking:

(My take: Don’t build toasters! Too much trouble in the long run.)

It would limit the ability of the Colonials to threaten the Cylons for generations. The Cylons could use nukes against space-based targets (CC&C space bases; shipyards and ship repair facilities, storage depots, and so forth,) after all they were shooting nukes at each other all the time in in The Expanse.

But against the planets themselves, to eliminate an entire species? Then again, given that we are referring to toasters and their ability to evaluate without a moral dimension to their calculations affecting their decision-making process, perhaps genocide isn’t an ‘evil’ to them, like it is to organic life.

By the time the Colonials rebuild, the Cylons would have even greater technologies than before; chances are the Colonials would never catch up. The Cylons could always keep them bottled up on the Colonies, effectively preventing future threats.

Oh, totally agree! (Unless we can figure out a guaranteed, fail-safe way to program Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics into AI machines…)

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That’s what I meant by “a larger-scale New Caprica situation”. Basically running a human zoo. Or rather twelve.

Doesn’t work without boots on the ground. And still goes terribly wrong more often than not.

So, I think technically (not morally) they made the right choice. From an “it’s either them or us” point of view.

Not sure if those are the only two options, though. In space. Where there’s literally a hell of lot of… well, space. In all directions.

Go beyond the red line. Don’t look back. Don’t leave your new address.

Underwhelming story material, though, I have to admit. Unless they accidentally run into the thirteenth colony.

(Wasn’t that the premise of the original series? Someone else’s toasters running amok? I have only very faint and fragmented memories.)

Yes, the Cylons were lizard people who had a xenophobic hatred of humans. They created their robots to more effectively battle humans. The lizard Cylons mostly died out (no reason given AFAIK) and the toasters just kept fighting.

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Weird, huh. It’s almost as if there’s a hidden connection. :face_with_monocle:

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“All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again."

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