Make It So - This is Only a Test 535 - 1/23/20

Two big stories dominate this week: the premiere of the highly-anticipated Star Trek: Picard show and Valve answers questions about Half-Life: Alyx in a Reddit AMA! Plus, streaming service confusion, Apple's rumored "budget" iPhone, love for Pavlov VR, and a moment of science!

Note: Picard episode 1 spoiler discussions begin at around 21:00 and end at 48:00. Watch for the red alert light!

Thanks for watching!

[timestampbot]

Pop Culture News 47:23
Technology News 1:18:15
Moment of Science 1:33:52
VR Minute 1:42:49

[tedwittman]

Episodes they recommend watching (ordered by air date):
The Battle - (S01 E09)
The Measure of a Man - (S02 E09)
The Offspring (S03 E16)
The Best of Both Worlds: Part I and Part II - (S03 E26 and S04 E01)
Unification I and II - (S05 E07 and E08)
I, Borg - (S05 E23)
The Inner Light - (S05 E25)
Chain of Command, Part II - (S06 E11)


Star Trek Nemesis (Film, 2002)

[NURNURD]

Love the 'one week later' idea. Appreciate having a place to hear discussion of good shows in a place I visit weekly, regardless.

[Shilly_JD]

Love your chemistry!
If you ever need a nerdy lawyer to join you, I can make myself available...

[dilun_ho]

The background color for spoilers look like the color orange to me instead of red

[RedHeadKevin]

46:55
I felt like Patrick Stewart was really channeling his "Old Man" performance from Logan in this. Which isn't really a bad thing.

[LordLOC]

To be clear, it was Starfleet that wound up not helping the Romulans, not the Federation itself. Picard made that quite clear.

[canadaplease]

Pavlov will eventually come to the Quest store. From what I have heard it is Oculus holding it up saying its not up to quality standards or something like that. It will come to the store likely in 2021 when it is a 1.0 state
-Cyrus

[BaldmanB]

You guys need to interview Shane, the creator of Sidequest.

[footballstadiumprints]

Over 2 hours!! Whooohoo. You have just made my day. Thanks guys.

[jedmeades]

If Oculus themselves leveraged the 3D room capture possibilities, could be interesting if our Quest home was a 3D rendition of our roomspace (that we've checked/fixed/adjusted in an interactive setup in headset). Exiting out of a game would return to your VR version of your actual room with the many flat spaces for menus etc. That type of layered reality integrated into the VR home experience could change the game entirely.

Loved Picard and was thankful they went cinematic (but agree, couple of lens flares too many)

[esaedvik]

Trying to use a VPN to bypass Netflix geo-blocking is getting a bit irritating as they actively block VPN providers' networks (or rather they buy the blocking service from a third party). NordVPN's obfuscated servers used to work, but at least I had a bad experience with them (super slow in Netflix use, bandwidth was plenty), so rather just unsubbed from Netflix. Renting a VM from another country and making that run OpenVPN or something might be a good option.

[budgetworkflow]

Picard! In Canada you can view on crave.ca from Bell, but their site has no support links. I have never seen that before. I am sad right now. My Bank Of Montreal MasterCard doesn't work with Bell. :(

[billwells]

Please clear something up for me. At about 1:08:30, it sounds like they're discussing the concept of a show, but the word sounds like conceit or concede. This is not the first time that I've heard this form Norm and the gang. Perhaps I'm not hearing clearly, but what are they saying?

[rade-blunner]

CBS: this year is garbage, we're going to transport you to the 2300s

Also CBS: we're explicitly making the show about all the garbage

[skywalkies]

The Rise of Skywalker was a financial success but a fans failure.

[billix]

Maybe Disney can do better with these VR promotional experiences for Frozen II. But it seems like two or so years ago a bunch of studios tried these with big tent-pole releases and no one was interested. I remember they had these VR short films for Suicide Squad, IT, Jurrasic World, and Hunger Games. But nobody cared.

[chris_stacey]

Barnacles don't carry you upwards?! What?! Please Valve - make it an option!

[Adamsappletechsupport]

if you had a look at asia, especially indonesia, the SE / 5s is super popular here.

[esaedvik]

I really wish they'd dropped all of season one...meh. Really nice episode though. Some weird non-futuristic future things in there though that felt a bit out of place. Was weird to see Maya Eshet from George RR Martin's 'Nightflyers' as "Index" as I literally just finished Nightflyers :D Also, quite a different type of show. Really wish someone had picked up the show for more than just one season. Had a cool Event Horizon vibe about it.
Avenue 5 was funny as heck too, just maybe a bit too much like The Orville.