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  • Stay away from rice flour and starch heavy GF breads, as they will be drier and go stale quickly.

    GF alternative flours tend to have higher hydration requirements than wheat and it seems few GF bread manufacturers have a clue about this. PhD inorganic chemist and cookbook author Katerina Cermelj has a lot to say about that in her book ‘Baked to Perfection.’

    There are decent recipes out there, especially ones that include psyllium, which makes it possible to make a gel that can give better texture and hold moisture.

  • As much as I like to see elements from the Relaunch novels brought to screen, in this case I pretty much knew where the chase was leading, based on the final Voyager Full Circle novel, and that took away some the wow factor of the contact with the 10C.

  • Just to say the way the role is presented kn television doesn’t highlight the sensitive roles such as being the senior NCO responsible for oversight of enlisted personnel performance evaluations or communications with command.

    It would be very senior AO role on a capital ship, but she mainly comes by to get the captain to sign stuff.

  • It absolutely is confusing.

    Roddenberry gave conflicting direction on this. By the time TNG rolled out, his position was that most of the crew were officers.

    But it was a long and confusing evolution. After intervention by the network after the TOS pilot, turned Janice Rand’s yeoman role, which is one of the most senior NCO roles on a naval ship, into what seemed to be a personal secretary. NBC was no more ready for a senior NCO who was a woman than they had been to have a female first officer Number One.

    Discovery makes things murkier by mixing in ‘Chiefs’ as a title for department heads but never actually saying who is chief medical officer or chief engineer.

    Lower Decks seems to have ensigns being hazed with junior enlisted tasks. However, Prodigy has introduced warrant officers as another career pathway outside the Academy.

  • Startide Rising is the best of them all.

    Sundiver is quite good too.

    The later books were deeply marred by Brin’s giving into pressure from his editors to centre them on a group of adolescent males of diverse species because his publisher was of the view that the average scientific fiction reader was a 14 year old male. Brin has written about this and how difficult it was for him to write outside his natural quite adult style. His fantastic characters from Startide Rising are pushed into the background and only get to step forward and shine again at the very end.

  • Here’s the review from Cinemablend.

    Not sure I agree that season 4 was the best. I’m in the camp that felt the pacing was off. But then I really liked seasons 1 & 3, and ran hot and cold on season 2, which pretty much makes me an outlier among Discovery fans.

  • He’s not only Canadian but Jewish from Montreal. He’s very much not what the commentator suggested.

  • They’ve been happily living in British Columbia all along.

    If I’m recalling correctly, there was one statistic in the 1970s along the lines that there were more bald eagles living in Vancouver’s Stanley Park than in the lower 48 US states.

    No effort at all to see their nests from the outdoor theatre at Malkin Bowl.

    https://stanleyparkecology.ca/2018/02/28/eagles-nesting-stanley-park/

  • Also excruciating.

    Faith of the Heart will never not be grating for me. Too American, too 90s wannabe 70s soft-rock dreary & derivative, despite being a cover by a British singer of something originally written for and recorded by Rod Stewart.

    This is exactly the kind of song that made me dread hearing soft rock music at dentist’s offices or physiotherapy.

  • This one was very, very well done.

    If I have a quibble it’s that it reminded me that Asian women haven’t had as strong representation in the franchise as they might. But it also made me glad that Christina Chong is in a main role in SNW.

  • Not positively received. Actually quite the opposite.

    I bought it in hardcover, then bailed on the entire Christie Golden Voyager series on the sequel.

    A horrible return with heartbreaking situations for just about every beloved character.

    I don’t truly blame tie-in writer Golden, or even Peter David who got tagged with responsibility for the most egregious plot and character point in the Relaunch universe version of the Voyager follow-up.

    Paramount itself clearly had but dire restrictions on positives for the returning crew that only came off when Kirsten Beyer was allowed to undo the damage in her Voyager Full Circle series when she took the helm from Golden.

  • So the OP seems to be suggesting that people wouldn’t be posting honest answers. . ?

  • The Supreme Court of Canada took a very dim view of the heist and required restitution.(SCC decision on maple syrup heist)

    Such a Canadian thing.

    KEY FACTS (from the linked article)

    The court unanimously ruled Richard Vallières must pay the multi-million dollar fine, reversing a lower court order that only fined him 1 million Canadian dollars ($800,000).

    The fine, along with another 830,000 Canadian dollar ($665,000) penalty he's been ordered to pay under a separate court order, roughly total the 10 million Canadian dollars ($8 million) Vallières and his associates sold stolen maple syrup for in the early 2010s.

    Vallières was found guilty in 2016 of stealing 9,500 barrels worth of syrup from a warehouse in Saint-Louis-de-Blandford, Quebec, that belonged to the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (FPAQ), which tightly regulates production and sales of the region's maple syrup.

    The syrup had a market value of more than 18 million Canadian dollars ($14.4 million), but Vallières said at his trial it was sold at a lower price.

    He is currently serving an eight-year prison sentence.

  • Fortunately, there is a maple syrup strategic stockpile.

    Unfortunately, someone robbed it a while back.

  • Just a note that, while the listing on the Simon & Schuster website is for the US, the major ebook sellers in other countries usually offer the same or similar deals on TrekLit, updated monthly.

    The best way to find out which deals are available in your country is to search ‘Star Trek’ and books/ebooks, then filter and sort by price.

    In most countries, sorting lowest to highest will put all the ebook deals at the top. In some, like the UK, just set the filter to a low maxim price e.g., less than £2.99.

  • The Relaunch novelverse is great even if an alternate timeline. The screenwriters are aware of it, and have woven some of its elements into onscreen plot lines.

    David Mack who wrote this and many other well received novels was a consultant for the early seasons of both Prodigy and Lower Decks.

  • The book that goes deep into the heart of Breen space and culture is called ‘Zero Sum Game’. It’s Bashir and an old colleague sucked into spy stuff. The most awesome Captain Ezri Dax makes a significant appearance too.

  • Ok, since no one else has mentioned it, I’m going to mention how the Typhon Pact formed in the Relaunch novelverse.

    Different cataclysm, but divided remnants of the Romulans joined up with the Tholians, Breens and assorted others to establish a competitor to the Federation, which was seen as failing its perimeter members planets and species.

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