Enlarge / The crew of the Enterprise in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan , a film with many references to Starfleet Academy. (credit: Paramount)

There's officially another Star Trek series on the way, and this time it's one we've been hearing rumors about since 2018: Starfleet Academy .

Announced today in a press release and reported by Deadline , the CBS Studios-produced series will follow a group of teenage Starfleet Academy students as they come of age while enduring rigorous training for future interstellar missions.

The central characters will reportedly have to navigate friendships, rivalries, and romances as they face a new enemy that threatens the Federation.

Enlarge / The 1982 TV series Knight Rider featured a car called KITT that a character played by David Hasselhoff (pictured) could talk to. (credit: Getty Images)

In the 1982 TV series Knight Rider , the main character can have a full conversation with his futuristic car. Once science fiction, this type of language interface may soon be one step closer to reality because General Motors is working on bringing a ChatGPT-style AI assistant to its automobiles, according to Semafor and Reuters .

While GM won't be adding Knight Rider -style turbojet engines or crime-fighting weaponry to its vehicles, its cars may eventually talk back to you in an intelligent-sounding way, thanks to a collaboration with Microsoft.

Microsoft has invested heavily in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. Now, they're looking for ways to apply chatbot technology to many different fields.

A lesser-known PlayStation 5 game called Returnal is coming to PC , and while it hasn't had as much fanfare as big-ticket titles like Spider-Man , The Last of Us , or Horizon , it's definitely one you should try. It's simultaneously a throwback to classic arcade action games, a PC-style Roguelike, a technical showcase for modern systems, and an homage to the moody science fiction novels and films of the 1970s and 1980s. But most importantly, it's a good game.

Published by Sony and developed by ( now Sony-owned ) Finnish studio Housemarque, Returnal was one of the earliest PS5 exclusives when it launched in early 2021, and it was a major step up into the triple-A game big leagues for Housemarque, which had previously released arcade-style games like Super Stardust HD and Resogun .

During The Game Awards on Thursday, Sony announced that, like many of its other recent first-party titles, Returnal will launch on PC with as-yet-unnamed PC-specific enhancements. The port is being handled by Climax Studios, and the release window is "early 2023."

Enlarge / Now we'll never know how Dolores Abernathy's story ends. (credit: YouTube/HBO)

HBO surprised its subscribers and the TV industry on Friday by announcing that it has canceled the big-budget science-fiction series Westworld just a few months after its fourth season concluded, Variety reports.

The series, which has received 54 Emmy nominations during its run, was intended to end with its fifth season, according to recent statements from its two showrunners, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy. The husband-and-wife creative couple had a specific ending in mind that now won't make it to the screen, though many viewers felt that the ending of the fourth season also worked as a conclusion.

Several reasons contributed to HBO's decision, including high production costs, declining viewership, and sliding critical response amid an overall effort to cut costs at the newly formed parent company Warner Bros. Discovery. Westworld set records when it first premiered, but its viewership declined with each season, with the recently aired season four experiencing an especially sharp drop.

[cross-posted at facebook ]

September 2nd is the day that Atlas Shrugged begins. (We’re shown Eddie Willers seeing the date on a gigantic calendar in the first chapter. Several other important events in the novel happen on that date as well.)

September 22nd is the day that Lord of the Rings “officially” begins. (In fact we’re shown a few scenes from the days of preparation leading up to Bilbo’s birthday party, but it’s become customary to say that LOTR begins on that date.)

LOTR and Atlas are similar in their subversion of expectations. [ SPOILER ALERT for both books.] LOTR is about a quest concerning a magical object that brings the wearer great power; but the goal of the quest is not to obtain the object but to destroy it. The climax of Atlas involves the villains torturing their hero; but their goal is not to get him to submit to them, but rather to get him to agree to become their dictator.

In short, both books are about the refusal of power.

Both books also arguably owe a debt to Platos Republic . In both LOTR and the Republic , a ring that grants its wearer invisibility but tends to corrupt its wearer is used as a metaphor for political power. But Plato’s and Tolkien’s solutions are different; in Plato we’re told that only the wise, the philosopher-kings, can be trusted with the ring; but in Tolkien we’re told that no one can be trusted with it and that the best course is to destroy it – a much more anarchistic moral (appropriately enough for an author who wrote “My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy …. the most improper job of any man, even saints … is bossing other men”). Moreover, for Tolkien, if someone has to be trusted with the ring temporarily, it is safer in the hands of hobbits (corresponding to the craftsmen, the lowest and least trusted class in the Republic ) rather than in those of wizards or kings.

As for the connection between Atlas and Plato’s Republic , I’ve written about that in Ed Younkins’ anthology Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged : A Philosophical and Literary Companion . Here’s the piece .

[cross-posted at POT and Facebook ]

What do Good Morning America, the Australian Outback, Mary Poppins, David Friedman, Lawrence of Arabia, and a balloon voyage to a lost colony of Vikings at the North Pole have in common? Get the answers in this video, as I take you on a journey BEYOND YOUR IMAGINATION!!!

[cross-posted at POT ]

The next best thing to giving a libertarian talk in Prague is giving a libertarian talk to Prague. Although if Aristotle is right about the locus of causal action being in the recipient rather than the agent, perhaps this counts as a talk in Prague after all.

I discovered this recipe when I was journeying through the Eiglophian mountains of northern Cimmeria. Winter had come early, and the cold wind bit like a knife through my all-too-thin cloak. A red glow in the west told me that dusk would soon be upon me, and my chances of reaching my intended destination, the small mountain village of Sparnuota Mirtis, before nightfall were clearly going to be slim.

I looked about for a place of shelter among the steep and cragged rocks, and initially had little luck. But then fortune favoured me, or so it seemed, for by and by I glimpsed a dark cleft ahead, slightly to the left of the rather rudimentary gravel trail I had been following since the morning. Scrabbling over shattered granite, I found myself at the entrance to a small cave – a welcome spot of shelter for the night.

Welcome, at least, so long as it was unclaimed and uncontested; for I knew well that snow leopards haunted these heights, and I had no desire to face the fierce jaws and talons of one of those swift and powerful beasts. Lighting the elvenlight that had been gifted to me by Lady Fafine Valea at the gates of the faery palace of Sloc Boglach, back in what now seemed an eternity ago, I proceeded cautiously, but saw no signs of prior occupancy.

As I walked farther into the recesses of the cave, however, the walls began to assume the regular angles of masonry rather than the haphazard ruggedness of nature, and I began to suspect that this tunnel had been hewn not by the random violence of the mountain but by the craft of men. My suspicions were confirmed by what seemed to be a doorway at the very end of the cavern, marked with strange runes that ….

[1254 pages later]

… as I climbed hastily up the ladder, for below me I could hear the angry shrieks of the lizard men growing closer. Risking a glance behind me, I saw the entire vast underground city of Lai Koht Teel, still lit by the eerie pale lichen that graced the high-arched ceiling, begin to crumble to dust, its lacy towers cracking and splintering like ice in spring. At last I reached the promised Night Door, and vaulting upward through it I slammed the portal behind me. I found myself in another tunnel much like the one I had entered a year ago, though in this instance the door lay upon the floor rather than being built into the wall. Seeing a large boulder near the door, I not without great effort rolled it onto the door. Soon I could hear the threatening scraping of the lizard men’s claws beneath the door as they hissed in frustration, but they lacked the strength and leverage to dislodge the rock, and at length their sounds faded, as they no doubt returned to the ruins of the fair city that I had, partly through intention and partly through inadvertence, so utterly destroyed.

I made my way to the cave’s mouth and saw the dark forests of Nordheim below me in the morning light, stretching to a far and misty northern horizon, for I had emerged on the other side of the mountains. The gems I had gathered in the great Treasury had been dropped in my flight, so that the only wealth I was able to take away with me from my adventure was my memory of the fabulous meal of Pibijé on which I had dined with the High Priest and Priestess of Fahadalana on the terrace of their lofty stone temple, jutting out over the turbulent subterranean sea as leather-winged zenido birds wheeled cawing overhead. Fortunately, I had committed the recipe to memory, and I am happy to share it with you on my recipe blog today.

Pibijé recipe:

1. 2 slices of bread
2. Some jelly
3. Some peanut butter
4. Some regular butter (optional)
5. Some skulls of your enemies (optional)

Spread regular butter (optional) and peanut butter on one slice.
Spread jelly on the other.
Place the first slice, peanut butter side down, on top of the second slice, jelly side up.

Garnish with skulls of your enemies (optional).

Serve.