Georgiou also got fridged for Michael’s character development. And then we follow Michael over the timeskip. Right out the gate, the universe exists to tell a story about Michael.

I think Zero might be a he/they enby

Insulting Janeway’s coffee is a dangerous move, holo-Rok

Mariner interrupts Boimler’s captain’s log in S1E1

Having a good clone protocol is important. Rok had the right idea.

I hope Robert Beltran isn’t around next season. Surely they can recast Chakotay. Maybe give the role to an actual native turtle islander?

“I haven’t seen a crew this dysfunctional since the Cerritos.”

Hey a Lower Decks reference!

This is so cool. I bet Beta Shift would love it.

I’m going to vote ranked choice, because first past the post is antidemocratic!

4, 1, 2, 3

To be fair the blonde bombshell in a catsuit was initially nonbinary.

And then Janeway immediately gave it conversion therapy and told it to be a woman.

These pods are only used on rails with very low ridership. They would switch to a train if ridership increased.

Look at it this way: you can have a train that has a capacity of 100 people, but it only runs once a day due to the low demand, and only 2 people want to ride it at that time of day…Or you can have 10 pods, which do not require as much railway maintenance, and they can carry the 10 people who actually want to use this railway, completely on demand.

Yeah, a train is better if you want to move ten thousand people a day at peak hour. But this is a cheaper way to move ten people at different times across a day. And it’s a cheaper way of inducing the demand that would justify the more efficient kind of expansion.

Mass Effect is one of those sci-fi series with only one fictional technology, and a whole lot of development on that, and on the stories that enables them to tell. And that fictional technology is the mass effect. In Mass Effect there’s a fictional element called element 0, or eezo, that humans found out in space. Eezo can alter the mass of other objects when electrically stimulated. Eezo can give a spaceship negative mass and enable faster than light travel. It can reduce the mass of a bullet to almost zero as it’s fired from the chamber of a gun, and return it to normal going at an extreme speed. It enables artificial gravity. Humans who are exposed to eezo can gain telekinetic powers. There’s a community of aliens out there, and they also use eezo in their technology. There’s a ton of politics, philosophical commentary, and secrets out in the galactic community and its history.

I have excellent colour vision but I still struggle with this because it’s hard to remember which shade of green is which when flipping between the map and the legend

Narcisstic Personality Disorder is a lifelong disability with no cure. You can be a nice person with NPD. You can be a wise person with NPD. You can even be a healthy person with NPD, because disorders and illnesses are two different things. Having NPD is like having type 1 diabetes. You can live a normal life, but it’s still going to take constant attention to treat, and some stuff is always going to be just a bit harder for you. The myth that people with NPD are abusers is pseudoscientific bigotry. There are plenty of self aware people with NPD and there are plenty of non-abusers with NPD. People with NPD are most likely to be the victims of abuse compared to the abuser, but the kind of people who prey on the disabled to satisfy their own desire for cruelty don’t want you to believe that.

It sounds like you don’t want capitalism. It sounds like you want market anarchism. Look up mutualism some time.

WOW is proof that human beings are biologically programmed to work together to achieve goals. It’s a shame capitalism suppresses this desire in people and forces them to only let it out in games. Imagine if we had a society where people’s work was properly valued, where they could self organise to accomplish great things.

The “thousands of people” watching your “stream” are bots. They can respond to what’s going on in the video in real time because they’re bots. Actually I technically think this would be more efficient and therefore is probably designed so that it’s only one LLM pretending to be thousands of people, but I’ll call it bots because that’s easier to visualise. The bots know what’s going on in the “stream” because they can understand what the “streamer” is saying, which means the pickup artist can put on a convincing performance to trick the mark. If it was just a recording, it wouldn’t be able to respond to novel situations caused by the mark’s behaviour.

I don’t actually know if this technology even works, but that would be the intent used to sell it to pickup artist bros.

“Maybe if I date someone who’s famous, they’ll have enough money that I won’t have to worry about paying for medical bills or groceries anymore. Gee, maybe we could even buy a house and raise kids.”

We live in a capitalist hellscape where such things are no longer taken for granted, and are now associated with the heights of success.

For those who don’t want to read the article but do want to understand what it’s about:

1. You download an app on your phone that makes it look like you’re streaming to thousands of people
2. You go to a bar and show your phone to a woman “look, I’m famous”
3. The woman fucks you because she thinks you’re famous or something

The creator of this app is a misogynist scumbag who edits interviews with journalists to erase criticism and promote his app.

Actual Plays can introduce you to new styles of playing and DMing and improve your skills at the table. For example many people started running planescape campaigns due to Rolling With Difficulty. Before RWD, lots of people had no idea that D&D has spaceships and what is essentially a sci-fi setting. If you’re a GM who wants to get better at running the game, then obviously my first recommendation is Matt Colville’s videos, but try listening to a few different actual plays and learning from the styles of different GMs. Maybe you hate the way Matt Mercer runs the game, but you really like how Brennan Lee Mulligan does it. Maybe you didn’t know it was possible to run the game in a different way than how Matt Mercer does it. If you don’t have three decades of experience playing with diverse tables, then actual plays provide a substitute for that experience.