Normal for a person, but not normal for him. We see him as a very passionate person before he gets his implant who treats the dulling of his emotions as a boon.

I’d be shocked if the person influencing this writing of his character had never dealt with SSRIs or a similar medication.

No Star Trek show loved Star Trek more than Lower Decks.

I hope this is not the last time we see these characters. Between losing Prodigy and Lower Decks it has been sad for Star Trek as of late.

Rutherford upgraded his implant to be little more like Alternate Rutherford who had a super implant that also blocked out his emotions entirely.

This wasn’t a story about how his implant was bad at dealing with alternate universe versions of technology. His story was about how he had always used his implant to protect him from feeling emotions. Cranking it up slightly was all it took to finally block him from loving anything. Himself as he is, the Cerritos, Tendi. As soon as he took it out all of those emotions flooded in.

How is different from Crazy Frog or Billy Bass? Dumb memes turning into toys or dumb meme toys have been around for forever.

In an American vacuum I could see where you are coming from. In comparison with literally the entire rest of the world, it is clearly a flawed standpoint.

The American Democratic party is the oldest standing political party in the entire world. It last changed it’s political stances in the 1960’s and not because they wanted to, but because they needed to respond to the Republicans flipping the entire south in their favor.

Other countries have real leftist parties that actually get government members elected.

Biden was incapable of clearly communicating verbally for 2 hours straight in a debate. I’d argue that Biden stayed in as long as he did to enable them to feel empowered to force another Kamala on us rather than having to deal with a Warren, Sanders or even a Buttigieg winning the Primary. Kamala was 6th in line in the Primary when she dropped out in 2020.

I vote for them, they move right. I don’t vote for them, and vote third party, they move right. I join their party and vote in their primary’s for progressive candidates, they move right.

It’s almost like a bunch of really old, well off, lifetime establishment government folks just actually want to be conservative authoritarians. At BEST they are stuck in a mindset of 1969’s ideas of what progressive politics are because that is when they became politicians.

Every year they relaunch classic EverQuest time locked progression. They did that long before WoW did and WoW hired their studio lead to help them improve their implementation of it.

I’m not recommending it, just saying you could still go experience it today. I’d maaaaybe recommend it over Pantheon but it is close.

It’s EverQuest. If you liked Classic/Kunark era EverQuest then you might like this game. The gameplay is very simplistic and heavily leans into you needing to manually go out and build a group of people that have the right classes. You go to an area and kill the same mobs over and over for a couple hours and hope you get something neat or a level.

It’s a 100% perfect addition to THE core combat light puzzle platformer games. It also has an age range of 0-99 by both having cute jokes and references that would appeal to older folks while never being even remotely offensive.

Also yea, what else was there? Closest was make Wukong which primarily crushed the market because it again proved that the new or smaller studios can absolutely give a better AAA experience than the big studios these days by focusing on delivering a game not a storefront

Instead of playing games, go outside, touch grass, undergo the series of organ implantations that are required to become a Space Marine. The only thing holding you back is yourself.

Same could be said for any game. The value mostly of a game is the controlled progression with little impact. If I go start power washing the driveway and then stop at a moments notice to go take a shower and head to work I’m gonna leave a giant mess laying around and a half done driveway.

I mean the issue with TikTok is that they give the data and videos over to the Chinese government to be able to mass process it and search for vulnerabilities or enable social engineering attacks on the US government.

Meanwhile Twitter/X is totally different in that they give the data and videos over the US government to be able to mass process it and search for vulnerabilities or enable social engineering attacks on US citizens.

I think the big difference here is that to the average user they see archive.org or Wikipedia as being a onesided transaction. An Archive where folks store information for you, an encyclopedia where information is stored by folks for you. There is no expectation of engagement of the average user. It is rare for someone to wake up and think “Man I gotta put something up on Wikipedia today or people are going to think I’m not the person I act like I am”.

People go to social events to keep up appearances. People participate on social media to keep up appearances. Maintaining these types of things require you to effectively help people balance their ability to participate in society with their ability to communicate. A Wikipedia contributor is a scholar. A community moderator is a bartender and a bouncer rolled into one. It doesn’t have the stability because the work required to keep things going is high stress for the majority of the people doing the work.

Lemmy’s solution is nice because the smaller instances can just ban whole cloth the larger ones and everyone gets to move forward. It means you never are burdened by having a ton of users, but that then also defies the goal of some of the larger social media platforms.

When it converts to the profit extraction phase the cutting edge folks will move on. Then the content will slowly become dominated by corporate auto created content. And then eventually the average person will look for the next place to go.

This is just the new cool local bar hangout at scale. This is how human socialization works. It has worked like this for hundreds of years.

Admiral April and Admiral Forrest are both solid options.

I think April did a really solid job of showing what a great but imperfect leader looks like in Ad Astra per Aspera.

Forrest was supportive and helpful. Willing to bend the rules to support his people rather than vice versa.

He still is ahead of Kamala by about 2% or 2.5 million votes. Before he was ahead of Kamala + Claudia + Chase + Cornell + Jill + Vermin Supreme + Elmo.

It’s still a closer gap than he lost to Biden by by a lot. But it is also super clear that Harris managed to do worse in this environment than Hillary did in 2016 back when Trump was an unknown crazy person instead of the well known crazy shill for hire.

I crushed it and have the American Dream. My experience now is, I’m surrounded by old people, trustfund kids, and people who broke themselves to get ahead.

I have to raise my kids knowing that 80% of their classmates have no chance and hope they luck out and also fall in love with a career path that pays well. All of my friends I grew up with are in a constantly struggle, none of them will own a house. I have friends with PTSD from serving in the military and even with the VA loan option and GI bill they will be lucky to own a house by 50 if ever.

I can’t even talk about my life, my struggles are meaningless compared to those around me. I feel like an outsider in America because I actually did what everyone says is the goal and it is wild to me. I’d give it up in a heartbeat just to feel like I was in a community of equals I felt safe to raise a family around.

Syndication is also called reruns, when the show is rerun out of order on TV at a standard Timeslot. Like for me TNG was on every night at 7pm M-F. It was shown in random order as far as I know with I believe them skipping less popular episodes, I honestly never noticed if they did hits for a bit then did a rerun through it or what.

The first season of TNG is considered weak as a heads up, similar for DS9 though DS9 has some bangers in S1, TNG is mostly weak. That said if you like it, you’ll LOVE the rest.

SNW is fantastic and I really recommend it, it is certainly New Trek but it’s a MUCH better successor to the legacy than Discovery.

Start with the best episodic episodes of TNG and DS9. Most of us were introduced to Star Trek out of order, it isnt like modern TV. 90s TV and prior was focused on syndication.

My recommendations would be, TNG: Darmok, Tapestry, The Wounded, Inner Light, Cause and Effect, Lower Decks (The episode that inspired the show). For DS9: In The Pale Moonlight, Duet, Trials and Tribbleations, The Visitor (Rest in peace Tony Todd)