Interesting take about TNG “standing on its own”. Sure that’s valid. But the first few seasons on TNG aired concurrently with the TOS movies. It’s never occurred to me that TNG is anything but a continuation of TOS, it’s Even in the name, not a spin-off, not a reboot, not an alternate timeline (until many movies later), a continuation of a story about imperialism struggling internally with morality and existential philosophy (vs. evil empire fighting rebels). New shows are welcome to be spin-offs, reboots, and alternate timelines, but (for me) not TNG.

Does your Dubai chocolate hate have to do with the arguments made in this opinion article, which basically boils down to the popularity of foods and culture being exploited as propaganda, obscuring atrocities committed by authoritarian regimes? If so, that was not at all clear from your post. (I’m still unclear what the ethnicity of the chef has to do with anything.) Any cultural artifact or pastiche is free game for the propaganda machines of the powerful and elite. But those same associations are a double edged sword, hanging a lantern on the same atrocities the regime wishes to obscure. In the end, I feel it is more productive to embrace the fad, eat the chocolate (sourced as ethically as possible), and exploit the popularity as an opportunity to illuminate rather than add to the hate.

Dubai chocolate is really one ethically questionable imperialist exploitation food wrapped around another. The metaphor is delicious. So is the chocolate. Let’s eat and discuss instead of hating it.

I hate hate. Retail is hell. That was a great episode. Archer is the best captain. I actually grew to like the theme song a bit. I’m out. Mic drop.

That’s fucking amazing. I love it. I want games like that for real now (they say, knowing full well that historically games made from movie and TV IP have been largely awful, alas):

• Asteroids, but with Star Wars ships.
• Galaga, but you fly voyager through Borg space, trans warp conduits, etc. Occasionally you pick up a clone or alternate timeline Voyager to fight along side you.
• Space invaders I think would also be a good with a Starship Troopers skin and bugs lobbing rocks at your bases, could also be good in the style of Scorched Earth (or Worms Armageddon).
• An Apple II style text only adventure game in Deep Space Nine.
• A farming/trading/city sim on Babylon 5.
• Civilization, but it’s Babylon 5, Star Trek, or Star Wars, Dune, etc.
• Old school 2.5D Zelda adventure game, but it’s Firefly or The Expanse.
• A Mario Bros. game but it’s Farscape.
• Mario kart, also Farscape.
• Leisure Suit Larry in the style of Lexx.

The only Star Trek or Star Wars shirt I currently own is black with yellow gold lettering saying “Star Trek” in the Star Wars font. I think it makes some people uncomfortable. My S.O. hates it. I think it’s hilarious and I know immediately what type of “nerd” I’m dealing with based on people’s reactions to it. I suspect most people don’t realize it’s a joke or they are worried that I don’t know it’s a joke.

migrants took over [an area] they took refuge on and made an apartheid for them.

That sounds familiar.

You seem to have almost completely missed the point of allegory and metaphor in TOS. “Time after humanity has dealt with” as you put it is just a literary device to soften the impact when the show was inevitably confronted or viewed by real racists. It was never a really view of the future. It was always a reflection of our present through the lens of futurism, a clever narrative framing device. That narrative framing device could not possibly remain unchangeable through multiple generations without loosing everything that made it work. Attempting to do so, i.e. keeping the storytelling framework completely unchanged and not adapting to new generations and new social dynamics, would have shown a lack of creativity and imagination.

The show was from a time when the U.S. thought they had beaten fascism (past tense, done, a part of the past) and would soon beat racism, classism, etc. From a time when imperialism was seen as a fundamentally good social force by most of the imperialist public. Today we (mostly) know better. We will probably never truly erase any of them. They are things we’ll have to remain vigilant for. A show today patronizing us with their perfected utopian society which remains VERY imperialist without shining a light on that contradiction just would not work. A show lacking any interpersonal drama also would not work and it’s not even something that was really true for TOS, just a weird kink Roddenberry got into when producing TNG. That’s the context of the way Star Trek has changed and it matters.

They should hide somewhere in the game itself the real credits of the people that spent significant effort to make the game. An Easter Egg if you will. Like just after defeating the dragon, you find a scroll in their horde with the real credits.

Is this wit or a genuine request that one of us explainsthejoke.com?

Can this keep num lock engaged? I swear my biggest frustration with windows lately is it’s habit of randomly and arbitrarily turning off numlock after I’ve turned it on. I never turn off numlock while working. I never use the number pad arrows. I prefer the number pad numbers and use them practically all day. And yet, several times a day I find my cursor moving around the screen instead of typing a number because windows decided that it got to control the numlock function instead of me and the dedicated light up key designed for that function that has worked fine for me for decades before.

Don’t sleep on that toothache if it is due to an infection. Tooth infections can kind of fast track to the sinuses and then the brain and go real bad real quick. Also there’s the pain. I don’t know how you can survive with that pain AND a tiny human. Probably best not to die on them because of a dumb thing like a toothache.

That’s not very helpful for connecting family, friends, and especially grandma.

Jellyfish cannot to setup to securely and safely be exposed to the Internet. It is only safe to access through a VPN. That rules it out as an option for sharing with friends, family, or even my own spouse. You call it phoning home to the mother ship; I call it paying Plex to manage user authentication for me. Until Jellyfin’s security holes are patched and it becomes clear that the Jellyfin developers actually care about security, it stays locked down to my LAN. Setting up a VPN is difficult for the average user on a good day, impossible in some circumstances on even the best of days, and is not access I want to hand out (and support) to all the people I share my Plex with anyway.

So edgy.

If someone wrote this article in the early 90s, it would be called “Why I ditched the radio, and how I created my own CD collection.” I think rephrasing it that way really shines a light on why it’s mostly still comparing apples and oranges.

I have a pretty substantial collection of music hovering around 5,000 albums or 1.6TB (mostly lossless FLAC these days, but still some moldy old mp3s and ogg vorbis files from my youth). I’m not even counting the physical media I still hold on to. I still use Spotify for discovery and playlists. I don’t think the depth and breadth of my library will ever match the depth and breadth of the music that I want to listen to in the very next moment. Lots of times I want to listen to the stuff I’m familiar with, and I do that using my own library. But, when I want to: remember a song I heard in the wild, share a holiday playlist with friends, make an obscurely themed playlist of songs features peaches, preview a musician’s or band’s stuff, discover other things that musician has collaborated on, or simply discover new music; I still use Spotify.

There are (or were) bits and pieces out there (many that pre-date Spotify) that can do some of these things. Last.fm (fka Audioscrobbler) was good for tracking listening habits to compare and share with others, it helped a little with discovery. I used allmusic.com a lot long ago to discover the artists that inspired the artists I was listening. If I wanted to share a playlist, I made a mixtape (really it was burning a mix CD). But, all of these collected information only, not the music itself. If I wanted to actually hear a new song, I had to go somewhere and find it first. That often meant literally traveling somewhere else or ordering from a catalog and waiting for delivery. Every new music discovery was a bet made with real dollars that I would actually enjoy the thing or listen to it more than once. Even after napster paved the way for free listening via piracy, one still had to work to actually find the music.

Spotify (and similar services) finally collected (almost) all of it under one app, so that I could discover and listen seemlessly. It is instant gratification music discovery. I’ll never give up my self hosted collection, but I also don’t have much hope that any self curated collection will be able to complete with the way that I use Spotify. Spotify is just the new radio. It’s never the end of my listening though. Just like with radio, when I find something I like enough, then I can expend the energy (or more often expend the money as directly with the band as I can) to add it to my collection.

Conservatives really like the recycling myth because it puts the onus of waste on the individual consumer instead of the corporations actually producing the waste.

Plexamp has gotten better lately. It can save your progress on audiobooks now. It’s a per library feature, so I have one library of music (that does not save progress) and one for audiobooks (that does save progress). I used to have trouble with some audiobook formats (M4Bs needed to be converted (really just renamed) to mp4s, but that wasn’t necessary for the last few I loaded. Plex still has a little trouble with standards around multiple authors and different productions (and different readers) of a single book, but that’s more of an ID3 tag problem and is resolved if you’re consistent in normalizing the tags on your library. I’ve also used the syncing features a bunch for offline time (like on a plane or on long trips). For a large library, I see syncing offline files as a necessary feature.

And before the Jellyfin fanboys chime in, if Jellyfin could match these audio and syncing features (and be easier to setup for access outside my LAN and sharing with family), I jump ship in a heartbeat.

“pretty easy” is a bit of a stretch

I can tell that this particular port is more or less from the same time as the PS2 ports in the post’s photo because of the color. The standardization of this port happened long before the standardization of colors to indicate the capabilities of said port. We mostly only see this in variously capable USB ports today. If I remember correctly this yellow color would have been used for a joystick or controller of some kind, but there may have been other ports with the same shape and pin configuration that would have different purposes.

I want the word “unalived” to be killed or murdered in the most vile and explicit way possible for a word.

Portal 3?