Luke

Oh no, somebody who might be Russian took a family vacation to go fishing with their loved ones!? What an orgy of indulgence! The audacity!

An effect that becomes less surprising with repetition. At some point, it’s no longer a “surprising effect” but an entirely expected one.

These fuckers should just release digital first, and physical comes when it’s done being printed and distributed. This anxiety over “oh no a finished game got leaked early” is manufactured drama. If the game is done, then it doesn’t matter when it gets released, except for artificial marketing angst. Make a good game that players want, and it’ll be purchased. Eventually. It doesn’t have to all happen at exactly the predicted moment.

This kind of confusion illustrated by Telegram users is exactly why it was the right thing to do for privacy when Signal removed support for SMS because it’s not encrypted. People still whine endlessly about it, but most users are not very savvy, and they’ll assume “this app is secure” and gleefully send compromised SMS to each other. All the warnings and UI indicators that parts of the app were less secure (or not at all in the case of SMS) would be ignored by many users, resulting in an effectively more dangerous app. Signal was smart to remove those insecure features entirely.

I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your overall point here (I have no idea why people engage with shorts, maybe they do love that format) but I wanted to push back a little on the idea that a product must be popular simply because corporations continue to offer them. Especially with social media, where users are actively discouraged from making their own decisions as much as possible by The Algorithm.

I think there are plenty of examples of things that people continue to use (and often even pay for the “privilege”) despite major aspects of those things being generally reviled by everyone who uses them:

• ad infested apps and websites
• gaming microtransactions
• a new phone every year
• cable service
• insurance
• HOAs
• gasoline
• Amazon
• pants and dresses without pockets

Wow this is amazing, that music is perfect for it. The shots of the Enterprise heading into the cloud while accompanied by this score felt so exploratory and awe inspiring. I don’t think I’ve ever been brought to tears by the original score in that movie, but this one did it.

Yeah, I agree that Vulcans would probably be naturally accepting of varied gender identification and presentation, and of varied sexual orientations. Probably similar to how the majority of the neurodiverse (especially autistic) communities among humans are accepting of gender and sexuality variations.

It strikes me as highly illogical to insist that anyone else has a better sense of what a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity is than the individual themselves. If they say “I identify with X pronouns” then obviously it is illogical to use Y pronouns when referring to that person. If they say, “I’m attracted to people like this” then it’s illogical to insist that they should instead be attracted to a different subset of people. If they express a preference for Z gender presentation, it’s illogical to insist they should prefer otherwise.

Gendered expectations are illogical relics of ancient human social structure anyway, so Vulcan society probably wouldn’t have as many of those to begin with, if any at all. Even our emotionally encumbered human cultures in the 21st century are beginning to wonder at how pointlessly gendered things have been for us.

some may have views that it is illogical to have a romantic relationship without a child

I don’t see why it would be logical to posit that the potential for creating offspring is a necessary component of relationships. There are all manner of motivations for intimate bonding that have nothing to do with whether biological reproduction occurs. Also, adoption exists.

Arguably, the very concept of romance being a core component of relationships would be viewed by Vulcans as an illogical and unnecessary condition. I imagine the vast majority of Vulcan society would be aromantic by default.

OnlyOffice can also be integrated with NextCloud or WordPress or a bunch of other stuff. I believe it can also be used standalone. Personally, I found it’s interface much more polished and usable than Collabora, though it’s been a couple years since I compared.

Good question… it’s not on my playlist but it’s probably actually cozy. I just don’t tend to watch that one often because it makes me feel sad.

My top 3 favorite cozy episodes are Data’s Day, Déjà Q, and Manhunt. Horny Lwaxana is an inspiration; her reactions to her daughter’s slut shaming comments are so priceless to me.

Yeah, I often fall asleep to a TNG playlist where I’ve selected all the most cozy episodes (e.g., no Borg or “4 lights!” because those are amazing but stressful) but being jolted wide awake by that jarringly loud intro music is less fun than nodding off to Picard romancing Lwaxana with Shakespeare quotes.

It’s better than Season 8, which is of course just about the lowest bar in existence, but worth noting when talking GoT.

The plot was kind of just a borderline uninteresting version of Downton Abbey with way more blood and incest, but the characters felt correct for the world and the acting and production was on point. Definitely worth a watch, but just don’t expect it to be anything on the level of Seasons 1-4 of the original show.

You got all that when you didn’t even finish the first episode? Damn, you are a tough audience.

I thought the show was pretty decent. It wasn’t literally perfect, but it was entertaining and beautifully shot. Some of the acting was kinda underwhelming, but some others did a great job IMO.

Especially Morfydd Clark, Joseph Mawle, and Ismael Cruz Córdova as Galadriel, Adar, and Arondir, respectively. Sophia Nomvete as Disa gave one of my favorite performances yet of a Dwarven character, and I enjoyed her scenes immensely.

I’ll probably rewatch that show more often than I will the Hobbit movies, which makes it a solid entry by my reckoning, and it’s okay that it wasn’t perfect.

Wasn’t that the Loki show, where all of time is run by a boring dystopian corporate bureaucracy?

Now that I think of it, I guess you’re right, that show probably did do better than Black Adam.

Give it a shot again, something changed recently in Proton (I assume) that made Vortex “just work” for me on my Steam Deck. I didn’t even need to do any fiddling, I just ran the installer exe from desktop mode using Lutris and whatever Proton was latest, and it installed perfectly. Vortex now runs entirely as expected, even from game mode.

Looking through their comment history, they proclaim their honesty quite often, it’s pretty funny when you’re looking for it 😆

I’ve now tagged them so I’ll remember that they are very honest:

I’ve been enjoying Apostrophe:

Vortex seems to work fine using Lutris now. I’m not sure when it changed, but at some point recently I figured I’d give it a shot again and just downloaded and ran their installer exe and it worked.

There’s no more funny malware.

That depends who gets infected.

You or me infected by malware? No thanks!

Egon Mark infected by malware? Absolute hilarity!

I’m not sure what else they would need to do. You can just install Plex or Jellyfin on your Steamdeck right now, and you’ve got yourself an HTPC. It works great!

What are the missing pieces you’re still looking for?

What I’ve done in the past is to copy the URL of the unavailable video (if it’s still accessible via the playlist entry, sometimes it isn’t which is annoying) and feed it into the Wayback Machine in the hopes that it got archived at some point. The video stream isn’t usually available that way, but at least the page title sometimes is, and then I can search for other versions of it.