What are you talking about? It’s clearly already there! It’s all over the thing!

I was around almost at the beginning of Eternal September. In December of 1994, I posted to a newsgroup that google eventually archived on the web. Beyond that, my eBay account predates y2k. The first purchase I recall was a parallel port ethernet adapter so I could use Arachne for DOS on my 386SLC33 laptop in the university library. I mailed out a money order and hoped this “buying shit on the internet” thing wasn’t going to be a scam.

Imagine if that one fire were the series finale. All-time great show if you end it there.

They say they used a paid actor. Of course, even if that’s true, it’s not particularly hard to find someone with a similar pitch, accent, and timbre, and then finish fixing it to make sure it’s as confidently soothing as the NPR voice you wanted to steal in the first place. I suppose in one sense it’s not utterly different from hiring a soundalike, but now the soundalike is damn near perfect (the clips in the article are VERY similar and feel more like the difference in recording equipment than anything else) and doesn’t need to actually be available to perform for new impressions. Yet another example of “withstand motion for summary judgment, string it out, lobby against future guiderails” as the totality of Silicon Valley’s legal philosophy.

I think what they’re saying is that the dissent says out loud the part that the majority would prefer to keep quiet. It’s a clear consequence of the “clever jackass 7th-grader” mindset that comes from the Originalist school of jurisprudence.

You can’t run a modern nation-state or withstand a bad actor in power if you insist that it must all be done exactly as set out in 4,500 words by a bunch of 18th-century provincial lawyers writing by committee, and that anything not expressly forbidden is allowed because… “oh well.” SCOTUS abdicating its role as a backstop of liberty and good sense to instead be a bunch of pedants is a piss-poor reason to send your country to hell, yet here we are.

They’re about to find out what we actually were getting in return.

This is one of the huge under-analyzed aspects of all this. The US “over” invested in defense and foreign aid, and got virtually all the soft power benefits of a hegemonic power, and by simply setting an upper limit on the worst abuses of imperial overlords, it generally had its allies saying “Thank You” for the privilege, with no particular signs that the bloc was weakening.

If the US is not an accessible market or a reliable guarantor of security, or if (for fuck’s sake) it’s threatening the territorial integrity of its own allies and trading partners, then it’s just China with less cheap shit to sell. Hell, even China doesn’t do the last one (offer not valid in Taiwan).

Ahh, but which one? LOL, I’m just kiddin’, they all have serious issues.

I grew up in the suburbs of the Florida one. It’s… fine? Go Jags!

Maybe it can repost racist MAGA slop, creep on the granddaughters of ex-girlfriends, and put private messages into the public feed, just like your dad!

When we were not-quite engaged and doing long-distance, my wife ganked my dumbphone and quickly edited my contact from {her name} to {her name}-mywife, no spaces, no capital letters. So now, twenty+ years later, that’s what it still says, and that’s how I address greeting card envelopes to her.

This is almost exactly what happened in the US a hundred-plus years ago. The fallout vastly improved medical education overall, but also ossified the field into a modern fortress of protectionism that hurts the public by ignoring the supply part of supply and demand, but also hurts the clever (and typically already privileged in most ways) young people who manage to get med school, by saddling them with huge amounts of debt and grinding them into powder for the first decade of their career. I also subscribe to the theory that the hypercompetitive selection process results in too many doctors who are not well-rounded or particularly good at processing information outside their fields, but are told over and over again that they’re too smart to have any blind spots. If you have the right credential and especially if you’ve made enough money with it, society does the Dunning-Krugering for you.

I had to sit on the floor to invite cuddles, but he finally came in and is now resting on his stinky blanket. To be completely honest, he was only out like that for a few minutes, but bless his heart he was trying so hard. The fosters called him “Sergeant” because he was bossy and protective of his siblings.

This is pretty much what I said to my wife while scritching my dogs. First it’ll just be expanded to missing kids and olds, because of course everyone wants to reunite families, but eventually it’ll be something that “law enforcement” can request for whatever the hell they want, because after all they’re the good guys keeping us safe!

But, and hear me out here, it’s also wicked cool.

Ours is more stick-shaped though, and really only good for candle wicks. If we smoked, you might be able to get a cigarette into the arc. It’d probably also work well if your grill’s or gas stove’s spark igniter was broken.

Why do you think Starfleet had to set that up in the first place? You think they WANT a huge network of oversized saltwater-flooded Jeffries tubes running alongside the constantly infiltrated and poorly electrically insulated normal ones?

Interesting. These say they’re from Mexico. It would be pretty underwhelming if there’s a blander variety.

But the tart ones are the good ones.

Raspberry for me, though I’m not sure if it’s fully artificial or “just” ultra-processed. It’s also partly because I like that flavor but I’m mildly allergic and about 25% of the time I eat it, my lip swells a bit, so I try to minimize how often I have it.

Deep cut here, but the old Rocky and Bullwinkle had a “Fractured Fairy Tales” that was often pretty fun.

I was using a 2012 “vintage” minitower PC that originally came with Win7 as a crappy little plex/local FTP/Minecraft server, and I had been wanting to try MacOS after not seeing it for a while, so I got a Mac Mini with an M2 in it, and while I’ve hardly stressed it, it seems really nice. It’s small and completely silent, and if I did want to use it more, Apple has certainly tried to keep their walled garden pretty and well-organized.

It’s funny… In some ways, I think he adored the stories they were telling, and particularly the potential the characters and the setting held, but he really seemed to dislike the production environment and many of the specific decisions that were made. He is an artist with a very specific voice (lol, literally even) and mindset that was maybe poorly suited to making Star Trek his “thing.”

God though, can you imagine if the brooding-to-manic Sisko acting roller coaster had become iconic in the broader culture like Shatner’s staccato shouting and dramatic pauses?