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.

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.

Middle school kids he mighta done nothing wrong at all. Those kids at that age are terrors and will oust people from a friend group for the dumbest reasons imaginable.

Sucks because that person may have done everything right and years later still can’t trust people or open up to them.

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.

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)

I’m an independent that voted for Jill in 2016 and Kamala in 2024. What is your issue with me? You think the country ever could recover if people like us didn’t work together?

None of this hurts me, I’ll be fine. I just question if I want to raise my family with American values now but I have the freedom to easily move anywhere. Others don’t.

They are short about 4 states right now. That isn’t as huge a gap as I’d like. And they have the ability to get the item out to the states.

The we made some mistakes but we are proud of our heritage deal only works when you’re not massively losing due to being out of touch with the morals of your base. It’s easier for me to not see the parallels when they are not sending troops to cleanse Gaza. When you look at the votes for them and realize that it is a combination of both the people who want Democrats and the people who just don’t want Trump and they STILL can’t win it is a huge issue.

It’s the oldest political party in the world, maybe it is time to rebuild it in a cleaner image.

It’s cool though, no way that a President that awful would still be ingrained in our modern politics. Well except for the fact that he is the Founder of the Democratic Party, you know… the “good” guys.

The Republican party is policy wise to the right of both National and the NZ First party as a comparison. They will also control all arms of the government and it is potentially possible for them to amend the constitution without any recourse but it isn’t easy.

So to be clear, they could change our Freedom of Religion and Speech to a Freedom of Christian Religions and “Truthful” Speech and there isn’t a ton that anyone could do to stop them just to give you an idea of the level of power they have taken in this election. It wouldn’t be easy, but the fact that it won’t be impossible should be terrifying.

The goals they have of criminalizing providing abortion services in all cases for the entire country is entirely possible. They could round up every person in the country of a certain nationality and put them in camps like we did with the Japanese during WW2, Trump already cited this act as being something he is considering to deal with immigration.

Historically we killed 90% of our indigenous population. When NZ was signing the Treaty of Waitangi, America was executing the Trail of Tears and rounding up 60,000 Native Americans and making them march 100km to live in a desert, a quarter of them died during the move. We’re not even starting in a similar place here and we’re moving far to the right.