I’ve been looking for a decent one, mostly to potentially run a fan in the event of a summer outage. I’ve actually been surprised how hard it is to find one that will support it at a reasonable price.

Can I tell you a secret?

Nobody is ever 100% for free speech. No one.

Invariably everyone who says they’re for “free speech” has a point at which they feel speech should no longer be free - whether it’s the classic “yelling fire in a theater” or expressing a viewpoint they feel is actually harmful. And that last bit is kind of the rub: Social media and people being siloized into echo chambers where they’re repeatedly told that everything the “right” people say is 100% absolute truth and everything “they” say is dirty horrible lies.

‘Free speech’ is very difficult to discuss with someone from a different, let alone opposing echo chamber because it’s so easy for people to fall into the belief that only their speech should be ‘free’, but those other peoples’ speech is all dangerous and bad, which makes it hard to discuss when speech is actually harmful. It’s been very, very eye opening to watch organizations all over the place twist themselves into pretzels to accommodate this.

This. If Kirk has any actual positive quality, I’d say that he’s highly adaptable and skilled at ‘thinking on his feet’. This gets him out of a whole lot of trouble and lets him play fast and loose with his actions as Captain, but it also means he gets himself into a lot of trouble that a more strategic, less impulsive officer would have avoided in the first place.

It’s telling, in my opinion, that the very first thing Starfleet does as soon as the Enterprise gets back home is rotate him off of starship command and give him an administrative position where his decisions can be reviewed, rather than assigning him on a new mission. He only manages to get himself back in command when V’ger is heading straight for Earth, and Starfleet is in “throw the kitchen sink at it” mode.

In 2002, there was a game called Naval Ops: Commander. It’s a warship simulator game, with the tweak that you could build your own warships out of an assortment of parts. I don’t think I’ve played it in 20ish years. Definitely more than 15.

Yeah, the Main Hangar (essentially, your ‘home screen’ once you’d selected a playthrough) Theme is on loop right now. The ending ~10 seconds of it, to be specific.

For clarity, when you say “anti-gun”, what is that position? Like, “average people should not have them, period”?

Not trying to knock on you - it’s that there’s so many positions which get lumped under “pro-” or “anti-”, it helps to actually understand where someone is coming from.

Yes and no. I think I was overly optimistic that people would make use of the possibilities of social media. I have thoughts on why I was mistaken, but ultimately I failed to recognize that a lot of people like their views affirmed and will seek out circles which do so.

At the same time, you’re 100% right: Companies saw an opportunity to drive engagement and reap huge profits with the teeeeensy little side effects of further siloizing viewpoints, distorting reality, and elevating the most extreme positions. It turbocharged everything awful and repeatedly turned sites into cancerous shitholes.

At one point I really, truly believed that the internet and social media would be a turning point in human interconnectivity and cultural understanding. The ability to just… talk to someone on the other side of the planet, at will? When we know that exposure to other beliefs and cultures is superb at punching holes in hatred and misunderstanding? Surely this would lead to great things!

Yeah, that was a miss.

Exposure to other is still a fantastic way to grow understanding. But the internet and social media were not a highway to it, and as the “wild west” era of the internet faded and we instead got corporate-governed, algorithm-driven siloization of views, my views on the value of social media changed sharply.

For me it’s the ‘Can you hear me now?’ animations. Every once in a while, when I see someone having issues with their phone/earbuds/whatever, those pop into my head unbidden.

Killfrog.com

Shit, that just awoke some memories in me. Back from ye olden days when people would just fire up their own website to host their stuff.

Oh, I’m not arguing about placeholder names. This whole issue is placeholder names escaping into the wild.

To me personally though, “2024” felt like the last gasp of Hasbro trying to sell an infinitely-rolling, “DnD-as-a-service” dynamic. Fans broadly understand editions and expect them to come with a serious scope of updates, but “annuals” could be deliberately confusing and ephemeral. The hope was they’d seem “new and shiny” enough to still prompt fans to buy them.

Or maybe that’s just over-conspiratorial thinking. I dunno.

“C’mooooon… play more OneDND 5e2024 5.5e. It’s totally a proper edition this time. Pleeeeeeease?”

In fairness this isn’t the first time. 5e was “DnD Next” (terrible name as well) during its development.

It is unacceptable that Babylon 5 is not on this list. It was rare, at the time, for shows to have a multi-season story arc with character development planned from the start. JMS got his seasons, though, and used them beautifully. Every single episode, even those that don’t contribute to the main storyline advancing, either show a character developing or build the foundations for that development.

FMA:B is up there on “shows I wish I could forget just so I can watch it for the first time again”, and so much of it has is how many characters’ final moments (re)define them. Tossup for me between:

Yeah, I 100% get where you’re coming from. (And I agree with you; the Ori seasons weren’t the strongest of SG-1. Babylon 5 had a similar problem where they wrapped up the entire show’s myth arc, only to be told there’d be a sudden fifth season. It showed.)

I think for me a lot of it depends on whether they decide to “un-conclude” the existing story or branch it off in an entirely new direction. Like, looking to Stargate again, the Ori seasons struggled, but Atlantis was a great way to propagate the concept with a new cast, characters, and story.

I’m kind of ambiguous about the first point. I think you can expand on a tightly-written, concluded story… but not repeatedly. Furthermore, it requires you to - to some degree - shift the focus of the following stories. Continuing the meta-story is all and just fine, but the immediate story can’t be about the same theme/issue/encounter indefinitely.

It’s an episode almost or entirely composed of clips from previous episodes. Usually it has some sort of a framing device - for instance, in an adventure show, it might be the characters taking a ‘breather’ after a tough encounter and musing on how they got here. Or one character might confront another about a situation that’s been brewing, and the clip show is showing bits of that situation leading up to the confrontation.

On an aside, reception to clip shows is an interesting shift. For a long time, one or two were an accepted part of a long-running series - either because it let you make an episode on the cheap using recycled footage, or because in the pre-internet-streaming-on-demand world, it let audiences catch up on what had been happening in episodes they might have missed or seen months ago.

Nowadays, however, they’re almost universally viewed negatively, as their reason for existing is absent and they’re mostly taken as a sign of poor planning by the creators.

This. It says, “I acknowledge you are upset, and accept blame.”

Tactical gameplay is already something I very much encourage. One nice thing about playing with the same group for a long time is that I know they’ll respond when I put things on the map - opportunities to flank, drop or collapse things, and so on.

Thanks for that link! I’ll toss that at my group and see what they think.

Out of all the ideas here, this is one that interest me the most. I’ve seen a lot of things, but not something that does better when you’re low…