EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

The actor of captain Picard

Do you honestly not recognize Sir Patrick Stewart? No shade, it’s just wild to think there would be people who don’t recognize him at all, given the length and breadth of his career.

In answer to your question, I can’t speak for Patric Stewart, but my guess is that he chose to play the scene that way because it’s likely that very few people in the Federation smoke, and that’s probably doubly true for people who spend most of their time on a spaceship. My guess would be that Stewart was trying to indicate to the audience that smoking would be somewhat of an anachronism in the 23rd century.

But if they know that, why hasn’t Russia started bombing the entire city indiscriminately on the off chance that they’ll kill some militants? Would that be some sort of monstrous act that’s impossible to justify? 🤔

They’d also talk about how the post was installed improperly because everyone in the USSR was drunk and incompetent.

I’ve seen every episode of both shows and this didn’t occur to me once. She doesn’t even look different, she’s just a great actress.

Also, Democrats would always prefer to find an excuse to lose rather than a way to win, so blaming leftists serves multiple purposes.

This argument would be perfectly coherent if there were a sincere effort to court leftist votes. There isn’t (ever) so the argument is moot. The response should be a simple “don’t expect votes you didn’t campaign for.” Honestly, it would be trivial for the Democrats to win every election at every level of government forever by promising like 1% of the popular and useful things that people want and then doing them. But they won’t, so again, moot.

The Simpsons’ version of Bill Clinton.

Give us Mario Kart 9, cowards.

I just don’t even know how you would argue that they aren’t making art. What purer form of artistic endeavor could you name than a child being creative for its own sake? Things like technical skill, novelty, complexity, etc. are qualities that art has, but they have nothing to do with the definition itself. If a child creates something with artistic intent, that’s art. Arguing otherwise is navel-gazing prescriptivism, the same basic argument as Roman statue fetishism and just as tedious.

The only categorical difference between a child’s painting and a professional illustration is that the latter has value as a commodity. If that’s how art is being defined here then we can dismiss this opinion as deeply unserious.

That’s the point. The US has effectively unlimited money, or let’s say unlimited liquidity, so their ability to repay is purely based on political issues. That they can’t get their shit together enough politically to avoid their own borrowing costs going up is extremely funny and embarrassing.

The US credit rating has fluctuated since 2011. At one point I think it was as low as A-. Regardless, the idea that it would ever be anything other than AAA is hilarious.

Despite its AA+ credit rating

People do not make fun of the US for having their credit rating downgraded nearly enough. Imagine being the wealthiest country in history with control over the most ubiquitous reserve currency on the planet and the credit rating agencies are like “it’s not that we don’t trust you, but we have standards to maintain.”

Look into design thinking and in particular ideation. There are lots of formal processes, exercises, activities, etc. that are used by individuals and teams in all sorts of contexts specifically for coming up with ideas. The process is usually one of throwing a bunch of things on the table, sorting through them, getting rid of most of them, elaborating on the ones that seem interesting, then following one to completion, or at least to some sort of first draft/prototype/mockup. You then decide whether or not you want to work on the draft further, or decide that it’s a dead end and start from scratch. The thing with “ideas” is that all of them are terrible and only serve to help guide us towards doing something interesting. Creating things is an intensely iterative process, and what you start with is unlikely to look much like what you end up with after a number of iterations.

Ideas are also all derivative. There are no new ideas, just riffs on existing ones. Even most interesting and innovative works have been influenced by past works, or works from different disciplines, or inspired by nature. If you’re looking to make a short comic, start by figuring out what works and artists and styles you like. Try recreating parts of them, or emulating them, or combining elements of them, and see if the results speak to you. That’s one of the few actually useful applications of LLM AI. You can quickly test concepts, maintain some elements and discard others, do mashups, etc. When something grabs you, try to figure out what it is that resonates about it, then try to recreate it with your own spin.

Ultimately, ideas are just prompts for doing work, and having a good idea (to the extent that such a thing even exists) is far less important than being willing to test a number of ideas to find out what will motivate you to spend real time and effort on creating something.

There is no reason to engage with the topic anywhere on normie internet. You won’t get into a good faith conversation, you won’t change anyone’s mind, and you wont learn anything new. Everyone is either astroturfing, repeating astroturf talking points, or is a Zionist/Nazi.

The irony of this extreme flattening of the discourse is that there’s no reason for anyone to participate. If you’ve read the official communications from the Israeli government, you’ve got all the information that anyone is willing to discuss. Everything else - including primary-source reporting, photos, videos, UN reports, NGO communications, and even established facts about the history of the conflict - is considered suspect. Want to learn more? There’s nothing else to learn. Want to make a distinction between Palestinians and Hamas? There is none. Want to discuss whether Israel’s strategy is or will be effective? Shut up.

I’ve honestly never seen anything like this since 9/11. It makes the initial response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine look like a nuanced discussion.

There is no evidence that belief in Santa is harmful to children, nor is telling them the truth. They only believe in Santa for like maybe three years, and they’ll figure it out on their own. The vast majority of kids figure it out by age ~7-8. You can tell them whatever you want, it won’t matter either way.

If you do tell them the truth, or they figure it out on their own, be sure to also tell them that even if they don’t believe, other kids do, and being a Santa-truther will not win them any prizes or make them any friends. It’s a good lesson about living in a society.

This is terrific, but why isn’t panel 3 a picture of Thomas Riker? Literally the second Riker, who also has a fuller beard (Thomas doesn’t shape his beard the way Will does).

Didn’t he go back to Earth to live with his human relatives? My guess would be that Worf would be his eccentric uncle/cousin who came to town every now and again to take him hunting and tell him war stories. Plus the Rozhenkos are on Earth, so I’d imagine Worf would ask that they keep in touch with him, too. I bet that, aside from the trauma in this episode, he probably had a pleasant and uncomplicated life on Earth, but he could tell kids at school that he was also a member of a Klingon family and they’d have to believe him or else his Klingon crew would have to show up to defend his honor. That would be rad, imo.

chef’s kiss