Went back and checked: Walter was 50 at the start of the series. The series spanned two years of in-universe time, and he died at 52.

Anyway, the point stands. Cooking meth is a valid shared interest for an older man and a younger man to bond over.

This is basically the plot of Breaking Bad.

The people in charge of TNG by that point were creatively bankrupt. It would have been a fiasco.

Also, the idea just doesn’t fit Star Trek. It isn’t a comic book franchise, where fan-pleasing callbacks and crossovers are baked into the formula. In Star Trek media, callbacks and crossovers have tended to be some of the worst stories.

Chrono Trigger. It’s basically the evolutionary peak of the NES-era console RPG. Every aspect, including the story, art, game mechanics, and music, are best-in-class, with no obvious room for improvement given the technical constraints of the time.

Let’s all be grateful that Google handled GChat and its successors so incompetently. There was a window of time in which the world might have gotten hooked into using Google for instant messaging, which would have been a privacy disaster. Lucky, they fucked it up.

Pull for scantily-clad farmhands.

Ultima Underworld

It came out before Doom, had full isometric 3D environments including looking up and down, and contained immersive sim and RPG elements. All the ingredients of a modern first person action RPG… in 1992.

This episode was probably peak Dukat. Unfortunately, I don’t think they stuck the landing for his character arc. His descent into insane mustache twirling villainy in the last season was not very interesting. By the finale, the Dukat part was by far the weakest of the simultaneous plot threads.

To avoid paying royalties, I imagine. Hollywood accounting is craaaaazy.

Measure of a Man was groundbreaking but feels pretty dated to watch. Back when it aired, the idea that sentient AIs should be treated as humans was far from the mainstream. Today, we’ve seen so many sympathetic robots in pop culture (including, of course, Data) that the situation is reversed: the arguments aired against Data in this episode seem shockingly bigoted.

Imagine if the plot contrived to make Riker get up in front of the court to argue for slavery – even if he’s clearly labelled as playing devil’s advocate, it feels beyond the pale.

People are very understandably dubious because of the Stadia fiasco, but this is a lot more promising. IMO, this have been what they tried first. There’s a huge market for casual games that people can play on their phones or tablets, and these often don’t suffer from the strict input lag requirements that bedevil cloud gaming.

Knowing Google, though, chances are they’ll fuck up the execution.

Given TikTok’s precarious situation, it’s no surprise they’re going out of their way to bend to the whims of US politics. Face it, there are a lot of Republicans ready to justify banning TikTok by pointing to teenagers getting abortion advice from the platform.

Sure, just like you can run an SMTP server that blocks incoming connections from Gmail. It’s not illegal, obviously, but it goes against the spirit of an open, interoperable internet.

To me, the argument for accepting Meta into the Fediverse goes beyond gain and loss. If you run an Internet service, you have a moral obligation to make a good faith attempt to interoperate with anyone using the protocol as intended.

By a similar token, if you run a mail server, you should accept SMTP connections as far as possible. Yes, you can ban spam, but you should not ban connections from Gmail even if Gmail is a privacy-destroying bad idea. By all means, allow individual users to set up their own block lists, but this should not be done at the server level.

Shouldn’t it have been the Odyssey? By the time you unsubscribe, ten years have passed, nobody recognizes you, and your wife is fending off suitors.

I feel like we’ve passed the peak of LOTR as a media phenomenon. As the Hobbit movies and The Rings of Power show, all the stuff surrounding LOTR isn’t as interesting as LOTR itself, and there’s only so many times you can retread the material from those three books. And the Tolkien estate seems to oppose expanding the universe beyond what Tolkien wrote (thank goodness).

The counter argument is that standardized open protocols are important. So if a big corporation moves to adopt a standardized open protocol, it’s a good thing for everyone, even if said corporation is sketchy, evil, or whatever.

It’s kind of like Microsoft’s adoption of XML for Office save files. Yes, they had ulterior motives, and the result isn’t completely satisfactory for third parties who want to parse the save data. But it’s still miles better than the previous situation where things were completely closed off.

It’s GPL compliant, so there’s no problem. It’s a good thing for companies to explore a variety of business models that are FLOSS-compatible.

How was syncing done in Usenet? It has a very similar decentralized model, and I don’t recall there being problems of data loss due to desyncing between servers.

That’s Microsoft’s playbook. If you don’t offer a better product than your competitor, pull out every dirty trick in the book to undermine them.