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.
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The opening is one of those things that just sticks with you. Minimalist artwork with just the studio's name and a couple of lines sung gently... then this sick trumpet beat drops and the title flashes in the most 90s way possible.