radix

Good news, you can stay. A position just opened up at Starbase 80.

Larry buys 18,000,000 calories worth of Cheetos in bags that don't reseal, and will go stale within 60 days. How many heart attacks will he have in the next two months?

I guess she's going to have to get a dog to keep her company.

Viral marketing for "You Can See Everything" perhaps?

It takes multiple books to cover, so this is the very, very basics:

~12,000 years in our future, Humanity goes to war with "thinking machines." The war lasted a while, humans finally win, and vowed to never create such machines again. Another ~12,000 years later, Dune takes place.

By this time, the "no AI/computers" is such a deeply ingrained belief, that it has made its way into literally every facet of culture: politics, religion, commerce/transportation, etc. Of course, having fast calculations is also really handy, so humans resort to selective breeding programs and strict social castes that result in human calculators (Mentats) and other specialized professions. Even that's not good enough to do interstellar travel calculations, so some people are imbued with "spice" (discovered on one planet, Arrakis, the Dune planet).

It's basically space magic mushrooms. Opens the mind like nothing else. That's the only way to do interstellar commerce, so it's the most valuable commodity in the galaxy, and whoever controls the planet gets enormously powerful, and also has a huge target on their back. Meanwhile, a maternal religious sect is running its own breeding program to get to fulfill some "chosen one" prophecy.

The only things a villain needs to do in order to be a badass in Movieland is to walk slowly and look menacing while uttering a memorable catchphrase.

That doesn't necessarily make them successful at their primary objective, since almost all Movieland villains lose eventually (they tend to leave their Plot Armor at home), but being remembered by the other residents forever is its own version of victory.

Unfortunately I'm not clever enough to have a good catchphrase, so I'm a minor henchman at best.

How do we get people to drop the saying "thought-terminating cliche?" It has an actual meaning, but is more often used by the "debate me" bros who are just lashing out any time someone doesn't want to engage with bad-faith arguments.

But if you do really good fictional representations of the absurd situations - or are especially attractive - you get to do more fictional representations on a bigger screen.

Just a coincidence, same as last year.
And the year before...

Autocomplete 2.0

Or is he just happy to see you?