southsamurai

It’s been there since TOS.

It isn’t lazy writing, it’s the necessity of long term writing for a series.

If you take the tos concept of “wagon train in space” as the starting point, if you want to maintain a multiple season show, you have to explore every idea you can come up with. You discard the ones that don’t fit the vibe, or you tear them apart until they do. But you have a deadline, budgets, and an ever-critical audience.

So, you get episodes like the one (s3e8 TOS) being rewatched in that community. A zero stakes illness, some hand wavy tech, and a single episode romance that amounts to a pile of meh. They can’t all be winners, and Voyager had and extra limitation in that it was expected to do a roughly TOS journey, with TNG baggage, and still manage to not retread plots too obviously.

It isn’t lazy, and I’d argue that it isn’t bad writing either, as Voyager usually managed to keep characterization on point and didn’t fuck up with major contradictions often.

In universe, you had people far from home, unsure if they’d ever get back, surrounded by strangers and emitted enemies. So the crew slipped a lot. It fits well enough as a head canon that only the really egregiously bad stuff can’t maintain immersion.

But it’s the nature of series writing. You always run into a “what the fuck do we do this week?” wall. It’s really rare for a show to have a long enough commitment that there’s real planning involved the way Babylon 5 worked out. Where you can tell the big story and fill in little bits in episodes rather than having to shove little bits of big story into one-off episodes.

I’ve done some amateur grade serial writing. If you don’t start off with the big picture in place, every chapter is a wrestling match between the idea you’ve got now and how it fits in the long term. It’s fucking brutal sometimes. I’m struggling with one now that’s likely to end up with the same level of “really? That’s what happens?” just because too much stagnation while trying to get the idea to take shape makes it less likely to. You have to push with what you can make work… I have to push with what I can make work so that it doesn’t die entirely.

Imagine that kind of situation on a budget, a deadline, and whatever exchanges directors and producers throw into the mix. I seriously doubt I could do it. It’s its own skill set.

I only saw the first one in theater, and I was so damn young, all I really remember of the experience is some of the exterior shots. But, considering how young I was, that’s still a telling thing about how well it was done.

I feel you.

Being real though, picking up some motorsickles is hard. I’m always impressed even when big guys do it solo, much less easily. Not entirely because they’re heavy, there’s also the factor that when most people drop their bike, it isn’t casually. There’s a reason it’s down, and that can interfere with getting it back up.

Still, totally with you. The fact it’s a woman doing it solo is no more or less impressive than a man of the same approximate size.

Canada goes fucking hard, yo!

Imagine having to fight moose and Wolverine just to walk two miles in the snow to get to Tim Horton’s! You’d fuck up some nazis too!

Moderation from a different instance can be a pain in the ass. It isn’t necessary to be on the same one as the community, but it is easier

If you gonna switch sides, you best be giving a refund to the first employer before you kill them

You can get smaller jars, though the exact brand and quality will vary.

But you can freeze the leftover sauce with no real issues. So you don’t have to waste anything.

I still don’t think that hating a general that would destroy civilian infrastructure and lives is a racist thing.

Defeating the Confederacy wasn’t a one man project. Other generals did their part, without the brutality or wanton destruction. Dude committed a war crime, by modern standards. It’s perfectly reasonable to hate him as much as it is to hate Rommel, or Hannibal.

It apparently impacted your comprehension since you only read part of that paragraph

Really? Really? That’s the best you can come up with?

Wait, why is it racist to hate some general?

They’re all tools of the state, and perfectly valid to hate

Well, kinda.

The problem is that it isn’t a 1:1 thing.

Hormones, insulin sensitivity, neurotransmitters, gut biome, muscle mass, brain activity, there’s a shit ton of factors that go into exactly what that break point is. Worse, that break point isn’t even 100% stable. People like to think it is, but it isn’t it can change as often as daily, and at the lower end of that point, a deficit is extremely difficult for patients to maintain healthily.

And yes, it is sometimes less healthy to eat less than it is to carry some extra fat. It’s not like vitamin supplementation is ideal, even when you know for a fact that what they’re swallowing is mostly bioavailable.

And, frankly, that bullshit of “enough energy on your body to not eat…” is utter bullshit. Starvation does jack shit for a bariatric patient, period. No, the energy burned absolutely is not enough to maintain a healthy body and metabolism for days. I don’t know where people got that idea, but it is malarkey.

I strongly urge people to go and consult with a specialist if they’re having trouble reducing their body fat. It is not wise to believe the random internet stupidity that can’t be bothered to stay up to date on a subject before prattling on. Fuck, I haven’t even worked in two decades, and I’m more up to date than random assholes, and I know I’m behind current bleeding edge in that specific field.

Fuck, I swear, people’s blind fucking cruelty trying to feel superior is disgusting. Fucking h lf assed sound bite garbage.

Thermodynamics my hairy asshole. People aren’t fucking furnaces, they aren’t a closed system.

Maybe boring little anecdote.

The first time I ever ran across “Chinese dragons” was at a local Chinese restaurant back in the early to mid eighties, and the owner/operators were a Chinese couple.

But I had never seen the name for the dragons written anywhere, but in English for sure.

So, until many years later, I thought it would be spelled lung in English because that’s closer to how they said it than long.

By the time I was old enough to be curious about it, the restaurant had closed, and afaik the couple was nowhere in town. So I have no clue if they’re pronunciation was the standard one, or a dialect variation or what, but I’ve heard maybe a half dozen ways to say the word since then, with the English “long” version still feeling weird to me.

I keep hoping I’ll run across a situation where a discussion of that word’s pronunciation will be detailed and I can just sit back and absorb it all.

Lmmfao! Yeah, it never even had a chance, unfortunately

Yeah, as fucky as English is, as hard as it can be to learn, it’s currently the lingua franca ;)

Plus, because it’s a language that loves borrowing words and phrases, it’s already set up with an ease of integration to a limited extent.

At this point, any effort to displace it as the default is going to cause as much trouble and hassle as it’s place as the default does.

That being said, a language like Esperanto would be a better choice overall. It’s kinda like how Latin can serve as a neutral and fixed language because it’s dead. Esperanto isn’t dead, but it’s similarly fixed, and not tied to a single culture, so it would work. Then again, so would Latin

There’s never any guarantee that changing such a thing would result in a better present, but I would sure as fuck be massively different

You’ve already hit on the best use. It’ll replace honey or sugar in glazes, easy peasy.

Secondary to that, as a mixer in sweet cocktails.

Beyond that, it can be cooked down into a syrup and used as such.

Mind you, I only ever tried making mead once, and it was agea ago, and at far smaller quantities. Not sure how well it’ll store at that abv, but it can be frozen in ice cube trays. Well, the stuff I had could.

There was a time in my life when id say “smile” to people. Thank the gods of common sense I never made the mistake of saying anything about “you’d be prettier if” because holy fuck would I need a beating to atone for that level of sheer stupidity

Solid rant!