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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • What’s good for making more money is not always or even often good for what we would think of as customer-friendly business. If you can wring more money out of a few whales at the expense of pissing off customers who don’t create as much revenue, then in our current system that’s what shareholders apparently want.

    Reddit wants more users in their official app where they can target them for ads, sell NFTs, and whatever other bullshit they want to sell. It doesn’t matter if the experience is worse, and it probably doesn’t really matter if a couple thousand 3PA users split for good. As long as they can tell investors that the official app use is growing and that they can target a greater percentage of users with ads and data, they feel like they won.



  • Neelix was one of the best characters on Voyager and I will stand by that assertion forever.

    I also think that Ethan Phillips was one of the best actors in the bunch too.

    Episodes like “Jetrell” and “Mortal Coil” still move me every time I see them. Dude is amazing at playing a very damaged person hiding (in part) behind a mask of joviality. Neelix was truly a good hearted man who loved his crew, but those times when the mask slipped really showed what a complex individual he was.




  • Honestly, the Federation itself. I always thought you could make a really interesting show that was a mix of Federation politics and Starfleet intrigue; maybe a show about the Federation government on Earth that delved into Federation society and dealt with an overarching plot. Like maybe a season where a Federation colony at the edge of Federation space gets into conflict with another race/government, and for a season you get a mix of stories from the colony, a Starfleet ship sent to the colony to support, and the Federation Council on Earth.

    Federation politics could be really interesting, but the shows always paid kind of disappointing lip service to it. One key example is in the DS9 episode “Rapture” when Bajor is being accepted into the Federation; the fact that a Starfleet admiral rather than a civilian Federation representative was overseeing the proceeding was lazy to me. Plus the entire ceremony was tiny and anticlimactic (and obviously barely got started since Sisko interrupted). Great potential for some real insight into the government but instead it’s just some rando admiral.





  • I know you said in game preferably, but I do think it’s worth giving a shout out to Nobbel on YouTube; his lore videos are really engaging and thorough, and you can often find videos on specific topics (like the story of Sylvanas) where he compiles history from several sources into a video. It’s worth a look if you’re really interested in the lore, because for better or worse the game itself sometimes only touches on events that have more depth in other sources.


  • Apollo is a great app; I think people like it so much because Christian has always been so engaged with the user community and has (mostly) been responsive to people. I don’t know if I’d go so far as to call it a work of art, and I don’t necessarily agree with all of the monetization limitations that were built in to it, but it is unquestionably one of the apps I’ve used the most over the years and it will be sorely missed.