Seriously. Jeri Ryan made that a masterclass. She was brought on as eye candy, but she decided, “fuck that, I’m going to knock this out of the park.”

because it is the typical product of sexism where the woman is supposed to wear hills and show her boobs, even if she’s a braindead robot.

Maybe the Borg just realized sexy drones serve as great tools to distract (overwhelmingly male) enemy soldiers in combat! The Borg weaponized the male gaze! :D

I don’t know, there is a certain nostalgia to it. Yes, it was a pain in the ass to use, but there was also the aspect where limitations breed creativity. If your time online is competing with one of the home’s primary means of communication, the landline phone, the internet becomes a limited resource. It wasn’t as easy to just rot on the internet as it is today. You had to be more deliberate with your time, even if that was just being more deliberate in the types of fun sites you were going to visit.

How finely do you cut your steak at a restaurant? I’m imagining you cutting very fine slices and savoring them one by one.

Every now and then I think paragliding would be an interesting thing to try but I have to tell myself another expensive hobby is hard to justify when I’d like to actually own a place to live some day.

What do you mean? You will simply live in your paraglider! You’ll be like one of those birds that stays aloft for months at a time. There you will be, a child of the sky. No need for land. No need for rent. Just a literal leaf on the wind.

You can’t take the sky from me…

That’s why you steal someone else’s kidneys!

Sauron…somehow returned!

We are now in the reign of King Charles III, or Chuck as I prefer to call him. We are now in the Age of Chuck, or the Chuckian Age.

God. Now I’m imagining some epidural addict rigging up a large series of hoists and pulleys to allow them to self-administer an epidural. Ain’t no ingenuity like addict ingenuity.

Eh. It can be multiple things. The Second Iraq War was about oil, but it was also about W. having a personal grudge against Saddam. Saddam at one point tried to have Bush Sr. assassinated, and Jr. had it out for him as a consequence. Plus it was for political purposes, both to drum up the base at home and to assist Israel abroad. It was about all of those things. Wars are never caused by just a single reason. Oil was absolutely a powerful factor, perhaps the most powerful. But it’s overly reductive to simply say it was about oil. Launching a war requires getting a lot of stakeholders on board. And not everyone will have the same motivations. The Zionist faction wanted Iraq toppled to help Israel, but they have no particular concern for oil. The oil industry folks wanted Iraqi oil, but money-hungry CEOs don’t really care about throwing red meat to the Fox News crowd. Launching a big war requires a coalition, even if just the Republican coalition. Wars always thus have many motivations behind them.