/r/vexillology is one of the only things I miss from the other site.

Don’t forget:

If you set up a location near a native elephant population where if an elephant brought you like a banana or something and you gave that elephant a handjob… I one hundred percent believe that the elephants would figure out the arrangement and you’d have a successful elephant brothel running in short order.

Think about being a child with Professor X’s abilities. He can get anything he wants, make anyone believe anything he wants, he can know everyone’s deepest most shameful secrets. How could a person like that even form a moral framework? From his childhood, he’d have every reason to believe that he was immune to all discipline and that rules simply don’t apply to him if he decides they don’t, because for him those are true facts! By all rights Professor X ought to be a an exceptionally dangerous egoist and megalomaniac.

Oh, also, if there is any Marvel character who ought to be canonically omnisexual, it ought to be Charles. He doesn’t see bodies, he just sees minds. That undersea prawn monster that Namor was making out with ought to be just table stakes for Professor Xavier.

Depending on who you ask, it looks like chickens currently outnumber humans by about three or four to one.

They’re already here!

Hell, I’m a married dude with a child, and I wear a rainbow flag. Ain’t nobody that straight.

I have real love for TNG S1E16, “Too Short a Season.”

The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he’s taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.

The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife’s eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole “Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides” seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it’s revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.

“My grandpa worked at the gives-orphans-cancer factory until he died of cancer, my daddy worked at the gives-orphans-cancer factory until he died of cancer, I’ve been working at the gives-orphans-cancer factory for the last twenty five years and by God I’m proud of my recent cancer diagnosis, and I will fight with every fiber of my being to make sure that my son grows up to work at the gives-orphans-cancer factory!”

That’s the Iconian gateway system, and it’s pretty boss.

“Go kill that Joan Wick.”

Hell, I’d watch it.

Of course politics will always disappoint you. Politics is the means by which large groups of people aggregate their desires sufficiently to achieve collective goals. It’s a massive process of millions of compromises. The goal is explicitly not to make everyone happy. The goal is to have enough people of good will and with enough information avaliable involved that the series of compromises move enough of us in the right direction.

You take some raw meat, not even necessarily very good meat, and run it through a meat grinder. You’ve got hamburger, and you can make a pretty delicious hamburger.

You take a cooked hamburger and run it through a meat grinder, and you’re getting something else, and if you try to make a new hamburger, it’s going to taste weird.

There’s not enough raw pulp going into the meat grinder for the latter entries.

I thought there was plenty to like about both Solo and Rogue One, but they both relied too much on nostalgia and familiarity to be actually decent on their own. I’ve heard good things about the original cut of Solo and wish we could have seen that.

I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor!

No you’re not, you’re Kareem Abdul-Jabbar! You play basketball for the Los Angeles Lakers.

Scientist: It’s for the good of the planet! [releases plastic-eating bacteria into the wild]

[Later, in the smoldering ruins of a post-plastocalyptic future…]

Former Scientist Now Pottery Shard Crusher: Okay, maybe that was a mistake.

I’m going to be honest, buying a war hammer and smashing some gourds from the grocery store made my serotonin levels skyrocket!

And down to get its friction on!