Late to the party, but Mass Effect, Dead Space, and the Arkham trilogy are all extremely solid choices haha.

For sure, there’s no community as large and passionate as religion. BUT there are other communities that are centered around goodwill to others, living a better life…some of them even have chanting, if you feel like you’d be missing that part lol.

Those communities usually involve doing work though (volunteering, performing, teaching, etc.) while you can just show up to church and kinda pay attention, and you’re in.

I feel like, at their core, most religions boil down to two things, for most people:

• Giving you purpose/security/scapegoats (“I’m living a good life so I can go to heaven,” “the Lord has a plan/is watching over me,” “Satan/sinners/demons tempted me”)
• Dissuading you from inquisitive, critical thought (out of self-preservation, I’d imagine)

Personally, I prefer to define my own purpose, live a more “dynamic” lifestyle than is traditional, think critically, and question authority. Doesn’t make me “better” than religious folks, in fact they’re probably overall happier than I am. But I can’t imagine living that way, regardless of whether or not I believe in a magical sky Santa who can’t decide whether he loves us unconditionally or whether or not he’s actually omnipotent.

In the Star Trek universe, if you’re intent on “glassing” a planet, it’s in one of two scenarios:

1. The planet inhabitants can’t fight off a single star ship, in which case you could just park in orbit and bombard to your heart’s content, with the option of either precision strikes or complete annihilation, without expending anything other than the energy it takes to power the ship.
2. The inhabitants can fight off a star ship, in which case they likely have the technology to detect such a weapon at sufficient range to intercept/destroy/redirect it, or planetary shielding powerful enough to stop it.

In the latter case, you could put the effort into adding a cloaking device to the weapon to get around that. But in that case, why not just use a regular cloaked ship to delivery some other payload? There are tons of examples in TNG of narrowly-averted planet-killing disasters only prevented by careful engineering. Probably way easier to actually cause the disaster. Examples include igniting the atmosphere, causing geographic instability/earthquakes/volcanic reactions, exploding the system’s star, crashing a natural moon into the planet, unleashing a biological weapon…

Pretty sure it’s a rule set by individual subs. Some even allow GIFs in the comments!

Sorry, Lemmy is being weird and won’t let me post a top-level comment, but had to get this meme out lol

Here’s just about every gag food I can think of from the show that could be translated to an edible dish:

• Popplers
• Slurm
• Manwhich
• Glagnar’s Human Rinds
• Bachelor Chow
• Bristol Myers Squibb steak (just serve steak tips in some novelty-size pill capsules?)
• FemaSlim (some liquid/gel served in disposable food-grade syringes)
• Soylent drinks
• Coffee served in whale mugs
• Deep-fried icecream sandwich wrapped in frosting and lightly baconed
• Jerked “lower horn”
• “Jamaican” platter: jerked meat of every variety
• “LaBarbara’s cooking”: comically spicy Caribbean food
• Sterno Nicoise (flambeed ice cream cake with blue frosting, probably a lot of work)
• “Froot” cup with cheese filling
• Molten Boron/Torgo’s Executive Powder (I’m thinking serve some spaghetti with red sauce in tin coffee cans with the “Molton Boron” label and the chemical hazard symbol, and Parmesan cheese labeled executive powder)

All I know is, my gut says “maybe”