Thank you! I’ll give that a try.

I’m using Cloudfare for DNS. I’ll check out what they have available.

I agree Reddit is toxic. I’d argue reddit actually stopped being Reddit around 2016. But it’s posts like this that clog it all up and are partially why it is the way it is today.

I gotta agree with this. The toxicity in any reddit thread increases dramatically when the poster pre-emptively complains about all the toxicity they expect to receive. Whereas when you just ask straight without going into a whole speech about comment quality, you get much better replies. Particularly because it’s hijacking your own thread; changing it from whatever question you wanted to ask into an analysis of the comments.

Exactly. Can you imagine expecting to go through life and never have a physical ailment? Why would you expect that you'd never have a mental one? Normalizing mental health issues and their treatment is vital for a healthy society.

Hi there!
/waves nerdily

25,000 planets, but only 10 faces and 5 voices shared among all the inhabitants of the universe.

But what do you do when his constituents actually vote for the plant? I mean I agree as much as anyone that he is unfit for office and should not be there, but if the numbskulls in Kentucky keep saying this is the most qualified person they can come up with to represent them, who are we to deny them their political voice? We can correctly say that they must be dumber than a vegetable to elect him, but don’t they have that right?

I’ve seen that, although I think it was a fan video and not any official creation. I liked it very much. It would have made a better introduction for sure.

Indeed. While I would have preferred an orchestral piece, the intro theme for Seasons 1 and 2 was jarring, but not bad. When they updated it for S3 and 4 it was absolute garbage.

The one-shot intro for the mirror universe episode was absolutely fantastic though. They should have stuck with that one, or Archer’s Theme, which has an appropriately Star Trek optimism to it, while still being a bit “pop”-y.

Ignoring anything you might say about the game itself (i.e. it’s not a good game at all), the biggest reason people are shitting on it is because Overwatch 1 was a $60 game that they abruptly canceled and re-released as Overwatch 2 “free to play” without any changes to the it, locked the characters behind a paywall, and leaned as heavily into micro-transactions as any game ever. It was a massive bait-and-switch. They also promised that a complex story mode pve experience was the reason they had to make it OW2 rather than an expansion or whatever to OW1, but they ended up canceling that… so literally all they did was take a game they had charged people $60 to play and made it an f2p micro-transaction game. They royally fucked over the loyal player base, and cheapened the game by making it free. I’ve never seen a more blatant “fuck you” from a developer to its fans ever.

Very true. Whatever we can say about Discovery, they did give this one to us.

It helped that Discovery was such garbage, and the Pike/Enterprise plotline showed us what could have been instead of what was. SNW was the show we wanted when all we had was Discovery. And now it’s great to see that they seem to have recovered that lost magic.

Season 1 Ortegas was hard for me to like. She was far too cocky for a Starfleet officer, talking back and too informally to superior officers. She felt like she didn’t belong in Star Trek, or at least in that kind of Starfleet command structure.

Season 2 Ortegas has backed off from that a bit and is now far more enjoyable. She’s got spunk, but she doesn’t come off as insubordinate or rude.

Likewise, the melodrama is what killed it for me.

There are a lot of bad trek episodes scattered across every series. Bad episodes isn’t the issue with Discovery. The issue is that, throughout all of trek, the crew has come together and stuck with each other through thick and thin. If there ever is inter-crew strife, it’s solved in generally one or two episodes (except for major plot/story themes like the Maquis, or Seven being a Borg).

Discovery, on the other hand, is a show where the crew was constantly backstabbing, betraying, lying, and being all around bad towards each other. There was no finding solace among the crew in a world filled with strife – the world was strife, and the crew was also strife. And whenever the inter-crew issues seemed like they could finally be resolved, some new stupid issue was shoehorned in. It was unbearable to watch because of the forced melodrama.

It’s the piece of corn in the turd.

I enjoyed seeing so many beloved characters again, and it had several very good moments, but seasons 1 and 2 did Jean-Luc dirty and S3 didn’t make up for that.

The demo was really fun!

Same here!!

Dude, you are way too focused on who did the thing (or rather, how much money they had) than what actually happened. You’re missing the forest for the trees.

That’s hilarious, and about on par with most of the writing on so-called journalism sites these days. Glorious!

My feelings exactly.

I played for 60 hours or so, and I enjoyed it a lot. But they put a fatal design flaw into the game by forcing to you be V, and by putting a ticking time bomb in your head. That means that if you play logically, you’ll follow the storyline quests in order to fix the big issue rather than spending the time slowly exploring the world they made. It also means that once you beat it, there’s no fun in going back and doing it again, because you have to follow the same railroad tracks and go through the same story beats again. It cheapens the experience greatly.

Like you, the world holds no interest for me now that I have found a satisfying ending for V. The least they could have done was put in a “story mode,” and a separate “open mode” where you can build any character (who isn’t V) and live any life you choose, free from the main quest railroad.

I’ll never understand why game designers would make an open world, and then slap on a "YOU HAVE TO SAVE YOUR LIFE HURRY UP!!! railroad quest as the main story. It’s a lazy and utterly stupid design choice.