In my headcanon, the Borg eventually reach a truce with the Federation, and over time eventually become full-fledged members of the Federation. That’s CRAZY right?..Is it? I mean, the Federation warred with the Klingons and Romulans, and look how those relationships changed over time.

How about the Borg’s willingness to join? What we’ve been seeing over the years is that the Borg adapt. Their willingness to adapt had been established from their very introduction as a faceless hive-mind. Over the course of the franchise, they’ve experimented with individuality with Locutus, Borg Queens, becoming so infatuated with individuality that they even dispatched 7 of 9 to live amongst Starfleet to investigate directly, and then instead of efficiently assimilating her to gain her knowledge, they choose not to re-assimilate her so that they could ask her about that experience and avoid corrupting that knowledge via assimilation. Why is the Borg so interested? The Borg found that Federation individuality had repeatedly repelled Borg invasions when Borg calculations indicated that they should have won, and even after re-adjusting for past failures, the Borg still found themselves stymied in encounters with Starfleet. The Borg were even saved from total extinction by the ingenuity of individual creativity and a temporary alliance with a Starfleet ship. That is a huge motivator for the Borg to re-assess their approach and look for a new way to adapt to prevent their vulnerability to a similar event in the future.

Would the Federation be open to it? Like I said, they’ve allied with past enemies before. Ex-Borg members of Voyager served with distinction. Borg tech has proven invaluable to Voyager’s return. Most importantly, Borg Drones are not undead zombies! Assimilation is a reversible condition, and that means that instead of hating the Borg for killing their loved ones, the Borg ARE their loved ones. Moreover, Borg assimilation is a weapon of mass diplomacy. Chakotay found that the hive-mind allowed warring alpha-quadrant races to all live in harmony in the Delta Quadrant, and losing access to the hive-mind allowed their old destructive conflicts to creep back in, and ultimately they reinstated a local hive-mind to regain peace. Chakotay joined that hivemind and came away from it with unparalleled understanding and empathy for the other members of the collective, and an overall positive experience, and he disconnected with immediate recovery and no ill-effects!

That is a game-changer, it allows the Starfleet to show up on the door of a new alien race, and those aliens would naturally be cautious, suspicious, mistrustful of the Federation’s intentions. First contact is extremely dangerous. An alliance with the Borg could allow Starfleet to establish first contact by saying, “We come in peace”, assimilating the alien envoy, and then the alien representatives would know that Starfleet truly and honestly means to “come in peace”, casting aside all suspicion of ulterior motives. Starfleet then disconnects the alien envoy from the local hivemind, and then those envoys can go home and sing Starfleet’s virtues to the rest of their race.

I tried it once or twice and it worked well. It’s too stupid now to be worth the attempt. The amount of time spent fixing its mistakes has resulted in net zero time savings.

Thanks, this was really interesting!

I’d say the first option is to simply talk to the mother and offer your help and paint it as a means of helping her out. Keeping the focus on the benefit to the mother and the benefit to the kid as secondary to keep her focused on how it would help her. Sympathize with her situation, she’ll be more amenable and that’s definitely the easiest way to get a constructive dialog going.

If that fails, involving CPS is still available as a fallback option but.0

+1 Casiopea is incredible.

That’s pretty dubious, otherwise why would I get all these replies from 3-7 years ago? Not new replies on dead threads, but the replies were posted that long ago, and I’m being notified about them now as “new” comments. Seems a lot like deleted posts coming back.

Hm, can you elaborate further? I don’t think you’ve supported in your point in that you say that AI art can achieve the same subjective outcome of invoking emotion and getting a person to think, but you concluded that it’s not the same.

I feel like there’s a finer point you want to make but haven’t gotten across yet.

Yeah I have that too! 20 minutes to dawn leans much harder into the bullethell genre and less about the skinnerbox progression aspect of vampire survivors. It’s much more challenging with fewer ways to make successive runs easier. I should get back into that one since a lot of updates were probably made. Back then it felt like the starting pistol and character as stronger than all the unlocked weapons and characters.

I have been absolutely hooked on this game. I loved Vampire survivors and Holocure and this was a great blend of those games with a diablo aesthetic.

The part that makes it so good is the sharply tuned enemy design to feed you levels steadily with interesting enemy movement patterns to dodge. Well done! Has such a good balance of challenge and progression.

Yeah, the simplistic “Just be yourself” advice doesn’t take into account the “If you don’t love me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” type of attitude.

It also bypasses the fact that “yourself” is such a fuzzy concept anyway. So because I’m bad at public speaking, that shouldn’t mean I should “be myself” and avoid it. I should merely be aware of my current limitations. That was an accurate way to describe myself in the past, but instead of accepting it, I worked on it, forced myself into a job that requires it, and now I’m pretty good at it.

I think almost everyone can look back 10 years ago and think of some way they ended up changing. So with that being the case, who knows who we’ll be 10 years into the future? No need to anchor too hard on who we think we are right now, it’s valuable to also give consideration to the kind of person we want to be in the future and take action towards becoming that person.

Yes, just a lot less because theres no app for it, so I only check it from a desktop PC instead of constantly the way I have in the past.

Maybe it’s just me but the volume of interesting posts has fallen off a cliff after July 1st. The front page has much less activity and noticably more of it is reposts (which were there before, just a much higher ratio now).

The niche subreddits were always the key draw though, those still only exist on Reddit and nowhere else on the internet.

I heard somewhere that people on average will make 3 career changes during their lifetime. Which is not a hard fast rule of course but the point is to expect that your goals may change over time as you yourself will also likely change over time.

So in the meantime, I suggest pursuing stable work that gives you a comfortable standard living and maximizing the use of your free time to pursue enrichment in your life and not worrying too hard about trying to get satisfaction from your work.

I cook most of my meals too. I just barcode scan the ingredients. For vegetables it’s the same as grocery selfcheckout, just type a few letters in the search bar and tap the corresponding listing, like “USDA broccoli” or “USDA red potato”.

They have a “create a recipe function” where you just scan in all the ingredients. So like I put in my turkey chili components, it resulted in 3994g of chili, so basically 10 servings of 400g each. Because I put in all the ingredients, it knows the total nutrients, and the amount in each serving. So when it comes to actually eating, I just go into “My Recipes”, tap “Turkey chili” 1 serving. I measure 400g into my bowl and I know I’ve consumed 26g carbs 22g fat and 66g protein, totaling 538 calories.

This is also applicable the first time I cook it, because on subsequent cooking times it’s already been entered. Also, it keeps a recent history so you don’t need to search frequently for eaten foods, it’s already available to tap.

It definitely takes a fair bit of time in the first weeks, you’re not wrong about that. But it also gets a lot faster and easier after those first few weeks.

Nah, they pay for Gympass membership (a service that gives you access to various gym franchises around the country) and the Gympass membership gives me access to a bunch of apps. (The other nice one I get is premium Strava, since I’d been using the free version of that for a long while)

MyFitnessPal. I had heard of it, but counting calories is a pain in the ass, no way I’d waste my time with that shit.

Workplace gives it to me for free, so why not take a look? Damn it’s so fast and easy and it has made such a huge difference in dirt success. Just wave the camera over barcodes and the rest of the data falls in place. When you actually get enough protein instead of thinking you’ve got enough protein, then you don’t have to feel hungry in a calorie deficit.

It seemed like a frivolous app, but it turned out to be the biggest driving factor for success. The key thing is, I didn’t realize how much it appealed to the nerd gamer instincts. The same way out optimize a build/load out for increased performance like in Diablo, that’s the same way rewarding feeling you get when you figure out new life hacks to optimize your macros even more to pack even more food into your calorie budget

Sure, it’s not my recipe, I just followed this guy’s recipe: https://youtu.be/l7RAaLZZDZI

I also like Jalalsalamfit on YouTube, he has good stuff too.

Ethan Cheblowski has a great channel, it’s not a health focused cooking channel but he’s an ex-fat person too so he tries to stay cognizant of macros in all the recipes he showcases. Good for learning the systems for cooking healthier. He has a video talking about the systems he applies : https://youtu.be/c1EpTfvPc84

Yeah it takes some more selective choices, but you can make some really good delicious and healthy meals. Certain kinds of foods like deep-fried butter sticks are out of the question but I’ve had a huge brick of cheesecake for breakfast everyday this week because I made it healthy. (21gCarb 3g Fat 41g protein)

Took a while but I changed my usual cooking recipes to macro-friendly versions and my family hasn’t minded at all, still tastes great. Trying to eat healthy outside the house is hard as hell though. Restaurants or premade foods rarely offer anything that fits my needs.

Like conceptually the hard part about eating burgers is the high carb buns and the excess fat in the meat. Can just use 93/7 ground beef, there’s only 170cal in a quarter pound, so why not double it? You just need to be much more careful when cooking it because the lower fat gives you less margin for error. Dress it with a spicy jalapeno cream sauce using Greek yogurt instead to bring back some of the moisture but without adding fat. Use something lower carb than potato roll or buttered brioche and you end up with a juicy burger with a lot more meat than what you’ll get from a restaurant and tastes better if you make it for yourself than some overworked line cook who doesn’t have to eat what he’s firing out the kitchen as fast as possible.

Yeah, it’s very relaxing stress release. I spend a lot of my day looking forward to my lifting between 10-11pm and thinking about what accessory work I’ll be able to get to do after my main lifts.

You can listen to podcasts, nobody is coming to ask you to do something and demand your attention, there’s no other chores to do during that hour.

It’s addicting too, feeds the same itch from video games leveling up, grinding in Diablo for that piece of loot that raises one stat by like 2% you get hungry for those little boosts and they stack up over time and you keep trying to optimize your loadout so you can squeeze out a little more performance from the build, same thing with lifting and trying to keep pushing to the next increase.

There should be no illusions about resisting an attack. That’s not really possible in the modern transparent battlefield. All fixed defenses are struck in the opening salvo, AA defenses, radar networks, airfields. China would take immediate air superiority. Amphibious assaults are ridiculously dangerous, nigh impossible, but every shot fired in defense receives immediate retaliation from the air. This is different from the war in Ukraine where there’s contested airspace instead of one-sided superiority. Mines will slow the landing but without the ability to resist it, its just a matter of time. Deterrence needs to be economic and political, a military deterrent is not going to work on the doorstep of a world power with anything short of nuclear armament.

Some women’s libido goes down from the stress of seeing a lot of chores needing to be taken care of. Doing those chores reduced the stress. Going further and doing what is normally their share of housework can be an act of affection.

It’s also noted in a study of women asked to rate a number of pictures of men on various factors including attractiveness and reliability. When they are also asked for dating preferences, as the age range went up, the prioritization on reliability ratings also went up. Doing chores is reliable AF.

More to the point, she’s already told you she likes it. Just believe her.