And rightly so!

I feel like the answer’s in your question…

I’d have to go with Virus.

Wipes out enough people to give humanity a chance to at least try something new from the ashes of the old world, but doesn’t leave a lingering threat like Zombies or Aliens or something like that. The survivors (ostensibly those immune to the virus) have struggles, for sure, but at least can rebuild without worrying about a constant existential threat.

Favo kills a lot of time for me. As does 2048 and any nonogram game.

That’s the hit song from my doctors weekend garage band.

Non fungible tokens

Immediately reshoot Season 8 of GOT with what I thought was going to happen.

I mean, I guess that’s true in a peculirar sort of way in which nothing really exists outside of our perception of it.

What I mean by that is that whatever we see, hear, taste, etc… is merely neurons firing in our brain, processing a signal that it receives. So if we’re looking at a tree for example; that tree is just light/energy waves vibrating on a specific frequency. It’s only when it hits our optic nerve and travels to our brain that it’s translating into something that we call a “tree”.

So when the eyes are closed, the random interference pattern could indeed be interpreted as you say. Goog catch. Kind of makes you wonder.

Simple answer without typing a textbook is simply that the longer a language exists, the more individual “quirks” it picks up.

Words or idioms from a different language, regional differences in pronunciation that become common, changes in preferred spelling, etc…

Language is protean and ever evolving, which means that no (natural) language is ever going to be without it’s own unique weirdness.

What you’re seeing is the inner workings of the holographic universe we inhabit. Your brain interprets the signal as static.

/Obviously I’m not serious…

Well I wish someone had told me that before I went through with the surgery.

Three words…

Cock finger puppet.

IMO, consumers aren’t necessarily stupid as much as corporations have very expertly learned to weaponize FOMO through advertising; allowing companies like apple to inflate their profit margin from something reasonable to “whatever the consumer is willing to pay.”

Is that “capitalism”? Yes…technically. But to me, it goes against the spirit of capitalism, which at its heart sums up as “Farmer has a cow that produces milk. Farmer sells the chicken farmer down the road his extra milk and charges enough to be reasonable but doesn’t get greedy because he needs eggs.”

Corporations don’t need our eggs. They don’t believe they need anything from us and so don’t care about being reasonable about profit.

Its “capitalism”, but in my opinion, a perverse, stilted form that should have been kicked to the curb the moment Reaganomics started making it popular.

6.5 Drachma, can be converted to 6 sesterces or six ducats.

Obviously I’m kidding.

The truest truism that ever did truism is that “power inevitably corrupts”

“work as much as you can, use as much as you need.”

You don’t need technological advancement to be sustainable if your population remains relatively small and static. Hunter Gatherers actually follow pretty much exactly the formula you described above and ended up with far more leisure time than their agriculturally “advanced” counterparts.

It’s never existed. Not in it’s pure form anyway. But neither has capitalism, or socialism either for that matter.

A theoretical system is always in some way perverted and coopted by the people implementing it. Humans are the weak part of the equation because humans are greedy and focused only on themselves and their own small group of friends/family. So scaling any political system up from theoretical to an actual national policy always ends up with a perverted form where one group ends up over another group despite the original theoretical intent of the system in question. That goes for Communism, Capitalism, Socialism, as well as religion too.

Humans suck and can’t have nice things without fucking them up.

I don’t know it it’s underused, but my go to for years gas been League Spartan from The League of Moveable Type

My opinion as a user:

I don’t personally care. I don’t necessarily see GIMP as being a slur at all, since to me it’s more related to a completely consentual sex thing than to something a person has no control over. It’s not called “R-word” or anything like that. If a person wants to be a gimp, more power to 'em. Let their freak flag fly, I say. And I’m not aware of the other use being at all common anymore, having been replaced with other more modern slurs.

However, in the matter of optics, sure, it still comes off as a little odd, possibly immature, etc… But the argument that “No body wants a name change” actually does hold some merit because GIMP is completely open source. There is nothing stopping people from forking it and releasing it with a new name, and even though this has been done (Glimpse) nobody jumps ship to this new, more maturely named alternative that is exactly the same. They stay on GIMP. Why…because no one really cares. We’re all mature enough to say “haha…stupid name” and then move on with our lives without getting into a huff about every little thing.

I loved the ending because it fit Sam’s character perfectly. He’s essentially told (by god or whoever) that the only one who controls when Sam goes home is Sam himself. That when Sam truly, deep inside feels that his job is done, he’ll go home. The fact that he never returned home means that He never truly felt his job was done. And Sam wouldn’t. The essence of the heroic journey…always one more person to help.

It made the ending bitter-sweet, sad, heroic and tragic all at once. Just like Sam’s character.

I thought it was brilliantly done for something designed to also be a season finale “just in case”