Gwardinen

I'm having much more difficulty finding good lists of top the Next Generation episodes online than I had expected. There's a distinct lack of consensus about anything more than the top 5. Even once you get to top 10 the opinions wildly diverge, so I'm finding it hard to expand SecretAsianMan's list for my own viewing purposes without just watching half of every season on the off chance it might be good.

I do not think I would do this:

Apologies for breaking internetiquette by double posting, but I just watched Yesterday's Enterprise and boy howdy, it makes me feel all kinds of sentimental. It definitely feels like there was some metanarrative going on there - wasn't the story that the fanbase was kind of angry about how Tasha Yar died? This new, more meaningful death seems like it might have been an attempt by the showrunners to atone for it.

By the by, I'm currently proxying into US Netflix to watch the show (for some reason UK Netflix has Star Trek films but not series), but wasn't there some big rerelease with higher quality sometime recently? Does anyone know whether it's actually significantly better? There's a lot of blurring and that strange line scan effect in this version.

I had a general idea of Tasha Yar, and I think I've even seen Skin of Evil, or at least some of it. I definitely didn't see the episode in which she and Data get jiggy, though, and this coming up in the courtroom was kind of a surprise.

So I started watching TNG based on SecretAsianMan's recommendations (although the TNG ones are a bit more scattered through the thread than the others, so I'm not 100% certain I'm doing it right). I've seen bits and pieces of the series before, so hopefully jumping from good episode to good episode won't leave me too confused. First up was the Measure of a Man. I don't think I'd ever seen the episode before, though obviously echoes of "is Data sentient?" come up a number of times during the show. Patrick Stewart pontificating about rights and consciousness and the future is always a fun time, so this is a good start.

I haven't seen many things in life that manage to look as great and terrible at the same time as that.

Ah yes, the most inaccurately named boss.

You can see it here: https://youtu.be/138kdoUD3Ss?t=39s It's really not very good, though.

Yeah, it's all very Brotherhood of Mutants. But the archetype fits well, and can make for an interesting storyline, so I'm willing to go along with it. Jensen's voice still feels generic and silly to me, though, which isn't helped by the generic and silly writing of the trailer (but, you know, it's a trailer).

That's contrary to the definition in the article linked by Deadpan, for the record. That does say that one can sexualise oneself, but one cannot objectify oneself, which honestly makes more sense to me. For example, if a person were having pictures taken of them, and decided at one point to strike a pose which is sexually implicit, the resulting image is sexualised, no?

Yeah, I didn't find him interesting at all. Maybe this will provoke me to finally finish Human Revolution, though.

Actually, in a discussion with the aforementioned time capsule friend, I had a lot of problems expressing this as a problem with porn. I was trying to explain how the vast majority of porn is constructed from the point of view of what men want, and I was having difficulty even explaining "male gaze" and how the fundamental assumptions born from the fact that most porn directors and producers are men can create issues with it. I was saying this as a man who watches and often (though actually not as often as you'd think/want for a pasttime focused on pleasure) enjoys porn and still having difficulty getting past the automatic "What? Porn's not sexist. I love porn." barrier she was putting up. Edit: Actually this has contributed to me thinking I need to get more educated about feminist discourse, rather than just the ideals. If I'm going to end up being a "speaker for feminism" in certain groups I should probably figure out how to do so properly. Being around all of you more knowledgeable Thumb feminists may have made me a little complacent about my own role in the wider world.

I upgraded to this and I'm enjoying it quite a lot so far, but that may be because I never finished Dark Souls 2 in the first place. At the time I just don't think I was into more Souls right then and there, but now I seem to be ready to play this kind of game again. Possibly because of the intense envy I've felt towards those with a PS4 who can play Bloodborne. What I will note is it seems like the difficulty of some areas has been changed dramatically by altering enemy spawns. There are now big, tough enemies in pretty early areas where there didn't used to be, but on the other hand some areas with big tough enemies have been switched to many small ones. It's a little bit of a headfuck if you played any of DS2 Vanilla. If anyone has the new version and wants to try phantoming together a bit, feel free to hit me up on Steam. It'd be helpful if you were either in the Idle Thumbs Steam group or sent me a PM here, so that I know you're not just a spammer.

Absolutely this. I actually have a friend who operates as a strange kind of time capsule of this. We were at college (in UK terms, so 16-18) together and she was always part of jokes about her really thinking "more like a guy" - she liked T&A, casual sex and video games, as a few examples. At the time I had a huge crush on her, inflamed no doubt by some of this stuff (though she also has a lot of genuine qualities that I still admire now), but it's struck me in the years since how much of that persona she still carries. Her absolute blindness to feminist issues and her acceptance and even espousal of gender stereotypes for both men and women now kind of rub me the wrong way, and I find it difficult to talk about meaningful topics with her. It's uncomfortable because as a man I don't want to lecture a woman about feminism, but at the same time keeping schtum when such things come up doesn't feel right either.

If I could like/upvote/whatever on this forum I would for this.

Sorry to hear about that, Mangela. I had a pretty similar situation with my dad while I was also way too far away to do anything about it. I hope everything goes well - for the record it seems like heart surgery is something western medicine has gotten really good at. I just put down the administration & application fee on a new flat, which is pleasing because before now I had no idea where I was going to live. On the other hand, I now get to worry about whether they'll say my finances aren't good enough and refuse me, and even if I get it I have to worry about the cost of moving and then the cost of actually living there. I really don't know how I'm going to pay for it now, let alone in September when I (hopefully) become a student again.

Oh my god teg that video is such a bummer. I feel like I need to both start cooking more complex dishes and also just smile all the time to balance out the fact that that exists.

There's kind of a curious dichotomy in the two biggest DC character worlds - Batman and Superman. With pretty few exceptions, characters related to Batman and Gotham are defined by their trauma. The bad things that have happened in their life are almost always the cause of who they become in the story. The most obvious example is the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents turning him into Batman, but this true of Robin as well and almost all the villains - Two-Face was created by his physical trauma, in some origin stories so is the Joker, Harley Quinn loses her mind, Mr. Freeze loses his wife, etc. In contrast, characters related to Superman and Metropolis are often defined by the good things in their life. Again you look to the big man himself - Clark Kent is a superhero because he has powers, yes, but even more importantly because he was raised to be. His parents are good to the point of unbelievability sometimes, and they teach him to be selfless and kind in turn. Even Lex Luthor pretty much seems to be a villain because of a good quality - his intelligence. He is just too smart and the arrogance is what leads him to the dark side (among other things, but I think you can see where I'm going with this). It's not as ironclad a rule as with Batman, but sometimes that only serves to highlight how profound the tendency is in Batman stories. Anyway, just idle musings.

Preposterously beautiful.

For some reason I started laughing really hard during that. And then stopped as I realised the machines had probably noticed, and that I would suffer in the future.

I have pretty much the same feeling. The thing that pushes me to actually play is that I have a couple of friends who do and we end up playing multiplayer quests. That's definitely great fun and I recommend it wholeheartedly, but once I've played with them I don't feel a particular drive to do the solo quests.

Yeah, what's with the unified posture? Did they develop a hive mind while in the shelter? Are there a dozen cats back there all sitting like that?

I have two cats to share - one from my family home, and one from when I was living with friends recently. First up is Tweebee, whose name is basically a corruption/merging of a few other things we tried to call him as he grew up. I first encountered him when I was around seven years old, and came home to find a tiny black and white kitten on the sofa (sadly no pictures of him at that size). I loved him from the first time I saw him. He was a companion for me through my teenage years, even during harder times when I was shutting everyone else out. More than one person noted that I showed him more affection than any human. Cats love boxes. Which segues us nicely into the second cat, Enigma (technically in a drawer, not a box). He wasn't originally mine, but I moved into a house of a friend who was eventually planning to have his girlfriend, another friend of mine, move in. They decided that her cat should move in first, partly because he was already having trouble with her dog and partly just for convenience I think. One way or another, over the next few months my other housemate and I pretty much adopted him as our own, and were planning to take him with us (with the original owner's blessing) when we moved out. Sadly Enigma had some kind of accident or medical condition, and showed up back at the house one day dragging his hind legs. We cared for him as best we could, and he made some progress, but his prognosis was still somewhat uncertain when an even greater tragedy befell him. Despite his seeming to get better over the course of a few weeks, I suddenly found him dead beneath my housemate's bed. By some strange quirk of fate, my mother rang me the very next day to tell me Tweebee had also died. This at least was more expected, as he had lived a good long life by that point. Still, the first animal I'd ever really loved had died just a day after the only other animal I loved died. That said, despite how rough the manner and timing of these losses were, I don't want this to come off as a total bummer post - the main thing I want to communicate to everyone is how funny and joyful these cats were, and the immensely positive impact they had on my life. They really did make some very difficult times much more bearable, and I'm so glad to have had them for as long as I did. As a bonus, you can engage in the game of find the cat I often had to play with Tweebee in this picture: