The Reapportionment Act of 1929 was a bullet to the head for representational democracy in the United States. It just took nearly a hundred years for us to realize how fatal the wound was.

You’re going to get into the blurry distinction between a ripoff and a tribute or an homage.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier has a lot of Three Days of the Condor, but is that a ripoff, or an homage?

Ditto Star Wars and Hidden Fortress.

Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More were uncredited remakes of Yojimbo and Sanjuro, and as I recall Kurosawa was pretty annoyed, so that probably counts as a ripoff.

Oreo cookies came out four years after Hydrox cookies, and I’d say they surpassed the original.

See also: Galaxy Quest, which is like the third or fourth best Star Trek movie.

Also, respect is not created through fear. You can’t scare people into respecting you by increasing the penalties for noncompliance. If anything you run the risk of further destroying what little respect might still remain.

How can you have any Cuba if you don’t eat yer Iran?!

I’ve found myself in a similar situation to OP, where a given app presumes that everyone is using gestures and conflicts with the buttons, and I don’t appreciate it.

I don’t care about that small amount of extra screen space, and I don’t like gestures, and I should have the ability to choose which solution I prefer.

Find a small used book store. Odds are very good that they discard quite a few books in any given week, not necessarily because they are garbage, but because they just haven’t sold, or they have too many copies, or they might have comparatively minor condition issues that preclude them from selling in the store. They may give them to you, or sell them to you at a steep discount.

cannot be too queer

Streaming services, and seemingly all computing technology lately…

Not for nothing, but couldn’t this be used to have AI play a game for 80,000 simulated hours and flag all the bugs? Human playtesters are important and have value, but no human should have to do the work of criss-crossing an enormous game map thousands of times just to see if the character model gets stuck on a random vertex sticking out somewhere, and yet it seems to be a distressingly common occurrence in more than a few games I’ve played.

That’s certainly one of the points that I needed to learn about. There are certainly genetic diseases like congenital heart defects or hemophilia. But then there are genetic differences that might seem maladaptive under certain given circumstances, but wouldn’t be any issue at all or might even confer advantages under different societal contexts. And then there are the straightforward differences that eugenics-obsessed regimes like to define as undesirable, like having the wrong hair, eye, or skin color, and then use that as an excuse to persecute whomever they want to. The whole thing is irreparably fucked.

When I was a freshman in college I thought “Surely nobody would want to inherit genetic diseases, and why wouldn’t we want to to try and make people just naturally live longer, healthier lives?” but then I did even the tiniest bit of research on how eugenics actually worked and I completely abandoned that line of thinking.

I like to see what’s going on in the handheld emulator world!

Like a madman who throws firebrands, arrows, and death, Is the man who deceives his neighbor, And says, “I was only joking!”

Proverbs 26:18-19

It is called MAD, after all.

I always figured that “digested over a thousand years” was a bit of a misnomer. I’m inclined to think that the almighty sarlacc incorporates its victims into its own biology, and uses them up over a thousand years. Like, you spend a thousand years as an unwilling gall bladder in the depths of the sarlacc, until the process very slowly eventually kills you.