I want to see Mount Everest. Not climb it - I don’t want to be one of those guys who basically gets dragged up the mountain by sherpas - I just want to see it for real.

Alright, just a sun.

THE SUN.

Supposedly this is also the reason that most 2D platforming videogames scroll left-to-right.

Yeah, I can just about fill in the handwaving myself, but it still felt a bit too vague for me. I guess I’ve never really been sold on telepathy as part of the Star Trek universe, so the more they use it (and the more powerful and plot crucial it gets), the less I like it. Still, I can’t deny that it is part of the universe, so maybe I should get over it.

Only thing that didn’t work for me was the Caleb/Tarima telepathy working like a psychic airtag for Anisha. Needed more explanation than ‘They have a connection,’ IMO.

Graffiti’d on the wall in the Atrium are the words “Break. Burn. Build.” Other visible graffiti include “Liberation”, “Take Change” and “Never Again”.

There’s also ‘Veni, vidi, vici, Venari’, which is a modification of Julius Caesar’s famous phrase meaning ‘I came, I saw, I conquered’. With ‘venari’ added it could be translated as ‘I came, I saw, I conquered, I hunted’. So, as well as being the name of the Venari Ral, it’s also accurate for Nus Braka, who has indeed been hunting down Ake, and at this point in the episode seems to have effectively conquered the Federation.

It’s also thematically relevant to the title, as it was Caesar who crossed the Rubicon (on his way back from a different conquest), and made himself dictator of Rome, similar to what Nus Braka was trying to do in this episode.

And Caesar also claimed to be acting in the name of the people, like Nus and many other dictators since!

Wine works well for me on Manjaro. Once it’s installed and run for the first time, it’s been seamless. I think every now and then you might find a game that requires an additional patch to run.

Free energy.

Never again will I tie my shoes without suspecting I’m doing it wrong, somehow.

This bad boy.

Things really went downhill when violins stopped wearing little shoes.

The market looked very familiar, I did think it might be the same place Worf carried out his Wednesday beheading!

Edited to add: I think I’m going to enjoy rewatching the scenes from the Ukeck market. I only caught a Ferengi or two at first glance, but there has to be other familiar aliens, right?

There’s a Lurian (Morn’s species)!

I think when they just said ‘Yes, LLMs can steal your work’. That showed they don’t even care about property rights, which is the one thing the right have always pretended was their raison d’être.

I thought it was interesting that the Doctor didn’t want to mentor Sam after he was so enthusiastic about taking the same role for Seven of Nine. This episode gave a solid explanation!

Even if you use open source software exclusively, the hardware you run it on was still manufactured under capitalism, the hardware it was built on was manufactured under capitalism, the electricity you’re powering your hardware with was provided by capitalism, and the very economic system that allowed the devs to build and maintain the software… was capitalism.

None of this is in capitalism’s favour. That there’s no getting away from it is, for Marxists, a key argument against it.

I’m not a communist myself, but the last point is so fatuous that I think it’s fair to conclude that anyone actually making it is not arguing in good faith.

The first two, though, are completely valid arguments and you should respond to them by ceasing to describe yourself as a communist!

Oh shit, that’s a good point, because it’s drying her out.

Damar drinks it often on Cardassia Prime in season 7, and it seems pretty viscous there.