Carl Sagan wrote a book, The Demon Haunted World, which is all about why people get sucked into nonsense like ancient aliens, and how to deal with it.

Gesundheit.

Or, if you prefer: “Yahweh bless you.”

How will this plan affect my real estate taxes?

Disagree. The movie is a mediocre adaptation of a fun and mediocre book into an un-fun and mediocre movie. The film was never going to be gold, but they spent an awful lot of CGI money to make a movie that wasn’t as fun as just reading the original and imagining all of the nerdy stuff being described.

Mid 30s, USA. I’m smart (Ivy League science doctorate) but I can’t drive a standard transmission because my dad “couldn’t teach me” because I “wouldn’t learn right”. It was just me asking him questions like "What does the inside of the clutch actually look like? " and him yelling “That doesn’t matter, just ease out on the clutch while giving it some gas!” Apparently I can be taught a lot, but not how to drive a standard.

Weirdly, my engineer friend let me drive his standard transmission car once after giving me some basic instructions and I did okay going up and down the road alone, but that was just one day and I fear I’ve forgotten everything. But I must be mistakenly remembering that, because according to my father I “can’t be taught!”

If you get good at it and if you run enough hives each year, it does, eventually, start making money though! Which is almost more frustrating, because every dollar you spend on it could come back some day in honey sales… but will it?

Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf

This is the shortest comment here, and perhaps the most elegant answer I’ve seen. Instead of shooting all of the rioters to prevent them from causing harm, you trick them into turning on each other, devouring just one of their number, and then after their internal melee you round up the survivors and throw them in a paddy wagon.

I’ve been playing little bits of Aven Colony, a straightforward and fun space-colony-themed city manager. However, mostly I’ve been watching my wife play Baldur’s Gate 3 and thinking "We should really buy another beefy gaming PC before Starfield launches so we can both play games simultaneously… "

Brawndo. It’s got what I crave.

Black & White 3. Just more Black & White, slightly updated and improved since technology is better, but it doesn’t have to be much better. Just a little bit. But basically more of the same.

Sure, but in the case of a show dealing with the question of what would happen if the general public could download celebrities despite the non-consent of the celebrities involved, literally Futurama did it.

You’ll take what you can get, and you’ll like it!

I once overheard a pair of utility workers talking, and as I walked past I only overheard a snippet of conversation. The older one yelled up the cherrypicker to the younger one and said, in a heavy Boston accent:

“If only you could use your powers for good, instead of for useless…”

That sentence is seared into my brain.

Cries in Medieval Engineers

I think reddit has just continued making more and more moves down their path towards the IPO, and all of those moves together have shown a lot of us that we’re not interested in staying on for the rest of the ride. Complicity towards corrupt or powerhungry mods of massive communities with tangible effects on the world (e.g. r/politics), censorship, revenue-focused anti-user actions, ignoring the community, downplaying the value of volunteer mods and threatening to replace them… Yeah, thanks, no. I’m good over here in the fediverse now.

“Comrades! It’s been fun but we’ve decided we like money now, so we sold you all like serfs to a megacorporation. Now do as they say. Bye!”