Does your Dubai chocolate hate have to do with the arguments made in this opinion article, which basically boils down to the popularity of foods and culture being exploited as propaganda, obscuring atrocities committed by authoritarian regimes? If so, that was not at all clear from your post. (I’m still unclear what the ethnicity of the chef has to do with anything.) Any cultural artifact or pastiche is free game for the propaganda machines of the powerful and elite. But those same associations are a double edged sword, hanging a lantern on the same atrocities the regime wishes to obscure. In the end, I feel it is more productive to embrace the fad, eat the chocolate (sourced as ethically as possible), and exploit the popularity as an opportunity to illuminate rather than add to the hate.

Dubai chocolate is really one ethically questionable imperialist exploitation food wrapped around another. The metaphor is delicious. So is the chocolate. Let’s eat and discuss instead of hating it.

I hate hate. Retail is hell. That was a great episode. Archer is the best captain. I actually grew to like the theme song a bit. I’m out. Mic drop.

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Ozone being generated by spotty and arcing electrical connections?

No it’s not. It’s not like people haven’t mapped, measured, and studied the ice for generations. If it had been like that any time in human history, there would be able evidence.

The Late Cenozoic Ice Age has seen extensive ice sheets in Antarctica for the last 34 million years.

This is how I feel trying to order a margarita without added sugar.

I used to think coconut water tasted a little funny (odd mix of sweet, earthy, and umami, not like the coconut flesh at all). Then one day after a particularly long hot hike, I tried it again. I’d been hiking through a natural area that had lots of coconut palms. Crews had been clearing out some invasive species. This is relevant because they’d been using the same trails and had cut open and presumably drunk the water from dozens of coconuts along the way as they worked. These guys must know something I didn’t, so I looked into coconut water as a drink because I’d never heard of such a thing at the time.

Anyway, this is all to say that I gave coconut water a second chance when my body really needed it and although it tasted exactly as I remembered it I suddenly found that it tasted fucking amazing. I’ve been a convert since then. I used to drink Gatorade, but now Gatorade just tastes salty, like Kool-aid made with ball sweat by comparison.

No, that’s not actually true. None of what you claim here is true without qualifications that make your statements meaningless.

This reads like an LLM with a large vocabulary failing to understand the actual context of the conversation. Lots of big words hurled with reckless abandon, lacking any real meaning and having little to do with the actual point.

You are wildly misinformed about how language works.

migrants took over [an area] they took refuge on and made an apartheid for them.

That sounds familiar.

You seem to have almost completely missed the point of allegory and metaphor in TOS. “Time after humanity has dealt with” as you put it is just a literary device to soften the impact when the show was inevitably confronted or viewed by real racists. It was never a really view of the future. It was always a reflection of our present through the lens of futurism, a clever narrative framing device. That narrative framing device could not possibly remain unchangeable through multiple generations without loosing everything that made it work. Attempting to do so, i.e. keeping the storytelling framework completely unchanged and not adapting to new generations and new social dynamics, would have shown a lack of creativity and imagination.

The show was from a time when the U.S. thought they had beaten fascism (past tense, done, a part of the past) and would soon beat racism, classism, etc. From a time when imperialism was seen as a fundamentally good social force by most of the imperialist public. Today we (mostly) know better. We will probably never truly erase any of them. They are things we’ll have to remain vigilant for. A show today patronizing us with their perfected utopian society which remains VERY imperialist without shining a light on that contradiction just would not work. A show lacking any interpersonal drama also would not work and it’s not even something that was really true for TOS, just a weird kink Roddenberry got into when producing TNG. That’s the context of the way Star Trek has changed and it matters.

When I call a fern (or wolf, crab, crow, whale, shark), at that level of syntactical broadly used common word I’m mostly talking about the phenotype, not the genotype. If someone was saying something about a specific fern, then we can argue against those romantic idea of deep time, a little. I mean, we’re probably all descendants of some ancient panspermia event anyway if you want to feel some connection to the ancient forgotten past.

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The article you keep linking disagrees.

Although having given its name to the word henge, Stonehenge is atypical in that the ditch is outside the main earthwork bank.

An atypical example of something is still a “true” example of the thing, especially given that the very term derives its origin from Stonehenge itself.

Edit: Oops, mistook 2 basic pedants regurgitating trivia as the same person.

So, by that definition and the definition everyone else is using, the game has been banned from various marketplaces for games. Context matters. In this context ban is used EXACTLY the same way we talk about banned books at the library.

What’s up with the ridiculous AI slop picture? It seems to have little to do with the article. It absolutely does not depict what a gator or crocodile nest looks like or would have likely ever looked like. Not how those kinds of nests by cold blooded creatures work. I can only assume the rest of the article is similarly meaningless AI slop too.

I guess the BBC is doing lazy AI slop now. Cool.

If it made a PDF with an image, it also made the plain image for which you’re asking. The PDF in this case is basically a container for that image (along with all the text, formatting, fonts, etc.). There are numerous programs for extracting images from PDFs.

Paging Cathode Ray Dude

This gives me God Emperor of Dune vibes.