Personally I could do without gore, torture and weapon fetish bullshit as well, but I've also never looked at an action extra getting shot in the head or a stuntperson being lit on fire and wondered if they felt exploited or if they felt pressured to sexually gratify some powerful exec that could ruin their career.

Honestly, I feel like we crossed a line at some point where nudity in movies feels unnecessary.

I'm not sure if it's the proliferation of porn in our society, or being more conscious about everything pandering to the male gaze, or the huge number of rapists in powerful positions, or just being cynical about everything, but I can't remember the last time I saw nudity in a movie or TV show that didn't come off as exploitative.

Nothing, they just intentionally fuck up the acronym. Sometimes they call the Enterprise the Entrepreneur. It's usually rooted in some one off comment, but sometimes it takes and slowly they've developed their own weird parlance full of in jokes.

On the Greatest Generation podcast, they say RSVP instead of RIP among other little in jokes.

If you haven't listened to it, it's a pretty funny take on basically every episode of Trek at this point. It starts a bit rough (and slightly inappropriate with some Wesley jokes IMO) but it gets good quick and now it's a fulltime job for the hosts. It's a good time if you're looking for a parasocial relationship with a couple of Trekkies.

I love the tribute, but it's pretty bold to put an in joke in a tattoo. There's a IYKYK factor for Greatest Gen fans, but almost everyone else is gonna need an explanation for why this isn't a fuck up.

I love Elite and it's definitely amazing in VR. For everything in a ship I agree with you, NMS is childish in comparison.

However, NMS is attempting a way more multi-cultural galaxy, and I often wish Elite had more diversity in aliens, and more interesting planets similar to NMS. Especially when Elite has so much grind to do rep etc. I wish just once I'd be doing a delivery quest to an acid jungle planet covered in hostile turtles, instead of yet another dead planetoid with a few outposts sticking out of it.

No Man's Sky is an incredibly uneven experience. The one thing it does better than its peers is the variety of aliens and flora/fauna. There are easily 30 hours of fun in just exploring around and seeing some cool alien vistas and ecosystems, trying to survive on ice or acid planets etc. The game gives you good reason to visit them too.

However, it sort of falls apart after that. The space flight, mining, and combat aren't nearly as good as (e.g.) Elite, the quests are pretty meh, the base building is okay but it falls down on automating production of anything you actually care about (I.e. it's mostly aesthetic, but it can be cool to have a home base in a neat spot). Some of the recent updates added things like big carrier ships, and the game contrives to give you one to captain with a quest... But that sort of obliterates the ship progression.

You may have more fun with something like Elite or X4 depending on what you're looking for, but if you just want to fuck around and see neat stuff on your own timeframe, NMS could definitely justify its price tag.

As Carlin said: it's called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Weird Al is a national treasure, an institution. I'd bet it's his sort of music, parody, that AI threatens most simply because it's riffing on songs that already exist.

On the other hand, the only reason I'd worry that a gen-AI could attempt a masterpiece like "Alternative Polka" is that Weird Al created it first.

Not to be too much of a downer, but all of these cute Google search results and other "quirky" "fun" things billion dollar corporations do used to seem so harmless but now it just reads like a friendly logo on a baby mulching machine.

If I don't bowl today the terrorists win.

Perfect headline.