Basilisk

The ENT mini-arc "explaining" the difference between Klingons "then" and "now" was absolutely unnecessary, but I do have to admit to finding it cute that the reason why Klingons became smooth-foreheaded instead of bumpy-foreheaded turned out to be a combination of all three of Bashir's guesses in that scene.

I guess I just fundamentally don't agree with the need for a "backsplanation". I am of the camp that I'm totally OK with the Klingons looking different in TMP than in TOS because it wasn't a 1960s TV show anymore and they wanted the aliens to look more alien, and that's all the explanation that I need. The Enterprise is different between SNW and its appearance in Discovery because it's a different show and they wanted to tweak its appearance some to make it more of a "hero" set. Spock and Sarek never mentioned his having an adoptive daughter/sister in spite of being in two series and a half dozen movies because Michael didn't exist until Discovery and the writers thought it would make for an interesting tie-in.

I have enjoyed the series since TNG in the 80s, and I'd love for it to come true some time in the future. But it's a TV show, it's not a history book. It's fine if there are inconsistencies, none of it is real anyway.

I mean, I do like so-called "Nu-Trek", but at the end of the day this is kind of a tail-wagging-the-dog response. You can explain just about anything in lore after the fact, but when the rubber hits the road the real explanation is that someone in a Hollywood design team said "We want it to be BIGGER," and then left it to the people who cared enough to find a reason why it would be justified.

Far easier to just suspend your disbelief a bit further, I think. Yeah, Discovery is weirdly big. It also flies through space by a man infused with a giant tardigrade's DNA sending the whole ship from place to place through willpower and a mushroom trip. If you can accept the second one, it kind of feels like the fact that the ship is a larj boye isn't that much of a stretch.

Although when they created DS9 in Star Trek Online, they had to massively scale it up because otherwise it would have gotten lost among all the players' ships, both by sheer volume and because so many ships in the game are absurdly large.

The ampersand (&) was so commonly used that for a while it was taught as a letter. British schoolkids in the mid- to late-19th century would include it as the 27th letter on writing work and needlework samplers, usually after "z".

There's some discussion that the Alphabet Song ends with "w, x, y & z" specifically to include it.

Q.E.D. is "quod erat demonstrandum", meaning "thus, it has been demonstrated".

I hated these Dairy Queen commercials so much I haven't done DQ willingly in over 20 years. It used to be a regular thing to grab ice cream in a hot afternoon during the summer.

Assassin's Creed Odyssey and RDR2

The problem is that if the candidate from Party "A" is a competent weasel who wants to undermine everything I stand for, and party "B"'s candidate is an incompetent boob who won't help matters but also is popular and won't actively ruin everything, then it's far more important to my interests that party "A"'s candidate not be voted in than it is to cast a vote for candidate "C". The system is working how is designed to and the only people who are capable of changing it are the ones benefiting from it being broken, so the only way that's likely to happen is if there were somehow a mass exodus away from the big two parties.

The premise is interesting, and the mystery of "what's happening to Tom" as he gets this weird body horror transformation is actually fairly well done. But any time that a scriptwriter types the word "evolution" into a keyboard there's should be an automatic spray bottle that pops out of the computer that spritzes them in the face and shouts "No! Bad!" Because any sci-fi script that mentions evolution is inevitably going to completely fuck it up.

A truly great line from "The Ultimate Computer"

M4 to Daystrom: "I am great. You are great. We are both great."

I've used gummy bears as tokens and maps thrown together in 30 seconds with Sharpie on wrapping paper and it works fine too. Players generally are pretty happy with whatever you throw at them.

I'd still expect better than that from a product that a major company is expecting you to trade money for.