It also forces Russia into a defensive war where they have already committed all their forces for an Offensive war. This will force Russia to either give up parts of Russia, or withdraw troops from Ukraine to retake parts of Russia. And also I’ve seen reports that Ukraine is having to slow progress because of processing surrendering Russian soldiers.

I figure once Russia withdraws troops from Ukraine to reinforce itself, Ukraine will likely pull back and swoop in and take their territory back.

Then we’ll see where this goes, either Putin will withdraw and try to get peace, or he’ll act like a cornered animal, and will get more unpredictable and erratic. There is always the chance that Ukraine will refuse peace talks and just keep marching on Moscow too. Either way, by pushing into Russia they are changing the dynamic of the war drastically and can finally put Russia on the defensive without worrying about losing support from NATO allies.

Its “Walz”, no t, and yeah, Daily Show already made that association yesterday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1geBpDjYb7c within the first minute of the clip.

yeah, I had heard of that, I’m hoping that since it was a while ago and most of them were the ones done by automated systems and not going through it comment by comment editing them, but I’ll keep at it, if I have to sneak one edit through a day or something.

Pretty much, when they removed search engines who wouldn’t pay them was the final straw and I went back to reddit (after not being there since the API debacle) 1 last time and replaced all my 26,000 karma worth of comments with “Comment removed in protest of Reddit blocking search engines.” Took me a while, but meh, if they want to hasten its enshitification, I don’t mind doing my part.

Event Horizon

Looking outside the ST universe, I’d say the perfect “breather” episode for a series would be Doctor Who (2005) S03E10 - Blink. 3 minutes of recording from the primary talent, and the entire rest of the episode is done by extras and every moment of it is engaging and extremely well done.

A Mary Sue can still fail, they just usually succeed. The biggest issues with a Mary Sue aren’t their success, its the believability of their success. Is it reasonable for this person to be so skilled. If they have PHD level knowledge in 15 different fields, that’s a bit much. But they may have PHD level knowledge in 1 or 2 fields, and they may be able to get through like that without coming off as a Mary Sue, look at The Martian by Andy Weir (or the movie with Matt Damon) The premise of sending people with 2 PHDs in complementary fields to reduce the number of people needing to be sent makes logical sense, so him being an expert, and also being the right kind of expert, to survive makes sense. And the fact he isn’t an expert in everything else helped drive the narrative and provided the direction and the plot in a reasonable and believable way.

I think that’s what is important, not making your character flawless, or even introducing some flaws to a flawless character, because that still ends up coming off weird, but instead start with a flawed character and then remove flaws until you have just enough to make everything the character needs to survive believable. Another view of this, Die Hard, John McClaine wasn’t the typical Mary Sue, he wasn’t perfect and the audience feels like he’s constantly in danger and just a mixture of skill and luck gets him through it. A flawed character is more impactful to the reader. I am a flawed person, I relate better to flawed people.

As an Arizonan, if Mark Kelley goes, I’ll be sad to see him go, but I think he’s a great guy and would do amazing in the position. So we’d either gain a great VP, or I’ll keep a great Senator, so I’m OK either way. But from a political standpoint, Mark Kelly, being a white male, an astronaut, etc brings a bit of the familiar to the ticket for people who may be undecided but lean right. And coming from a swing state, it could cement the undecided votes to swing in her favor and could influence other swing states as well. And the same might be said about any of the picks, but the one I’m most familiar with is the one from my own state, and I think he’d do a pretty damn good job and he’d do that job with integrity.

She doesn’t want to lose the nutjob vote, she just doesn’t want to let the nutjobs run the whole asylum.

From your own usa today article:

according to the poll of 1,261 adults surveyed May 21 through May 23. It found third-party candidates Cornel West and Jill Stein — not Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — are making the difference, pulling support away from Biden.

Emphasis added by me. And I agree, with the article, other 3rd party candidates are likely to pull more from Biden than Trump, but also in agreement with your article, not RFK Jr. And it goes back to people pushing RFK Jr as a threat to Biden, when in reality he’s not at all a threat to Biden. Its FUD being pushed by bad actors and people are falling for it and is distracting people from the real threats to Biden, which is Cornel West and Jill Stein.

I can’t see a world where RFK costs Biden a higher percentage than Trump in any state, that seems like FUD being spread by bad actors. I am not saying anyone here is a bad actor, I am just thinking that people are fearing the worst possible outcome and bad actors are praying on that to push an agenda and because of Wizard’s First Rule (“People are Stupid. People will believe anything because they want to believe it or because they are afraid it might be true.” [Amusingly that quote comes from an Author that if he were still alive would probably vote for Trump]) it spreads, just like most other misinformation.

You can’t just say he’ll cost Biden 0.1% in Michigan without also considering how much he would affect trump, if he costs Biden 0.1% and Trump 0.9% he still only gets 1% of the vote, but it hurt Trump 90% more than it hurts Biden, which in the end will actually improve Biden’s position. And the newly (within the last 4 years) never-Trumper republicans who would never-Biden as well who votes for RFK Jr can’t be counted as a “biden” vote since they would never vote for him to begin with, if anything its a vast majority of 2020 Trump votes that are shifted to RFK Jr.

I don’t get how it would help trump, RFK Jr is such a right-wing nutjob, I don’t think anyone who would vote for Biden would vote for him instead. Its much more likely to pull votes from Trump instead since he’s just the right kind of nutjob to appeal to the extreme Q-Anon supporting far right who would otherwise vote for Trump.

Gmail wasn’t even the first, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, there were tons of free email offerings, even sites that would host your whole website for free like geocities. Gmail came into the market when 3rd party email being free was already well established. They just followed an Apple style of development, taking something that already exists and made a better version of it. Also back then their motto was still “Don’t Be Evil” and they mostly still kept to it, so they used that goodwill and the better user experience to grow it at a massive rate. And for the most part, its still the best experience for email for many cases.