Hotter take: gender is irrelevant in 100% of situations. Your sex is sometimes relevant to your doctor and your sexual partner, and is irrelevant the rest of the time. Embracing atypical gender expressions gets in the way of discarding the whole outdated concept.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

Be sure to follow up with Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, I liked it even better

That's how I felt after S3, but I gave S4 a shot and it justified a lot of the decisions I didn't care for in S3. Maybe S5 would've disappointed, maybe not, but it seemed like it was going to be the last season and I would've at least given it a chance to fully redeem itself.

Season 4 of Westworld changed it from "Too Long" to "Too Soon" for me, personally. I didn't really care for season 3 when it aired, but season 4 made me more forgiving of it, retroactively. It seemed like they were setting things up in season 5 which required season 4, which in turn required season 3. Especially given the nature of the show, it felt like they were building some grand story which required these banal meanderings that would all make sense when they clicked into place at the end.

Now I'm really curious what they were planning in 5 and it looks like we won't get to find out.

Definitely, and both were very... different from the books.

likes to see FTMs as female still and pushes that female gender norm of being unseen

I think it's kinda the opposite, in that androgynous men are fairly invisible in society. Large women with broad shoulders, strong jawlines, and masculine hands stand out, inviting more opportunities for scrutiny and criticism. Small men with narrow shoulders, delicate jawlines, and feminine hands disappear into the background, and no one thinks about them at all.

Obligatory relevant xkcd

Of course some things will always slip through the cracks, but this is egregious. What does their peer-review process look like that this passed through it?

Did we read the same paper? I didn't see any conclusions based on unsubstantiated non-scientific guesswork. I saw some speculation, but always tempered with explicit acknowledgement that it was hypothetical and speculative. The only conclusion they reached was that many reported UAPs could potentially be explained by plasma activity in the thermosphere.

Yes, they do hypothesize that it's conceivable that dusty plasmas could foster conditions which could allow for the synthesis of amino acids and even RNA. They do also hypothesize that the structure and complexity of the plasmas could allow for the possibility of a non-organic kind of life. But then they are very quick to say that both of those hypotheticals are purely speculation, and that the plasma behavior can be explained by electromagnetic differentials without necessitating intelligence.

Overall, the paper seems like a collaboration between a number of authors working on different tangentially related topics, broadly under the heading of "extra-terrestrial cellular plasmas": electromagnetic life, abiogenesis in the environment of plasma, and the complex behavior of plasma bodies observed in the thermosphere. Those in the first two camps seen very excitable (I would speculate they are responsible for all the !s and ?s in the paper) and prone to speculation, with those in the latter camp reigning in that speculation and trying to bring focus back to the main conservative claim: that observed plasma phenomena are consistent with many UAP reports.

Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2042

What do I know, I only worked in the industry for a decade. My views are probably oversimplified because I only based them on personal experience with hundreds of coworkers. All the minimum effort coworkers I had to deal with must have a been crazy flukes, that's very reassuring.

You're probably right, unanimous industry-wide wage increases would happen flawlessly and there would be no consequences whatsoever. Change implementation at that scale is simple and easy, restaurant margins are cushy enough to smoothly handle that kind of transition, and restaurant owners would obviously navigate the voluntary wage increase without a hitch.

Every server would quit and get a different job because no restaurant is going to match what they were making in tips, and it's not worth the hassle to serve for what the restaurant could afford. Service quality would regress to the minimum, because there's no incentive to provide prompt, high quality, friendly service.

Anyone who's never waited tables vastly underestimates how much the tip incentive effects your server checking on you frequently, answering your questions and making recommendations, getting your food out quickly and ensuring everything is satisfactory, refilling your beverage frequently, bringing your check promptly, and doing it all diplomatically even when you're being an asshole.

Frankly, I think American service expectations are a bit high, but if you're used to it then all that would stop very shortly after the customers stop tipping. Think of the performance of every other minimum-or-near-minimum wage hourly worker. That's your server. Anyone with the professionalism to maintain that kind of service will move on to Sales or something.

Didn't they also use basically rocket fuel as a sealant?

Another fantastic opportunity to share one of my favorite pieces of magical art

For whatever reason I I didn't get that result from Hank, and tbh my bad run Kara refused to break through her programming and that ended her portion of the run pretty quick

Sometimes I get the urge to decorate my house with signs of every permutation of "Laugh", "Live", and "Love" except for the popular one.

Dang, camshaft + Geneva is really obvious in hindsight, cool.

Oh, well >!I'm using Sync and have only used Sync!<. Sorry. If you have an alternative I'd love to know

Fed up with monopolies