Since it hasn’t been mentioned, one thing that I am truly thankful for that we have improved since the 1990s is public smoking. Not having to be prepared for the reek of cigarettes in virtually every public space is such a big win.

Hell, in 1990, which is 35 years ago, you could still smoke on airplanes in the US. Airplanes! Can you imagine flying back then? Your neighbor could light up and there was nothing you could do but sit there and stew in the smoke stream. I’m glad I never had to experience flying with smoke but I had my fair share of being forced to sit in smoking sections of restaurants until my teenage years.

Cake is all over, don’t forget about this cake either!

Now I’m picturing a comedy spinoff set at a 24th century Waffle House run by Klingons. Do not bring dishonor to the House of Waffles!

Like light bulbs, Weyouns come in 4, 8, or 10 packs, save more by buying in bulk and store the rest in your utility closet until needed.

The fact that so much highly rated Trek is out now is vaguely enticing but overwhelming for someone not familiar when anything in the current generation. How is the new stuff supposed to be attacked? I also was not into the Abrams movies that I saw, I’d always preferred the more mundane and cerebral stuff in TNG and the slow paced world building and character development in DS9.

This reported 3% is thanks to uncountable coder-hours devoted by crowds of volunteers, and employees at many companies, notably but not at all limited to Canonical, Red Hat and Collabora, and put into developing massive, explicitly Linux-on-desktop software packages like the KDE and GNOME projects, Wayland, X.org, freedesktop, Cinnamon, Budgie, Xfce, (many more that I can’t think of or list here), and the numerous distro developers and maintainers at Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, Arch, etc. who put effort into packaging and keeping fresh these softwares for end-users to download for (mostly) free, competing against for-profit operating system desktops from Microsoft and Apple that have significant advantages in OEM bundling and testing, marketing, system incompatibility both intentional and inadvertent.

That so many people put so much effort over multiple decades into producing a range of products that earn many of them no profit whatsoever and which has barely made a dent in the marketplace it competes, for over two decades, is a testament to optimism about the human spirit, ideology, stubbornness, and the kind of pride and satisfaction of a service rendered for public consumption that is almost alien to modern capitalism.