Spyke

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The new fake "Indie" radio station in town

It's likely this station is in the non-commercial band if it used to be a college station - anything below 92 mhz. They're legally not allowed to have actual commercials but they can run PSAs, membership drives, underwriting, etc due to FCC rules.

It's almost certainly not a ploy: it's way more likely the college decided the previous format was too expensive. The college probably decided to lease out their frequency to someone else. The lessee still can't run commercials (or even operate "commercially," whatever the FCC decides that means), but it's very easy to pre-program a music format with all the breaks already slotted in which explains the top 40s and the lack of live DJs. The college therefore reduces their operating costs to nearly zero and they make money from the lease at the same time.

This exact situation happened to my college radio station when I was an undergrad and I hated it too.

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Lady of the Lake [Drawerofdrawings]

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In Le Morte d'Arthur we learn that the scabbard is actually more valuable than Excalibur itself because any wounds received by the bearer wold never bleed. In the final panel of the comic there is a large pool of blood forming, presumably by the lady of the lake's death (or maybe her hand being bitten off). There shouldn't be blood.

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The Three-Body Problem Trilogy by Cixin Liu

Like many of the comments I had mixed feelings about this trilogy (enjoyed some concepts and large scale plot, disliked some characters and prose and specific plots) but so far no one has mentioned the misogyny. Phew boy the misogyny is front and center in a few places and it's really jarring and unpleasant.

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28 December 2024

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All the warthogs at the party are very ugly and have warts, including the handsome one. There's nothing really to distinguish the handsome one except he's got the cool eyes thing going on and he's smoking. So you can interpret the joke a couple of ways: a) it's silly Larson anthropomorphism where humans like us reading the cartoon don't get what attributes animals would find attractive or b) every animal thinks cool eyes and smoking is cool, which probably circles back to being a commentary about those things not being terribly cool at all. Or a hundred other meanings I haven't gotten.

Edit: I don't think it's a specific reference, more just the 70s/80s "movie cool" character would look like that but not be a warthog

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If Scotty, Geordi, O'Brien, Torres, and Trip were each tasked with providing medical care who would perform the best?

I think we can pretty safely put Scotty and Trip at the bottom of the pile. They've never shown any specific aptitude for medical work and I think 24th century Starfleet basic medical training and technology helps everyone else. Of the remaining three, Geordi seems like he would be very nice and try to be as helpful as possible about your injuries, but I'm ranking him 3rd overall. I don't recall O'Brien ever doing anything on screen to indicate his medical competence, but we can guess that maybe he's seen enough combat to have picked up some of the basics, so second place to Miles. Torres, with her extensive knowledge of programming and reprogramming the Doctor (enough to suggest a DNA re-sequencing of her own baby to the Doctor [Lineage, Voy]) and the fact that her year at the academy may have been a double major in engineering and medical [Extreme Risk, Voy] makes me put her in first place.