But it's not Fallout in Space. I can travel from one edge of the map to the other in Fallout or Skyrim and stumble upon a pitched battle or a cultist ritual or a lost dog or a juicy plot hook. In Starfield I can travel from one interstitial area to the next interstitial area to listen to a bland NPC tell me to go to the next interstitial area.

It's okay. I look forward to mods. Right now it's like somebody reskinned Super Mario Bros from the NES with a generative image AI trained on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day and Mass Effect 1 stills.

Since you chose CDB, here is an interesting bit of trivia about that song in particular:

The song uses a clever play on words to promote Southern rock music. ... The "it" that the South is going to do again, it is implied, is to produce additional popular rock groups.

Daniels factually bristled at more nefarious interpretations of what the "it" was. ... Daniels told Billboard, "I'm damn proud of the South, but I sure as hell am not proud of the Ku Klux Klan. I wrote the song about the land I love and my brothers. It was not written to promote hate groups."

Maybe use the songs as an opportunity for discussion ... or save it for your kid-free time.

Please elaborate

"I'm here to apply for the position of your Next Bad Decision. My parents always said I was a mistake, so I think that makes me well qualified."

That's literally how I got my wife.

Make sure you have a towel. I say this as a guy who dried off after showers with an old tshirt the first week after I moved because I am a great planner.

Extend that to other less glamorous essentials. Think about the mundane things you use daily that blend into the background.

Battlestar Galactica will always be my comfort apocalypse.

Atomic Rockets has a whole page for this

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php

Looks kinda like the OG tricorder Spock carried in TOS.

https://trekmovie.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/tos-tricorder.jpg

If you enable developer options and then disable animations, your phone will feel 1000% faster on any OS.

I dunno, Makita and some Milwaukee tools are absolutely worth the money, especially if you're willing to buy into their battery ecosystem.

Income and net worth are different concepts though. You can have a car and be too broke to buy gas.

There is a Magisk module that bypasses that on Android. Look up SafetyNetFix.

I used to be an industrial chemist. We did esterification reactions to turn chicken fat and laxatives into oil field soaps by the truckload. So I guess mid-level organic chemistry?

I thought the same way, then became an American engineer. Fuck a horsepower, because it's so goddamned context dependent.

I had a guy run a greek-inspried monk named Testicles (pronounced test-ee-cleeze) because he's a murder hobo waitin' for a smitin'

"The group also excluded vehicles with pedestrian automatic emergency braking systems," well fuck. Maybe there's a reason this is a standard feature on most new vehicles.

"the auto industry is embracing bigger, more brutish designs for its SUVs and trucks, ... and car buyers are increasingly buying into that marketing, snapping up these high-riding vehicles in record numbers." It's almost like there are no other options on the market as manufacturers chase fuel economy requirements.

You give me an update of a 90's-00's midsize truck like the Tacoma or Dakota and I'll write a check so fast the paper rips.

There's something of a character and chapter like that in Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. It's a good book otherwise, too.

You think so? Earth and the Sun are only about 5 billion years old, or 1/3 the age of the universe. Life is estimated to have appeared on Earth about 4 billion years ago.

Under the law of averages, life could have independently developed and reached comparable maturity to Earth at least two other, non-concurrent times. We're third generation at best.