Thank you!

In my understanding of the Many Worlds theory, any possible reality does exist in the multiverse. As Q shows, the “Ensign Picard” universe is possible, so it has to exist, I think. And if he can just shunt prime-Picard over to that universe for a few days, why bother making a bespoke pocket universe just for his little experiment?

Oh man, the “for want of a nail” options are huge, aren’t they? On one hand, maybe no Locutus; on the other hand, maybe Halloway became Locutus, and things went way worse. Maybe without Picard to toy with, Q never introduced the Enterprise to the Borg, and they’re still chilling in the Delta Quadrant.

Yeah, that “Parallels” Riker definitely got in the fandom’s collective head. It’s a striking image.

You’re very kind.

Thanks! Glad you did.

Holy word explosion, Batman! Sorry about that. Yikes.

Whoa, I never thought about that before.

From alternate-Picard’s perspective, he’s just living his life, doing his thing on the flagship under Captain Halloway, completely content with his own life as an assistant astrophysics officer, not making any waves. He burned the bridges with Marta, but maybe he found someone else and had a happy relationship. Perhaps they even had kids. Since Robert thinks he “finally got his head on straight” after Starfleet Academy, he and his brother enjoy a far warmer relationship, and he’s active in Rene’s life from an early age. His timeline is comfortable and lacks ambition for much else. He’s just happy that he gets to explore the stars.

Sometimes he thinks about that weird weekend back right after the Academy when a bunch of memories of the future suddenly crowded into his brain and he felt like he wasn’t in charge of his own body anymore, even though he still kind of was. And was there some old guy in bed with him who called him “Pickerd?” Weird. But then the extra memories left his brain, and he went back to normal–maybe with a little bit more wisdom and tact. He chalks it up to a strange manic episode, but he was examined by a psychologist and they told him nothing was wrong.

Then suddenly, one day, the memories crowd back into his brain again, but this time instead of feeling like memories of the future, they feel like a bizarre, edited version of the past. And it brings with it this strange discontentment that he hasn’t felt in decades. He finds himself going toward the bridge instead of toward engineering, certain that that’s where he belongs; there, his superior officers ask him what’s wrong, and he finds that he’s not in control again, and feels this strange discontentment: I’m supposed to be in charge of the Enterprise, not Halloway!

That Q person is in Dr. Crusher’s chair when he goes to get checked, looking ridiculous and spouting off nonsense; though no one else seems to notice. Something about having a…real heart? What else would he have? He remembers being stabbed by a Nausicaan, but he also simultaneously remembers Corey’s look of disgust as he walked away that night. What is going on?

This isn’t a life worth living, he thinks to himself. But I enjoy my life! It’s calm and comfortable. How is that a bad thing? I have to talk to Riker about a promotion. A promotion? That’s ridiculous! I’d never get back to Earth often enough to be present in the kids’ lives if I was the head of Astrophysics! Head of astrophysics?! No, I’m supposed to be the captain of the ship!

And then he’s in front of Riker and Troi, asking them for something he doesn’t really want; and part of him is abashed to discover that he doesn’t take risks, while the more familiar part of him is gratified to know that the First Officer of the Flagship knows that he’s a reliable officer!

Then he walks toward the turbolift, and again is startled by his own thoughts, some of which he hears himself saying aloud as he rides the car toward engineering. I have to get out of here. Out of what? This is my ship, my life, my job-- No. This is wrong. Q is playing with me. I’m sure he thinks this is simply hilarious, reducing me to this bland tedium. Tedium?! I’ve seen some of the most beautiful and rapturous things on this mission; astrophysical phenomena that would fill tomes, new worlds and civilizations, why just last month I helped discover a brand new synthetic life form! But this is wrong. I should be so much more! If this is what I am to be reduced to, I would rather be dead!

But before he can answer himself, the turbolift door opens once more, and for a brief instant he thinks he sees a white void on the other side and that Q character again; but then the intrusive memories and thoughts all leave his brain, and he finds that it’s only main engineering on the other side of the door.

“Everything ok, JL?” Geordi asks, looking up at him from his station. “I expected you here an hour ago. It’s not like you to be late.”

Picard pauses, considering the question. “Fine, Lieutenant, thank you,” he replies. “I apologize for my tardiness. My mind has been…occupied.” He chuckles to himself at his own little pun. “But I believe that it has cleared.”

“If you need to get checked out, I can handle these calculations for a bit.”

“No, thank you, sir. I’m fine.”

For the rest of his life he regularly wonders at those two episodes, manic days, decades apart, and at his intrusive thoughts of a life that isn’t enough. As you noted, he never forgets that moment where he found his mind insisting to himself, indignantly, that he would rather be dead than live this life. Each time he remembers it, his certainty and contentment with his life is further cemented.

But the episodes never again recur, and he lives happily ever after.

Yeah, I’d definitely prefer to use fresh garlic, no doubt. But…take this morning. I put a pork shoulder in the crock pot for carnitas at dinner. I chopped the onion and the jalapeno. Chopping the garlic, too, would’ve practically doubled my prep time, because it needs so much of it, and I was already late for work as it was.

I was added to a moderation list on Bluesky for following someone on Twitter and subsequently muting them, and then forgetting I had followed them when I used a tool to migrate all of my follows to Bluesky. Which is just a stupid mistake, but what about people who are following notable bigots because they’re journalists and have to keep tabs on what they say?

Being banned for upvoting someone’s comment seems similarly tunnel-visioned. If you’re upvoting their pun about the moon or their helpful cooking suggestion or their computer build tip, getting banned because you didn’t check their entire post history before upvoting is absolutely insane to me.

Guilt by association is only a thing if it’s actually association.

Interesting. You might be right. The whole “does x taste the same to me as it does to you” question is fascinating, and I hadn’t thought about it here. For me, jarred garlic lacks a bit of the bite and spice of fresh garlic, and tends to be weaker after cooking, but I don’t associate it with any sour flavor. Basically, it’s “rounded-off” garlic to me.

Now I’m curious how you experience powdered garlic. That tastes even less strong to me than jarred, and maybe slightly processed, but I wonder if that has a stronger effect on your palate.

Me too.

Do you remember how Trump tried to take control of the National Archives as, like, his first action in office? The idea that he just wanted to display the Declaration of Independence in the Oval Office never seemed like enough to me. I think the files have already been copied, and there was a copy in Biden’s presidential records. Who knows where else they’ve been sent?

If they’re released in an edited or heavily redacted state, I bet we’ll get the real ones shortly thereafter.

This one has legs. They’re trying to quash it for some reason. I’m not saying it’ll bring down Trump, even though he’s obviously in there, but it’ll probably bring down at least a few senators.

And Trump’s base is breaking with him on this like they haven’t done in a decade. This is bigger and worse than I’ve ever seen. If it shifts the balance of power in Congress, I could see something happening to him too.

That’s the thing about Teflon. If you keep using it over and over, it eventually wears off. Given enough time, something will stick.

It is when her boss is almost certainly someone who deserves to have justice rain down on him.

Apparently my palate is not so refined. I can definitely tell that one is better than the other, but only slightly.

Life is too short to waste time cleaning a garlic press.

Garlic (usually the refrigerated kind from a jar) and cumin. Dried onion can be acceptable if you don’t have time to chop an onion. Coarse ground black pepper has a distinctly different flavor than the kind that goes on the table. Crushed red pepper flakes really help revive leftover Italian, Mexican, and Thai food. And it’s situational, but I am really starting to like Aleppo pepper quite a bit.

Some people see participation in any sense as a sort of tacit agreement or endorsement of the system as a whole. So by casting any vote, even one of protest, you are legitimizing the system as a whole.

This assumes that there we are always afforded the option to choose whether or not to participate. If you are a bus driver and your full bus is careening toward a cliff, and you have the opportunity to swerve into a procession of nuns crossing the street (toward the cliff? What kind of street is this?), not choosing is still a choice. You can’t say, “well, I’ll just sit this one out. I can comfort my conscience with the knowledge that I’m not making a choice.” The people on your bus are still going to die, and it will be your fault. Now, if you swerved, the nuns would die, and that would be your fault, too.

A person who comes of age in a country with suffrage is a part of that system; they are not afforded the luxury of not casting a vote guilt-free, even if they tend more Kantian, because they were placed in the driver’s seat of that bus on the day they became an adult. In fairness, they share that seat with hundreds of millions of others, but they still face a choice between two bad options. No matter which they choose, even if they choose neither, bad things will happen.

I guess what I’m saying is, when the stakes are high enough and stacked up against you enough, you have to become at least a little bit of a consequentialist.

Probably not if you lived on Pandora.

I think he thinks he’s Jack in The Pre-Sequel, but really he’s Jack in Borderlands 2.

Honestly, for me, it’s the one-two-three punch of easy notes taken anywhere + podcasts + camera.

• notes : before smartphones I carried a notebook in my pocket. And sometimes I still do; writing longhand is still pleasant for me, and being able to sketch and doodle with my notes is still clunky with a touchscreen, amazingly. But the experience of losing my notebook, or not having the right one with me when I need it, is disproportionately frustrating to me.

• podcasts : this is one of the few ways my ADHD brain truly focuses. Listening to a podcast while walking, biking, running, driving, doing dishes, cleaning a room, mowing the lawn, etc. is almost foolproof in getting me to pay attention to the content. I have to be in the right mood to read, and videos are background noise to me after having the Discovery Channel or Scifi Channel on 24/7 in my apartment in college. Before smartphones I had a trusty RCA Lyra that went everywhere with me; and while the form factor and experience were fantastic, I now have a backlog of over 800 podcast episodes that would not fit on that device’s 512MB internal storage. (Also, I just got a pair of noise canceling earbuds, and I have to admit I really like them)

• camera : I’ve chosen my last four smartphones based on the camera quality. I’ve got kids, and being able to take adorable pictures of them at the drop of a hat is very useful to me. I don’t need all the computational nonsense, but I do need it to be good enough and ever-present. Before smartphones, I would occasionally bring a digital camera around with me, but I can’t afford one that would give me the quality I want, and it wouldn’t fit in my pocket anyway.

Messaging, fitness tracking, and work stuff is also easier, though not in a way that I don’t think I could backfill with other things if needed.

Nostalgia aside, the experience of these big three use cases is indisputably better with a smartphone than it was in 2005. Could I live without them? Yes! Absolutely. But I’d prefer not to, and since I shook my social media addiction I don’t really feel the need to.

Comprehension is the responsibility of the speaker. You’re good. I should’ve been more clear.