He’s decided you’re not on his level, but he thinks you’re cool all the same.

Some ships do have emergency antimatter generators per the TNG Technical Manual, but they’re hideously energy-intensive to run–something like a 10:1 ratio of deuterium used for each unit of antimatter. They only make sense to run in the rare situation you absolutely need to warp to safety when you somehow have deuterium and a warp core but no antimatter.

But holodecks apparently have their own infinite power supply incompatible with any other Starfleet technology, so perhaps Voyager used the holodeck replicators to generate deuterium to run their antimatter generator whenever the Doctor isn’t practicing his sermons.

Efficiency would be abysmal even by the normal standards of this process, but it beats walking back to the Alpha Quadrant.

I’m just going to pretend that’s one of the researchers from Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.

If they’re really lucky, they’ll end up working for the Laundry only once. Residual Human Resources is a bad way to go out.

Charles Stross’ Laundry series is basically this concept set in the present day: magic is a branch of mathematics, which means it can be computed and programmed.

It is perhaps worth noting at this point the series genre is cosmic horror.

I’ll preface this by noting that the sin of sloth has traditionally been understood to be a sin of omission, not just commission, i.e., you are insufficiently devoted to the things you ought to be.

Which means you could, in theory, have a (reflavored tiefling) devil paladin so devoted to sloth he works against evil causes. He’s not interested in good per se, it’s just that advancing the interests of good and traveling with a good adventuring party has the best ROI for failing to carry out his evil responsibilities.

Naturally, this has caused a fair amount of controversy among sloth devils, and there is a multi-century trial going on in the Hells about whether this ought to be allowed. This is not expected to be resolved in the foreseeable future because the advocates for both parties keep filing their responses well after petition deadlines expire.

Oof, I definitely did that once or twice.

It really does seem like they decided to bring this sequence up to introduce settlement building and power armor early. I get why they did it, but man, I do not think it ultimately has the effect they wanted.

I think video art and art commentary is great, but lumping it all in here would make this place less interesting to me. I’m also not sure anyone looking for video art would think to look here for it. Maybe having periodic threads to post commentary or non-image art could be a good compromise?

I acknowledge that’s somewhat arbitrary, but I don’t think we can ever eliminate that entirely where art is concerned.

Maybe a controversial suggestion, but my advice is to ignore the Minutemen stuff until late in the game. Just don’t even go to the museum until you’ve followed some leads and want something else to do for a bit.

This is definitely not the intended way to play, but I promise the story flows so much better without it. Setting out to find your kidnapped son just to immediately get sidetracked helping some uncharismatic misfits set up mattresses is just an underwhelming start to an otherwise decent game.

Doing all this stuff later on, when you’ve actually demonstrated you’re a badass survivor and the OP gear you get free from the Minutemen quest actually feels earned, just feels much smoother. It’s a great coda that they unf put two minutes into the game for some reason.

I’m always pumped when an article titled “Beast/Monster of <location>” is an actual cryptid and not just the nickname for a serial killer. This is way more interesting!

I’d really like that. Enriching posts with this kind of metadata is what sets this apart from just a Google Image search, IMO.

Like you said, it’s important context, and it’s really helpful to have when I want to learn more about an artist or image. I’m way more likely to revisit something if I have more than just a title or author to go on, especially since traditional art isn’t guaranteed to be online or easily researchable.

While the adulteration surely didn’t help, I don’t think I’d trust pure milk from these cows, either:

Swill milk dairies were noted for their filthy conditions and overpowering stench both caused by the close confinement of hundreds (sometimes thousands) of cows in narrow stalls where, once they were tied, they would stay for the rest of their lives, often standing in their own manure, covered with flies and sores, and suffering from a range of virulent diseases. These cows were fed boiling distillery waste, often leaving the cows with rotting teeth and other maladies.