This is Kirk and Riker slander.

Kirk doesn't deserve that kind of reputation, whereas Riker does.

Slight shame that the contractors didn't start from the end. It could have been funnier if they had taken off the "er" instead.

Or shut them down, given the recent debacle with Amazon shutting down someone's account, disabling their devices in the process.

Even TOS had a blatant anti-racism episode where the conclusion was very much explicitly "if we don't get along, we'll be left extinct on an empty, dead husk of a planet".

Isn't it not sci-fi? It's usually more classed as sci-fantasy, if memory serves.

In fairness, that's probably more due to the novelty of the disaster, more so than whoever was actually on board.

A refugee boat sinking is a tragedy, but it's also not novel in the eyes of the media (and might be difficult to report on, depending on local laws). It happens with enough regularity that it's considered another tragedy, in much the same way that America doesn't report all their mass shootings (they tend to have one for almost every day of the year), or how the local paper usually doesn't report every robbery and homicide.

The submarine incident is a bit more like a plane crash by comparison, which is rare and novel enough that it's worth reporting on, irrespective of whoever is on board. Particularly with the other facts being dug up, which only added fuel to the fire.

It was fun for a while, but like any joke on Reddit, it's also been run into the ground to the point of obnoxiousness, and you kind of see users becoming tired of it in responses to protest updates.

Which I don't really blame them for. From a user standpoint, it does seem a little like a moderator/admin spat that they're just caught in the crossfire of. They're used to their cozy little community, and don't have much of a desire to leave it, or see it shut down. In fairness, there aren't very many good alternatives, either. Kbin and Lemmy are nice and all, but they both much younger, and much more limited compared to Reddit, in addition to having problems like some instances (like Lemmy.ml, or Kbin.Social) crashing under the load of new users, whilst also being less intuitive to begin with, if you're coming from Reddit.

As an alternative, I'm a bit more partial to the /r/politicalhumor method of just giving everyone moderator permissions instead. That way, nothing really changes if the users don't want it to, and it's effectively unmoderated without having to deal with potentially unsavoury content, or making as big of a mess of the sub.

From a Reddit perspective, changing things to John Oliver would get his attention, but at the end of the day, that's still more content for the site itself. Reddit Inc isn't going to care too much about what the content is, as long as they can spin it as "more content", and still put advertising revenue on it.

Given how that's been going, and how that subreddit apparently got caught in the crossfire, it kind of makes you wonder what's going on behind the scenes at Reddit. With a different person revoking it ~~and apologising~~, it kind of seems like the admins aren't really communicating to each other, and that some are putting out fires that the others are lighting.

EDIT: No Apology, just an explanation.

At the same time, it might not fit them. Lemmy is a link aggregator, which seems like extra functionality that they don't really need, not when existing forum software will do what they need, while also being more stable/mature.

Lemmy is pretty immature, and probably doesn't suit their needs compared to a forum.

They don't really need a link aggregator, so using Lemmy there wouldn't really make much sense.

The only thing that they might use Lemmy for is the community, but otherwise, it's not a great fit for what they need.

For those curious about what a defibrillator does do: It stops hearts.

Which might seem insanely counterintuitive, but it's great for when the heart gets stuck in a rhythm that prevents it from being able to pump properly, since stopping it lets it restart itself in a more normal rhythm.

Before we invented the defibrillator, doctors basically had to punch the patient in the chest to hopefully hit the heart at the right point to stop it. It does also mean that if you really know what you're doing, and got lucky with the timing/amount of force, you could technically pull off one of Kill Bill's death punches, although it would be a little less dramatic than them walking five steps before their heart explodes.

But unlike video games, unless you fry the heart itself, a defibrillator won't instantly kill someone. It will stop their heart, sure, but their heart will restart itself, unless something is wrong (stopped for too long, physical damage, irreversible chemical imbalance, etc)

"Metaverse" is mostly dead, anyway. It's basically turned into VR Bitcoin, and a worse version of the already existing VR.

A.I. seems to be the new shiny thing investors are moving into, and I'd be surprised if Facebook didn't just silently remove references to the metaverse eventually.

Fediverse, for the slightly cringey "verse" name, does seem to at least be trying something new. Federating multiple completely different sites like Mastodon, Kbin, or Lemmy isn't really something that was done before (that I can remember, feel free to correct if I'm wrong). You had some integrations with things like RSS and APIs before, but you couldn't just go on Twitter and post/reply/read a Reddit thread from within twitter, or you'd have to do it with a complicated network of bots.