I’ve never been able to get orchids to successfully rebloom. What did you do?

What beautiful, bittersweet memories. Thank you for sharing them.

It’s pineapple on a pizza. Of course it’s good.

Like a record baby

Lol

Jesus. Who are the numbnut 62% who chose Yes?

No, of course it’s not healthy. I’m just saying it’s not violent.

In a marriage/committed partnership, I think most people would consider a fight to be an argument with raised voices and some ill feeling. I really don’t think most people consider shouting to be violent. Upsetting, maybe, but violent?

Please give him a smooch for me, looks so soft and cuddly!

Snoot boops and butt scritches for my favorite internet longboye 🥰

My wacky headcanon is that K’Ehylar was just Q cosplaying as a Klingon because she was bored. And Alexander sucks so bad because the Q don’t know how to raise children.

I love how diplomatic Martok was there

Hey different strokes for different folks ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But personally I love her. Tough as nails, hardened but hopeful. Actually a reasonably well written woman in scifi, which in the '90s was pretty rare.

So of course over the years her uniform became a catsuit (obligatory “fuck you, Rick Berman”).

You’re thinking of an Enterprise episode. Kira Nerys is Bajoran.

This is salamander baby erasure and I won’t stand for it.

He’s bad to the (milk)bone

Oh wow - thanks!

That’s not Crusher, it’s probably Diana Giddings.

Socks are like little blankies for my feets.

The biggest pockets of prejudice in the US seem to be the most homogenous. Homogeneous white Christian culture does seem to lead to racism, antisemitism, and a general dislike of progressives. It’s easy to convince yourself what “others” must be like when you’ve never met one and have always been taught bad things about them.

My dad is Jewish and lived briefly in Arizona in the '70s. People actually asked - with a straight fucking face! - to see his horns. Because that’s the stereotype they grew up hearing and never thought to question it.

I’m white. I mostly grew up in central Jersey in the '80s & '90s in a pretty diverse area, with a mix of blue and white collar. My school district was about 45% white (about 2/3 Catholic and 1/3 Jewish), 45% Black, and the rest were mostly Hispanic and Asian (largely Filipino and Vietnamese). I never heard a white person say the N word. My best friend in grade school was Black, and that wasn’t unusual in any way. We all liked R&B and that was the majority of what was played at school dances. Black History Month was taken very seriously and concepts in race and racial sensitivity were taught all the time (not just February). They did not flinch away from teaching about how horrific slavery was. Over the course of about a week, we watched Roots in the auditorium in Junior High (and little me, who loved TNG, was so excited to see Levar Burton, and absolutely wrecked after watching it). We discussed Rodney King & the LA riots, we talked about the OJ Simpson trial. Anyway my point was that we were steeped in racial awareness, both historic and present-day, and there was very little conflict along racial lines.

The summer before junior year, we moved to a white-ass upper-middle class suburb of Philly, where my new high school had about 3,000 kids (roughly 1,000 each in grades 10, 11, & 12), and there were about 5 Black kids total. I don’t remember there being any non-white kids in any of my classes. None of our classes taught anything about race, and Black History Month wasn’t even mentioned. And in my first week of school there, waiting at the bus stop, all the white boys were trying to look cool by using the N word constantly, just absolutely casually. I was horrified, because to me this was such an awful thing to say, I couldn’t understand why they were so comfortable saying it. Everything they said about Black people was based on an offensively cartoonish stereotype. And then I realized those guys had probably never even met a Black person, so Black folks were an abstract idea to them rather than actual people.

Anyway this has turned into a novel, but I thought it was an interesting microcosm. We need a strong program of racial awareness and history taught to kids throughout their education. What worries me is places like Florida trying to remove slavery from history curricula for K-12. That will cause ignorance, which eventually leads to hatred or contempt.

Of course, there are so many more aspects of race relations and generational disparity, but I don’t have the mental energy to address them right now.