Basilisk

It's an alternate art in relation to its first printing and not a showcase or anything, but the MID printing of Abrade is amazing. If we're limiting it strictly to variant printings, I think Embereth Shieldbreaker

I remember reading someone joke about this line somewhere about how that song is probably about Sybok and J'onn on Nimbus III.

"Move Along Home" is objectively pretty not great, but I have to admit I really like it too. I appreciate what they were trying to do with it and they just never really got there. It's a plot that I've cribbed for running D&D games in the past when player are unable to make a session. The party gets trapped in the game and the missing player/s is/are the one who's on the outside trying to get them free.

I'd watch Shades of Grey a dozen times over on repeat before wanting to watch Code of Honor.

It's hard to watch The Wrath of Khan where the Reliant fires and hits the Enterprise's neck and not think "Gee, if Khan had got a bit more of a shot in, that would've been the end of the movie right there." Beyond even followed through on that. I love the Enterprise's design and love the way that it shows that it's in space by not being constrained by the rules you need to follow in gravity but it's definitely not a tactically sound design.

But then my favourite ship design is the Steamrunner which is equally impractical so sometimes tactics can go out the window for a pretty ship.

The Mayan Riviera is absolutely gorgeous, but it's not exactly a representative sample for what moving to Mexico would be like, and a vacation there is not the same as moving there either. I'll very happily visit the US. I'll do the touristy things, I'll meet with my American friends, I'll go to Vegas for a weekend and melt into a puddle. But if I were picking up and moving I would want to be good and damn sure that my life there would be an improvement and that's not a great bet in a lot of cases in the US, especially when one half of the government is actively, intentionally and openly working to make everyone's life worse and there's a reasonable chance that they'll be back in power with the next election. And even if they aren't they're still able to act through state government and the Supreme Court.

I've been doing some figuring to see if leaving the country is feasible for myself, but the US doesn't make my short list of destinations. It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

It wasn't intentional. The Starfleet Delta was something Zac's followers had done to honour him, it wasn't intended as a lure.

Just to keep the conspiracy going, I agree, and also feel like at least some of that has to be from the studios themselves. Like, anti-woke protests are obnoxious, but they're also advertising for whatever they're protesting against. Some people will hate-watch it. Some will tune in just to see what the fuss is about. It would take relatively little investment to seed a few trolls out there and rile up the anti-woke crowd to create engagement that far outstrips traditional advertising, so why shouldn't Paramount kick the hornet's nest a bit?

I, for one, appreciate Wizards' efforts to make sure I keep my money in my wallet...

The only one whose art even slightly interests me is the Ralph Bakshi one, and the cards there are so pathetically worthless, both for cash value and usability in any of my decks that is a really easy pass. Last one was the same. Feels like they went hard early in the SL runs with good, interesting lairs to get people on board, and they're already scraping the bottom of the barrel.

I'm just kinda thrilled to see Canada in the Star Trek universe. Obviously they've been doing a bunch of filming out of Toronto so technically we have seen it, but it's nice for them to sidestep the fact that 99% of the time they get thrown into Earth's past and they end up in California. Kirk "recognizing" the city as New York was a cute touch given how often Toronto doubles for it. Also technically I guess this means that the greatest tyrant in Earth's history technically is canonically Canadian too.

Kirk being a chess hustler was cute too, explaining how he's able to keep up when playing Spock in TOS.

Aside from that, the episode was fine. I like seeing La'an getting some development, and seeing her spar with M'Benga (and getting beaten) was nice since it justifies him being actually kind of a badass, and makes the fight scenes in the first episode of the season more reasonable. Also a bit more behind the curtain of Pelia.

A lot of the episode was just goofy "man out of time" stuff, which is cute in its own right but doesn't really add a ton. But it was entertaining and fun, and worth watching again, so I'm still calling it a winner.

Ro Laren and Elizabeth Shelby have entered the chat.

I mean, the fundamental problem with "Dear Doctor" is that it completely misunderstands every point that it's meaning to make. Phlox may as well have said he was refusing to treat the Valakians because God told him not to. Evolution doesn't have a will. It didn't "want" the Menk to take over the planet any more than it "wanted" the dodo to go extinct. While this might have been what happened if Enterprise had never come by, if it's right to help save the Valakians if there had been no one else to replace them, then it's also right to save them as they live alongside the Menk.