There's no ethical consumption under capitalism. And it's not like HL was handmade by JKR herself, there were plenty of people working on it who I'm sure aren't transphobic and whose livelihoods are connected to the franchise as a result, some of whom are probably trans themselves.

The "separate the art from the artist" argument just always rings a little hollow to me. I tend to be put off when people cling to a franchise that is owned by a person who profits off hateful rhetoric and contributing to an unsafe environment for us. It feels like continuing to enjoy her art continues to platform her hate and shows people that being transphobic not only isn't a deal breaker, it's acceptable and profitable.

Anyone can have shares of anything, so that's kind of moot. Even if suddenly Minecraft stopped making money, it would not affect Notch in the least. From what I can tell he might kind of like it, he seems to be kind of bitter about it. Though who knows what's legit and what's a grift at this point.

Picard is definitely the worst for this. It's woefully generic and miserable.

On the other hand, SNW feels like it has much more of the TOS-era vibrancy, LD is pretty similar to TNG in terms of setting (plus modern humor of course)... Prodigy even takes the novel approach of seeming like generic sci-fi at first only to become probably the most similar to 90s Trek out of all the new shows, albeit in kid's show format. Still, it's really fun and is all about the hope the Federation represents.

And for that matter, while early Discovery is pretty dark, I feel like Discovery gets more hopeful. Sure, the 32nd century has kind of a "fallen utopia" thing going on, but it very quickly turns into rebuilding and by the end they're looking hopefully to the future as they're expanding their borders again. It's different from the previous eras of Trek, but it's still hopeful.

Weirdly, we see it happen in the 23rd century before replicators were invented, so it was a "synthesizer", not a replicator.

WG uses UDP, so as long as your firewall is configured correctly it should be impossible to scan the open port. Any packet hitting the open port that isn't valid or doesn't have a valid key is just dropped, same as any ports that are closed.

Most modern firewalls default to dropping packets, so you won't be showing up in scans even with an open WG port.

The "make a fork" thing is part of the issue, I think. In general there's this culture in the open source community that if you want a feature, you should implement it yourself and not expect the maintainers to implement it for you. And that's good advice to some extent, it's great to encourage more people to volunteer and it's great to discourage entitlement.

But on the other hand, this is toxic because not everyone can contribute. Telling non-technical users to "make it yourself" is essentially telling them to fuck off. To use the house metaphor, people don't usually need to design and renovate their houses on their own, because that's not their skillset, and it's unreasonable to expect that anyone who wants a house should become an architect.

Even among technical users, there are reasons they can't contribute. Not everyone has time to contribute to FOSS, and that's especially notable for non-programmers who would have to get comfortable with writing code and contributing in the first place.

Goes to show I don't know much about SSO I suppose. Time to do some more research

CSAM is supposed to be more explicit that the images are essentially crime scene photographs, and to emphasize that it is Abuse first and foremost and not merely pornography.

CP is a morally neutral term, or at least the components words themselves are. CSAM is not, and is explicitly negative.

Out of curiosity, who do you see as the LGBTQ+ characters? I can think of a few, but outside of mirror universe eps no one is actually established as queer. It's all subtext, or implied.

Then there's the big lesbian kiss with Jadzia, and that's awesome, but immediately after they decide that they shouldn't be doing this and they go their separate ways, and Jadzia never to my knowledge expresses her attraction to a woman again. Even in that case, it's unique because said woman used to be a man. It's not Jadzia just being attracted to a woman on her own merits.

What's big about new Trek is that the characters are actually queer in the text, not just subtext. I'm a big fan of reading Garak and Bashir as queer, but they're fundamentally not good representation because as far as the story itself is concerned, they're two straight men. It's only through the actors' performances that the queer implications shine through.

There is a standard naming convention, and it predates the creation of Discovery. Voyager is VOY, and Enterprise is ENT. No one calls Voyager "STV", as that would cause confusion with Star Trek V, the movie. If you've ever used Memory Alpha or participated in a fan community like Daystrom you'll know that this has been standard for a long time. By extension, Discovery is DIS, Picard is PIC, and Prodigy is PRO.

DSC is a special case because it's used internally by the production (even shows up in the show itself once or twice) so some people have taken to using it, but it's not consistent with the other naming schemes we use so it's not standard. In fact, when it came out that Voyager was referred to internally as VGR, basically no one switched because everyone was so used to calling it VOY.

This is certainly an interesting topic. There are men who are comfortable wearing dresses and wearing makeup and all that, just as there are women who are comfortable with cutting their hair short and wearing baggy clothes and all that. It's also true that those people are sometimes harassed and called "eggs" by people who are ostensibly trans-friendly (especially fem-presenting guys).

But I don't think that that is equivalent to the trans experience. I assume you're not trans, correct me if I'm wrong, but dysphoria is a real thing that for many people is very deeply related to physical body parts, and your theory just doesn't account for that at all. I don't think that your average fem-presenting guy wants to take HRT to get breasts, let alone go to the extra length of getting bottom surgery and get vaginoplasty. There's clearly something more about dysphoria than it just being a matter of what they like differing from what's socially acceptable, unless you broaden it so wide as "liking having breasts or a vagina" or "liking having a penis", and even that is a stretch because dysphoria is a very visceral sense of wrongness in one's body that goes much deeper than just preferring a different body part.

Not all dysphoria is physical, either. It can relate to misgendering, or any number of societal things that aren't necessarily related to just what we're "allowed" to do. Frankly, unless gender is outright abolished and there are no longer distinctions between genders or even societal differentiation between sexes, I don't see it going away. And even in a post-gender world, I imagine there would still be trans people (perhaps by another name) who experienced physical dysphoria.

Your theory also doesn't account for trans people who present as would be socially acceptable for their assigned gender at birth, and have interests that are similar to their AGAB, but still identify as trans and even may experience dysphoria.

All in all, while I appreciate your conclusion to support trans people, I disagree with your reasoning. I don't think that being trans is merely a result of one's likes not being in line with societal norms. I think it goes much deeper than that, and can't be reduced to such a simple cause.

I tried to play it when it came out, but there were some visual issues that started to give me a migraine so I put it down and just haven't picked it up since. At some point I'll give it another shot and see if they fixed the migraine issue haha