What a missed opportunity.

Imagine an episode of DS9 where Quark, on Bashir's suggestion of how he buys more drinks when he's in a good mood, decides to have an open-mic comedy act on odd nights. Then he himself takes the stage in the third act, and ... bombs? slays? It could go either way, honestly.

Morn could even have a slot, only to get pre-empted at the microphone by a guest comedian.

Spock: It's comedy, but not as we know it.

That's actually key. The outside starch coat can't be at all sticky, and the grains have to separate enough to move around the wok. But not too dry as to resemble uncooked rice. Any other way, and you get a hot blob of rice with seasoning on the outside - basically a really rough fried mochi.

From the horror stories I've read on old Reddit, this is likely a deliberate decision to keep sharp objects out of the hands of table servers. It's for everyone's safety. Everyone.

That last panel. ::chef's kiss::

Data: Captain.

Picard: Thank you.

Beverly: Captain.

Picard: Make do.

Riker: Captain.

Picard: Make it so.

Geordi: Captain.

Picard: Proceed.

Worf: Captain.

Picard: Of course not.

Troi: Captain.

Picard: ...

Wesley: Captain.

Picard: Shut up.

For a lot of people in suburbia, the entire concept of indoor "third spaces" is mostly "pay to play" at the end of a drive. A big exception to this is/were shopping malls, but those aren't always close by. To get to more a functional social fabric, we have to provide more convenient ways of interfacing with our neighbors that don't always require money to change hands.

Perhaps this is a predictably orange-pill response, but we need to change zoning in a big way. Each suburban development has the street plan and infrastructure to support small businesses and common spaces, walking-distance from everyone's front door. All it takes is to allow small-scale commercial development in corners of these collections of tract-homes and, just like that, you can have something like a functional village. Beyond that, encouraging more development of community recreation space, both indoor and outdoor, would go a long way to provide a place for people to mingle.

Edit: strip-malls don't count. They're often at the very edge of residential areas, and are tied up with way more capital than what I'm talking about. That's why they're made up of franchises, require ridiculous amounts of parking, and contribute to "stroads" and all the knock-on effects and hostile architecture that requires.

Watching people repair old electronics on Youtube has opened my eyes to the realities of real-world electrical engineering. In short: it's all about tolerances.

A power supply may have a nominal voltage of 5V, but anything from 4.8 to 5.2 is a-okay. Why? Because your TTL components downstream of that can tolerate that. Components that do 5V logic can define logic zero as anything between 0 and 0.8 volts, and logic one as low as 2 volts. That's important since the whole voltage rail can fluctuate a lot when devices use more power, or draw power simultaneously. While you can slap capacitors all over the place to smooth that out, there's still peaks and dips over time.

Meanwhile, some assembly lines have figured out how to aggressively cost-reduce goods by removing whole components from some circuits. Just watch some Big Clive videos. Here, the tendency is to lean heavily into those tolerances and just run parts hot, under/over powered, or just completely outside the published spec because the real-deal can take it (for a while). After all, everything is a resistor if you give it enough voltage, an inductor if the wire's long enough, a capacitor if the board layout is a mess, and a heatsink if it's touching the case.

I'd hate to be the one to say this, but that's not what people mean by "picking up girls."

If you don't change the menu, but substitute processed products for meat, then it very much is more expensive. If you change what you're eating entirely, and go after the no/low processed route, you can do pretty well.

Having cut a bunch of things out of my diet due to food sensitivities, I routinely see people struggle to imagine what dining looks like for me. A lot of folks have a very fixed view of cuisine and the day-to-day of making meals at home. All I had to do was eat less "American" food and more "East Asian" food; suggesting this makes some heads explode. IMO, a lot of people are not prepared to change that much, and will conjure any plausible excuse to avoid that struggle.

let his family live and instead have written a story about living in diasporas

Given that Discovery had plenty of Afrofuturism themes at this point in the story, this really seems like an obvious go-to for where to go next. Booker's homeworld wasn't perfect, but it was more perfect than anything else going at the time; losing it was a tragedy that really needed a better epilogue. Rebuilding that place, or helping his people find a new home (probably with the Trills), is a very compelling arc and would have seen the character come unto their own. We really should have seen Booker find a place among the Federation delegates by the end of the series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrofuturism

due to some strange quirk of their time travel.

While that's kind of a trope all by itself, I agree that would have been far superior to the apocalypse crybaby reveal.