I also run at night an I find it safer after 10pm than during early evening or daytime. Other than my running shirt and shorts, which are an obnoxious high viz color scheme, I wear a headlamp as well. Oh, and an Apple Watch as I’m tracking mileage with the goal of running a thousand miles this year. As a bad athlete (I ran 22mi last year), part of my attraction to running is the lack of necessary gear.

I’ve got a whole box of inks, many colors I adore using, but for any functional usage I find I’m always reverting back to Platinum Carbon Black.

This. FP usage changed my aversion to writing and helped me stay the course on re-training myself to write cursive and move past RSI/cramping. Pilot VP is my goto FP for meeting notes since it’s retractable.

I had pretty terrible RSI (and even more terrible handwriting) and could write much without cramping up or pain. What helped for me was teaching myself proper cursive and fountain pens. Rather than clutching a ballpoint and marking with jerky finger/wrist movements, I now use my arm for larger movements and let the pen glide. It’s helped tremendously. It’s slow going at first but keep at it. Plus fountain pens are pretty fucking cool. Also, paper matters too; but paper and notebooks are another fun rabbit hole.

Or a warp core!

Try reversing the polarity

ST:TAS had some surprisingly good scripts for something that was somewhat a 70’s kids cartoon. Very much enjoyed how animation allowed them to run wild where practical effects wouldn’t have been possible (for better or worse at times, lol).

I adored Lower Decks. It was the right way to approach fan service for a franchise as I hate seeing fan service awkwardly ham fisted into every corner of nutrek. Some of the later seasons were a bit awkward, or rushed?, but overall I adored it. Terrific character development and overall really told that story of that period between being a bunch of green academy grads and being adaptable, competent professionals.

If only ST:TAS hadn't given us the Holodeck... IMHO TNG would have been better without the holodeck episodes.

I’ve leaned heavily on em-dashes over the years to help reduce my lisp-worthy overuse of parentheses. My add brain loves adding tangents, (likely unnecessary) context, and excessive completeness. I like both em-dashes and parenthesis b/c they’re visually easy to parse and skim past if the reader finds the extra detail unnecessary.

Funny enough, my kid asked me to proofread their essay the other week, and I noted some awkward comma usage and inconsistent voice. We talked through options for breaking apart sentence clauses as well as punctuation that could do the heavy lifting—specifically semicolons and em-dashes. They thought the em-dash looked cool af and semicolons looked harsh. “I love em-dashes, they’re so cool!”, was fun to hear a middle schooler say.

Ofc their teacher said that their essay was “likely 85% AI assisted.” Fortunately, the change log showed continual revisions during school hours on a managed device (ChatGPT blocked). I emailed their teacher that I had proofed it, highlighted an awkward spot or two, and pointed my kid to grammar devices they could explore themselves and apply if they wished. No harm, no foul.

Fast forward, my kid and their friend were talking about it and the friend told them to do what they do: intentionally sprinkle in grammar / spelling mistakes. le sigh I suggested to them that LLMs can easily do that too and they’re better off just learning to write well as it’s em-dash today and something else tomorrow; that the worst thing would be to dumb down style/vocab/grammar for fear of appearing LLM generated.

So it goes.