Laser blasters are lame because they're supposed to be futuristic, but simple guns would be so much more effective. Same thing with Star Trek handheld weapons.

Stop reading anything that's more than one or two sentences. It's either a bot or someone who can't be concise and to the point.

There's no shortage of fiction. Why wade through so many bad stories to find the good ones?

Also, — obviously my opinion — it's hard to get past some of the lame stuff in Star Wars. Laser blasters and light sabers are lame. Space magic is lame. Training up young wizards only to have the empire turn them over and over and over is lame. I think cute puppets are lame. The motivation of low to mid ranked individuals in the empire is lame. Almost none of the characters on either side ever have any fun, and it makes for dimensionless characters.

Maybe much of this is improved in some books or shows I haven't seen.

I completed Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, and it was good, but the Star Wars parts made it worse.

Mass Effect 3 ending is fine. They improved it after people complained, and the remaster will undoubtedly contain the DLC that should have been included in the base story all along.

Anything that's long and really good in the beginning and middle almost always leads to a disappointing ending. Expectations get impossibly high, and endings are disappointing by their nature.

Rather than look for Star Wars stories that aren't terrible, just forget about Star Wars.

If you want something good, watch The Expanse. If you want good space video games, Mass Effect 1-3 remastered will be out in less than a year.

I think I will buy put contracts.

GameStop isn't hurting because they need back office improvements. They're hurting because there's no reason to go to GameStop. New console boost will be over in 2 quarters. And Funcopop sales aren't going to make up for traffic lost to online and digital.

That’s 3 paragraphs of politics in a Covid discussion from someone who pretends he doesn't want Covid to be about politics.

If someone wants to work an irregular schedule around their college classes, he wants the government to forbid it. They need benefits!!!! Even though they are on their parents' insurance and they never go to the doctor anyway.

Retired and just want to earn a few bucks giving car rides and talking to people? No! You need benefits!! Even though you already have Medicare. No work for you unless you give up being retired and commit to work 30-40 hours every week.

Why is it virtuous to force people out of arrangements they like and into arrangements they don't want?

Stop meddling in others' lives.

Worse in short term. In longer term, maybe worse, maybe not. What's your complaint with taking it more seriously than the flu, as I said? Flu is also serious.

You should read what you wrote. Level-headed people don't write like that.

How can disease death rate over time not be relevant?

Did you ever see a documentary where they talked about people visiting an Amazon tribe and infecting them with influenza? They had no immunity from getting similar illnesses in the past, so it killed way too many of them. Once. Then after that, it wasn't the same type of threat.

Covid is new. It's either especially deadly because it has special deadly aspects, or it is especially deadly merely because it's new. In the first case, it may be more deadly than influenza. In the second case, it may be more deadly or much less deadly than influenza. We don't know. If we did, we could make some choices and save some lives and improve some other lives. Seems relevant to me.

Except influenza has a history we can look at for insight and Covid does not.

I am not the one making proclamations about what we know about diseases. I'm the one saying we shouldn't draw long term conclusions based on less than 1 year of data.

It still leads to unknowns about how deadly Covid will be over time. We don't know. Might be move deadly than flu over ten years, might be less. We don't know.

There's no evidence that any other measures would have changed the outcomes significantly for the better. You can look at dozens of countries with dozens of different policy timelines. They all got hit by Covid in unexpected ways. Everything was under control there and they were geniuses ... and then a few weeks later a huge wave of cases. No rules, strict rules, medium rules, mandates, no mandates, police enforcement of mandates, no tracing, detailed tracing, lockdowns, no lockdowns, etc. They mostly all still ended up with a huge wave of cases. Sometimes a second or third wave. All the measures seem to do is postpone the waves. Show me today's geniuses, I'll show you some people who will be humbled by a wave of Covid cases shortly.

Everything in the US gets politicized because (among other things) the news media are assholes who hate Americans.

Go ahead and wish things were better all you want though.

Getting one type of flu often gives you a partial immune response to other types. They are related.