Same.  I never bought them specifically for that reason.

Wait... Aren’t those bags foil? But, yeah, I stopped buying the full set when they reached 4$ each... Now I only get the one(s) I really, really want...

I spent a long time standing around feeling, squishing, and massaging plastic mylar bags before thinking “what am I doing with my life?” and just deciding mini-figure collecting was no longer for me.

I loath blind bag with the fury of a thousand suns. There have been so many collectibles I would have loved to get over the years, but I patently refused to buy them because they were blind bagged.  It’s essentially gambling in my eyes.

I’m not a collector myself but everyone I’ve heard of who is even slightly into these as an adult is a “feeler” as it were, i.e. they attempt to discern the figure by touching - it’s part of what they enjoy about it, especially as like you, most people quote high success rates.

Welp, I huess that is the end of me collecting these minifigire series.

Oh yeah, hard agree here! It had such a dramatic backlash that I actually waited more than a year to play it after it came out. Then when I finally did I was like, “Oh actually, this is really great despite some of these rough edges!” And you’re right, instead of looking at any of the strengths, everyone took lessons…

I have high hopes because Mount was so good in Discovery and the talk about the nature of the show (episodic! fun!) is encouraging.

We just watched Star Trek Picard episode 9 which was arguably the WORST episode of Star Trek ever put on TV, and consequently also arguably the worst hour of anything Star Trek-related ever put on any medium.

Even great writers can lead a badly written show.

And he somehow completely misunderstood the character and Star Trek in general. I know someone who worked on the show and Chabon didn’t even know what the Borg were. Good writers can churn out shit. It happens all the time and it most certainly happened with Picard season 1.

It doesn’t, but that doesn’t mean it’s a problem. I think the biggest issue with both Discovery and Picard has been the need to stretch a premise across a season long arc.

they really need to hire better writers.

Discovery and Picard really make me miss episodic storytelling. everything in those shows is just so dumb and badly written. I wonder if the people writing them have ever even watched a Star Trek show.

Unfortunately not.

I can only hope it has a completely different set of writers.

++ Mythic Quest

Most of these carbon neutral and negative schemes fake it by using carbon offsetting, which is basically a book-keeping scam where a company says “sure, I’m pumping out tons of CO2 every day but I planted (or preserved) some trees so it all balances out”. It’s complete bullshit, they’re still spewing CO2 into the…

It’s becoming apparent that the greatest potential of crypto, NFT, and the blockchain is to immediately poison whoever tries to utilize them, making any company toxic and untouchable.

I mean, it’s Kickstarter. They’ve been blatant conspiracy theorists and assholes for nearly a decade. Probably the first sign was their attitude towards GMOs. The point about their size is spot on, they basically stumbled into being huge and then never bothered to do a good job.