Usually, but I love the optimistic fanfare of the TNG intro, and it has a habit of drawing me in.

This is extra frustrating in daily games.

I’ve gotten into chess for the past year, and while I used Lichess for a little bit, I wound up going with chess.com primarily instead. The app is great. The learning modules are really helpful, and I love the puzzles.

It also has tens of millions of users on the platform, so your matchmaking is going to be more accurate, whether you need to be matched with opponents who just learned how the pieces move, all the way up to the top professional players.

As for outside resources, I’ve been mostly learning from random masters/GMs that have youtube channels.

You can’t expect her to move the bishop all that way.

We need a fourth, derpy-er dragon.

This is great. I have a new daily game to play. Thanks for sharing!

The lesson is forgotten the moment the next match starts.

Yes, this one was tragic.

If someone wasn’t in the comments saying this, or “that asphalt isn’t the right type for La Guardia”, or “based on the sky in the background, this is actually somewhere in the southern hemisphere”, then I’d be on the wrong website.

This is why I love TNG so much. Even though TOS is the original that laid the groundwork for everything, TNG took that “boundless optimism” and ran with it. Watching TNG inspires me to continue to self-improve and encourage it in others.

The Lindbergh baby has been wandering around La Guardia for decades like Tom Hanks in The Terminal.

Lol, there are just so many random variations of every opening that it’s virtually impossible to know them all. It’s sometimes helpful to see what an opening is called so that you can potentially look it up later, but 99% of the time I feel like Michael in the meme.

I’m lost and genuinely can’t tell if you’re joking or mad.

I’ve still not tried it. I should probably turn off chat and give it a go.

That’s a good point. I think this contrast between individual (often flawed) human judgment vs collectivist ideals has always been a theme. In TOS, you see Kirk calming McCoy’s knee-jerk reactions almost every episode. In TNG, it was Yar or Worf. In DS9, probably Kira.

Even then, I would say the collectivist ideals (i.e. Starfleet regulations) were more often portrayed as overly-cumbersome in implementation, which leads to someone like Kirk violating the rules in place of the ideals that they stand for. For example, how many naïve (but well-meaning) diplomats do we see in TOS or TNG? However, rules being restrictive or imperfect in an effort to support larger agreed-upon morals can still be trusted, compared to corrupt power structures, which cannot.

Ah damn, sorry about the paywall. It let me hit “continue reading” on mobile, but I know sometimes these types of sites can be inconsistent.

It’s just another tired bit about how following orders and perfect institutions are what Star Trek is really about, to hell with any evidence to the contrary.

I’d argue that the theme is less about following orders and more We are all individually flawed and are at our best when we follow our shared values - which is represented by both Starfleet and the utopian setting as a whole.

I can see the argument (for fiction and real life), that as we trust institutions less, our focus becomes more on individual judgement rather than collectivist ideas. It also tracks for me that as this occurs in real life, our media would reflect individualism more and more.