I swear I've seen this exact prompt before....

Huh. It's not often you come across a depiction of Hell more derived from scripture than from Dante's Inferno. I like it. Well done.

So here's my thought on The Metaverse: The Zuck was about 5 years too late. VR Chat already gave us what he wants to sell and doesn't cost a damn thing other than the hardware to access it. Why would we pay for what he's peddling when someone else already did it better and gave it to us for free?

You're mostly correct. It's one of those details that we gloss over in science fiction because we're too busy telling a story to bother with details that don't contribute to the story, but yeah. The thing we're going to will have moved by the time we get there.

One detail that you forgot about, however, is the contraction of space. Granted, that may not be a thing at FTL since we wouldn't be traveling through flat space if we were going faster than light, but it may still matter. As you approach light speed space contracts from your frame of reference. I'm too lazy to do the math and get the exact figure right at the moment, but in the scenario you laid out you'd cover that 25,000 lightyears in significantly less than 25 years (from your perspective) thanks to this phenomenon.

Ugh. This is just a reminder of why I view Nietzsche with such distaste.

Which takes a stronger man: To serve his own self-interest or to willingly make the world a better place knowing that he is doing so at cost to himself? The denial of self in the pursuit of a better world undeniably takes more and stronger will than selfish acts. To call such a thing weak is delusion.

The first few books are worth the read. I wouldn't go past book 4 though.

I used to love the series, but it got to the point where it was just too much in-your-face objectivism.

Putin granted him citizenship last month apparently. Beyond that we don't know.

Barrels are rotted by microorganisms, which cannot survive in alcohol, especially on in the concentrations of any alcohol you would want to age. Take whiskey for instance. Whiskey can be as much as 60% or 70% alcohol while it's aging, which is plenty to kill any microbe.

What came of it was the man who exposed the government's illegal activities was forced to flee to Russia. That's it. No one ever answered for, or stopped, the illegal spying on the American public, and Snowden can never return to the US for fear of being arrested. He should be hailed as a hero, but half the country for some absurd reason views him as a traitor.

I'll use a relatively recent occurrence as an example.

The state legislature in Kansas has a GOP supermajority, meaning that the GOP has all the power. After the recent census, they had to redraw the district maps to reflect changes in the population.

The city of Lawrence is one of the largest Democrat dominant areas in Kansas. When the GOP redrew the district maps, they cut Lawrence into four parts that combined with other areas. The end result of this is that instead of one Democrat dominant district surrounded by GOP dominant districts there are now four GOP dominant districts and no Democrat dominant ones. The way the map is drawn is clearly biased and ridiculous by any standard, but it serves to further cement the power of the far-right GOP in a state which, were the will of the people to actually be reflected, would be very moderate.

My biggest problem with my SO is her absolute refusal to exist. Any idea how I should broach that conversation?

OK, seriously though, all joking aside, this is very good advice.

The purpose of green screens is to give a solid background that is easy to remove in video editing software. Green is an idea color for this purpose because it's a primary color for human vision that does not show up in any appreciable amount in human skin tones. Human skin tones are mostly red, so blue is also viable, but green ends up working better because reddish-green or greenish-red isn't a thing for human vision.