I find Neelix really difficult to watch in the early seasons. His stubborn attitude, jealousy and overall inappropriate relationship with Kez… Makes me sick to me stomach watching him.
Context: I am biased. I’ve been underage and been with men like Neelix. They are pathetic, narcissistic and not worth anyone’s time.
Except for Dogman, who was bitten by a radioactive dog during a school trip. Now he can use scent to track his enemies and hear a bad guy whisper across a building.
From a mental health POV, having dogs has definitely helped me maintain routine, reduce emotional escalation and kept me aware of how I am accountable to keep them going too.
Sometimes you can get so stuck in your ways, thinking in the moment you need to panic to survive. It takes a cute animal reacting to that to make you realise there’s other ways to be.
tl;dr - Dogs teach us to be better people.
I became so good at masking because of coming from a environment where my needs weren’t met and my true self wasn’t safe to exist. I was often more concerned about making sure my parents didn’t pop off that I developed an unhealthy way of looking at the world where I put the needs of others above myself - to the point of complete self destruction in front of people who cared about me.
Over the years I finally realised what was going on, but it took being with another person who also has autism and C-PTSD to observe the behaviours in one another and finally take control. In some ways it is a little tragic we both went through so much hardship while having our basic needs ignored from a young age, but in another way I’m so grateful for the miracle of having found a person who perfectly fits my broken parts so we can guide each other through it with understanding and experience.
I regret the times I’ve treated others unfairly because of the pressures of life and not having the resources or wisdom to do things properly. I’m doing my best now to make amends for my past mistakes, heal myself and move into the future with healthy boundaries. I’ve been hurt in ways I can’t even begin to explain, I require a certain amount of medication just to function but I’m still here and I feel optimistic for the future. It’s going to be hard work to rebuild the things I’ve lost, but I’m motivated to do good for myself and for the new family I’m building.
The worst part is all our data is stored on American servers run by megacorpos. ID information scanned by venue terminals is one, but even private health records and sensitive government documents are being chucked into Amazon S3, Azure/OneDrive and Dropbox.
The government should be prioritising secure, independent digital infrastructure but they’re too busy giving our tax dollars to foreign consulting firms so they can build bad websites.
Advertising doesn’t seem like a large enough lever to drive something this globally coordinated.
My read is that governments and large institutions are preparing for the kind of systemic instability climate change is going to produce.
Across the world we’re already seeing laws and policies that quietly restrict the ability to organise, protest, or remain anonymous online, while surveillance capabilities expand at the same time. None of this is particularly popular, yet it keeps happening.
Why?
Because the next few decades are likely to involve continuous pressure from climate-driven problems: migration, water shortages, falling crop yields, energy instability, and the political conflict that follows when resources get tighter.
From that perspective, universal ID verification online isn’t mainly about ads or “protecting the kids”. It’s about mapping who is who, who talks to who, and how information spreads.
If you expect future mass unrest, protest movements, or large-scale political instability, that kind of data becomes extremely valuable.
And historically, elites often choose to invest more effort in managing the consequences of systemic problems than in solving the underlying causes.
So instead of “AI spam broke advertising”, the bigger story might be that institutions are building the infrastructure to monitor and manage populations during a much messier future.