Leaving aside the quality of Rock Band vs. Fortnite, there are some other key differences:
Playing with your friends in the same room. With Fortnite I think that’s possible on consoles, but it isn’t how people tend to play. If you’re not playing games with friends in the same room (at least sometimes) you’re missing out.
A variety of games. Almost nobody exclusively played Guitar Hero, or Rock Band. They were just one of many games people played. For some reason, kids these days seem to be hyper-focused on one game. First it was Minecraft, next it was Fortnite. My nephew switched to League of Legends next, and again, it’s all he plays. I can understand getting hyper-focused an MMO, because they try to pile in all kinds of content: quests, raids, dungeons, professions, seasonal events, exploration, PvP, PvE, etc. But, Fortnite and LoL lack a lot of those features.
There’s a famous Churchill quote about democracy that is almost always misquoted:
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
To me, the key words that are often left out entirely are: that have been tried.
For the Aztecs in this picture, it may actually be true that their system was the best one they’d tried so far. Maybe ritual sacrifice of a tiny minority was a small price to pay compared to what they’d experienced until then. Representative democracy with voting rights for all citizens over the age of majority might be the best system we’ve tried so far. Kings willing to devolve some power to their barons in the Magna Carta was the best system for England so far.
We shouldn’t stop trying to make things better. Otherwise we’re like these Aztecs.
Meanwhile virtually every possible (and infrequent) side-effect of the vaccine is also a possible (and frequent) side-effect of COVID.
Like, cardiac issues are possible, very rare side effects of the vaccine. Cardiac issues are common side effects of getting COVID. So, even if you’re really worried about one specific side-effect of the vaccine like pulmonary embolism – guess what, you’re much more likely to have one if you don’t get the vaccine because then you’re much more likely to get it as a COVID side-effect.
This makes me wish even more for a Star Trek spinoff about the lowest-ranked people on a starship.
Even aside from its cartoonish style and stories, the characters in Lower Decks are too high ranking and too involved. They’re ensigns, and they often interact with the captain. They’re almost never in the dark about what’s happening, and often they’re instigating things.
What I want to see are the non-commissioned people, like Chief O’Brien in his TNG days. It would be really interesting to see things from the PoV of a character who had no say in what was happening, who didn’t really know what was happening except in rumours, and the only time they heard from the top-ranking officers was in ship-wide announcements and so-on.
I’d especially like to see a security team of literal red-shirts beaming down to a hostile planet. Not as part of a standard away team involving the highest ranking officers on the ship. I want a squad of NCOs who are expendable to go down to secure a site so that it’s safe enough that the first officer and doctor can beam down. So many of Star Trek’s episodes are about politics, espionage, secret deals, etc. I’d love to see things from the PoV of a red-shirt security NCO who isn’t cleared to know any of that, but is just told to beam down and secure the landing zone / beam-in zone. Or, better yet, is part of a team that’s sent out in a shuttlecraft weeks ahead, and has to set up a stealthy observation post and camp out, waiting for the Enterprise to arrive. I want NCOs in dirty work gear, not clean uniforms, camping out on a lonely planet not because they’re stranded, just because they have orders to set up the site and wait for the ship.