There were protests and threats aimed at TOS for being too progressive, particularly on racial issues. TOS didn’t make the command structure clear but as bridge officers and department heads Uhura and Sulu can’t be any lower than 6th in command and TOS had the first interracial kiss on television. Yeah it’s pretty bad looking back at it now but keeping in mind that the first season aired less than 2 years after the end of segregation helps temper the shock.
She’s described as an empath rather than a telepath but she does display telepathic abilities. I think she’s just a weak telepath by betazoid standards and that’s why they highlight her abilities as an empath. In Encounter at Farpoint Troi is able to communicate mind to mind with Riker suggesting that with some time and emotional connection at will or continuous mind reading is a possibility for her.
It’s not so much the contradictory expectations that bother me, it’s how success and failure are framed in modern society. The messaging is that for cis white men success should be externalized and failure should be internalized while for everyone not cis white and male it’s the opposite. The messaging is that the system is built for the benefit of cis white men so when they succeed it’s because the system pushed them to success and when they fail they do so in spite of the system pushing them to succeed so their failures are do to some particular flaw within themselves. The system is built for the benefit of cis white men so when someone who isn’t cis white and male succeeds they do so despite the system pushing them to fail so the success is because of some special strength within themselves and when they fail it’s because the system pushed them to failure.
There is truth to the premise that the system is built for the benefit of cis white men but the system doesn’t push cis white men to succeed, especially not poor and working class men. It does give cis white men advantages but it does so primarily by creating additional barriers for people who aren’t cis white and male. Your parents economic status is the most reliable indicator for success.
TNG’s “The Battle” is an outlier in that it’s one of the franchise’s best episodes in spit of being a TNG Ferengi episode. Otherwise TNG Ferengi episodes are not good but even if they were it would be unfair to make them try to stand up to Quark centered episodes. Quark’s is the Star Trek sitcom spinoff we deserved but never got.
They are, when you buy a game from gog they send you the installation files. You install and run it with your own hardware whereas with Steam and other digital gaming companies you are just getting access to the game on their servers. By sending you the installers and letting you play independently from their servers gog gives up the ability to lock you out. It’s the primary reason that they should be the first choice for where to buy a digital version of a game. The upside is that it’s the closest you can get to actually owning a digital copy of a game; the downside is that playing on another device requires that you transfer files and reinstall rather than just logging into a remote server.