Who needs search engines when you have me? Video Games * [With Stellaris, Paradox is making a better Star Trek game than any official Star Trek game](http://www.pcworld.com/article/3007737/software-games/with-stellaris-paradox-is-making-a-better-star-trek-game-than-any-official-star-trek-game.html) -- OK, the title could use some cleanup, but _Stellaris_ sounds really great. Politics * [In reversal, Trump expresses openness to raising minimum wage](http://thehill.com/policy/finance/278778-trump-expresses-openness-to-raising-minimum-wage) -- Pretty soon he's going to look like the most liberal candidate. Of course, he'll still be a horrible, repulsive racist and misogynist.

I was asked today what’s going on with the Hugo Awards. What’s this business about “sad puppies” and “rabid puppies”? Are you confused? I’ve got you covered. If you know what GamerGate is, you can think of the sad/rabid puppies as the science fiction literature equivalent. In many ways, they’re just another head on the same hydra. If you don’t know what GamerGate is, you can go educate yourself, but it’s not entirely necessary to understanding the Hugo situation.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) which made clear to me the level of frustration a lot of people have experienced with it. It also helped me realize how poor our health coverage options are, in general. The marketplace plans available to single young people with modest incomes bring either large premiums or large deductibles, running up an overall expense that can be several thousand dollars a year.

This is not how I thought this election season would go. I don’t mean that I didn’t expect Donald Trump to be the Republican Presidential nominee. I was reasonably certain he would be the one back in November. But I didn’t think things would unfold quite this way. I expected Ted Cruz to stick it out through the convention, to attempt a floor fight for the nomination as the alternative–the true conservative–candidate.

I’m short on time today, which means I must pursue the low-hanging fruit of mocking Ted Cruz. If you have not yet seen Ted Cruz for Human President, well, go there right now. Trust me. Protester tells Ted Cruz he looks like a fish monster: [embed]https://twitter.com/GMA/status/727456210677469184[/embed] Ted Cruz and Carly Fiorina attempt to imitate human friendship behavior and fail miserably: Ted Cruz gets heckled by a child and accused of being a serial killer.

This is a topic that, although I have no professional experience or qualifications with, I have quite a bit of personal experience to speak to. I do not have borderline personality disorder (BPD) myself, but I have had many friends and family members with it, and was involved with (and married to) a woman with BPD for many years. I’d been meaning to write something about this for a while. I suppose I didn’t find just the right “spark” until this past weekend, when a friend linked an article on BPDFamily.

But it’s all lean here. I don’t know, I’m bad at jokes. And puns. Everyone should be good at puns, because puns are terrible, but I am even bad at those. Anyway, no huge changes this week, except you might have noticed the new “Popular Posts” box to the right, which shows posts that have received a lot of traffic recently. This is nice for presenting a more or less random selection of articles to visitors, I think.

Fresh from my browsing history, here’s another set of links! Politics * [The habits of highly cynical people](http://harpers.org/archive/2016/05/the-habits-of-highly-cynical-people/1/) -- An exploration of how political engagement is damaged by the relentless insistence that we can't change anything, so it's best not to even try. * [The end of empathy](https://medium.com/@stephaniewittelswachs/the-end-of-empathy-5d8383b066d3#.1vrmehjyl) -- This applies to politics as much as anything, so I'm putting it here. One woman elaborates on how empathy is devalued and chastised in our culture, and how easily we are cruel to one another.

After this past Tuesday’s primary results, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ chances of winning of the Democratic Presidential nomination went from longshot to pipe dream. What’s next? All along, Sanders has said he’s leading a revolution. His supporters, who have grown significantly in number over the past year, took up that call arms and made it their own. Though he didn’t win, Sanders pulled off a minor miracle in doing as well as he did.

I don’t own any Apple products. No iPhones, no iPads, no Macs. I’m not a fan of the company, its culture, or the late Steve Jobs. And yet, I can’t help but think the market is hugely overreacting to Apple’s recent earnings disappointment. It’s true, revenues and profits are down. Are they down enough to erase $40 billion in stock value, though? Does that make any sense at all? Apple is even being blamed for dragging the Dow index into the red.