Named in honor of Biff Yeager, I presume. His mail-in campaign finally paid off.

I’ve got a million other things to catch up on, so I’ll survive without new content for a few months. I suspect most of us will.

It sucks that the studio heads forced this on us, but I will stand in spirit with the striking artists for as long as it takes to make the studios see their worth.

Exactly, and I wish headlines would better reflect this. The strike is a natural outcome of studio fuckery.

You can tell by the underscore that it’s special.

Wow, a whole community for persecution complex babies whining that they can’t use dogwhistles and complain about ‘wokeness’ (whatever you think that means) without consequences? Nah, I’m good out here, thanks.

If you think about time travel seriously, you start to see how truly complicated it would make things. If the multiverse exists and time travel also exists, then inevitably there would be meddlers from the future messing things up. And following that would be those who believe such meddling is dangerous, because it creates more timelines branching off that would accelerate the meddling, until there are more polluted timelines than “natural” ones, creating a future filled with bizarrely chaotic outcomes all branching from the recursive meddling. And so there would have to be some kind of ongoing arms race of preservationists versus people who want to stack the future with timelines friendly to their own cause.

They also name-checked the rubber ducky.

Is that true? I could swear I have a memory of Geordi describing it as a bubble at some point on TNG. Then again I also spent a lot of time looking through Rick Sternbach and Dennis Okuda’s TNG Technical Manual back in the day, so maybe I just absorbed it and incorporated it from there.

It’s easy enough to forget that the very term “slash fiction” came from “Kirk/Spock” stories in early fanzines.

Only the workers outside the castle lost their memories. The guards had helmets made of a material that protected them from the worst effects, and the palace shielded those inside.

The end result is a caste system, where you have people who remember and give orders and people who forget and have no choice but to follow.

Yup, they basically touched down, immediately encountered some nasty violent opposition, and cut their losses and left bleeding. It was bad enough to make Pike question his fitness as a leader.

Ooh, look at this guy with ten speakers! Fancy pants over here! : P

I did let out a big guffaw when I realized their bait and switch. Started it out like it was going to be an Ortegas focused episode, and then Spock comes in and pops hers and everyone else’s bubble with his Vulcan science. Loved how she put the hat back on as she was walking away, as if to say “I’m gonna wear this for a while longer because I can, dammit.”

The Abrams chapters are action movies, so of course they’re not giving a rounded depiction of Kirk, anymore than the TNG movies were a fair depiction of Picard.

No holodecks yet in this era. The bet I’m interested in is whether Nurse Chapel gets to be his Saavik.

Yeah he definitely dips in and out. It’s always a lovely surprise when his show pops up in my feed.

It occurs to me that the “healing effect” might in fact be the Travelers, or some other unseen group of time travelers from some point in the future who have a vested interest maintaining events that lead to a specific point in history. It doesn’t need to be some impersonal force of nature making these course corrections.

I have maintained from the beginning that his final episode is crammed full of strange details that don’t serve any purpose beyond setting up Hemmer’s survival.

They make a point of saying that Aenar have different responses to cold. They make a point of saying the Gorn incubate at different rates in different species, and that they require a certain level of heat. They pointedly don’t show him being killed after he leaves the ship - out into the cold, where the Gorn cannot easily incubate. And those are just the major things. There are a lot of little dialogue bits and production details that on close attention seem deliberately seeded in much the same way things in The Wrath of Khan were set up for a payoff The Search for Spock.

Of course, this could have just been the production leaving the door open to bring back Bruce Horak if they wanted, or to add in a note of hope to soften the blow, but I believe it was a calculated prelude to a planned return.

But also: ‘Never argue with an idiot. They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.’ - Mark Twain

Often, but not always. Remember it didn’t originate as a right wing epithet. Time to take it back.