Not sure if it quite meets the standards of the question, but I keep calfskin driving gloves in my car and I love them. They’re good for when the steering wheel is too hot or too cold, they keep my hands from getting sweaty on long car trips, and they make me feel like an old-timey race car driver.
I have real love for TNG S1E16, “Too Short a Season.”
The Enterprise is dealing with a hostage crisis on a planet where the local government wants this old admiral who had negotiated a truce there decades before to come back. He shows up and it turns out he’s taking experimental de-aging drugs to grow younger. It turns out that when he had negotiated the original truce before, he had violated the prime directive and given weapons to some rebels, but he told himself that he made it even by giving the same weapons to the other side, which led to decades of bloodshed.
The writing is just okay, and the old guy / young guy makeup is pretty bad, but the scene where the admiral dies while looking into his wife’s eyes gets me. I also like to imagine that the ep might have originally been written with Kirk in mind as the old guy, because the whole “Well I made it fair by giving weapons to both sides” seems like the kind of cowboy insane shit that Kirk would pull and then never consider the consequences. The episode feels a little bit like it’s revisiting some of the times when Kirk would do his thing and then warp off into the sunset while definitely leaving some loose threads behind.
Everyone should read Motel of the Mysteries.
They led into Picard mowing down Borg with a Tommy gun in First Contact, so they’re a-okay with me!
Incidentally, I just watched The Big Hit, which came out in 1998, right around the time that In The Pale Moonlight aired, and it features Avery Brooks chewing scenery as a cartoonishly over-the-top mob boss, so I like to pretend that it’s a holosuite program he ran to loosen up after the events of the episode.
Commander Riker: Let’s beam down to the surface. By the way, Lieutenant McMichaelson, congratulations on your upcoming wedding! I understand that as soon as we’re back from this no-doubt totally routine away mission, you and your soon-to-be bride are going away to meet her parents on Lovely Wholesome Vacation World Alpha 7.
Lieutenant McMichaelson: [dawning horror of narrative awareness noises]
I was astonished at the extent to which popular culture lied to me about diaper changing. Every TV or movie depiction of a man dealing with a baby includes him absolutely losing his goddamn mind over how difficult and gross diaper changing is. From fiction, you’d have thought that changing diapers was as difficult as gathering honey from a wasp’s nest. In reality, I adjusted to that in less than a couple of weeks.
Now the fact that babies and toddlers can get so tired that they can’t go to sleep, that was an unpleasant and unexpected revelation.
games like Blood
Hot damn, but I loved Blood. Duke Nukem for H. P. Lovecraft dorks!
I’m wondering if I could obtain some kind of old/used android phone, remove all the apps so the home screen is completely empty, transfer via USB or ssh/scp the MP3 files (and metadata + cover art), then have some kind of music player app which would be the only app on the phone/device.
This is exactly what I did. I used an older Moto and uninstalled or disabled everything I didn’t want and only used BlackPlayer EX. It also has halfway decent external speakers so I can just play music directly off the device if I want to. The only thing that doesn’t thrill me is that it’s a full sized phone, which can be a bit awkwardly large at times. It’s been working great, but when the time comes for another device, I might go with one of the little Unihertz models.
My SO and I say that all the chips they’re exchanging during the Enterprise-D poker games are exchangeable for sexual favors.
Looks nice. Non-reactive. Quark talks about gold-pressed latinum having a distinctive clink, so the gold would be a part of that.
Bajor isn’t part of the Federation, so they don’t have immediate access to all Federation tech. Also, even when they join, I’m not convinced that the Federation just hands new members everything. The Prime Directive is all about not interfering in a society’s natural growth, and although achieving warp travel is the major barrier to initiating First Contact, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were additional steps along the way once a planet has joined the Federation.
Having seen Avery Brooks give panels at cons, I can confidently say that all the times when Sisko got space madness or was holosuite transformed into a Bond villain or was otherwise acting like a madman… all of those performances are the real Avery Brooks, and the stolid, restrained, level-headed Sisko is the character that Avery Brooks uses his formidable acting skills to pretend to be.
There’s RiffTrax. They’re pretty much the only way I can stand to re-watch the Star Wars prequels at this point.
Leave them all in. Remasters are for restoring a work to as close as possible to the way it was meant to look when it was released, and nothing more. You wouldn’t look at a painting by da Vinci or Vermeer and say “Hey the perspective is off there,” or “That kind of bird doesn’t belong in that time and place,” and then “fix” the painting in the process of restoring it.
The creator(s) made a series of decisions during the original process of creation. Maybe some of them were mistakes, but they were their mistakes to make, and not anyone else’s to try and second guess after the fact. Once you start down that path, there’s nothing preventing George Lucas style special edition madness.
Any time I see “Directed by LeVar Burton” I know I’m in for a good time. He was fantastic at directing episodes with heavy interpersonal stories.
Tough little ship!
Seems a little bit over-greebled. Normalize those dark areas of the hull and the whole thing would look a lot cleaner.
WE DON’T TALK ABOUT THAT EPISODE.
I have a theory that explains why genetic engineering and cybernetics are a rarity amongst the main galactic civilizations.
One can point at the Eugenics Wars as a reason for Earth, at least (and the Federation, as a result), to have a phobia of genetic engineering in particular and transhumanism in general. The lasting trauma gave humanity such a collective phobia that centuries later they almost totally forbid genetic modification, and seem to limit cybernetic augmentation to corrective prostheses like Geordi's VISOR. The encounter with the Borg reinforces this phobia, but its essence was already firmly in place.
The Eugenics Wars explain the Earth-originating phobia of transhumanism, but what about the rest of the galaxy? Vulcans might have their own half logical / half mystical reasons for rejecting augmentation, saying that such methods would be tantamount to trying to cheat one's way to achieving pure logic. Klingons might have lingering trauma from the augment plague of the Enterprise NX-01 era, combined with the belief that augmentation is dishonorable.
We don't know enough about the Gorn, the Tholians, the Sheliak, or the Breen to make informed guesses. They don't seem to be chock full of cybernetics, but as to why or why not, there isn't enough information.
But what about the Ferengi? The Romulans? The Cardassians?
All three have the means, motive, and opportunity to embrace either genetics or cybernetics, or both. None seem to be morally "above" the idea of using artificial means to advance themselves or get advantages over their enemies. And yet none seem to have embraced the idea. Why not?
This is where my theory comes in. I submit that every race that fully embraces transhumanism (Transbeingism? One doesn't want to be too Homo sapiens-centric.) eventually either self-destructs, is destroyed, or literally transcends our conventional understanding of civilization.
As for examples, look at the Bynars. They embraced cybernetics, and were one bad solar flare away from totally destruction, saved only by a desperate theft of the Enterprise to reboot their entire planet, dependent on the good will of the victims of their theft. Look at Earth, where experimenting with genetic augmentation nearly destroyed humanity. Consider the children of Landru, who were arguably under the control of a fully cyberized intelligence, and were totally stagnant, and well on their way to extinction.
Next, consider the Borg, a fully cyberized species that has taken on the nature of an uncontrolled cancer, gobbling up unique life and technology. If they continue as they have, the other powers of the galaxy will have no choice but to destroy them out of self-defense. Also look at the example of Gary Mitchell, augmented by the Galactic Barrier, who went mad and had to be killed by Kirk before he could pose a greater threat.
Finally, consider the many beings we have seen who seem to have ascended beyond mere mortality, to the degree that they barely interact with the universe any more. Trelane, and his parents. Kevin Uxbridge. The Traveller. At the very upper scale, possibly the end result of all of this upward mobility, are the Q Continuum. But all of these beings exist in realms that defy our understanding of technology and biology. These are beings for whom cybernetics and genetic augmentation have long since been left behind; they have escaped destruction, but they also cannot remain in the same community of mere mortal beings as most other sentients in the galaxy.
In essence, augmentation is one of the great filters of galactic civilization. When a species begins tampering with its own existence, more often than not it is destroyed, but those that are not destroyed must continue to ascend; they cannot remain in a form that we would recognize as mundane life, only moreso.
TLDR: You either die the Bynars, or augment long enough to join the Q.
Is there something wrong with LRG that we should know?