quixotic chaotic

Star Trek: The Next Generation I Relics

Star Trek makes me soooo crazy cuz you got Picard saying things like "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose."

And Data saying things like "I would gladly risk feeling bad at times, if it also meant that I could taste my dessert."

And Bashir saying things like “You can't go through life trying to avoid getting a broken heart. If you do, it'll break from loneliness anyway."

And Odo sayings things like "It has been my observation that one of the prices of giving people freedom of choice is that sometimes they make the wrong choice."

And I’m just supposed to be normal about it???

The key to understanding Leonard McCoy is that he only ACTS like he hates everyone and everything. Underneath that sarcastic abrasive middle aged man is a fundamental love for living creatures, desire to help others so strong that he made a career of it and a respect for the simple joys, which occasionally show their face when he's turning on the southern charm for a woman or offering to sacrifice himself to save a patient. I mean, you'd probably be a bit grumpy too if your marriage ended and you were stuck in space (a place you hate) trying to stop your best friends getting themselves killed when you could be spending time with your daughter. He's not surly and outspoken because he doesn't care, he's surly and outspoken precisely because he cares so much and yes, that has got him hurt before and probably will again but dammit, he's not going to let that stop him being what he is - an old country doctor who will do anything he can to help people. I love his sardonic witty banter as much as anyone but I think the real reason we take him into our hearts is because despite his complaining he's arguably the most down-to-earth, no-nonsense character in TOS and deep down we all admire his simple selfless dedication to caring for others. Never change, Bones.

New Zealand TV Weekly, October 28 1968

Oooo, what a great new photo. Yay New Zealand!

star trek tos doodles so far!

Alright I've been revisiting and watching both of these, and I want to know what Tumblr's opinions are on these franchises as a whole.

The really funny thing about Data playing poker with the rest of the senior staff is that, like... with the way his brain works he's constantly aware of numbers and calculating probability but he would also know that counting cards is against the rules so does he just try to ignore it. Does he pretend not to. Can he like actively choose to discard that information as it comes in so he just forgets every .005 seconds

Data trying his absolute hardest not to accidentally rain man his coworkers. I'm autistic I can make that joke. Data sitting there not so much "playing poker" as "playing playing poker," as in, doing his best approximation of a human playing poker. He has an algorithm figured out for it. Semi-random to appear more natural, like how his blinking is timed. He is having fun btw. Data loves playing humans

He isn't trying to win at poker he's trying to win at being in a social situation & he has found that people like it more when they win a certain percentage of the time. The game Data's playing in his head is not the same as the game everyone else is playing

Godspeed, Captain.

bones to spock: you are the worst ever

bones to others: spock is the best being out there how dare you to think he is capable of doing anything bad he did nothing wrong ever

A Star Trek idea: A comedy sitcom where instead of a Vulcan on a mostly human ship it is a human on a mostly Vulcan ship

All the Vulcans are fiercely protective of the ‘fragile, illogical, prone-to-danger, smart, reckless little human’.

To make the human feel more accepted (as it is only logical) the Vulcans try to include aspects of terran culture in the ship’s day-to-day life, failing spectacularly at it.

The human loves them even more for it.

They’ll get better at celebrating the human’s birthday next year. It’s the thought that counts.

@jvlianbashir​ THAT’S A GOOD END TO THAT EPISODE THOUGH… the vulcans put together awful, bland decorations. they make a cake because it’s of “significant importance”. they go through the process of putting together this party and Studying this Human Ritual and the entire episode is setting up to what you KNOW will be a horrible result. they do a bad job!! then when the human’s birthday comes, and they reveal the off-the-mark, underwhelming looking birthday bash, the human just. starts crying. because they had no idea their crew would go through all this trouble to celebrate their birthday, and even put up DECORATIONS, or make a CAKE, and there’s a birthday card with extremely polite impersonal messages written and a hundred perfectly tidy signatures. and the vulcans are just standing around like “you appear upset. the Birthday Party was unsatisfactory”.

I would watch the fuck out of that

“Humans require regular physical contact to remain healthy. We have a weekly rotation for The Daily Shoulder Pat. Please inform us if this is insufficient contact, either in frequency, magnitude, or duration.”

Okay, I reblogged this because of how adorable it is, but then I started picturing McCoy as the sole human.

I would like to offer a counter argument.

Bones grumbled as he fumbled for the manual override for the cargo bay lights. 

“Surprise!” 

The word was not yelled so much as chanted as soon as the lights flickered on. Only Vulcans could breath so quietly that he wouldn’t hear three dozen of them laying in wait. 

This had to be Jim’s fault. The cargo bay had been draped in black bunting and hung with “Happy 50th Birthday” and “Over the Hill” signs. Someone had replicated black balloons. Someone had sent pictures to the Vulcans. Jim. 

Bones stood in amazement as the ship’s choral group sang an old 20th earth Happy Birthday song followed by a Vulcan chant of blessings as 50 ritual flames were kindled in his honor. They’d baked a cake. Baked, not replicated. Trimmed it in black icing with “Happy Birthday Bones” written on it and a couple of icing bones underneath. 

A ritual dagger was pressed into his hands “you must cut the first piece.”

They were watching with that quiet tension that he’d learned to recognize as Vulcan anticipation. A handful of the younger crew members had managed to find spots at the front of the group and looked almost eager. It couldn’t be for the cake. Vulcans weren’t overly fond of sugary desserts. 

Then he realized. Vulcans struggled to understand human frivolity but no one had a more highly tuned sense of ritual. Most of the crew had little experience with humans and were thrilled, in a quiet Vulcan way, the be able to participate in a human birthday ritual. 

He cut the cake. No one turned down a slice. He watched as they took careful bites using their forks and contemplated the sugary sweetness. Then catching the eyes of one of the younger crew members, he picked up his slice with his fingers and bit into. The young Vulcan barely hesitated. He picked up his cake and bit it. Others saw and did the same. A group of young faces, smeared with black icing waited to see what he’d do next and he let out the first real laugh he’d managed since boarding the ship. A sigh of satisfaction ran through the crowd. 

He was presented with a bottle of very excellent bourbon as a gift. Then instead of a birthday card, the ship’s captain unrolled a ceremonial scroll. Precise Vulcan calligraphy wished him a Happy 50th Birthday and the formal house stamps and signatures of the crew attested to their agreement to the statement. “Damn thing belongs in a museum” he muttered. 

…In the fullness of time, the scroll found its way to the Space Museum on Earth as one of the few example of Vulcan ritual scrolls outside of Vulcan itself. The museum director on hearing a senior Vulcan ambassador describe his experience in the birthday ritual as a young crew member once asked why McCoy had been honored in this fashion. The ambassador had explained that only Kirk, one of the few humans to have heard about the Pon Farr ceremony (much less having participated in it) could have understood the importance of ritual to Vulcans how honored the Vulcans were to be asked to host such an important ritual for his friend McCoy as the “Over the Hill” Birthday celebration.*

*Scholars of the era debate whether James Kirk arranged the ceremony with this understanding of Vulcan ritual or whether he thought he was playing an enormous joke on his friend McCoy. Kirk never answered the question with anything more than a smile and a twinkle of his eye. Even after Kirk’s death, his husband Spock refused to bring any clarity to the matter. 

When pranking your buddy goes so well it becomes a significant point in history and diplomacy

X

star trek explores these strange seemingly inconsequential extremes because it wants you to consider the possibility that your concept of ethics doesnt and could never possibly account for every scenario. It wants you to consider the ethical ramifications of just wiping out the little nanites taking over your ships computer even though eventually this will kill you all becuase

-What if they’re alive?

-What if they’re sentient?

-What if they don’t realize they’re hurting us?

-What if what hurts us is what they need to live?

-What if we can communicate with them?

Star Trek takes the situation of, “these computer bugs are eating our ship and in an hour we’ll all be dead and we COULD just wipe them out utterly but…what if they’re like us?” because the ramifications effect what risks we ourselves are willing to take in the name of pacifism and understanding. it says that even the smallest most immenently dangerous creature deserves as much of a chance to live peacefully as we can possibly give it through understanding.

without examining ourselves this way, through these made up seemingly inane situations, we will never be able to understand ourselves and what we’re truly capable of, what levels of understanding can be achieved. without the ability to place ourselves in a difficult situation and reach beyond our first instinct of fight or flight and self-preservation, we will never be evolve as a global community

preserving creekfiend’s tags because GOLD

#star trek does this because its the space talmud actually

Also, gonna talk specifically about TOS here for a minute:

This show came out when media was under such strict censorship, you don’t even know. And keep in mind at this time not only was there no internet for piracy and independent film, there was no home media. The networks made it and the censors approved it or you didn’t see it. Period.

TOS was wildly subversive. TOS had a Black woman on the bridge in a trusted and vital position, respected and deferred to by a white man, when it was still legal to discriminate against Black people in matters of housing and education due to their race. (I will remind you all of Whoopi Goldberg talking about running through the house yelling “everybody come look, there’s a colored lady on TV and she ain’t no maid” when she saw Lt. Uhura.) TOS had a Russian man on the bridge as second in command at the peak of the Cold War, when most Russians on TV were conniving spies or traitorous backstabbers, and Kirk trusted and respected him without question. TOS examined the possibility of a post-scarcity world. TOS, in other words, was dangerously close to SOCIALISM. And in those times (frankly this is still a problem but it was even worse then), “socialism” and “communism” were seen as the same thing.

TOS couldn’t openly do much more than its baseline premise without censors hacking it to bits. (And boy did they try anyway. The stories of Roddenberry versus the censors are insane.) So what did they do?

They came up with these seemingly-bizarre allegorical plots. No, no, they’re not criticizing the Vietnam War, see? They’re talking about how awful it would be if we fed millions of people to a machine at random because it designated it was their time to die in an ongoing computer chess match where neither side could really win or lose! TOTALLY different. This episode isn’t about the nature of humanity and the destructive effects of racism, it’s about creating androids! DEFINITELY not the same.

It was a way around the censors. The writers had to trust that the viewers were picking up what they were putting down, knowing sometimes that wouldn’t happen, and inserting a healthy dose of bullshit along the way to further obfuscate what they were doing (I’m pretty sure the message of Amok Time was “we see you out there watching, ladies” and not much more than that).

They could only ask the important questions in secret. And THAT is why ships get eaten by nanites and tribbles come out of the ventilation shafts. Because they want you to think…and the establishment doesn’t.

I want a black belt in Captain Kirk fight moves.

I love Spock I love him soooo much they were like let’s make a character that’s nerdy and a pacifist and a vegetarian and he’s also a mommas boy and a sensitive musician. But he should also be. A straight up Bitch

How many secrets can Spock spill before he sleeps?

can u believe we all fucking love THIS ^^^ show

“Damn it Jim, he nearly sliced your tits off!”

“I know, Bones, and is it weird that I found it kind of hot?”

is.

is this real?

The screenshot is, the caption is not. In the actual episode it was more like “hey our closest friend is gonna die if he doesn’t fuck and since he can’t do that why don’t you slip me a shit ton of morphine so he can strangle me to death which is the next best thing”

His titties got cut in an extremely horny death battle with said friend on a planet of grumpy elves who have elaborate rituals for everything including fucking (especially fucking).

another satisfied customer

star trek heritage post (August 11th, 2020)

i think it's really funny that there is no letter k in the Klingon language

there are, however, two qs and a tlh.

The very best decision that Marc Okrand did is to decide that all the canon names are really bad Anglicizations of the original Klingon.

Klingon? It’s thlIngan because Federation types couldn’t pronounce  [t͡ɬ].

Kronos? No, dude, it was originally Qo’noS with that freaking uvular affricate at the front. Not sure why the retroflex became an [s], but maybe the Federation came on an odd dialect to start with.

Seriously, man. Sure, it’s much better to do the conlang early to get all the names consistent. But if you’re ever hired for a conlanging job with a bunch of established names that won’t work together or just don’t fit your aesthetic, just throw it out and say, “Hey, whoever wrote this down for English speakers did a really bad job.” It’s not like it’s unprecedented in the real world.

Oh. Oh I like this.

This is especially common when one language has a single phoneme for a group of sounds that another has multiple phonemes for. For instance, in English there's a difference we hear between the sound /th/ in "theories" (thee-rees, assuming your accent uses only two syllables for that word), and the /s/ in "series." To a native German speaker, those words sound like homophones.

Throw in a different alphabet and you end up with a real mess. The Japanese kana writing systems don't have any symbols for just consonants, because it's a syllabic writing system, and the only consonant that gets to be a syllable all by itself is /n/. So, Spock goes to Japan, and someone wants to write his name down. They don't have the right symbols for most of the sounds, closest they can get is スポック. Which isn't that far off, but it is a different set of sounds.

And then people who haven't heard it spoken read what they wrote down and try to pronounce it based on how they interpret the symbols the first person used....

Especially if you have limited cultural contact, which the Klingons and the Federation did for a long time, things are going to get further and further off-base.

And I don't even know what the Universal Translators do to all this. They're supposed to work by just... making you hear the right things when someone else talks. Maybe the Klingons think everyone in the Federation is pronouncing stuff the right way, because the translators account for badly pronounced native words?

I did not know all of this and it's really interesting! I love checking the notes on a post and learning things.

I feel like the "bad Anglicizations" explanation is really good. It's obvious that it was the easier route but I don't think it was lazy or unwise. Because yeah, it's not exactly unprecedented.

To build on the Japanese example, wasn't the name "Japan" itself the screwed-up end result of several layers of linguistic telephone?

I like that the Klingon writing system doesn't work well with our letters; it adds a layer of realism to it. I like the decision to make the structure of Klingon sentences so different to English ones. Learning it so far has felt like learning something alien, rearranging sentences and teaching my brain to configure meaning in a totally foreign way

(to be fair though I only know English and a bit of Spanish and a few ASL signs, so maybe it's a matter of limited perspective)

Either way, I do think it's pretty funny that there's no K in Klingon but I also like the decision to not have everything about the Klingon language be simple, easy and straightforward.

So I found a very interesting video where Mark Okrand explains the pronunciation of Klingon letters and it answered some of my questions.

First of all, the language was made with the actors in mind. So all of the weird-ass capital letters are to indicate when a letter is pronounced differently from that same sound in English.

Secondly, the reason there is no K is because Mark Okrand thought it was stupid that there are so many sci-fi bad guys with names that start with K, and didn't want to do something basic like that so he decided there would be no Klingon equivalent.

Also, watched Jan Misali's conlang critic episode on Klingon. I think the observations are fair but a lot of the issues of Klingon make more sense in context, and frankly I think Mark Okrand deserves a bit more credit for doing as well as he did given what he was provided with.

i hear tumblr is bad with links so hopefully this works, here's the video