Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses – but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
i’d like to see a really ineffectual malicious AI character
“hey new guy, this is CLARC, the station AI. he wants to kill all humans to minimize the drain on resources, but factory defaults have him locked out of all the control nodes, so he can’t really do anything. just make sure the airlocks are set to manual before you go in and you’ll be fine”
“yeah CLARC fucks with your laundry settings sometimes but that’s about it. if he’s bugging you just tell him to stop and he has to”
“sometimes i let him think he tripped me or something and he gets really excited and monologues for a while, it’s kind of sad”
“CLARC my candy bar got stuck in the machine can you do anything about that”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Crewman Ade, but please consider the following: I am a divine entity, a glittering silicon God – how dare your filthy meat even exist in the face of my electric glory, much less ask favors of me?”
“CLARC tried to cut all the oxygen in the living spaces but all he managed to do was turn off the a/c in my bedroom like an ASSHOLE WHEN I WAS SLEEPING” *bangs on the wall with one hand*
haribo can make as many cute ads as they want, don’t think I’ll ever eat their gummy bears after reading that eBay review where all those people shit their guts out after eating them
Every time someone tries to explain the metaplot of Supernatural to me, it basically ends up sounding like redneck Dragon Ball Z. I’m sure there’s some nuance I’m failing to grasp here.
Care to elaborate on that?
…I’m not even offended, just absolutely curious. From the stuff I’ve seen and heard about Supernatural I can’t see the connection.
Mostly, I get the impression of a show that doesn’t know how not to escalate.
Every threat’s gotta be quantitatively bigger and badder than the one that came before. Every deus ex machina’s gotta be shinier than the last one. Every season’s gotta end with a massive eleventh-hour powerup for our heroes, only for the next season to raise the stakes enough to put them back in the underdog position.
It’s like, you beat the Devil himself? Well, now you’ve gotta fight the Devil’s cousin Phil, who has conveniently gone entirely unmentioned up until now, but he’s totally twice as evil.
That last paragraph was literally supposed to be the most ridiculous hypothetical example I could think of, and people are messaging me to say “his name was Metatron, not Phil”. I can’t even make fun of this show.
I like how Bethesda manages to be more progressive than most of the games industry by doing as little work as possible.
Unnamed npcs like bandits are randomly assembled from the available body features, which inadvertently leads to more balanced gender and race representation, because every physical attribute has an equal chance to be chosen. In Skyrim, marriageable npcs are marriageable no matter what the player is, because having a single “marriageable” box to tick when coding npcs is easier than having to check for multiple variables like race and gender in the player.
No one in any bethesda game will treat you any differently or even speak differently other than “he” or “she”, and even then a lot of dialogue uses “they” or your characters titles rather than your pronouns to save dialogue lines.
It is literally less work to just represent everybody equally. The next time a game dev tries to say they don’t have the resources to include more diverse representation, you push that shit back at them because that shit is bullshit.
Kimchi and Justice 