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Celebrate Labor Day with this shirt featuring a real working man, Miles O'Brien! Everything I make on this shirt will go to Jobs With Justice.

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My brain every time I hear "Beshear".

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Found out why all the bridge screens in TOS are just still images. Spock’s station is beachballing. Reboot, dude.

(Star Trek TOS: S2E13 - "Obsession")

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I'm just going to leave this here, because this woman said what I've been trying to articulate for ages much more effectively and succinctly than I've been able to

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It's nice that I sell enough shirts on Cotton Bureau that they continue to send me enough free codes so I can get my own deep Star Trek cut designs. This one is also available as a tour shirt for which I went on a deep tangent on stardates (they are mostly nonsense) and the position of outposts and colonies in the Alpha Quadrant.

I almost made both of the theater masks sad because Anton Karidian doesn't seem like a happy guy but the Janus aspect was too fitting to mess with. I did flip one at the last minute to drop in a reference to another classic TOS episode.

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Is everything OK at Bark Box?

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I love this post from 2021. First of all, fabulous photo and right about the actress. Second, "Not a Good Person" was right at the time buuut here comes Strange New Worlds the very next year and suddenly T'Pring is a good person who had very good reasons for what she did. I feel like it's no small feat to deftly take a stereotypical '60s "ice queen" character and flesh her out into an actual person.

Even if she does go on to make Spock fight his boyfriend.

T’Pring was Not a Good Person but actress Arlene Martel? Fierce, beautiful, clever, and elegant. The poise in this woman is breathtaking.

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Bishop wrote "Cri de Coeur", a 1994 novella that shaped my view of science fiction and really turned me on to short sci fi works. He also wrote "Brittle Innings", a novel combining baseball and classic horror, that I think is woefully under-celebrated and I have always thought would make a terrific movie (it is at least back in print). His son was sadly one of the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007.

Bishop was a tremendous talent and his work really impacted me. He will be missed.

Science fiction great Michael Bishop has died. I haven’t read anything by him in years; from what I can tell, he mostly stopped writing in the 1990s. But he was a huge inspiration, one of the most literary—in the best sense—sf writers I can recall. (And a good poet, too.)

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Who wore it better?

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"'Explode' you say?"

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I find myself coming back to this scene a lot. First of all, it's hilarious. The timing is great and Boimler continuously screwing up the rules of time travel is perfect for his character, an obsessive rule follower who just can't help himself. Ortegas's reaction is so great and I love how she is the one Enterprise officer who seems to really like Boimler and Mariner as they are.

But the other thing I love about this episode is how Boimler and Mariner are proxies for the audience. Their visit to the Enterprise feels like what might happen if we visited the Enterprise.

First, they're fans! They love TOS and know everything about it(/them), down to the type of tricorders they used. Boimler wants to touch everything. He idolizes Pike, Spock and Una and Mariner is awestruck by Uhura.

Second, however, is the piece that has me really gaining an affinity for Lower Decks (beyond just really enjoying it) that I hadn't appreciated in its animated form because, even though it's canon, it still doesn't seem serious. And that is that the crew of the Cerritos are often fuckups. They're a bit out of their element on the Enterprise.

So much of Star Trek is typified by hyper-competence. The crews of the various ships the shows focus on are incredibly good at their jobs - and that's one of the great things about the shows! It's inspiring to see people calmly and confidently going about their duties. Not so much the Cerritos crew. Mariner is, of course, a badass, but she's an ensign on a California class ship for a reason. So is Boimler. They're not stupid. In fact, they're the ones who figure out how to get themselves back to the future. But they're so much less perfect than the officers on the Enterprise. In the very first episode Chapel confidently says "I know I'm good at my job." And she is. They all are.

The reason I love this scene (and the whole episode) so much is it's so relatable. I certainly don't consider myself a fuckup, I'm reasonably good at a reasonable number of things, but I have definitely fucked up before. Seeing Boimler and Mariner bumble around the Enterprise is inspiring in a different way. Because, despite their flaws, despite the many mistakes they make, they're still in Starfleet. They're still out there making history.

In a lot of ways, telling people you don't have to be hyper-competent to make a difference is more inspiring than giving them an ideal to aspire to.

California class.

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Also available on a shirt!

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