#from any trek :)

[floccinaucinihilipilificationa]

[woodsywarbler]

most normal thing for an engineer to say to his doctor after getting experimental technology permanently implanted

[de4thart]

[dustykneed]

i just think spock has great mom friend potential tbh. strong contender for the cutest thing i've ever drawn

[urghblergh]

Husbands 🌟🌌🥹

[spocks-kaathyra]

thoughts about the Cardassian writing system

I've thinking about the Cardassian script as shown on screen and in beta canon and such and like. Is it just me or would it be very difficult to write by hand?? Like.

I traced some of this image for a recent drawing I did and like. The varying line thicknesses?? The little rectangular holes?? It's not at all intuitive to write by hand. Even if you imagine, like, a different writing implement—I suppose a chisel-tip pen would work better—it still seems like it wasn't meant to be handwritten. Which has a few possible explanations.

Like, maybe it's just a fancy font for computers, and handwritten text looks a little different. Times New Roman isn't very easily written by hand either, right? Maybe the line thickness differences are just decorative, and it's totally possible to convey the same orthographic information with the two line thicknesses of a chisel-tip pen, or with no variation in line thickness at all.

A more interesting explanation, though, and the one I thought of first, is that this writing system was never designed to be handwritten. This is a writing system developed in Cardassia's digital age. Maybe the original Cardassian script didn’t digitize well, so they invented a new one specifically for digital use? Like, when they invented coding, they realized that their writing system didn’t work very well for that purpose. I know next to nothing about coding, but I cannot imagine doing it using Chinese characters. So maybe they came up with a new writing system that worked well for that purpose, and when computer use became widespread, they stuck with it. 

Or maybe the script was invented for political reasons! Maybe Cardassia was already fairly technologically advanced when the Cardassian Union was formed, and, to reinforce a cohesive national identity, they developed a new standardized national writing system. Like, y'know, the First Emperor of Qin standardizing hanzi when he unified China, or that Korean king inventing hangul. Except that at this point in Cardassian history, all official records were digital and typing was a lot more common than handwriting, so the new script was designed to be typed and not written. Of course, this reform would be slower to reach the more rural parts of Cardassia, and even in a technologically advanced society, there are people who don't have access to that technology. But I imagine the government would be big on infrastructure and education, and would make sure all good Cardassian citizens become literate. And old regional scripts would stop being taught in schools and be phased out of digital use and all the kids would grow up learning the digital script.

Which is good for the totalitarian government! Imagine you can only write digitally. On computers. That the government can monitor. If you, like, write a physical letter and send it to someone, then it's possible for the contents to stay totally private. But if you send an email, it can be very easily intercepted. Especially if the government is controlling which computers can be manufactured and sold, and what software is in widespread use, etc. 

AND. Historical documents are now only readable for scholars. Remember that Korean king that invented hangul? Before him, Korea used to use Chinese characters too. And don't get me wrong, hangul is a genius writing system! It fits the Korean language so much better than Chinese characters did! It increased literacy at incredible rates! But by switching writing systems, they broke that historical link. The average literate Chinese person can read texts that are thousands of years old. The average literate Korean person can't. They'd have to specifically study that field, learn a whole new writing system. So with the new generation of Cardassian youths unable to read historical texts, it's much easier for the government to revise history. The primary source documents are in a script that most people can't read. You just trust the translation they teach you in school. In ASIT it's literally a crucial plot point that the Cardassian government revised history! Wouldn't it make it soooo much easier for them if only very few people can actually read the historical accounts of what happened.

I guess I am thinking of this like Chinese characters. Like, all the different Chinese "dialects" being written with hanzi, even though otherwise they could barely be considered the same language. And even non-Sinitic languages that historically adopted hanzi, like Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese. Which worked because hanzi is a logography—it encodes meaning, not sound, so the same word in different languages can be written the same. It didn’t work well! Nowadays, Japanese has made significant modifications and Korean has invented a new writing system entirely and Vietnamese has adapted a different foreign writing system, because while hanzi could write their languages, it didn’t do a very good job at it. But the Cardassian government probably cares more about assimilation and national unity than making things easier for speakers of minority languages. So, Cardassia used to have different cultures with different languages, like the Hebitians, and maybe instead of the Union forcing everyone to start speaking the same language, they just made everyone use the same writing system. Though that does seem less likely than them enforcing a standard language like the Federation does. Maybe they enforce a standard language, and invent the new writing system to increase literacy for people who are newly learning it.

And I can imagine it being a kind of purely digital language for some people? Like if you’re living on a colonized planet lightyears away from Cardassia Prime and you never have to speak Cardassian, but your computer’s interface is in Cardassian and if you go online then everyone there uses Cardassian. Like people irl who participate in the anglophone internet but don’t really use English in person because they don’t live in an anglophone country. Except if English were a logographic writing system that you could use to write your own language. And you can’t handwrite it, if for whatever reason you wanted to. Almost a similar idea to a liturgical language? Like, it’s only used in specific contexts and not really in daily life. In daily life you’d still speak your own language, and maybe even handwrite it when needed. I think old writing systems would survive even closer to the imperial core (does it make sense to call it that?), though the government would discourage it. I imagine there’d be a revival movement after the Fire, not only because of the cultural shift away from the old totalitarian Cardassia, but because people realize the importance of having a written communication system that doesn’t rely on everyone having a padd and electricity and wifi.

[ihaveaweirdidea]

Where to?

The original

[jasonisaacs]

Happy Star Trek Day! (8th September)

[pavel-chekov-appreciator]

This First Contact Day I’m crying over the fact that in-universe humans celebrate First Contact Day as a holiday and traditionally eat salmon on it because the first shared meal between humans and Vulcans was salmon and it just feels so hopeful and sweet that humanity’s reaction to finding out aliens exist was to essentially say “do you guys want to stay for dinner?”

Like we were so excited to find out we had new friends to make out there in the galaxy that we made the day we met them a holiday 🥹

[bumblingbabooshka]

Patreon Request: Spock [Patreon | Ko-fi]

[lostyesterday]

It’s interesting to me that Voyager has so many episodes where Tuvok becomes disabled and then stops being disabled by the end of the episode. The obvious examples are Year of Hell where he becomes blind before the timeline is restored, and Riddles where he experiences a major brain injury whose symptoms are cured at the end of the episode. But then there’s also Endgame, where alternate timeline Tuvok is in the later stages of a degenerative illness, and Meld, where what happens to Tuvok when he mind melds with Lon Suder could arguably be considered a disability (especially from a Vulcan perspective). Arguably Flashback counts too. These types of plots aren’t uncommon in Star Trek, but I think it’s interesting that such a large proportion of these storylines in Voyager happen to Tuvok in particular.

So, why Tuvok? I think it partially comes down to the fact that many people find it narratively interesting to see the most in-control, stoic, and independent characters stripped of their skills or strengths in some way. In other words, disabling them. How does a character who is defined by their self-control and discipline deal with a sudden loss of ability to control themselves? How does a character who deeply values their independence deal with a sudden necessary dependence on others? Tuvok is arguably the Voyager character who most represents competence, ability, and control. If being disabled is to be unable in some way to measure up to the standards of what a person “should” be able to do in society, then Tuvok in his typical state represents or possibly strives to represent the opposite of that. So, from this perspective, making Tuvok disabled affects him as a character more fundamentally than it would other characters, which is theoretically more narratively interesting.

From an able-bodied perspective, it could be argued that such a storyline represents a deep-rooted fear of becoming disabled. Able-bodied people fear disability because it represents the weakness and dependence that anyone can find themselves embodying under the right circumstances. Accidents and illness and old age can happen to anyone, and happen to almost everyone in time. Disability is a fact of life, but for many people, it is a looming cloud on the horizon – something they might ordinarily choose to ignore. To explore such a theme in fiction is to thus look at a subject tinged with discomfort. To give such a storyline to a character that represents the peak of control and ability could serve either to heighten that discomfort by showing even the “strongest” person being vulnerable to disability, or to lessen it by displacing that fear from an “ordinary” and thus more relatable character to one who is unusually skilled or strong (in this case, Tuvok being Vulcan on a ship of mostly humans). Either way, though, if the character is cured in the end and their disability is gone by the next episode, that discomfort is narratively relieved. Disability affects able-bodied characters only temporarily. There’s nothing to fear – they’ll be returned to “normal” next episode.

This might make it sound as if I entirely dislike the disability storylines centered on Tuvok, but that isn’t true. To a certain extent, the cures or time resets that bring Tuvok back to his able-bodied state after every episode are an inevitable part of a mostly episodic show like Voyager. Beyond able-bodied fears and miracle cures, I do think there can be something compelling about telling a disabled story centered on a character like Tuvok. I like that Year of Hell shows Tuvok skillfully using a tactile console and navigating the ship while blind, while at the same time having much more difficulty with certain tasks than he did before, because that’s realistic – that’s how it often actually feels to become disabled. Some tasks that were easy before become impossible. Some tasks seem at first to be impossible, but over time become possible as you adapt and learn new strategies. A skilled and resourceful character can be skilled and resourceful in adapting to disability, but they are still disabled. I also like that Riddles asks the question of what it means for a person to feel less valuable when they become unable to perform the tasks they did before. That kind of question can become more profoundly unsettling when applied to a character who defines himself fundamentally by the abilities he has lost. I do think it would have been interesting if Tuvok had been disabled for longer – if disability had been a more defining element of his character rather than merely a frequent theme. But I also think that what is there in the text has interesting elements as well.

[muirmarie]

tos mcspirk red string of fate au:

Where McCoy makes a smart remark about not believing in soulmates (and even if soulmates & red strings of fate are real, HE certainly doesn't have one) to some powerful being that decides: lmao, I know what would be really funny, and the three of them get dosed with something that (temporarily) makes their strings not only visible but also PHYSICALLY PRESENT. They can't wander too far away from each other because they become a tripping hazard. The strings grow or shrink depending on their proximity so when they're nearby their arms are getting tugged when someone reaches for something, because for all intents and purposes they're physically tied together.

McCoy and Spock trying different ways to break/cut/dissolve the string, but absolutely nothing works on it. Meanwhile the strings keep getting caught in the door and making them fall on their butts.

McCoy still valiantly trying to pretend that these red strings mean Absolutely Nothing, No, They Are Not Cosmically Bound Together By Destiny, Thanks.

They divert to Vulcan because Vulcans have studied the red strings in depth, and the Vulcan High Priestess is losing her mind because usually Vulcans have to go through some special rituals to prove they're the Vulcan-iest Vulcan in order to gain the ability to even see the red strings, and Spock is trying to pretend he's not Smug about it (he is failing badly).

Kirk is feeling Extremely Sappy but is trying to hide it.

McCoy is losing his mind about trying to perform surgery while attached to these two, and also at the fact that Kirk has unilaterally decided it makes more sense for them to all just sleep in the same bed in the meantime, and also the Knowing Looks the entire crew is giving them, and also -

And also everything about this situation, tbh.

Comedy ensues, is the point.

[cipher-fresh]

Society if Hikaru Sulu had character depth

[bagheerita]

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine "A Time to Stand"

[favvn]

Spock + Duty

It's about how he is torn apart. Half Vulcan, half human. One parent expects a Vulcan, and the other expects a human. Of course, Spock will throw himself into his work. Of course, he will claim Starfleet, the Enterprise, and Captain Kirk as his only obligations. They're the only things he could choose for himself, without expectations attached. His life is a self-made purgatory because he has chosen a third path away from his parents and away from Vulcan, but his parents can't understand it or choose not to understand it. (Technically, they do. Amanda herself says Spock is at home nowhere except Starfleet. Sarek understands that Spock ought to be respected simply for being Spock, not as an ambassador's son or as the first Vulcan-human hybrid. But they fail to tell this to Spock, so Spock is still caught between the life he has made to get away from the expectations his parents still carry.)

[muiromem]

Kathryn Janeway - "The Fates"

The Moirai of Greek myth. The youngest, Clotho - the spinner who controlled life, choosing when a person was born and weaving their thread of existence. The middle one, Lachesis - the allotter who measured out the length of this thread and decided a person's destiny. And the eldest, Atropos - she who was inevitable that ended a mortal's life, cutting the thread and choosing the manner of their death.