#tech trek

[musicmags]

[hazieash]

Star Trek Lower Decks S4 Ep2 is iconic for many reasons and the workout attire is one them

[stra-tek]

Some very sad news, Lora Johnson, author of several hugely influential Star Trek and Star Wars technical manuals, has passed away.

Her books were a huge part of my childhood, I adored Mr. Scott's Guide to the Enterprise. Elements of her work have shown up in numerous technical books, novels and her unreleased TMP Enterprise deck plans are the basis for the Roddenberry Archive's version of the classic movie ship. Even some of my most popular posts here were pages of her work. Rest in peace.

[leohtttbriar]

i know that uhura’s role in tos was written to be like a radioman (the guy in wwii movies who carries the phone on his back sometimes) meaning that the “communications officer” role evolved from radioman to linguist in the time since tos aired. but that makes uhura in tos really interesting with a retrospective read of her character, applying things novels and later iterations of her have fleshed out, because she doesn’t do any visible linguistic work in any tos episode. she does security and navigation and piloting and engineering which sort of makes her seem like a valuably flexible sort of many-skilled officer.

it was probably both enterprise with hoshi and the 2009 movie that really cemented the idea of “communications officer means linguist or at the very least polyglot” instead of it just being an uhura-quirk. uhura in the 2009 movie does a lot of engineering/operating work of comm equipment and is implied to speak a lot of languages on top of be able to interpret subspace “noise,” so to speak (like, there’s no way it’s radio. it can’t be radio. star trek takes place across distances of lightyears—when they say “signal,” i’m assuming it’s not radio). and of course strange new worlds has run with the linguistics angle and made it even more explicit that yes she studies linguistics, linguistics is a core part of starfleet academic infrastructure, to the point where whole episode plots are written around the act of translation.

the retrospective addition of this expertise to uhura makes what she is in tos a character even more focused on leadership and, idk, becoming something like a captain, because she doesn’t seem all that specialized. she’s more of a kirk-like character, or janeway or sisko, characters that have a specialized skill but have set it aside mostly to pursue some sort of command. obviously this wasn’t the intention of her character. writers of uhura have mostly just stumbled on the idea of her as a polyglot (according to wikipedia, first introduced in the novel uhura’s song, so) and been like “neat idea! makes sense! explorers need to learn languages!” and kept doubling down on that idea until we get to an origin-story uhura in snw that (wildly) speaks 37 languages, for whatever definition of speak or language, i guess.

what all this overthinking on my part has generated is this idea of uhura very much like a futuristic-captain aubrey or a captain sisko not nailed down to one station, hanging off the shrouds of a solar-sail ship’s rigging, looking beyond, in the most romantic and idealized version of an explorer. i think a lot of people read/write female characters as being more down-to-earth than the whimsical leader-on-the-sea or more nurturing than than the hardened captain-of-a-ship, partly why janeway and burnham are so wonderful to me. but it’s fun to imagine tos uhura being the exploring-captain archetype, amongst the political structures of the 60s. like the additions to her character over the years have solidified that romantic adventurer portrait of her in tos, when the idea of her in command would be the least welcome.

and the fact that she was shown to be excited about a solar sailing ship in snw, like sisko was in ds9 for that one episode, i think emphasizes this read of her—and that her character-journey in snw is going to be how she goes from bookish linguist to “hanging-on-a-shroud-on-a-sunsail-ship” looking out to “sea”.

[burning-taste-of-mouthwash]

💚 - 🤎 - 💚 X 💚 - 🤎 - 💚 X 💚 - 🤎 - 💚

Josh Levy!

[fruitsboots]

Going to a local sci-fi convention this weekend, so you know I had to do my nails 💅 🖖

[yourfourthgradepetrock]

what I love about Star Trek tos, that I rarely find myself feeling in regards to most modern sci-fi, is how much you can tell people cared about making everything. Even if the sets are weird, and the clothes are garish, and the lighting doesn't "make sense", and everything doesn't look as neat and "realistic" as we're used to, you can see how much care a group of individuals put into creating this show. You can say to yourself, "wow, someone painted that set backdrop!" "wow, someone constructed that box set!" "someone spent hours doing layer after layer of alien makeup!" and it's gorgeous. I've done tech before, and when things are imperfect but they are real, the experience of whatever you are consuming is so much better.

And I'm not saying that modern media doesn't have a lot of care put into it, because it definitely does, it's just harder to notice, because everything looks exactly how it is "supposed to"--I find that our expectations, in that regard, are far too high.

[electrichylian]

My Demily has arrived and is already judging my meager manga and book collection

[felicia-trenny]

[cassette-amateur]

[starfall-xo]

Zendaya styled by Law Roach and shot by Nadia Lee Cohen for On’s latest campaign, Zone Dreamers (2025)

[musicmags]

[eightiesfan]

70's Christmas

[retrocgads]

UK 1982

[stra-tek]

Know your Star Trek OS's!

S-COMS

ENT, DSC, SNW, TOS, classic movies (across many art teams with many very different ideas)

From TOS onward, these ran on Duotronic circuits, developed by Richard Daystrom.

PCAP

Kelvin Universe, insanely this evolved from Hewlett Packard's "Machine" circa 2016, according to advertising around and in Star Trek Beyond

LCARS

TNG, DS9, VOY, LWD, PRO, PIC

Library Computer Access and Retrival System

[licorishh]

"screw you my child is completely fine" your child got unfixably attached to these characters above all others within milliseconds of screen time