“Now Tell Me Which Is Better: Three...or Four? Three...or Four.” “Three...or Four.”

There’s something deeply distressing to me about how there’s been this steady push over the past twenty years to transform all forms of media from things you can physically buy and use as you see fit into things you essentially rent in perpetuity from publishers and hosting services. It’s like there’s this assumption that we can rent these things forever and never have to worry about the Internet ever going down or one of these digital landlords deciding to take them away from us whenever they want. Movies and PC games are my beat, but I've certainly had to stockpile a number of hard copies over the years due to rights issues or lack of interest keeping them out of the digital marketplace.

On the Existential Fear of Losing Your Online Persona

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“Digital is about access, it’s about sharing,” Schwartz said. “But once you digitize something, suddenly the object is not human-readable anymore—not readable like a stack of letters in your attic. With digital you have to preserve the letter, and you have to preserve the software, and the machine that can read it.”

That means that as technology evolves, the types of data it can read evolves as well. Think about the floppy discs you almost definitely have in a box somewhere—or DVDs, to pick a more recent example. My current laptop doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive at all. I couldn’t watch my Mona Lisa Smile DVD if I wanted to. So you can see how delicate that media is.

Thinking a lot about this since Apple announced the demise of iTunes. One great thing about iTunes was the convenience of digital while still owning a physical library. I spent a good chunk of the 90s building a music collection. It defined me, which was the things worked then. It’s no coincidence that the transition from aesthetic to moral signal occurred alongside the transition from owning a physical to a virtual library. If the things we own can’t define us, then what does? When I was twelve or thirteen, I would have killed for something like Spotify where all the music I could ever dream of was at my fingertips, but there’s no hunt, no sense of personal value.

The mirror universe, transporter accidents, other parallel universes, time travel, cloning technology operated by unscrupulous doctors and scientists, the holodeck...the list goes on and on.

The “would you fuck your clone?” question is so uncomfortably real in Star Trek because of the Mirror Universe.

For the Daily Kuvira thing (and I thank you for that~), maybe a sleepy Kuvira? Or a sleepy Kuvira that's too stubborn to admit that she's tired.

Daily Kuvira #6

Long night…

Daily Kuvira #46 - memes never end

When you can’t remember if you locked your giant killer robot.

Nasty little beastie, but a good doggo nonetheless

Who’s a good ghost doggo?!

Look, @coppermarigolds, Space Kuvira rides again!

The most passive-aggressive move Star Wars’s tie-in novels ever made toward their scifi franchise competition: the cover artists started drawing the evil Admiral Daala in a very similar way to Voyager’s Captain Janeway.

Mind you, Trek isn’t quite as bad as Star Wars in this regard. I can still type the name of, say, Jenna D’Sora or Susanna Leijtin into Memory Beta and discover that they’ve never appeared in any of the novels since their appearances on TNG.

star trek character who appears for 3 lines of dialogue: hello, my name is Blek’tho, i’m a Zeeyopian dishwasher repairman

star trek beta canon: Blek’tho, the secret prince who had newly become king of all zeeyop,

Kuvira thinking about crushing you like a bug

INTERIOR - CABIN JEAN-LUC PICARD: You’re...James Tiberius Kirk? Right? JIM KIRK: Yes, I am him. JEAN-LUC PICARD: Why? <puzzled silence> - a scene cut from the shooting script of Star Trek: Generations (1994)

what if after the five year mission, people treat captain kirk like they treat tony hawk?

like people don’t recognize tony hawk unless he has a skateboard, and people don’t recognize kirk unless he’s in uniform