something poignant

[on the verge of having a complete breakdown] i need to make some kind of list or perhaps sort things into categories

Time to reorganize my beads

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

humans: hahaha yeah

humans: it did tho

vsa: IT EXPLODED

humans: it exploded twice as fast

I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.

Yeah, I love this.

Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.

Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.

All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.

klingons: okay we don’t get it

vulcan science academy: get what

klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way

klingons: why do you let them run your federation

vulcan science academy: look

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up

vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip. 

vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how. 

vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want. 

klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation

Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.

you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.

you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus, testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do? do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey, while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.

“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.

“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.

there must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten it.”

Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.

Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”

“That was ONE TIME.” 

There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity. 

And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”

There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”

reblog for new meta.  RE that last line: McGuyver. 

“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.

during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words. 

“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”

“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”

there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’. 

This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg

The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans

The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light

This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.

“there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.”

I just died

I lost my shit at “toasts your bread after you’ve eaten it”

Oh please please someone write this

the best thing about this post is that the way it’s written - by multiple human authors getting over-excited about ridiculous, wonderful, impossible ideas that ought by rights to be terrifying - is itself proof that we’re like this

it just keeps getting better. 

There’s a saying in space:

“If you want something reasoned out, you get a Vulcan. If you want something fought, you get a Klingon. Spied on? A Romulan. Records kept? A Cardassian. Sold? A Ferengi. 

You want something changed, you go with a human.”

Tihis sounds complementary, but its really said with the same sort of tone as “May you live in interesting times.”

Because something doesn’t become your #1 rule unless its the rule most at risk of being broken, and the human rule is the Prime Directive. Humans are change agents. Its in their nature. Their nervous systems are keyed to the novel and to  curiosity to such a degree that many of them would prefer pain to boredom. 

The science is what draws the eye because its overt, but the historians are the one who put together the pieces. Klingons are a conquering warrior-empire for their entire history, but within a few centuries of human contact their entire political system is altered and they join the Federation. Cardassian totalitarianism crumbles within decades of crossing the Federation. In less than a decade of contact with humans, the Ferengi grant equal rights to women and adopt numerous non-profit social programs. The societal changes on Vulcan initiated by the family of Sarek, who married a human, are so far reaching that they reunite with the Romans. The humans have convinced  multiple Q to change their minds. The humans reintroduced individuality to the Borg. The Dominion fell within years of meeting them.

Not all of these are directly caused by humans. The Cardassian system wasn’t tenable long-term, the primary figure pushing Ferengi social change was Ishka and her children, but the correlation is too large to dismiss. Certainly not if you ask Quark, whose dumbass brother’s journey to being Nagus was set off by Nog befriending a human boy. 

the Federation itself as a concept is so funny because the founding members are

like imagine you're the Romulan Empire and these weird monkeys who've barely figured out interstellar travel show up on your doorstep in the equivalent of a shipping container with missiles strapped to it, kick your ass in front of everybody, and then start a friendship club with 3 of your neighbours who all hated each others' guts until like a year ago. now I understand why every Romulan on the show is so angry

I like to think that Vulcans who come to understand that Humans just can’t try to process emotions the same way as them, it’s just healthiest to let it out in harmless ways, decide that venting and stuff should be taken just as seriously as Vulcan’s meditation time, and will encourage the Humans around them to complain about what’s upsetting them

People who are used to aloof Vulcans who avoid Humans at all cost running into one comforting a Human

“-and then they said my cheesecake was subpar, and they didn’t even bring a dish!!!”

“The purpose of this event was that every participant brings a food item of sorts, correct?”

“Yeah!!”

“And they did not follow this rule while insulting dishes that were brought?”

“Mostly just my dish but yeah >:(“

“How illogical”

“That’s what I’m saying!!!”

@mcspirkmindmeld your tags *chef kiss*

god I would be UNSTOPPABLE if I was capable of consistently initiating tasks. just you wait. you'll be waiting a while but just you wait

Gale slipped on his own ice and fell down like this. He looks so defeated lol

Gale's inner thoughts:

he’s been on his best behavior. they all know it.

Astarion walking into the fight with Cazador, skin glowy and moisturized, recently fed off of thinking blood, hair freshly curly girl-routined, surrounded by friends who love him whether he likes it or not (one of them on fire... several of the others in possession of at least 2 different "disentigrate that old man" spells), dressed to the nines in the finest clothes the world has to offer, pockets jangling with the 30k gold and the copious amounts of jewelry we have given him throughout the journey, chapstick: on, four ghouls he summoned with his newly acquired Necromancy of Thay knowledge b-boying along beside of him, big wet kiss mark on his forehead: fuck you!

Cazador, with 2 bucks and cobwebs in his bank account, no steeze, no friends, no real plan of attack except the 8 dudes he found on craigslist, and yet all the audacity in the world: I got this... He has NOTHING ON ME!!!

beach episode?

This mans got me in a chokehold ahahahaaa 🫠

don't tell him I said that

i’m absolutely normal and think about the second picture in a totally healthy way.. 👀

I'm literally only on Twitter to follow Bg3 stuff and artists but this has me HOWLING.

I love me a good Elon Musk burn

"You starve Tara? You leave her to starve like lowly stray? Jail! Jail for one thousand years!"

Not pictured: the rest of camp waking up and all hell breaks loose.

Welp, this game has unexpectedly taken over and lives in my head rent free to the point it actually jump started the will to art lmao.

I’m so sorry

Ref:

Astarion: “No one ever cared about me >:\”

Karlach, standing 10ft away: “ME I CARE I CARE SO MUCH”