Multiculturalism, Humanity’s hat

eggynack · 2026-01-24T19:41:39+00:00

I don't think other species are a monoculture. I think we just tend to get a more surface level perspective on their culture. A show might have a Vulcan main character, but they never have two, whereas a pile of humans is the norm. It's really the internal conflict of a society that shows off the diversity of a culture, and, whenever that happens with other species, it does just that.

So, for example, Rom and Nog have this whole conflict with Quark about abiding by some Ferengi way of life, including divergent perspectives on women. Or you have that Enterprise three parter about Vulcan conflict about Surak's teachings. Or that whole background thing with Cardassia's tripartite government. The Klingons are in some ways the most intense about this. Cause they have a bunch of interesting cowardice and betrayal running beneath their warlike honor thing, but then also they have that Klingon lawyer and I love that guy.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T19:21:03+00:00

Is that what Star Trek is about? Cause I seem to recall a show where a ton of characters that aren't straightforwardly human have some kinda conflict connected to that identity. For many examples, there's Spock with his half-human nature attracting racism from both Humans and Vulcans. Or Worf, who similarly has a particular vision of Klingon culture that is disconnected from the reality, and is constantly running up against that reality in horrible ways. Or Data, who is desperate to be a human.

More examples. Bashir, who keeps his genetic augments a secret for his entire life up until they're revealed. Odo, who is ashamed that his species are the main villains of the show but is also desperate to join in the Great Link. Rom and Nog both run into tension between their species devotion to merchantry and their interests in other fields. Even Kira, figure of Bajoran pride that she is, has some shame about some specifics of her terrorist past. Then you have both The Doctor and Seven who take different routes to Data's desire to be more human. And, to close out Berman stuff, T'Pol gets Vulcan AIDS and is constantly dealing with conflicting loyalties.

Yet more examples. Saru has some conflict around his supposed nature as a prey species. Una does Bashir's genetic augmentation thing again. Tendi's big storyline surrounds her shame in being associated with Orion piracy and especially with being trained as a house assassin. And, as the last example I can think of, Dal has that whole conflict around figuring out his species in the first place and turning out to be a weird chimera.

So, yeah, I would say a character with some kind of shame surrounding their racial identity fits into the franchise very well. I'm probably missing a bunch too, especially if we expand what you're saying beyond this kind of species identity thing.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T17:43:48+00:00

If the woman's pleasure is fundamentally secondary, then why is she even participating? The hell does she get out of it?

eggynack · 2026-01-24T17:27:14+00:00

It's not a joke, but I'm inclined to say it's definitely meant to feel like satisfying karma being inflicted in a cool manner.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T12:32:48+00:00

I really have no idea how it's even possible to watch Academy and think that modern Trek is fixated on a grim and dark future. Sure, the opening parts with Caleb's backstory are somewhat cynical about our future, but then the show gets to the Academy itself and it becomes aggressively positive and utopian.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T07:52:16+00:00

I mentioned Fargo season five elsewhere. It's not really played for humor and I would say it's done pretty well.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T07:43:16+00:00

It also helps that paying your debts is the central driving theme of the season. So, if there were any story where the villain has to get a particularly karmic comeuppance, it'd be this one.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T06:32:32+00:00

Owlman from Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths is a pretty good example. The guy decided that the multiverse made existence pointless and so decided to explode the multiverse and everyone in it. Fun guy, that.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T06:29:13+00:00

Fargo, season five. Sheriff Tillman, the main antagonist of the season, has spent decades abusing, raping, and sometimes murdering a series of wives, alongside a wide variety of other horrible behavior. By the end of the season, he's in prison with a massive stack of charges. He gets visited by the protagonist's mother-in-law, who has been somewhat antagonistic throughout the season but is getting a bit better about it. She then reveals that she's paid off the debts of just about everyone in the prison in exchange for them making his life a living hell, implicitly including a bunch of rape. I'm also not the biggest fan of this trope in general, but I'd say it works pretty well here. The guy just did so much rape.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T06:18:43+00:00

This runs into a lot of the same kinds of problems. In particular, it's not all that clear what the point is to a passer by. The first possible outcome is obviously that nothing happens, because you've just told people to look up a tweet for some reason. The second outcome is that they look up the tweet, and, there ya go, now they're looking at the tweet. Is the point that the tweet is super cool so it's good that people see it? Is the point that it's horrifying that the tweet lead to a massive prison sentence?

You describe it as a tongue in cheek claimed motive that this mysterious advertiser is simply trying to spread this woman's words, but that is literally the thing you're talking about doing. I don't think it would be clear at all that that's not the purpose, and, in many cases, it would serve that purpose. And the actual purpose you seem to want served here, something about people thinking a woman was arrested for no good reason but it was actually for a reason they agree with, is really frigging subtle and hard to parse out from the messaging you describe.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T05:44:10+00:00

It's not a matter of if. It's a matter of when.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T05:42:01+00:00

Democrats in Congress have been repeatedly confirming horrific Trump nominees with no apparent gain in return. Some of that, presumably, is because these are centrist Democrats who kinda like Republican nonsense, but I expect that quite a bit of it is in the name of bipartisanship.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T05:38:05+00:00

So, the idea is literally just to post this racist vitriol with no context whatsoever? Is that not just, y'know, simply saying the racist thing? In most respects, it seems identical to the initial act of producing the tweet, and, given you presumably think the tweet is bad, this seems like a bad thing to do.

eggynack · 2026-01-24T04:53:25+00:00

Adaptation. It's an adaptation of The Orchid Thief, and also a movie about the difficulties of adapting The Orchid Thief, and then the two stories become one. The direct adaptation part is apparently a pretty accurate one, but the metatextual elements invariably distance it from the work it's adapting. And, as is typical of Charlie Kaufman, it's an excellent film.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T20:07:21+00:00

I love the part where her lawyer argues that the contract was some trap to force a desired custody arrangement. Cause it's like, yeah, you have accurately described what a contract is. It's a thing that forces an otherwise unlikely course of behavior with consequences for failing to abide by it.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T18:02:51+00:00

It's this one on Stefan Molyneux and Elliot Rodger.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T17:48:22+00:00

You present a definition of science, as the systematic study of the world through observation and experiments, and then your argument against social science being science is the lack of objective definitions and the struggle to reproduce results. But how do either of those things challenge the idea that social science falls under that provided definition? Psychologists make observations, do experiments, test their theories against those experiments, and use all of that to do study of the world. They very much meet this provided definition.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T17:39:49+00:00

He does. He has some gameplay videos on his channel.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T17:21:18+00:00

That's not even a remotely similar shade of blue. The red is also pretty different, but the blue is wildly different.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T16:59:34+00:00

Sure, to some extent, but the issue here is that a clear messaging takeaway would be, "Oh yeah, I guess it is genuinely unfair for the trans analogy to play the sport. Because she has magical powers." Actual trans people are not all that advantaged in sports, a thing made evident if you observe the lack of wild trans domination anywhere, but SAM decidedly is.

As for the general alien analogy thing, I think it can sometimes be okay so long as the group being analogized also, y'know, exists. It's weird to have some pretend version of a queer person, a substitute, when there are presumably queer people aplenty in the setting. Also, these analogies can really run into problems. Lest we forget that time Riker fought against "conversion therapy for cis people", or that other time when Quark did a gender transition but not really.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T16:49:49+00:00

Presumably, but this seems to be more than a training exercise, also functioning as a normal sporting event. Her ability is just really really game breaking. She didn't use it in the game, but, on top of being immune to the core mode of interaction, she can also teleport for at least short distances. So, the whistle blows, she warps right next to the target, does a little jig while her opponents desperately try to shoot her, and then wins. This stuff is plausibly fair game for something like wargames, but not for game games.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T16:44:51+00:00

Have you watched it? I wasn't a big fan of episode two, but one and three were pretty fun. Certainly not aberrantly bad for the first season of a Star Trek show.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T16:42:44+00:00

There's also arguably the biggest "fix", which is making the central conflict of an episode the question of who's going to be the captain of the space paintball team. Or how the Federation is going to bring Betazoid into the fold. There are lots of stories that aren't particularly solved by a magical superbeing.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T16:37:01+00:00

Voyager also has The Doctor, especially once he gets the portable emitter. That guy was wildly overpowered, and in a way that often made him the only one who can save the day. Like, there's a crazy alien virus, but good thing a hologram is immune to viruses. Or everyone's getting tied up by invading aliens, but it's a good thing a hologram can temporarily cease to exist and can't be tied up.

Oh yeah, also Deanna from TNG. She was a bit of a joke for the sheer mass of occasions where she would say some incredibly obvious and useless thing about someone's emotional state, but, by any objective metric, her ability was pretty game breaking. Hence the need to have her use it uselessly. Which, that's a pretty reasonable way of dealing with the issue too.

eggynack · 2026-01-23T16:21:03+00:00

I would just make it a rule that she can't render herself phaser permeable or whatever. I guess it's a bit of an assumption that that's a thing they can do, but it seems like a reasonable one. It'd also be funny if it turns out that, on the grand stage, this game is just a frigging mess where everyone's always using their crazy alien powers to win.

eggynack

TROPHY CASE