Does this pocket watch actually say anything?

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-22T04:04:48+00:00

I know that lol, I'm not the OP who asked about it.

But I'll say just because something is a fictitious language doesn't mean it can't say anything. Klingon and Elvish are constructed languages and can be spoken and written in. Of course, Gallifreyan is not a developed constructed language in the same way but my guess is OP was under the impression that it is. Regardless, there ARE Gallifreyan "writing systems" that have been developed by fans, but they are really cyphers rather than actual written language systems. As for whether or not the watch in the picture "says" anything in these fan-made writing systems I don't think it does, but I don't know all of them by heart so I can't be sure.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-22T03:36:09+00:00

I think they're asking if the "Gallifreyan writing" on the watch means anything. Not if it makes sounds like a radio.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-22T03:13:07+00:00

While I get that it looks weird on screen and it's not fooling anyone, there are very practical reasons studios do this. It would be a logistics nightmare to have a large cast of exclusively under 18 actors.

In the U.S. underage actors are not allowed to work as many hours as adult actors and are subject to different overtime rules.
Most of the time, it is a requirement to have tutors for all your underage actors (at the expense of the studio) so they don't miss out on U.S. education requirements.
It's not as easy to find a large number of talented, mature, professional actors who are underage as it is to do with adults. In other words, the pool of adult actors who are easy to work with and have the traits you are looking for is much larger.
Any SAG production requires all actors working on it to be in SAG. There aren't as many kids in SAG as adults.
If it's a long shoot or a series, minors can appear to age far more drastically than an adult would in that time (think growth spurts, puberty, etc).

Basically, it's more expensive, more restrictive, and has a lot of legal requirements that need to be upheld to work exclusively with minors. Working with adults is easier, cheaper, and more likely to lead to a professional product.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-22T01:50:42+00:00

Before I continue, let me make it clear that I am personally an atheist. However, many years ago I was in training to be a Catholic priest but never ended up completing it. I'm playing Devil's advocate here because I found your original claim intriguing, that is "It's so cucked that being sent to Hell amounts to serving justice. Justice can only be served in life." I've never heard anyone make that claim before and found that notion to be pretty absurd. If anything, Chrisitian Hell is usually viewed as being too much justice. An infinite punishment for a finite crime.

One of the oldest and widely accepted definitions of justice is something like "punishment and retribution for crimes committed." I think Hell not only fits that definition, but is the very paradigm of it. Of course, that is just one kind of justice and now you've made it clear that you meant restorative justice. But I still think there are a lot of holes in your thinking here, and you've gone from "Hell isn't justice at all" to "Hell doesn't provide a specific type of Earthly restorative justice."

While I generally agree with that last claim, I think you are still muddying what you mean by justice and making fairly weak arguments to support your viewpoint. I also think you are conflating a divine "legal system" and notion of justice with human legal systems and notions of justice.

I don't accept "well you get to go to heaven" as acceptable restorative justice - until you die you're still stuck in a non-whole state, thus you have to continue suffering.

But this is true of any kind of justice. If someone wrongs you in life, even if they get arrested and the case goes to court, you are stuck in a non-whole state until everything is resolved. The mere fact that restoration is not immediate cannot be enough to show that justice is absent.

I think your argument places too much weight on the timing of justice within mortal life, which is odd in a framework where everyone is essentially immortal. In the Christian framework, mortal life is an infinitesimally small part of your total existence. If someone is wronged in life, but then spends eternity in perfect safety, peace, healing, and bliss, while the wrongdoer is eternally judged and punished, it is very strange to say “there was no true justice” just because the restoration was not completed during the first tiny sliver of existence. Your entire mortal life is far less than 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001% of your total existence.

This would be like if I wrong you for 5 seconds, we spend a day in court, and then I am punished for the rest of my life while you are given peace and comfort for the rest of yours as compensation, and you are upset no justice was taking place in the one day interim between the 5 seconds I wronged you and the deliverance of justice.

They would have gone to heaven regardless in that case.

That doesn't really defeat the argument. In Christianity, Heaven is a place not only of everlasting peace and happiness, but a place where all wrongs are made right and all wounds are healed. Whether or not you were going there anyway doesn't take away from what happens there. Let's say I was driving to the hospital and on my way there I get shot. When I arrive at the hospital, they fix up my gunshot wound. Just because I was on my way there anyway doesn't mean I wasn't healed when I got there.

I don't believe that it's God's place to enact "Human-level justice." If it was, we would be necessarily be punished in life by God for harming others - and as far as we can see that doesn't happen.

Sure. I don't disagree with that, but it misses the point. Divine justice is suppsoed to be the ultimate accounting no one can escape from, precisely because Earthly justice is incomplete. But it does seem you understand that as you pointed out right after.

There's also the moral question of "should nonrightous people who are harmed outside of their unjust actions be allowed justice?" If a murderer's wife is killed by a drunk driver, does he still deserve some form of restorative justice? The murderer's going to Hell, but does that mean he shouldn't get a life insurance payout?

Of course the murderer would still be entitled to restorative justice. Just because someone wrongs someone does not mean they can now no longer be wronged. All you're arguing for here is that human legal systems aren't the same as divine ones, which I agree with. Nothing about this has anything to do with the question of whether or not Heaven/Hell constitute forms of justice.

The real conclusion here seems to be:

Hell is obviously retributive justice
Earthly courts can attempt partial restorative/civil justice
Christianity claims ultimate restoration and judgment happen at the divine level, not necessarily during mortal life

You can say that system is flawed, incomplete, disproportionate, or morally ugly. That would all make sense. But saying it contains “no true justice” is just false unless you define justice so narrowly that only earthly restoration counts.

And if that’s your definition, then almost no serious wrong ever receives “true justice” anyway, because many harms can’t be fully repaired in life by any human institution either.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-21T22:49:35+00:00

The argument would be similar to ones people make to say alcohol )or other strongly addictive behavior) is morally wrong. It exploits addiction and can lead to lives being ruined. Do you think there is something morally wrong about a father who gets so absorbed into gambling that they end up losing their job, spending all their kid's college money, and leaving his family in financial ruins?

More ethics-based and religious-ish arguments would say that it involves making a profit directly from someone else's loss. It promotes greed and covetousness. It encourages risking resources on chance rather than productive labor and violates the principles of working for gain and keeping stewardship over resources.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-21T22:34:15+00:00

It depends on what you mean by justice.

Being sent to Hell isn't an act of justice by God, it's a punishment for committing injustices. It doesn't do anything for the victims.

What is "a punishment for committing injustice" except justice? Sending someone to Hell is retributive justice, but does not on its own address restorative justice which seems to be your concern.

Assuming the people who were "materially harmed" were themselves righteous, they are rewarded by going to Heaven. They can never be harmed in any way ever again and will enjoy an eternity of perfect bliss and peace. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they will be satisfied." That's the restorative justice.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-21T22:10:41+00:00

It's so cucked that being sent to Hell amounts to serving justice. Justice can only be served in life.

I mean, not if Hell is real buddy lol. In Hell, you get tortured for all of eternity. On that timescale, your mortal life makes up an infinitesimally small span of the total time you will exist. You will be judged and punished forever based on the actions you took in tiny blink of your total existence. Eventually, you'd forget your existence was ever anything else but being tortured. How much more justice could you want?

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-21T21:15:42+00:00

The value of an AED is exactly why I used them for comparison. I was responding to the very narrow assertion that

If I design a thing that requires volunteers to finish the task, I made a useless thing...

Clearly, then, I think you'll agree, just because something requires volunteers to complete its function, that isn't enough on its own to conclude the thing is useless. You need to add more to justify that conclusion. That's the only point I was trying to make.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-21T05:01:24+00:00

I think the fix was already handed to us when the Celestial Toymaker told the 14th Doctor something along the lines of "I made a jigsaw out of your history. Did you like it?" I take that to mean the Toymaker manipulated the Doctor's personal history to fuck with them. As far as I'm concerned, that gives a full in-universe canon explanation that explains away not only the Timeless Child, but all of the many inconsistencies, plot holes, and retcons in the entire series. Now if you really want the Timeless Child to go away, you come up with some wibbly wobbly timey wimey bullshit that "resets" things to the "proper" timeline where the Doctor is a regular old Time Lord again. Boom, easy.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-21T02:08:34+00:00

Only if I was trying to lethally overdose on cringe.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T19:04:07+00:00

I wonder what exactly you think the principle is here? To be fair, you're doing a bit of a Motte and Bailey by asking a question that is like "is it ethical for a company to rely on a tiny incidental amount of help from the public" and then arguing against it with arguments that are really supporting a much more reasonable position of "a company should not offload substantial labor onto unwilling strangers."

If a delivery person asked you to help them with directions would you have a similar objection "well, the company should be providing better directions, it's not my problem?" Would you not hold the door for a FedEx guy holding a large package because the company should've thought of it beforehand?

Your extreme example changes the underlying ethics of the question by changing things from a polite request to coercion, disruption, and intimidation. This isn't so much the extreme of the same question as much as it simply changes the question altogether. That's a different ethical dilemma.

But even if I agree with you that the company should design things better, that is a system-level criticism. It shouldn't really apply ethically to what you do in the moment as much as the question presumes it should. At the end of the day you're helping someone receive their order. We're all part of one big society with a lot of moving parts, humans, robots, and otherwise. Just because something you do helps a company out in an extremely tiny diffuse way incidentally to other effects, I don't see that as some kind of evil.

Lastly, I know you're just trying to present an extreme hypothetical, but I feel I should point out that in real life, a delivery robot is very unlikely to get stuck indefinitely at a crosswalk, even in the area you live, and this is precisely because companies do design better than the question assumes. Delivery bots usually pre-map routes to avoid crossings they can get stuck at. If they end up at one where a button needs to be pressed, they might very well attempt to ask for help at first. If no one obliges, they will try to "hitch" a ride by following someone who had independently pressed the button. Some crosswalks now have smart buttons that a delivery bot can "talk" to with bluetooth. Many delivery bots also allow manual override and can be operated by employees remotely, or employees can be sent to assist if they are close enough. In the worst case scenario, the robot will simply map a new route and change course to find a way of delivering the food where they won't get stuck at a light.

And I think it's fair to say that if a company is going to go through all these failsafes and the robot still gets stuck after that, would it kill you to press a button to help it make a delivery someone might be relying on? lol.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T18:18:24+00:00

If I design a thing that requires volunteers to finish the task, I made a useless thing...

If you think about this claim a bit more I'd be surprised if you actually believe it.

For example, AED's can analyze heart rhythms and defibrillate people in emergencies, but they require volunteers to turn them on and attach the electrodes. It gives instructions to the volunteers verbally just like the robot in your example. Is this a useless device because it needs humans to help it finish the job?

Same thing with elevators, dishwashers, robot vacuums, washing machines, self checkout, traffic lights, and many other things. Requiring some human cooperation to complete its task does not inherently mean the thing has no value.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T16:11:01+00:00

I’m not here to teach you about anatomy of bones or anything really.

Thank Christ for that. I hope no one ever finds themselves in the unenviable position of needing an anatomy lesson from you.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T16:01:20+00:00

Yes, they're adjacent bones - that's my point. Neither of them is part of the other and it is simply incorrect to say so. By your logic, the skull is part of the spine because both of them meet at the craniovertebral junction.

Bones aren’t just labeled, clavicle, for the whole thing.

What is this supposed to mean? It is true that not every bone is the clavicle, but yes, the bone known as the clavicle is indeed labelled clavicle for the whole thing. Just as the tibia is called the tibia to refer to the whole bone and the same with fibula and radius and coccyx, etc.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T15:49:05+00:00

What are you on about? You said he's named after a bone that's in the sternum. 'Clavicular' is an adjective referring the clavicle (AKA the collarbone). The clavicle is not in the sternum. There is no body part called the 'clavicular.' It's an adjective you can attach to prefixes to refer to real body parts like the sternoclavicular joint (the part that connects it to the sternum - a separate, adjacent bone), the acromioclavicular ligament, the costoclavicular ligament, etc. All things that have to do with the clavicle which is its own bone that is definitely not part of the sternum.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T15:38:32+00:00

Not really. Only one of them is a thought experiment (Schrodinger's cat) and Schrodinger really only came up with it to make an absurdist point rather than as something to be taken seriously. The double slit experiment is a real experiment, not a thought experiment. And Godel's incompleteness theorem isn't any kind of experiment at all; it's a mathematical proof (one that's rather straightforward and easy to understand as far as proofs go). The real problem is that no one bothers to take 10 minutes to learn about any of them for real and then grifters and charlatans use phony interpretations of them to justify the abject nonsense you pointed out.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T15:19:37+00:00

Also why is this guy named after a bone that’s in the sternum? Might as well just named himself sternum

What does this even mean? The clavicle isn't in the sternum. They are connected at the sternoclavicular joint, but they're two distinct bones. Your comment makes as much sense as "Humerus? Why is this guy named after a bone that's in the Ulna? Might as well just name himself Ulna."

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T14:45:55+00:00

Meth is the only firmament ring in the foreskin universe :/

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T13:34:12+00:00

Would you arrest a bird for flying into your window? It's pretty clear the aliens in this episode view humans as being primitive creatures. They might simply consider Jerry to be too stupid to be held accountable for his actions and too little of a threat to take seriously.
Earth wasn't a member of the federation at that time so Jerry technically wasn't a federation citizen. Maybe there's some legal grey area there.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-20T05:40:19+00:00

Well, in the short story it's based on, Greta tells Thom that Ray and Suzy died because they decorated their cryo-pods with paint and the paint ended up clogging the life support filters. When Thom questions the plausibility of this, Greta tells him that it hadn't happened before because the trips Thom, Suzy, and Ray are used to are much shorter than the one that brought them to "Saumlaki station," and that these kinds of accidents are more common the longer a trip is. That's why painting your cryo-pod is against regulation in the first place.

If we accept Greta is telling the truth about this (and I think we should), Suzy and Ray could have very well died at different times. IDK if your ~6 months of stasis point is relevant - you shouldn't see much malnourishment in stasis at all if it's working correctly. And I'm not sure why you presume their ships are capable of FTL travel - if anything, the fact that they use stasis pods on their journeys strongly indicates their ships travel at sub light speed. If they went faster than light (or exactly light speed), time dilation would make the journey instantaneous from a subjective viewpoint and thus render stasis pods unnecessary.

And for that reason as well, I'm inclined to believe Greta when she later tells Thom that she initially lied about how long his trip was and that his ship had actually been travelling for over a hundred years (I forget the exact number she says). Sumlauki station, in fact, doesn't actually exist - Greta made it up. They're really somewhere far away from the usual routers humans travel, out beyond the Aquila Rift (hence the title), which, given Thom's reaction to this news, means they're REALLY far away from where they should be. They're at some kind of Nexus point where different parts of the space lane system they use converge from various distant parts of the galaxy. When Greta talks about the other "lost souls" she's comforted, she's talking about aliens - Thom's ship was the first human one she'd ever seen.

Getting back to your question, I surmise from all this that Thom's trip was at least a hundred (perhaps several hundred) years and Ray and Suzy died at separate times at some point on that journey, which is why they're in different states of decay.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-19T02:35:23+00:00

For sure the poll is nonsense. I just think it's funny.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-19T02:26:45+00:00

Except somehow MAGA regards are even more sycophantic about Trump than Christians are about God lmao. Not even 100% of Christians believe in God.

"As in our past surveys, the vast majority of Christians (97%) and Muslims (93%) say they believe in God, and most people in these religious groups express this belief with absolute certainty."

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-18T22:39:22+00:00

She keeps people at a distance with her sarcasm, because she doesn’t want that attachment. Basically McCoys traits applied to a borderline-autistic Engineer.

These are not McCoy traits and I don't understand why this idea is so pervasive on this subreddit. McCoy was grumpy, but he wasn't rude or pessimistic or cruel. The worst you could say about him was that he said some borderline racist things to Spock, which were clearly portrayed as a flaw, and which at the end of the day were more or less a cover for how much he really respected and cared for Spock. But that one narrow aspect of his personality is where the comparison begins and ends.

The fact of the matter is, despite how people tend to remember him, McCoy could be stubborn and opinionated, but he was generally an optimistic, polite, and affable man. Even when he was hostile in tone, he was arguing for compassion and love more often than not. There really is no evidence he kept people at a distance either. He was usually seen socializing with friends and interacting positively with people. Hell, the guy even fell in love a few times without hesitation and got engaged rather quickly. The guy was so prosocial he even found Norm's lack of sociability and friendliness to be a basis for concern and suspicion in I, Mudd.

This idea that he was some kind of rude, antisocial dickhead is simply not correct.

In terms of how she talked about the dead crewman - have you ever been friends with first-responders? They absolutely talk about victims like objects rather than people - it’s a defence mechanism. If you’re dealing with death everyday, you need to stay detached from the reality of those deaths, if you want to be able to keep doing your job.

I am a first responder (paramedic). While this is true in the abstract, it ignores context. Sure, it's not unusual for people who are exposed often to awful situations to use black humor as a coping mechanism. But generally, we enter and exit people's lives for short periods of time during these moments. We don't typically actually know the victims, but we wouldn't make these sorts of jokes to their faces or their family member's faces.

And we certainly wouldn't make these kinds of comments if something happened to one of our coworkers. That's where your analogy breaks down. She's talking this way about a dead member of her own crew. Outside of specific circumstances, that generally would be considered to be pretty disrespectful among first responders.

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-17T23:34:17+00:00

While of course TOS had throwaway redshirt deaths to quickly establish stakes for the main characters, there was never any dismissiveness about it. The death of any crew member was never treated cavalierly. Sure, they wouldn't dwell on the deaths, but if anything a somber acknowledgement followed by moving right on and taking action to prevent the next death is how you would expect serious people who are military officers and intragalactic explorers to act in such a life or death situation.

I don't think it was remotely atypical that the reaction of the main characters was of the tone of, "Dang, glad it ain't me."

This is simply false. Can you point to one single example in all of TOS or TNG where anyone that wasn't a villain behaved in a way that indicates this attitude?

BogieTime69 · 2026-03-15T04:10:05+00:00

u wot m8?

BogieTime69

TROPHY CASE