For Seven’s sake, too bad Jellico didn’t get stuck in the Delta Quadrant.

Gosh, I love that quote; just rewatched Generations last night as part of my memorial activities.

Indeed, the bermagot does slap.

I’m a recent ex-Mormon, so that’s why I’ve never had it before.

It took a couple tries to get it right (I didn’t let it steep long enough the first time), but I sure like the sensation of what feels like drinking an orange or lemon peel.

If Wil Wheaton was never in TNG for the youth appeal, my mom might have never watched The Next Generation as a tween/teen, and by proxy, I may have never watched watched it. Also, he was really fun in Star Trek: Prodigy.

https://startrek.website/post/12349474

Yes, finally, someone else who recognizes the meme potential of this frame!

You sure that’s not just Prepotente from Dungeon Crawler Carl?

1. Both characters are in uniform rather than their own fashion choice in the picture.
2. Klingons are also the race that read love poetry (granted, while having stuff chucked at them by their mate), so I don’t think looking a little snazzy is exactly un-Klingon. I mean, heck, Worf got someone pregnant on the holodeck while in uniform.

I basically just gave three (or at least 2, as the DISCO one maybe is a bit iffy) examples of modern Star Trek scrutinizing the means despite the obstensibly good ends.

Also, another example is S2 E2 “Ad Astra Per Aspera” borderline almost literally puts “the moral cost of the means” (keeping good genetically modified people like Una out of Starfleet) that is ostensibly done for the ends of preventing another Eugenics Wars. I wouldn’t hesitate to call this episode one of the best in the whole franchise, very much in the tradition of court case ethical discussion episodes like “Measure of a Man”.

I don’t think one can make a blanket statement about newer Star Trek quitting “believing something”; sure, it may be uneven in quality (maybe more than classic)*, but dismissing all of “NuTrek” out of hand is akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

: I mean, there’s whatever DIS season 2 was, Section 31, most of PIC, etc., but also, it’s not like good swathes of classic Trek aren’t also kind of crap - I mean, there’s the time Riker murdered his clone and nobody batted an eye, as well as TOS S3, TNG S1, and the inconsistency of VOY. Even in the good classic episodes, it’s not like every one is “do the ends justify the means” - in addition to other ethical themes, classic Trek still had room for simply "Cool sci-fi s** happened and we have to deal with it", not to mention episodes focused on interpersonal drama like “Data’s Day” or any of Deanna’s “Oh f*** my mother is on board” episodes.

Hey, sneaking Alexander onto the holodeck is more than Worf ever did as a father.

I would say it depends.

I mean, the ends not justifying the means is kind of the entire point of DISCO S1 (whether or not the rest of DISCO embodied it is a different matter); Burnham has to let go of what Lorca summarizes as “Universal law is for lackeys. Context is for kings.” or in other words, the ends often justify the means.

Also, SNW is better about it, than say, PIC; for instance, SNW S3 E7 “What is Starfleet?” from 2025, for all its flaws (including in some ways being very similar to TNG “Tin Man”), basically has the crew going “WTF! The ends (saving an alien race from a war they didn’t start) do not justify the means (enslaving a sentient space whale)!” Also, SNW 1x06 is basically “ends don’t justify means”, although mostly because it basically copied “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”.

I’ll have to see if this is in the officially published edition, but I’m currently at my dorm and both my Tech Manuals are at home.

One I bought in a used book shop in Sedona, and the other I got with a big load of Trek books that someone gave away back in 2025.

Looks like that site is dead and has being an AI slop domain squat.

XFCE!

In all serious, while I use XFCE on most personal things, if I was pressed to choose between the big two, I think I’d choose KDE over GNOME; in fact, when I had to loan my younger sibling a laptop recently and that laptop was too old to run Windows 11, I put them on Debian with KDE. I think KDE is also my backup plan if major applications start dropping xorg support before XFCE has implemented sufficient Wayland support, although they seem to be making progress.

Out of the box, KDE tends to be more Windows-like and just better for my workflow in general, while GNOME can just be… weird. Like, I don’t quite hate GNOME as much as I used to - I plan on throwing it on an old Surface tablet soon - but like others have said, it’s very opinionated and doesn’t like customization and whatnot. I also resent GNOME in the sense that they tend to make design designs (such as in GTK 4) that reduce ease of interoperability across different open source desktops.

A long time ago, I tried to tune a Piper voice using Majel Barrett’s speech from her reading of the novel “Q In Law”, but I didn’t get very far - just a small amount of training data collected.

I agree; for reasons other people have discussed in detail here, I think Majel Barrett is probably one of the least ethically ambiguous actors you can do this with.

Technically, Fandom is MediaWiki, just used for its evil aims.

Since Trek is nearing a big lull in activity in the next year or two, I think that might be the optimal time to start up a Memory Alpha fork.

I can get it being back by the 32nd century, but I still wonder why Nova Squadron (or any elite academy group beyond a simple honors society) came back in Prodigy relatively shortly after:

1. The Locarno incidents
2. That time Red Squad tried to take over THE ENTIRE FREAKIN’ FEDERATION.

I felt better once they got out the prisons; the ship aesthetics have some generic sci-fi aesthetic to them, but having the reds in them makes it feel overall much brighter and Trek-y. Honestly, even though it’s not as bright as TNG, just being able to actually see scenes was nice.

I think KDEnlive is good as well, definitely the least terrible FOSS one. I never used Premiere Pro on that advanced a level, but for basic effects, keyframes, and title cards, it does quite well.

The main proprietary, “professional” one on Linux is Da Vinci Resolve, but I’ve never used it on Linux, since KDEnlive is just fine for me.

Honestly, in my opinion, every video editor is terrible to some extent; it’s having to deal with enormous amounts of data every second more than almost any other program on a computer, and even a semi-usable editor is a mind-bogglingly impressive feat.

Of course I don’t mean those art-stealing cannibals over at Adobe allowing them, I mean the Wine software allowing them, as it semantically implied.

Like I said, I wouldn’t touch Adobe with a 39.5 foot pole, but Photoshop is unfortunately necessary in those relatives’ industry, so getting on a high horse and telling them to use GIMP or Krita is not going to accomplish anything.

I’ve gotten used to GIMP and used it for a lot of cool thing (especially G’MIC for getting CD liner note scans looking quite good), but it’s just not a solution for serious professional use.