Another Place To Ramble

A critical hit is described as the world slowing to a halt as you suddenly become aware of the enemy’s aching scar that could be struck to disable them, or a persuasion check becomes you hearing everything the other person WANTS to hear and then reciting it perfectly, or identifying a dye becomes you watching a flower’s moment of sprouting and growth before being harvested and processed into dye.

…but nah, everyone’s just still insisting “actually they’re different races of the same species because they can breed”, ignoring that cross-species hybridization is a thing in real life, even if it’s extremely rare and situational

Fantasy is inspired by reality, from folklore to cultural concepts, and we’ve been taught to casually accept “race science is real” in fantasy media, alongside the trope of equating humanity to whiteness, as we so often see the “human culture” in fantasy media being based on Western European cultures in contrast to “non-human” cultures inspired by indigenous cultures, or just blatant Orientalism.

Whenever a player wants a spell, the DM must decide wether the spell has entered common knowledge, if only a few people have developed it, or if it just doesn't exist yet

Trevor Noah has a great tip, that when he craves ice cream at night he breaks it down into parts: I want something cold, I want something sweet. He drinks a glass of cold water then waits to see if he still has the ice cream craving. Usually he doesn’t.

So listening to your body isn’t “follow every urge” but “decompose the urge to discover the underlying need.”

If you always feel like getting cozy in bed you may be: cold, dehydrated, and/or malnourished (maybe a need for high calories that are bioaccessible…not processed).

If you do not feel tired at bedtime you may: need to eat dinner earlier because your body is still digesting, need to exercise or go outside more during the day, get the fuck off your screen for an hour so your brain can enter sleep mode.

Hope this helps someone.

The first season finale of Starfleet Academy sees Nus Braka conduct a twisted courtroom around the idea that the Federation doesn't deserve to be a part of the galaxy. There are multiple moving parts to this trial and the story aspects are very good, but I want to talk about why the writers would do something like this.

And if you ask me, they did it because they knew exactly what they were doing.

As I have ranted about at length before, Starfleet Academy is a show that at its core is about explaining why institutions matter, and why they are not necessarily illegitimate. The show is about this because we live in a world where the legitimacy of virtually every institution is either wildly questionable, or lost outright. So now is the perfect time for Star Trek to ask maybe the biggest question about Star Trek:

Is any of this worth saving at all?

Does Star Trek deserve to continue? Is Star Trek a viable formula for delivering hope? Is Star Trek... even a good idea anymore?

And it's a valid question. Because if you take a step back from the utopian posturing, there are big questions woven into the rug here. The original series was groundbreaking television because it dared to imagine reality after the cold war as something other than a mass grave. But it did so with a chain of command, with things that to modern audiences sure look like misogyny, racism, and military glorification. (Including, horribly, the ones who LIKE that sort of thing.) And also this whole thing, this Federation, aren't they kind of symbolic of the US hegemony? Isn't all that... kind of a bad thing?

So Academy sat down and actually asked the question. And they did not flinch from the contradictions. In fact they gave that contradiction a voice, and they made him mean, and smart, and cynical. Everything we feel like maybe we have to be to survive in this world. Nus Braka is not, in the end, a mere caricature of our modern day enemies. He's something a lot more morally dangerous: he's who we are afraid we might have to be, to win.

They didn't make him foolish. They didn't even make him particularly selfish, or perhaps more precisely, they didn't make him someone who wallows in his selfishness. They made him someone who sees his selfishness as the only viable option. The only way to not be fake. To Nus, the Federation is obviously corrupt, because it professes generosity, and he knows, down to his bones, that ALL generosity is a smoke screen constructed by empire to delude and propagandize.

So he is the perfect prosecuting attorney, to put the Federation's feet to the fire.

And the writers give him a lot to work with, and wove his argument through the whole plotline through the show's main character: Caleb Mir. In Caleb we see exactly what happens when institutions crumble. We see exactly what happens when the rule of law is turned on the powerless. We see exactly why we are right to worry.

And this is why the trial is such a smart final episode: the trial was going on the whole time. Every time Caleb interacts with his classmates, every time he questions their motivations, every time he's there where the rubber really meets the road on this whole Restored Federation thing, he is acting as the true judge and jury of the trial.

No amount of virtue in the phoenix egg that is the new Federation is going to make someone who has seen as he has the worst of the collapse into a Federation choir boy. You will not see Caleb, even if he ends up an admiral, pronouncing the Federation to be the good and holy thing that, say, Captain Picard saw it as.

Which is why it works that he ultimately is forced to agree: the Federation should exist after all. It should exist because at the end of the day, building a resilient and abundant world doesn't mean we don't share the load, or have leaders, or make laws. In fact, we need to do all those things. Especially when they've all been twisted and warped by moral collapse. We just have to do them right.

And that's the thesis of Starfleet Academy: that Star Trek is worth saving, because those gleaming ships filled with crews and command structures were never really meant to be gunboats. I think even Gene Roddenberry knew that. The ships don't represent a military. They represent a means to understand, to cooperate, and to grow.

If some left before war overtook and destroyed the planet, they still have to reckon with the loss of culture, homeworld, family… overwhelming hate destroyed all but those who turned away from it. Does it really erase the original episode’s theme for someone to see all-consuming destruction, turn away from it, and have a legacy and descendants separate from it while still impacted by it?

Maybe I’m too much of an optimist, but I got all excited when I saw a Cheron in the background because it meant even in the face of so much destruction, there was still hope, and they could still change. War and infighting wasn’t inherent to the people of this planet, they had hope to change and survive.