Wow, I did not know that! The TNG crew met Venusians from the centre of the galaxy. That’s wonderful.

Reading between the lines of The Nth Degree, one might suppose the entity was a Cytherian, who granted Sybok the knowledge to get the ship, as would later happen with Barclay. And maybe the other Cytherians helped them get back home as well?

Of course, this all contradicts my preferred theory was that there was no entity. At least, not until Sybok arrived and found his supposed “Eden” to be an empty wasteland. Unable to deal with his whole belief system falling apart, his subconscious leveraged his advanced mental abilities to conjure an appropriate godlike being. But of course, like him, it was a little bit mad…

Actually, there was just a lot of downtime between shots of STV. Kirk, Spock, and McCoy spent about 40 years in that brig cell waiting for Scott to break them out. By the time they made it back home they had caught up to the TNG era. That’s why Worf was able to serve as as defense attorney in the trial in STVI. It’s obvious when you think about it.

This scene rather speaks for itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW5Qx7jU9pU

But if you really want to be convinced, I’ve gotta recommend this deep dive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiW3wOUgBTY

Obviously rife with spoilers for both TOS and the films, though.

Mulder, there’s never been any conclusive evidence that Vulcanians even exist, let alone operate a prestigious science academy. And the idea that this fictional academy is dictating policy to the United Earth government across light years using some kind of universal translation technology? It’s completely scientifically implausible.

The Borg ain’t nothing but zombies.

There are a million Fight Club theories. My favourite is that the narrator is Calvin and Tyler is Hobbes.

Fascinating, I’ll need to see if I can find where they got their system from.

The best and most detailed stardate system I’ve found online is here. It makes a valiant attempt to integrate the TNG and TOS stardates into a coherent whole. It’s a little overwrought in my book and makes some calls I can’t agree with, but you can’t fault the dedication!

For sure, I seriously doubt it was at all intentional, but the fact that the offset matches up as well as it between the two examples is very lucky for any of us foolish enough to try to take these things seriously. I definitely think about these things too much.

Data and Lore switch places on every encounter. From Datalore to Brothers its Lore. Then it’s Data again until Descent. Then back to Lore until Nemesis. That’s the real reason Data’s personality is all fragmented when he returns on Picard. Too many swaps got him confused.

Empty chairs. Stare at an empty chair late at night, and I just get the sense that someone is sitting in it looking back at me.

Oh no, now there’s two “that persons”!

1000 stardates is definitely 1 Earth year, as confirmed when Discovery jumped 800 years into the future and they hadn’t drifted away from that pattern.

However, there’s good evidence that stardate x000 is not January 1st.

In Data’s Day, the stardate is 44390.1 and Data notes in his log that there’s “a celebration of the Hindu Festival of Lights”. That could technically be any one of 5 days in 2366, from October 31 to November 4th, according to this calculator: https://www.drikpanchang.com/diwali/diwali-puja-calendar.html?year=2366

(To confirm that 2366 is the correct year, Data directly said it was 2364 in The Neutral Zone, 2.4 years earlier on stardate 41986).

Assuming November 1 for Data’s Day, that’s 214 days after April 1. 44390 - 1000 * (214/365) = stardate 43803 for April 1. The start of the year would be 304 days earlier around stardate 43557. Of course, stardates trip over themselves all the time, but would Data of all people be wrong?

A little support is in Voyager Homestead, when they celebrate First Contact Day (April 5th) sometime shortly before stardate 54868.6. That’s a bit late but in both cases we’re looking at April falling in the 800s. I’d go early 800s, because Data is better at math than Neelix. (I dunno, maybe Voyager’s clocks had fallen 2 weeks out of sync after being separated from Federation servers for 7 years).

I dunno, I remember people receiving the wrong message about Rorschach long before Snyder came on the scene.

Listen, those are from a long, long time ago. I don’t like to judge. The world was different then. We were different. Obviously I wouldn’t tolerate it today, but in 2011 it was still widely seen as acceptable, even normal, to have a twitter account.

Some heavy Garth Marenghi vibes in those comments.

Loved Academy, hopefully something comes of this. Very unlikely, but if nothing else maybe it’ll motivate a novel or comic series continuation…

Yeah, going on the critical drinker’s podcast in the first place is a monumentally bigger red flag than the part where he said he thought Star Trek is shit.

The point of the post was that it’s weird to find Hooters titillating at all. Let’s not act like titillation itself is a bad thing or needs to be segregated from other parts of your life. Titillation during dinner is a great mix!

Or, of course, Barclay’s deep fakes. The holodeck really does function a lot like an outgrowth of today’s LLMs, at least as far as its usage goes. But I don’t think TNG really endorses it, given the frequency of holodeck malfunctions and misuses.

If they saw it before they were 14, it’s nuanced, insightful, even challenging. If they saw it after they were 14, it’s shallow insincere pandering.