Trekkie Miscellany

“The Star” [ Art for @theuhurabang ]

This is Captain Kirk of the USS Enterprise speaking. We’ve entered the orbit of a planet not terribly unlike our own… save that it is exclusively populated by petty old queens.

They seem to have accepted Commander Spock as one of their own.

Chris Pine in Star Trek Beyond (2016)

Vulcans would easily annihilate the Jedi, because while the Jedi go buckwild once and fall to the Dark Side immediately the Vulcans are culturally allowed to go buckwild every seven years or so. Everything bad in Star Wars could’ve been avoided if Anakin had been allowed a Pon Farr.

Is that what you believe in, James T.?

James T. Kirk:

-Graduated in the top 4% of his year -was bullied by jocks -Is a history nerd -was so much of a teacher’s pet that he cheated on an exam and was commended for it -Was referred to as “a stack of books with legs”

Jean-Luc Picard:

-Spent all his free time drinking in pubs and playing billiards -broke more hearts than he can remember -started a bar fight that ended up in him being stabbed in the heart -likes to explore dangerous ruins of ancient civilizations for fun -wouldn’t even have become a starship captain if he wasn’t this much of a hothead

And yet people still manage to get it backwards???

I think it’s a problem of First Officer, really.

Jim Kirk seems like a wild man because he’s standing next to calm, logical Spock.*  

Meanwhile, Picard seems stately and dignified because he’s standing next to Will “Any alien physiology is bangable if you just put some thought into it” Riker*.  

* Of course THEN, we get to the next layer, which is that Spock is the dude who told the Vulcan Science Academy to fuck itself, while Riker plays the trombone.

The Federation is a confusing place.

Damnit maybe I’ll try Star Trek

cause i keep seeing so many cute snowman art UwU

Did I not, on multiple occasions, demonstrate an exceptional aural sensitivity?

An AOS AU story concept:

Jim gets mad at how blasé Bones is about Jim’s failure at the Kobayshi Maru; Bones knows it’s unwinnable, so he doesn’t care that much, and doesn’t think Jim should, either. 

Jim says, “why don’t you take it and see how it feels to lose everything?“ 

Bones, fed up with Jim’s mood, and especially that jab - “Kid, you don’t think I know what it’s like to lose everything already?” - agrees to take it, if he’s allowed. It’s highly unusual, but Jim manages to convince Pike somehow. 

In the first recorded instance in Starfleet history, Bones somehow manages to beat the test without cheating. It’s something out of The Sword in the Stone, with King Arthur anointing himself by casually pulling out the legendary sword that the strongest men couldn’t move. Everyone is flabbergasted. Jim doesn’t know what to do with himself.

Fifteen Starfleet psychologists descend on Bones en masse, trying to find out his secret. He’s being cajoled into joining command track - something he doesn’t want at all - and is the talk of campus. Jim is losing his mind, partly out of jealousy, partly out of fear that Bones will have his own ship and if Jim wants to be a captain, he’ll have to move on by himself.

Jim’s problem resolves itself neatly when it’s finally discovered what happened. Yes, Bones has a unique blend of brilliance, compassion, self-sacrifice, complete lack of ego, and complete apathy towards the test itself. But that’s not why the test seemingly rolled over for him, like a particularly obedient dog begging for Starfleet Snacks.

It’s because Bones asked a simple question during the test. “Call Starfleet Command,” he says. “Ask them what the hell a civilian freighter is doing in the Neutral Zone in the first place.”

You see, when Spock programmed the test, he anticipated hundreds of ways that cadets would desperately try to save the Kobayashi Maru, and then their own skins. Every other cadet just immediately started in on the strategy.

He didn’t expect someone to question why the ship was there. It wasn’t logical. The parameters of the test were clear. The ship is there, and you must save it. To inquire about its backstory would be a waste of time, irrelevant.

But Bones is a diagnostician, with a serious lack of patience for unreasonable authority. So he wanted to know: who the hell thought this was a good idea in the first place? If he’s going to go down, he might as well know, and expose some greater issues with the Powers that Be, and the concept of the Neutral Zone itself.

Spock’s program couldn’t deal with that, and like every self-respecting Star Trek computer when faced with an illogical action, promptly unravelled, allowing Bones to beat the test relatively easily while the program stalled.

Bones is no longer being courted to the Command track. Jim practically cracks a rib laughing, and apologizes for being insufferable. Pike secretly sends over a bottle of good bourbon, which Jim and Bones share, as Bones promises he’ll serve on Jim’s ship eventually, having no desire for one of his own. And Spock, thoroughly embarrassed (though he’d never admit to it), and having started the proceedings to bring Bones up on tribunal before the flaw in his program was discovered, begins a longstanding rivalry with the doctor he can’t quite decide whether or not to grudgingly respect.

By Isaac Livengood .

STAR TREK BEYOND 2016 | dir. Justin Lin

We were discussing salads in Discord and Jim Kirk accidentally revealed himself

I found my happiness for today.

Bless these men.

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us— we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

legit tears

Being the transporter operator must be wild. You stand around doing absolutely nothing for hours and hours like a cashier in a very unpopular store and then once and awhile out of the blue someone on the bridge is screaming "TRANSPORTER ROOM!!! GET THEM OUT OF THERE, NOW!!!!"

Like if it were me, I would be be totally spaced out and those people would definitely die.

[ holiday fluff ]

They (mostly Jim) finally got Bones to pose with a Tribble and it’s worth at least 5 years worth of holiday holocards

[ Image description: A digital drawing of AOS Bones Mccoy in a knitted sweater while holding a tribble with both his hands. He is looking ahead, smiling a bit. The background is crosshatched speckled with stars. end ID ]

Lt. Commdr. Spock: Psycho-File by Alden McWilliams, from The Enterprise Logs, Volume 3  published by Gold Key Comics in 1977

Spock’s scars!

Spock’s snake tattoo 🐍👀