Alex/Caster | mid 20âs | they/them | Autistic, college student, artist, Twitch Affiliate, sci fi enthusiast, gamer, and shitposter | I'm just a silly little crafty nerd that posts and reblogs whatever catches the eye of the monkey in my brain.
i really really really love the idea of eridians hearing absolutely everything in a human body and being able to predict an episode of something, similarly to how medical alert service dogs can
the pros of reading ao3 fics in public is that their layout is so clean and simple that people would think youâre reading some academic researches when youâre in fact reading a 50k fic. the cons is that you need to control your face all the fucking time
Ray Bradburyâs short story âThere Will Come Soft Rainsâ that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Nowâs your chance to read it around the time itâs based in!
Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.
I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.
There are SO many ways humans and Eridians compliment each other, and I don't even think some were intentional. For example: Lots of fan content I've seen has been kind of thoughtlessly projecting humanity's heat seeking behaviour onto Eridians. Reading the biology document, however, has made me infer something â Eridians love the cold.
They sleep at night, even in the absence of a light cycle, because that's when the temperature drops. Unlike humans, they don't use blankets. They don't try to preserve heat. They want to cool down faster, because because that's what their body needs shut down and rest! They RELAX in the cold!
Not only that, but their version of breathing is a constant influx of cool air. If they're without that coolant for even a few minutes, they're in serious trouble, and after half an hour, they're dead. Unlike us, they're at constant risk of overheating.
But not while they have a source of cold nearby. Like, for example, a human who lives at a fraction of their temperature.
On the Hail Mary, Grace spends a lot of time pressed against Rocky. Their temperature differences are extreme enough that xenonite can't entirely halt the heat transfer, so it's pleasantly warm. He feels like a cat curling up by the fire. It's relaxing. Of course, he also feels a little bad that he's draping his freezing raincloud of a body all over Rocky, but he figures Rocky puts up with the unpleasant cold okay.
Except: Rocky is chasing the cold just as much as Grace is chasing the heat.
Grace's muscles unwind with a constant heat press. Rocky relaxes with an endless source of peaceful, relieving cooling. What a funny quirk of biology, Rocky thinks, that being so incomprehensibly opposite to each other is so pleasant. What a lovely quirk of fate, that they've been given the opportunity to learn that through each other.
the stress of sensing a shift in the vibes of the conversation/the group youâre in but because it took a bit to process and figure out that something changed you donât know what it is you said or did to trigger the shift but youâre also pretty sure it was something you did
Yall????? omfg???? If you're a historical artist you NEED to look at what I just found because A BUNCH OF ORIGINAL SOURCES ON CLOTHING RANGING FROM MEDIEVAL TIMES TO THE 20TH CENTURY??? WITH CLEAR PHOTOS AND VERBAL EXPLANATIONS??? AND THEY'RE SORTED IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER WITHIN THE CENTURIES TOO????????
https://bloshka.info/
there's also this which also seems good but has less original sources and I haven't looked through as much :)
Something something everything you read/watch/listen to has an impact on your life and shapes who you are and has lessons for you to learn if you choose to do so and I feel very strongly about this but struggle to put it into words
Humans make mistakes, itâs a part of life. Regret too, is a part of life.
Especially when one is younger and still learning, we make lots of mistakes, and sometimes they can overwhelm us and send us down a spiral of regret that can be hard to shake off. Heck, sometimes that happens later in life too.
When I was 19, I had one such spiral of regret, culminating in a meltdown of epic proportions, feeling the weight of the last few years that, at the time, seemed to be wasted and filled with regrets. My dad, in a rare moment when it was just the two of us, offered me some advice in the form of a story.
Thereâs an episode of Star Trek The Next Generation, he said, called Tapestry (season 6 episode 15 for those wondering). I donât know if youâve seen it yet, or remember it if you do, but I think it would help you right now, he said.
Spoilers I guess for the episode in the cut, plus the rest of my little story.
The episode, as my dad described it, was a story of regret and the consequences of our actions.
We start the episode with Captain Picard having suffered a fatal wound, and we learn that Picard actually has an artificial heart, which is now severely damaged. Unfortunately the ship doctor is unable to help him in time, and he dies, regretting the incident in his youth that led to him getting his artificial heart to begin with.
Now, thereâs a character in Next Generation called Q, a powerful god-like being whoâs whole thing is testing humanity to see if weâre worthy of further exploration into the galaxy (and I guess the other sapient species who join Starfleet, but Q specifically tests humanity the most because of his doubts in humans specifically)
As Picard is in the afterlife, Q appears randomly, as he does, to pester Picard, as he does, and eventually asks Picard if he has any regrets, and eventually the topic of how Picard got his artificial heart comes up. Eventually Q poses the question; if you could go back and change that moment in time, do something different, would you?
Picard hesitates at first, Q doesnât offer things out of the goodness of his heart and there is always a price. But eventually, he says yes, he would take the chance to go back and change his past mistakes.
And so with a snap of his fingers, Q sends Picard back in time to his Starfleet Academy days, and after some interactions with his old love interests and friends, he actively avoids the fight that landed him with his artificial heart, choosing not to defend his friends to do so, and makes a love confession.
Q then appears again, and congratulates Picard on changing the past successfully, and sends him back to the present day.
Only, this isnât the present day that we know.
For starters, Picard is now wearing science blue instead of command red, and heâs a junior lieutenant compared to the captain he once was. Thatâs a MASSIVE rank decrease.
After the initial shock, Picard explores his surroundings, finds a few familiar faces, but eventually becomes frustrated with the situation.
And so here comes Q again, in all his majestic goofy glory, and he tells Picard, this is exactly what you asked for, this is what you agreed to. You wanted to change the past, rewrite history, and take the safer road on the journey of life. And so you did. You lived a safer life, and this is what that life leads to. You can run your tests, write your reports, but you wonât be in command again.
Picard, frustrated, goes to find more details about the person he is in this lifetime. Too timid, unable to reach his goals, unwilling to take risks, and doesnât stand out. The exact opposite of the kind of person we know Picard to be after 6 and a half seasons of this show.
And, of course, Picard protests this, and asks Q if this is just a plot to torment him, if Q is taking pleasure from his pain.
This is what you wanted, Q says. A second chance at life.
I canât live a life devoid of meaning, canât live a life that has nothing worthwhile, begs Picard.
But this is who you wanted to be. You wanted to take the safer road, so you lived a safer life. You valued your own life over that of your friends in that moment, because you had regret over the consequences. But without that regret, the man who would make that choice would lead a very different life than the one you originally walked, says Q in return.
Then I take it back, says Picard, I would rather live the life I had then the one I see now. Even if that means living with regrets.
And so back in time they go, and Picard does what he did the first time around, leaping into action and eventually getting stabbed. And all returns back to normal as he wakes up back in his present moment, alive and well with his artificial heart beating once more.
So yeah. This episode is special to me. Because the whole point is that even if you have regrets, you canât let them consume you to the point that youâre stuck reliving the past pondering what if and how comes. That each action we take impacts our lives to some extent, whether we know it or not. That every part of you is shaped by what you live through, and the choices you make. That everything has a consequence, good, neutral or bad.
But 19 year old me didnât fully get it yet. Yeah yeah yeah live your life without regrets, itâs the kind of advice you see on poor quality posters in classrooms in ridiculous swirling fonts.
But Picardâs choice made sense, I said to my dad. Sure having to replace your heart sucks, I can see why thereâs some regret there, but it was the right thing to do in that moment, to defend his friends, to be brave and bold.
And thatâs when my dad smiled at me and said the words Iâll never forget
Everyone makes the decision that feels right to them and what they value in that moment. Itâs when those values change, or the consequences are more than we expect, that we tend to feel regret.
And a lightbulb kinda went off at that moment, as my dad went on about the metaphor of âyour life is a tapestry and everything you do is a thread, and changing one thread makes for an entirely different pictureâ.
Sometimes things that we do in the past bite us in the butt later in life. Sometimes a kindness granted years ago is paid forward in future.
But in the moment? All we can do is the best we can. Stressing yourself out about what ifs before they happen isnât healthy, nor is getting stuck on the what ifs after the fact.
Every second you live is part of who you are, and each moment contains a lesson, what you learn from them dictates how your tapestry thread continues to weave going forward.
I know itâs cheesy, trust me, but one of the best things you can do for yourself is learn to let go of your regrets, take that feeling and process it into something more meaningful and helpful for you. Do you regret not paying attention in class? Let go of your regret but remember the lesson of focusing and paying attention to whatâs important. Regret a bad relationship? Ditch the what ifs and focus on things you can change or keep the same for your next one so that it has a better outcome.
Every moment you live shapes who you are, and for me, those moments spent watching people boldly go where no man has gone before, shaped me far beyond my comprehension.
Go, live long and prosper, hopefully without regret.
Something else I see people keep forgetting: between humans and Eridians, we are the astronauts. And we are good at it.
Eridians' perception of the world relies on something that is completely absent in space â sound. They haven't been looking at the stars their entire existence the way we have. Their concept of aliens might only be as old as their discovery of astrophage. They made a bad ship, because it was their first one ever! Rocky himself says they rushed it, and that multiple (vital) things broke. Their mission was just as much of a Hail Mary pass as ours was â they had no idea what they were doing, if they could even travel in space safely. And, as it turns out, they couldn't.
Humans are the ones who have been doing it over multiple lifetimes. Mary is state of the art. We've been space farers longer than most humans have been alive. We can actually see through space. We are more likely to survive exposure to the void. We can encase our lighter, more flexible, more mobile bodies in a material that lets us walk outside of our ship, and, to a degree, we can get our bearings out there in a way Eridians just can't.
Eridians are not looking at Mary and thinking she's a bad ship. They are not thinking humans have no idea what we're doing. They are looking at this species that can walk in the stars, have been perfecting machines to take us to them for decades, have been dreaming about them and mapping them and naming them for millennia, and used all of that to save them, and thinking, wow.
spending 40 minutes writing a post because I was feeling emotional only for a blip in my internet connection to delete the whole thing without saving it as a draft. hell.
And now it keeps trying to add a mature content label because I want to add a GIF of Picard where heâs shirtless in bed but like basically completely covered (the scene where Q decides to sneak in after the person Picard spent the night with had left, that one) and Iâm getting more and more determined to post this now, tho I may remove the GIF which sucks lol
spending 40 minutes writing a post because I was feeling emotional only for a blip in my internet connection to delete the whole thing without saving it as a draft. hell.
spending 40 minutes writing a post because I was feeling emotional only for a blip in my internet connection to delete the whole thing without saving it as a draft. hell.
turnnoffyourmind
romaincrisis
prguitarman
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
ellievsbear
