#TnG

[cursedtrekedits]

Hey bud, could we please have Q Paul’s drag race

yes you absolutely can

[shigeoreum]

hiiii.... been a while since i uploaded anythin... have some daforge ^_^ watching TNG so far has been an Experience for sure

(was gonna color but ive been too lazy nowadays. or i guess busy is the better word. w some personal projects 😏 and work 🙄)

[antzonian]

Good Tea, Nice House.

TNG | 3.03 THE SURVIVORS

[spockvarietyhour]

Data's "Hmm, well I guess that's not my problem" face

[thebluestockingfirefly]

Literally the only thing keeping me going right now is Star Trek.

[encounteratnearpoint]

My belief is that Q is aware that everything that happens in Star Trek is happening on a TV show and knows which characters are the main characters and that’s how he chooses who to harass. Because as much as he loves to cause problems for everyone he encounters, the thing he loves best is attention, and how better to get attention than to force an episode of Star Trek to revolve around him

[hmantegazzi]

Following what's described, this might be the way on which the VISOR manages to produce brain images: bypassing the eye and directly stimulating the optic nerve to produce phosphenes.

A more sophisticated implementation could be able to produce images based on optic sensors, so as to reproduce visible light sight, but on the other hand, it might be that phosphene generation simply doesn't allow for the resolution or latency to adequately serve that purpose, and that a wider spectrum but with low bandwidth signal would be an alternative compromise, resulting on something similar to what we find on the series.

If that were the case, one could wonder if the VISOR would still be able to project simpler shapes from non-imaging sources, like those screen readers that show one word at a time for high speed reading, so that the device would interface directly with the computers and project text in such a way, which would be functionally similar to our current TTS implementations, but technically entirely visual.

About expressions, and keeping in mind the kind of vision Geordi has, it would be really interesting if he, through brain plasticity and sheer ingenuity, had taught himself to infer them from hints that are "invisible" to sighted people, like slight variations in localised body temperature or skin conductivity. He could even have learnt to read Data's emotions that way, by noticing changes in circuitry activation patterns. In fact, it would be supremely interesting to see Geordi and Deanna practising their own ways to read emotions, and collaborating to verify each other's findings.

And thinking of adaptations, it would be really interesting to think on how the VISOR's technology could be used to develop them in ways that aren't available to blind people currently, like having the Engineering team wearing uniforms with a special thread or coating material combination, that is clearly distinct for each person through a VISOR, allowing Geordi to recognise his direct colleagues at first sight, instead of depending on their voices alone, which might not be as reliable in a noisy environment.

As a visually disabled person myself, one thing I wish TNG had done with Geordi is show his disability actually affecting how he functions in his daily life. For example, I can’t remember a single time in TNG where Geordi is shown as needing accommodations in his work environment. You might say that’s because his visor means that he can basically “see” normally and so he wouldn’t need accommodations, but I find this explanation frustrating.

For one thing, real life visually disabled people absolutely require accommodations to do most jobs, so if Geordi’s meant to be any kind of accurate reflection of the experiences of blind people, he should require some accommodations. For me at least, it isn’t some kind of wish fulfillment fantasy to see a visually disabled character who can do anything a sighted person can with no accommodations whatsoever. Instead, it feels like a denial of everything that being disabled has meant to me over my life. Disabled people are disabled. We have more difficulty doing certain tasks than an able-bodied person would – that’s what makes us disabled. We require changes to our environment in order to function well.

Also, literally just based on the in-universe information given about Geordi’s visor, it doesn’t make any sense to me that he wouldn’t require accommodations. Geordi’s visor is not really described as simulating vision, it is described as providing completely different sensory information about the physical properties of the world around him. I like to imagine the visor’s input as a kind of enhanced spatial awareness with a precise knowledge of where certain objects are, what their shape is, and what they’re made of. As TNG mentions several times, Geordi’s visor provides much more information than human eyes do, but, importantly, in the few episodes where the details of how Geordi’s visor works are discussed at all, it’s never described as providing purely visual information such as the color or reflectiveness of an object. I think that if Geordi faces a mirror, his visor will tell him there’s a piece of glass in front of him and he’ll know about how large it is and what material it’s made of, but he won’t be able to see his reflection in it, because the visor doesn’t provide that kind of visual information. This distinction is important to me, because it means that Geordi is still functionally blind with the visor, and it should mean that he interacts with the world differently from a sighted person.

For example, I would have loved if Geordi had been shown to be unable to recognize particular people until they spoke. All his visor tells him is that there’s a person in front of him and about what size and shape they are, but this isn’t generally enough information to determine a person’s identity. He canonically perceives Data as looking very different from an organic person which makes sense because Data is made of fully different material. And maybe Geordi can generally tell different species apart based on different body temperatures or something like that. But I really wish that Geordi had been shown at least a few times to need the sound of a person’s voice or some other cue to tell him who they were.

I also think it doesn’t make sense that Geordi can apparently read text on computer screens. How can he read if the visor doesn’t really provide visual information? A computer screen should just register as a flat piece of material. Geordi should have required some kind of accommodation to be able to use the computer screens. For example, maybe Geordi could use the computer entirely through voice commands, something that obviously already exists in the star trek world. Or he could use some kind of tactile display. The Voyager episode The Year of Hell shows that computer terminals on starships are able to utilize a tactile display that I’m guessing is somewhat similar to braille. I loved this mention in Voyager of tactile displays, because it indicates that Starfleet ships are probably automatically equipped with such accessibility devices. Geordi needing an accommodation as small as this would have gone really far in terms of making him feel like a genuine representation of a disabled character, at least to me.

[turingtestedblog]

[mostly-natm]

Read my silly little self-indulgent fic that I wrote on a six hour train ride, based around a conversation with the lovely @hawkstar5!

[sreegs]

[thekinglemingle]

I referred to something as a "real Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra moment" in conversation with someone who has never seen TNG, and let me tell you, that was a real Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra moment

[andyoullhearitagain]

People are always like "why do they let Data play poker with them, his brain is a computer, he has an unfair advantage," and the answer is simply because it's for fun!! He's their friend! Like can you imagine if they told Data he can't play, he'd be like "I understand, that's a logical decision, and as an android I am unable to feel left out," but then any time the poker game came up he'd be looking at Riker across the bridge like

[fire-rabbit]

She's not wrong...

Star Trek The Next Generation S4E5 Remember Me | "Maybe there's something wrong with the universe."

[encounteratnearpoint]

Geordi and Data talking in unison <3

[galactic-magick]

Star Trek makes me soooo crazy cuz you got Picard saying things like "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose."

And Data saying things like "I would gladly risk feeling bad at times, if it also meant that I could taste my dessert."

And Bashir saying things like “You can't go through life trying to avoid getting a broken heart. If you do, it'll break from loneliness anyway."

And Odo sayings things like "It has been my observation that one of the prices of giving people freedom of choice is that sometimes they make the wrong choice."

And I’m just supposed to be normal about it???