Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles, tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit space-magic countermeasures out of their arses – but they’re as likely as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms – they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus, testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do? do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey, while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
Tags:
#Star Trek #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #long post #(IIRC Romulan warp drives actually produce temporal anomalies as a side effect) #(so it’s not just humans who get into weird shit all the time) #(but anyway)
as a kid i always thought gotham was in michigan because i thought it was a midwestern city like chicago, and there was always shit going down at the pier or in abandoned factories and if michigan has anything it’s a lot of piers and abandoned factories. anyway turns out it’s probably in jersey.
one of the most heavily forested states in the country with 20 million acres of forests oh my god poison ivy would be so powerful the second she got outside city limits fuck
there’s 20 million acres of this and she’s got plant powers no wonder they want her on lockdown
there are more than 6,000 shipwrecks in the great lakes how many supervillain origin stories is that good for
“63 commercial ports handled 173 million tons of cargo in 2006″ aka holy shit that is a lot of opportunities for boatcrimes
mr freeze has a pretty tragic origin story but if you had to put up with michigan winters and then some motherfucker showed up freezing the town outside of freezing season you would have no mercy
MOTHERFUCKER I JUST PUT MY SNOWBLOWER IN STORAGE DO I LOOK LIKE I NEED THIS SHIT RIGHT NOW
imagine batman giving someone directions by pointing to his hand
“we believe killer croc is somewhere around here” he says pointing to the tip of his thumb
good fucking luck finding stats on abandoned buildings in michigan but holy shit are there a lot of them, no wonder they’re always having fights in abandoned factories and empty warehouses
“kitty why are you including that map of the railroads like it’s relevant” because when you’re trying to sleep and you hear a train in the distance it’s fucking spooky okay
i have no evidence that traincrime is an issue for batman i’m just saying the ambiance is there
that’s what i thought but apparently metropolis is new york during the day and gotham is new york at night which means the dc universe has three new yorks which i think even new yorkers can agree is too many
when i was a kid i used to slide down the slopes made by snowplows on my stomach which i feel is relevant to the penguin
there’s always a ton of cars from the 30s driving around gotham which makes perfect sense if it’s in michigan because that’s when we made cars and we’re not over it
rick snyder and his emergency managers are basically supervillains and i want batman to punch them
michigan is closer to kansas which means bruce can visit clark’s parents and then they’re emailing clark about what a nice young man he is and there’s nothing clark can do about it
if someone said that a city in michigan had been hijacked by an evil clown that was only stopped when a man in an animal costume kicked him in the face would you even blink
this is meadow brook hall in rochester mi
this is the charles t fisher house
here’s the james scott residence
welcome to michigan hope u like houses with turrets and fucked up clowns and evil men poisoning the water
Headcanon accepted, Gotham is definitely in Michigan. (Doesn’t Gotham have docks in at least one canon- one of the cartoons, I think? So it must be somewhere on the lake…)
another dumb headcanon: superman is nice to birds because of course he is, and helps out birds who are in distress. also he can fly around with them. birds see a lot more of superman than they do of most people, basically. the unexpected consequence of this is that the crows of metropolis recognize superman as a friend. sometimes crows just follow him around like a weird flock, or try to give him shiny things. but mostly please just imagine luthor trying to gloat while threatening superman with kryptonite only to have a crow steal it. or just, generally, lex luthor getting attacked by crows. if that does not improve your day i don’t know what to tell you.
“What is that?”
Superman followed the direction of Batman’s gaze. A crow had landed on the rooftop beside them, and dropped a bottlecap near Superman’s feet. “Oh! Hey Francis. Is that for me?”
“Caw,” said Francis.
“Do you have a pet crow?” Batman asked.
“No, I don’t have pets,” Superman said as he bent down to retrieve the bottlecap.
“You named it.”
“Not this specific one,” Superman explained. “I just call all the crows Francis.”
“… why.”
“Caw, caw,” said Francis with a flap of its wings.
“I don’t know. Just calling them ‘crow’ felt rude after a while. I’d name them individually but I can’t actually tell them apart. Except for Old Francis and One-Eyed Francis.” Superman tucked the bottlecap into a small pocket on the back of his pants.
“Why Francis?”
Superman shrugged. “It’s gender neutral. I don’t want to misgender them just because they’re birds.”
“Of course you don’t,” Batman sighed, looking back out at Metropolis.
“Caw,” Francis added.
“Do you keep dog treats in your utility belt?” Superman asked.
“Why would I do that.”
“… in case you meet a dog that needs to know he’s a good boy?” Superman suggested. Batman shook his head, but opened a small pouch on his belt and held out a small treat. “See, it was a yes or no question, I don’t know why everything has to be such a production with you,” Superman said as he took it. He tossed it over by the bird’s feet. “Here you are, Francis. Keep up the good work.”
“Caw, caw,” Francis said. When it realized no more treats were forthcoming, it flew away in a flutter of black wings.
“You’re unbelievable,” Batman said, shaking his head again.
Superman took his eyes off the departing crow to look back at Batman, and frowned. “You know,” he said, “it’s really weird seeing you in costume during the day.”
“Don’t start.”
“It’s like seeing your teacher at the mall.”
“Don’t think I won’t take care of Poison Ivy without your help, if I have to.”
Superman shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
But…what if the crows also recognized him as Clark Kent? This mild-mannered reporter who doesn’t seem to do anything in particular to the crows that would make them like him, but they’re not afraid of him at all, and they keep trying to give HIM things, and Clark being a nice guy, he just. Accepts the bottlecap. Says thank you. Keeps walking. Lois adds another factoid to her “Weird Stuff About Clark Kent” file.
Maybe he tries to convince his coworkers that everyone is friendly with crows in Smallville. That the farmers discovered how smart crows are and decided to make friends with them instead of chasing them off.
Maybe he tries to talk the crows into palling around with him as Superman but going their separate ways as Clark Kent.
Please imagine Superman on top of a building holding Clark Kent’s glasses and trying to explain the concept of a secret identity to a flock of attentive birds.
Tags:
#Superman #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
Because hell yeah – promotion via death (“Oh, our CMO bought it in that last attack? Looks like you’ve got the job now, McCoy” – what the hell, that’s not how the chain of command works!), acting captain (Spock) and ex-first officer (Kirk) get into punch-up on deck and not alone an ordinary fight, Spock is very nearly strangling him to death, and everyone just stands there and looks on? Where the hell were Security in that scene? Nobody called them? Nobody – not even McCoy – tries to pull Spock off Kirk?
We go from Spock not wanting to assign Uhura to the Enterprise in order to “avoid the appearance of favoritism” (translation: ‘everyone will think you only got the posting because we’re screwing’) to Carol Marcus and That Scene because while you do need to be good at your job, the unspoken addendum that everyone knows is that it does no harm to flash the goods for the guy in charge so he knows what’s on offer.
No rank badges on the women’s uniforms unless they’re wearing the long-sleeved version of the uniform – not that far from the midriff-baring uniforms of mirror!verse for the women.
No attempt to evacuate the people in San Francisco or even, as far as we can see, have a warning siren blaring as Enterprise and Vengeance scream through the atmosphere overhead – why, is this because screw them, they’re only dumb civilians?
The only way the scene in Starfleet Headquarters with ‘Harrison’ makes sense is if Admiral Marcus is string-pulling: “Oh my, we’re just having a top secret high security meeting with the ranking Starfleet officers after a terrorist attack on one of our facilities, so of course we’re having it in an unshielded room with ceiling-to-floor windows where the guy responsible for that bomb can fly up right up to the window and blow you all away, conveniently leaving me in sole charge to prosecute my plans”?
Heading for the mirror!verse makes a scary amount of sense. Vulcan (the voice of reason as most everyone accepts, the one planet which had a restraining effect on Terra because come on, the Tellarians and the Andorians aren’t even at the races in reboot) is gone. Starfleet is on a war footing, whether that’s admitted or not (they actively went out looking for potential threats after Nero which is how they found the Botany Bay and Khan), there’s not a word about the civilian government of the Federation – the President and Council – which makes it seem like Starfleet is the one body making decisions on a grand scale.
Nearly thirty years of paranoia after Nero (the destruction of the Kelvin may have had a huge effect on skewing the development of both Starfleet’s approach and civilian politics) resulting in militarisation, seeing enemies and potential enemies everywhere, an attitude of “you could be killed in the morning through no fault of your own”, ‘dead men’s shoes’ being acceptable as a career ladder, casual sexism and trading sexual favours for promotion/better opportunities being accepted within Starfleet, casual and routine lying on reports (see how outraged Kirk is that Spock told the truth about what happened on Nibiru!) leading to blatant ditching of the Prime Directive, the perception that the only way Terra will be truly safe is to get them before they can get us – it’s easy to see it happening.
Maybe the reason we don’t hear about Tarsus IV and how it affected reboot Kirk (because a traumatic event like that would certainly explain why he turned out to be “the Mid-West’s only genius-level repeat offender”) is that in this universe, the Governor is not regarded as Kodos the Executioner, but Kodos the Saviour – after all, he kept half the population alive until the relief ships could arrive, and without his forward thinking, determination and leadership, a lot more people would have died for no good reason (instead of being sacrificed as ‘useless mouths’ for the fit to survive).
I mean the mirrorverse has its own backstory but “most worlds converge on mirrorverse-ish stuff” is also cool!
Hot damn, I just thought of something really cool. So, like, I headcanon that Harry kept Parseltongue after he lost the horcrux, because it’s just really fun to imagine stuff like Harry talking to Albus Severus’ pet snake or finding a little snake in the garden and hissing a hello. Parseltongue is really neat and snakes are awesome, so it’s so feel-good to imagine that instead of being used for Dark Arts, Harry’s just using it to make convo to little scaly cuties.
Like, Parseltongue apparently transfers with the soul or whatever? So you could totally claim that Harry’s soul/magic kept/learned the skill. A skill passed down through the soul/magic could totally transfer that way.
But… do you know who also had a piece of Voldemort’s soul inside them and was speaking Parseltongue pretty regularly for a long period of time? Ginny. Ginny Weasley.
So imagine twelve-year-old Ginny Weasley going home to heal after the whole Chamber of Secrets business, and finding a snake in the garden, muttering about sunny rocks and sleep. And it scares her so badly at first, because what if Tom isn’t really gone? What if Tom’s still lurking in some dark place in her head? She freaks out and nearly doesn’t come home for dinner that day… except… then she remembers that Harry can speak Parseltongue too.
Harry had an horrible encounter with Voldemort where Voldemort tried to take his life and somehow a piece of his power transferred to Harry, so now Harry can speak Parseltongue. Maybe she just got a piece of power too when Tom tried to steal her life?
It’d be really cool to have an AU where Ginny kept Parseltongue and decided that no, I’m not going to let Tom run my life and was treated Parseltongue like the cool trick it is. And Harry is the only one who full gets it and doesn’t get a little bit uncomfortable when she drops into hissing, and maybe Harry shyly gets encouraged to start hissing back. Voldemort tried to ruin our lives so let’s stick it to him and his Slytherin ancestors, right? Yeah!
Anyway, twelve year old Ginny and thirteen year old Harry having hissing conversations at the Gryffindor table, using it to talk smack and have inside jokes, and using it to scare the heck of out any pureblood supremacists. (Who are all absolutely scandalized because Parseltongue is something Salazar Slytherin is famous for and here it’s being using for casual conversation and Quidditch commentary by a Potter and a Weasley.)
Just picture these two adorable children hissing jokes at each other in the hallways and helping each other recover from their fear and trauma.
Ginny (in Parseltongue), “<Hey Harry, let’s both stare at Malfoy breaking into laughter and hissing at each other in Parseltongue.>”
Harry, “<…That would totally freak him out. …I’m in.>”
Ginny, “<Okay, he’s noticed we’re staring now.>”
Draco, “Do you have something to say Potter?!”
Ginny, “<Laugh now.>”
Harry and Ginny burst out into enormous laughter and Draco Malfoy is furious and gets increasingly mad as Harry and Ginny crack up and hiss things like, “<Great weather we’re having today!>” and “<How about them Harpies?>” And Draco can’t call a Professor on them because he can’t prove they’re saying anything bad (and it’s just icing on the top that they actually aren’t and he’s getting worked up over nothing).
This continues well into their relationship and into adulthood. All of the Potter-Weasley children can speak Parseltongue and have a foolproof way of having secret conversation in public. Sometimes they have to smack Jamie Sirius on the head to use English in public and tell Lily Luna to stop trying to scare people and convince them you’re the next Dark Lady. Harry and Ginny hiss at each other all throughout Ministry Events and Quidditch Events (Rita Skeeter cannot eavesdrop on them and she is furious) and to their children, lovingly telling them in this “language of the Dark Arts” to “<Behave yourselves>“ and ”<Remember to wear your jumper when it’s cold out.>“
Somewhere out there Tom Riddle and scores of Gaunts are rolling in their graves. Harry Potter and Ginny Weasley do not care.
Tags:
#Harry Potter #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
i like to imagine that clark kent’s search history is mostly normal but then there’s stuff like “improved superman costume concept art” because he wanted ideas
no but like… do you sue him for using your designs? Do you politely ask him to stop using your designs? Do you ask him for license fees when the Superman merchandise adopts your design as well?
i am absolutely sure that he would find one with an artist’s comment/description that included “hey superman if you’re reading this feel free to use this anytime ok ;3″ and he would say “oh man that’s so thoughtful, thank you weedhorse69, I think I will” and like how do you explain in court that you, weedhorse69, did not intend for your statement to be any kind of contractual offer because you did not think he would ever find your public internet post with his name all over it
The Baseball of the Emissary as an important religious icon
–baseball game is how he explains linear time to the Prophets
–how he bonds with his son and his crew, also Kasidy on their first date
–always playing with it when he makes important decisions etc
–probably there’s something meaningful with Buck Bokai? I try to forget that episode.
–leaves it on the station so Dukat knows he’s coming back
–takes it with him to New Orleans when he didn’t know he’s coming back :-(
–rolls off the piano!! how the Prophets regain communication with him!!
–ezri throws it and that’s where he starts digging on Tyree!!
I assume when he’s dead/gone from this time-space (I haven’t seen the last episodes but know vague spoilers), the Bajorans keep the baseball as a Sacred Memento, if not the new improved Orb of the Emissary. People pray to it and hope the Emissary can intercede with the Prophets on their behalf, etc. Bajorans play games of baseball, not for entertainment necessarily, but on the Day of the Emissary in order to contemplate their linear existence and honor the end of the Dominion Wars and all that The Sisko brought to them.
Baseball games as ritual, baseballs as relics. Baseball space religion.
DS9 season 3 episode 15, “Destiny”, moral: always absolutely believe ancient bajoran prophecies because they will totally come true and ruin your day (esp if your name is benjamin sisko)
Tags:
#Star Trek #DS9 #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
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