Just watched an episode where they literally went to a section of space completely absent of all energy and matter and still somehow met this
I scrolled down and I was jumpscared by this. XD
TOS came out at a time when people still talked of Columbus discovering america.
TOS came out at a time when Columbus was still being held in high regard. :)
Quick search suggests that the people of Columbia are still pretty happy with the name.
Meanwhile the people of Ohio’s capital aren’t
I live in NYC and no one is actually pushing to get rid of Columbus Circle.
otoh, Trump has a Building right on Columbus Circle, so maybe we should ask Mamdani to rename it Obama Circle.
Meanwhile, Amerigo Vespucci, America’s namesake:
That’s the part of the story I can find funny. Columbus made four trips to the New World, set up colonies, and explored. He never set foot on the American mainland but he saw it with his own eyes, sailing up and down the Mexican coast looking for the Singapore Straight, which he obviously never found because it was busy being on the other side of the planet. He went to his deathbed believing he’d visited Asia. It wasn’t until Mr. Vespucci made it all the way to Argentina before going “Dudes…there’s no fucking way we’re in the Philippines. There isn’t a landmass thousands of miles long in the Philippines.”
And he was right, which is why AMERICA! FUCK YEA!
And then he’d sign an executive order, in the middle of shitting his pants, demanding it be renamed after him
I’ve only driven through Columbus Ohio once via highway, so I don’t have a complete picture of it, but all I remember about it is it had the worst highway layout of any I’ve experienced, and it had the ugliest, most souless corporate signage along the road that I’ve ever seen as well.
I also stopped to get some fast food, and immediately had a couple people loudly mock me for wearing a mask after I let them ahead of me while I was looking at the menu.
The place just left me with really bad vibes, honestly.
I lived there for a time and love it for what it is. I’ve had many a fun night in the old north and occasionally was able to afford some time in the short north. I love their main library and to this day
onetwothree of my favorite bars of all time is there. Hell I got married at their lesbian bar. They’ve also got/had some other awesome and unique stuff in some alternative scenes.But yeah, it ain’t a pretty city outside certain parts. They hid one of their rivers, the city is dominated by the highways, they’ve got abysmal public transit, and large portions of the city have strip mall feel. But also night time bike rides through the city with a group felt magical.
And yeah they’ve got some shitty folks but plenty of places do. I guess I partly love it because I had to work hard to get there from even worse parts of Ohio.
Thanks for sharing your experience there, glad to hear it’s much better than my very brief trip through it seemed. I guess it kinda stood out to me as negative from the highway, since other cities that I’ve been through happened to look really cool even passing through on the highway, like St. Louis (though they had the big Arch thingy right in view from the highway, which gives them a pretty unfair advantage :p).
That’s totally fair lol. It’s not a beautiful city, especially compared to Cincinnati or Cleveland, and there’s nothing about it that would drive a person driving through to think “I bet this city has been a long time hub of alternative lifestyles to the point it’s a destination for people in certain communities as far as Kentucky.” Even Peoria IL is more beautiful to drive through. But Columbus is a city where a lot of organizations refuse to address it by name and instead call themselves “central ohio” and where the state government keeps having to wash paint off the statue of the namesake.
Also it’s long been a meme there to want to rename it to flavortown after everyone’s favorite person from the city, Guy Fieri
They don’t have much to be happy about in general.
Well yeah, their days keep being ruined by a group of assholes who meet in their city
You talking about that guy who sailed around the world, but didn’t make it very far, then told the people they were Indians and the people were like “¿Qué, bro?”, and then claimed himself the founder of an inhabited land that he never even touched? Did something scandalous recently come out about him that made him fall from grace?
which makes no sense, because even then, we knew Columbus wasn’t the first person there.
So I suppose Star Treck are just the Colombus of space
Yes? the whole show is based on naval exploration, mercantilism, colonialism. That is why they have that whistle when an officer enters the ship, that is why there are no seatbelts.
I’ve seen a lot of far-fetched arguments over the years, but I’ve never seen anyone tie together mercantilism and seatbelts.
I have to say I do like the cut of your jib, sir.
Because even in a tea clipper there would be no needs for seatbelts, and seriously, a red alert should also mean “Buckle up”. no more flying round the bridge at every torpedo hit, and how much voltage goes though those terminals? they should not explode, put some breakers maybe!!!
“One hand for the ship and one for yourself” is an old naval motto.
They actually tied guys to the helm all the time. Usually because of the weather, and sometimes because they’d been away from land for too long.
[jk]
Where no MAN has gone before. Therefore plenty of space chicks
That was in TOS. They changed it to no one in TNG
Star Empire vibes, if they’re not human they’re no one.
To be fair, it would be a boring show if they didn’t.
Ship enters orbit of a planet
‘Spock, what do our scans show?’
‘Intense geologic activity, no atmosphere, no life signs.’
Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data, moves on to the next target
‘Spock, what do our scans show?’
‘Planet is frozen, no geologic activity, no life signs.’
Ship spends the next 3 months in orbit collecting data
Realistic sci fi is waaayyy too boring for a general audience.
I choose to believe that it’s usually like that, and we’re just seeing the days where something interesting happens.
I mean it has to be.
They age and have discussions of things we don’t physically see.
Talking about the first encounter of the Q being 3 years ago not 1000 episodes ago
Yeah, it kinda feels like you could do a very ‘boring’ science series just showing all of that. But I feel like that’s just ‘sci’ with no ‘fi’.
You know, I bet I would still watch that.
Hey look, it’s Starfield!
I’m glad you made this comment because I was about to.
Starfield, a surprisingly great framework for a game from Bethesda, but they forgot to put the actual game inside it
Todd spent all their time and money making sure the game was utterly impossible to see without a 3000 dollar oled monitor (that LUT was a monstrosity).
I fully agree with this, but at the same time I just sort of assume any Bethesda game is gonna require a kind of baseline mod setup just to be comfortably playable, so that almost felt like par for the course to me 😅
More power to them, but I will genuinely never understand how people can play Skyrim or Fallout 4 unmodded or on console. I can see New Vegas unmodded, but that ain’t Bethesda anyway.
Unmodded Fallout: New Vegas gameplay
I did use Neutral LUTs when I tried it, which at least made it not give me a splitting headache, but sadly it did nothing to fix the other issues. I got like 10-15 hours into the main story so I’d like to think I at least gave it a fair shot.
Or Mass Effect 2 at times.
Probe launching noise
What pissed me off about ME2, amongst other things, was them saying they’re not going to “make you go to every planet just to extend gameplay”. Only to force you to go to other planets to launch probes and gather materials…just to extend the game play
Yeah it was annoying but the sad thing is Mass Effect 2 was still an improvement over Mass Effect 1 in that regard. As much as I can enjoy the planet sections they did overstay their welcome and actively annoy me. ME2 at least never pushed it’s luck on that front.
realistic scifi can be fun for general audiences still. they just have to focus on the right bits.
look at the early seasons of for all mankind. it’s about the realistic process of achieving space flight goals. it spends 60% of its runtime on how the launch even comes to happen. then it shows the bits that go wrong and the ways they manage fix them and the political/personal drama of the decision making process on all sides.
now, that’s a very dry show for people that like science, politics, and history, but the realistic scifi could just as easily be wrapped in a funny show about dumb politicians and crazy rich people. use the same strategies, but make it about the engineers at space x having to work under musk. show them having to suddenly pivot away from lidar for no reason other than musk’s ego. show them trying to talk about space flight with a podcast bro. create drama when one of the main character’s lives is actually on the line because no one trusts the new valve gasket supplier musk brought in for political clout.
the parts stat trek glosses over are the parts realistic scifi focuses on. like how they decide what planet to go to next. the episode always starts with them already there or randomly being drawn somewhere. or like what actual physics would matter in what they’re doing and not “plasma phase inverter coils” needing to be “degaussed of subspace radiation”.
The aliens didn’t go there though. They’re just there.
There are parts where no one has gone, but landing on a barren rock probably isn’t a good story
I’m struggling to come up with an example of them landing on a barren rock and anything neutral or positive happening. It’s almost always bad
It doesn’t have to be a barren planet it could also be a planet with no intelligent life. Maybe a solar system with that’s void. Idk
Well, sure - the times it turned out fine don’t make for an interesting story!
I mean, isn’t this basically what every European did in the Americas and Africa?
Columbus: “Look, I’m the first human being ever to set foot here!”
200 Taíno people staring at him wondering WTF was going on
Columbus: “Look, I planted a flag, that way if anyone else ever comes here, they’ll know this is Spanish land now.”
Well, it was supposed to be where no ‘man’ has gone before, but people had to whine about it, and here we are.
I’m just realizing that the wording change made humans seem REALLY pretentious!
Star Empire leaking, if it ain’t human it ain’t no one.
They said no “one”. They can go places as long as there are many things there.
I mean the original line was “where no man has gone before” which at least made sense, although it didn’t represent the female crew very well.
English uses ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ interchangeably.
Grammatically, ‘no man’ makes more sense than ‘no one.’
I’ve always thought it was an odd change. I get why they did it, but the original clearly wasn’t being used in the way the change implies.
It has the same energy as saying that you can’t use the term “whitelist” and must substitute “allowlist”, or “master bedroom” to “primary bedroom”, or that time they changed “monkeypox” to “m-pox”.
“Master bedroom” being changed is such a silly one. That term wasn’t even used until the 20th century and referred to the master of the household. It has nothing to do with slave masters.
It speaks to a larger cultural ignorance or poor literacy to even consider it, in my opinion. I’ve seen similar reactions to talking about “plantation-style” home architecture. It’s as if many people have only ever heard these words in connection with slavery from their lessons in school.
A place I worked out stopped carrying “Plantation” brand peanuts because somebody complained.
Nevermind the fact that the word “plantation” existed long long before America ever existed and associated it with chattel slavery in the minds of Americans, or the fact that the peanuts in question literally come from a modern, active plantation still today!
The etymology of “Plantation” is very transparent too. And with the centralization of agriculture almost anything we eat comes from plantations today.
Yeah it’s be hard to argue TOS was excluding women in that sentence given the presence of female bridge crew members.
You mean space secretary and space operator? The pilot had a woman as first officer but we couldn’t keep that for some reason…
You mean the Yeoman and Communications Officer?
Those are actual roles on warships that at the time women were not allowed to fill. How come when a woman is in those roles you reduce them “secretary” and “operator”?
I don’t. The show did.
As I pointed out there was a woman first officer, but we could not keep that.
The show didn’t, you did. The show put women into positions reserved for men at the time. The men in those positions weren’t called secretaries or phone operators, the female characters in Star Trek weren’t called secretaries or phone operators. The only person being reductive of their roles is you lol.
The reason was Gene Roddenberry had cast his mistress in a costar role, and wasn’t yet the Lucas-esque TV god that could get away with it.
That’s true, but they could have kept the part as a woman. There were other motivations in removing the role entirely.
They told Roddenberry he could keep Spock or Number One, but the network didn’t think the 1960s audience was ready for both at once.
Look it up.
I honestly don’t know if Majel minded that much in retrospect; she’s still the only actress to voice the Enterprise herself. She died in 2008 and most recently voiced the Enterprise D in what? 2024?
Progress happened. Uhura wore Lieutenant’s stripes so Janeway could wear Captain’s pips.
I still think that Master and Slave were the most apt descriptions for IDE drive roles
Someone else posted that they didn’t consider getting rid of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben as big wins.
Most of the changes are performative and not material. imho.
They were big wins the same way getting rid of the Redskins was a big win for Native Americans. It’s not about the specific instance. It’s about what growing up in a world that tolerates that kind of portraying of ethnicity does to young minds.
Yeah I don’t disagree, but that is still why they changed it. Using “man” to refer to all mankind (and even “mankind” for that matter) is going out of style.
What’s the preferred replacement?
Humankind and person I guess. Idk I’m not a stickler on that kind of thing.
I hate pointlessly gendered shit. No one sounds much better to me and makes the same grammatical sense as no man. I don’t see it as any different than using they instead of he or she.
To boldly go where no ugly giant bag of mostly water has gone before.
It wasn’t considered as gendered, as referring to humanity as “man” is a holdover from when “man” wasn’t ever gendered; we don’t have any recordings of it specifically referring to males until around 1000 CE.
The old words for male/female were “wer” (see: werewolf) and “wīf”, the latter of which diverged into “wifmann” (“female human”), later “woman”, and “wife”, specifically referring to a married woman. You still see “wife” used without implication of marriage status in words like “midwife”.
Anyway tl;dr “man” historically wasn’t gendered, hence it commonly being used to refer to humanity as a whole even in modern use. Also it more accurately states that no humans have been there before, rather than discounting present natives.
Edit: also, as another comment played on, this was used as wordplay in the Lord of the Rings, in which humanity is referred to as “the race of man”, where a prophecy refers to no man being able to defeat one of the antagonists but doesn’t specify that a woman can’t.
I don’t have anything to add, but I want to say that I found this comment super interesting.
wait, so are werewolfs trans people or intersex.
Yes, it did though. Women, too, are human.
“I am no man!” Says the female crew, who proceeds to stab the space Nazgul in the eye.
Goes into the women’s bathroom because I really have to shit and the men’s has been occupied for 20 minutes
It was a list:
- to explore strange new worlds
- seek out new life and new civilizations
- boldly go where no one has gone before
Boldly yes, but It’s been a long road gettin’ from there to here.
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Huh…
…
huh…
Colonizer mindset.
TBF in the ToS it was ”Where no man has gone before”, not “Where no one has gone before.”
So if it was aliens then the statement was correct, we’d just have to skip all the weird human populated worlds they found.
“Man” and “woman” has never referred to humans exclusively in Star Trek, though.
“Mr. Data, you are a clever man - in any time period.”
And, not take any women along, which of course was never an option on Kirk’s ship.
At the time “man” was often used to reference the human species as a whole. Like, when they’d say something like “the dawn of man” they were specifically referring to the earliest humans regardless of gender.
Obviously this is not particularly representative of roughly half the species, which is probably why it’s less common today. Taking that into consideration, though, TNG’s intro is arguably more colonialist than TOS.
for most of the history of the word, “man” has generally meant all humanity, or any human.
male men were called something like “wer”, which survives in “werewolf”.
Just empire things.
As progressive as the show was for its time, it is informed by narratives of the settler imperialism that helped Europeans “conquer the new world”.
There’s a reason why the intro casts space as “the final frontier.” The frontier myth and its accompanying ideology of Manifest Destiny still formed the widely accepted version of U.S. history. Not the land-grabbing, genociding, slavery-spreading version we know today.
Bonus thought: Exploring space was obviously a big thing back then so it’s understandable how Roddenberry came up with this line. But when you really think about it, time is the final frontier that we haven’t managed to break through yet. Not space.
star trek isn’t science fiction as much as naval mercantilism with a sci-fi coat.
so much is taken from that genra, like the whistles when an officer enters the bridge, or absolute lack of seatbelts, because it isn’t a spaceship, but a reskined naval bridge.
