why does my caladium act like she is starving for light. hang on
every day i ahve to reposition the damn lamp cuz she’s dead set on sticking her first leaf Right The Fuck In There and i don’t want her to burn. but every day i come home from work and she has closed the distance anyway. bestie PLEASE cooperate with me
i finally caved and moved her to the windowsill but this has clearly not satisfied her because she still presses that leaf RIGHT up against the glass
apparently instead of actually growing new leaves in order to increase her light intake she’s decided that these are PERFECT conditions to flower in
I kinda snooze at the thought of TOS novels because that’s not really my era of Star Trek (as of this writing anyway), but I got sucked into these Myriad Universes stories in which various authors explore the “what if?” side of Star Trek. Each story focuses on a different era available to them in the late aughts, from ENT all the way to VOY.
The first entry in the “Echoes and Refractions” anthology, titled “The Chimes at Midnight,” is a TOS movie era novella that certainly had me snoozing at first. It was just kind of recounting what I already know from the movies, except it follows an alternate timeline established in TAS in which Spock died as a kid and an Andorian named Thelin fills the role of Kirk’s XO. It picks up the pace midway through where it diverges into an exploration of what the Genesis device from the second and third movies could really mean for galactic stability.
But the author of this article does a much better job of describing the story’s merits despite the lackluster opening. They point out the critical role Spock plays in Star Trek both in-universe and to the audience, as well as how the World War II memories and fears that the original creators brought with them left out the ultimate question of how far the Federation would go to end the carnage of war. (Something explored a little more in later shows like DS9.)
“Ties of Blood and Water” was very much about me processing my own guilt for missing my mother’s death. I was at grad school in L.A. She was fighting colon cancer in S.F. The last time I called her to check on how she was feeling, she said she was feeling good and I should stay for finals week, then come home.
She died the next day.
I’ve always regretted not coming home early so I could see her one last time, and that’s the basis for that episode.
As you can imagine, it was a tough and deeply personal story to write, and I’m glad it ended up as one of your favorites.
dukat is such a fucking insane character. like SUCH a well written villain. the way he so so deeply hates the bajoran people and also ends up fetishizing them EVERY single time he turns around, his nearly psychosexual obsession with sisko because he’s in the position with bajor that dukat really wanted. his insistence that he was good for bajor and so desperately wanting their love, but never once respecting them. it grows and grows throughout the seasons, culminating in the pah-wraith cult and the surgical changes to make him appear bajoran, like the way he has himself SO convinced that he believes what he is doing is right, and yet never is able to stop being nefarious at his core
An elderly neighbour gave me a few gourds and potatoes the other day and I made soup with them and took a nice pic of the soup preparation process—I meant to send it as a thank you and to let him know his vegetables were appreciated, but then remembered he isn’t online at all, hasn’t got an email address or smartphone. The next time I saw him I told him jokingly that it felt a bit strange to realise I’d have to wait a few days to show him the photo in real life and he gave me this look of—confused consternation, probably the same look grandma-me will give the young person in the year 2070 who tells me it feels weird to assemble words into sentences to communicate with me instead of doing a quick mindsync on the metaverse
