To be fair, the mirror universe in general, even in the DS9 era, is kind of Star Wars-y.

In general, though, it sometimes gets annoying when the franchises swap aesthetics, even back to V when they did bargain bin Mos Eisley (the bar in III was hilariously campy, though). Recently, I watched the first episode of a certain Star Wars series on a friend’s recommendation (I wouldn’t have otherwise), and at one point, I was like, “What the heck! This is supposed to be a rough pirate ship, but there’s so little weathering on the set that this could be a Federation starship!”

I agree with your positions about short seasons and brand new big bads.

However, I don’t think TNG, and classic Trek at large, have a future totally devoid of “the pains and pitfalls of present-day life”. For instance, Captain Maxwell blows up a bunch of Cardassian outposts, and there was that whole incident with the Pegasus and the cloaking device. These are clear instances showing in TNG’s world, we haven’t completely grown out of the darker parts of our nature.

I think the ideal of Star Trek is there is a future where we have overcome many of our problems, and when new (or old, sometimes) arise, we can work together to overcome them and improve ourselves.

In some ways, I think that Lower Decks embodies this extremely well. Because it’s supposed to be a comedy, it liberates the show from a lot of modern sci-fi conventions; this allows a largely utopian environment for our Federation characters where they’re free to help each other evolve far beyond the borderline insane sitcom archetypes they started the show as.

Depends on which Khitomer - the original accords (probably most notable) were because of the whole Praxis incident.

“And I will see my dream come alive at last / I will touch the sky”

Coolio, but I won’t be using it at least until it hits Debian Testing. Hopefully this can be in Trixie - looks like the freeze hasn’t happened yet.

“His neural engram structures are experiencing rapid total depolarization. Get me the dineurotrocacaline hypospray, quick!”

Man, making up nonsense Treknobabble is fun. 😏

Funny, but the truth is most warp cores from 2375 have secretly been powered by the suffering of transporter clones of Miles O’Brien made without his knowledge while he taught at the academy. Eventually, when people found out what actually powered ships sometime before the 31st century, O’Brien warp propulsion was retired and dilithium was brought back into use.

Ooh. That’s difficult to say. I feel like the holosuite ones are always great, but that’s nearly every Trek for you.

I can live with “In the Pale Moonlight “.

Yup. Always are.

I don’t know that I’ve used enough handheld Linux devices to say. The only major one was I had Debian on my Surface Go 1. Power management never worked quite right - after a few suspends, I’d get these weird graphics glitches and have to reboot.

Also, I kind of hated the keyboard- it wasn’t very sturdy and often flexed, causing accidental trackpad clicks.

I still have the device, but when I need a portable Linux machine, I just go to my Thinkpad these days, which other than installing the backports kernel for Wi-Fi support and then adjusting the modprobe.d entry because it was Realtek pretty much just goes brrrr - even my desktop gave more of fuss, as I used to be in a room without ethernet and needed a card that worked with Windows, Linux, and Hackintosh (from before I got rid of my Windows install and my Hackintosh SSD conked out, leading me to switch to virtualization).

I got the Worf one and a mini-Spock for Christmas (sitting here in my bathroom cabinet):

I love the Janeway one, though, one of which I gifted to my mother a few years back.

I swear it’s one of the top episodes in the franchise now.

Also, according to an okudagram shown close up by someone who worked on it, Harry is a lieutenant during Prodigy.

Miles O’Brien in the chair after a field commission to captain on an engineering vessel: “Time to suffer, I guess.”

(Personally, though, I head cannon that O’Brien eventually gets the nickname “Non-com Admiral”.)

He also is oddly enraged about Debian including slightly old versions of Xscreensaver in stable. I get his reasons - dumb people will submit bug reports for things that might already be fixed - but also, Debian has a promise to keep and is well within their rights since the software is FOSS.

Not quite. Upon a Google, it looks like they are hacks, but Wayland doesn’t support programs (like the Xscreensaver daemon) blanking the screen and would need a standard to do so.

However, these screensavers are just individual binaries that the daemon executes, so although they won’t pop up automatically, you should still be able to run and enjoy them as fun little graphics demos.

I think you give valid examples and make your point well.

However, another weird thought is perhaps we’re always slowly dying to some extent. For instance, you at age 7 is dead; today, yourself at age 7 cannot speak or act or think. For instance, in a situation where your young self may have tried to buy a toy, you have different wants and make different decisions - you cannot perfectly replicate what that past self would have wanted.

This might be true even of myself from five seconds ago - I hadn’t thought of a certain wording of this concept yet, and so might have worded it differently under different circumstances - that “me” is gone and can’t do anything. This could be true even a millisecond ago, or a duration approaching either an instant or perhaps one cycle based on whatever the “clock rate” (if there is such a thing) or the human brain is.

However, to function, we need a convenient abstraction for what life and death are. I think my definition of life would be when one particular sum of experiences permanently terminates its (mostly) granular evolution.

Thomas and Will Riker both evolved from the same sum of experiences of the original William T Riker; since those sums of experience are still evolving, he is, within our convenient definition, alive.

Our family actually has a bunch that an aunt sent once.

Cool. In a little over a month, I hit 3 years.

Was about to cite TNG Tech Manual as well - although that also said that holodeck characters’ bodies were replicated meat puppets, which I think they didn’t stick with.

Ah, you must be an ice man. 😁