Clearly we're not living in the best of all possible worlds, but I just think we can reasonably "prove," by certain metrics like lifespan, disease rates, number of people living above a certain poverty level, etc, that the present is indeed better than most times in the past, in most places. I think to argue…

In order, not really and a reluctant no (reluctant because I like Troi as a character and because I think Sirtis plays her well), but I don't think that has anything to do with the theory that a language barrier element could have strengthened TOS's sci-fi cred. As I said, it probably wouldn't have been as good a…

Well that's hardly an accurate straw man, IMO. I doubt you'd find many people supporting the Black Death, which in some sense paved the way for the Renaissance. Things would have played out differently without the Plague, and maybe they'd be better in some ways and maybe they'd be worse in some ways, but no outcome…

It's so interesting that she mentioned talking to both Majel and Gene in the context of pants: to wear or not to wear, in light of the fact that Majel DID wear pants as Captain Pike's Number One in the TOS pilot. I so badly wished that there had been someone like her, wearing what she wore, on TOS as it actually came…

The talk about Troi vis a vis Roddenberry makes me think of Persis Khambatta. Do we know if, as Ilia, she was speaking more or less with her own accent, just deadpanned, or whether it was an adopted accent?

That's also true.

Were you drunk when you called Roddenberry the Great Brid of the Gallaxy? ;)

I haven't heard that one before, but I like it better than the usual "two steps forward, one step back."

That would be freakin' awesome.

My comment on this apparently disappeared, which marks my first major problem with the new Disqus. Perhaps it will appear later, having passed moderation. In the meanwhile, I will try again:

Me? No, I'm an atheist (as is Penn, to point out one of his few good qualities).

"Star Trek is built on the vision of an ideal future; a tomorrow in which so many of the wants and hatreds that drive us today have been put aside. No money, no starvation, and if politics still seem as sniping and childish as ever, well, maybe there are folks who prefer it that way. The fundamental assumption is that…

"…before his friend, magician Penn Jillette, paid to set him up with an apartment."

Damnit, now I'm trying to find this SNL clip and can't.

I dunno, I laughed at the setting and the close-up of his crazy-eyes. If it's supposed to look like the last manifesto of someone ready to go down in a blaze of glory, mission accomplished.

No love for Morrowind, Don Marz et al? I think among Elder Scrolls games it feels the most sandboxy. Skyrim can be surprisingly linear, and getting away with murder (and finding people worth murdering who can be murdered) is hard, but that's a lot of the fun of Morrowind. Sadly, the graphics have aged to a point…

True, but I mean, I don't think our heroes in Trek are supposed to be quite THAT unselfconsciously biased. I think in this case it was more a matter of the writers not wanting or having time to develop their reactions more thoroughly.

True, Sloan toyed with Bashir and they can't easily let that slide. But they've all presumably lost friends to the fighting, and are worried that Starfleet might not prevail over the Dominion, and I can imagine that those concerns might outweigh their outrage over Bashir's treatment for at least some of them. During…

I'm not saying it is, DRC… Sorry, I guess I can't convey what I mean. Let's call it quits on this one. :)

DRC, I'm not sure I follow you… But what I was trying to say was that it sounded to me like a joking response to the question "why did you change your name?" because it wouldn't be true, because it would be a rather humorously anticlimactic and unlikely reason (to my way of thinking, anyway). Like in "Casablanca"…