the narrative: *starts the third act by repeating a scene from the first act but now it has a totally different context*

me: ohoHOhohoHOHOhoHO

it’s genuinely so awesome how ds9 stops halfway through its oceans eleven themed holosuite episode to let sisko explain why he’s uncomfortable roleplaying in an era that in reality he wouldnt have been accepted in. hard to imagine a show nowadays that would play this so straight.

even though he does eventually join in, and kasidy presents a different perspective, his opinion isn’t treated as invalid by the narrative or anything. it’s perfectly understandable & in character for him to feel like he does, and also in character for him to put aside his feelings to support his friends. just great stuff

I know this doesn’t go for every tng episode but I just watched s3e5 “the bonding” and I adore how much deference picard shows deanna. feel like usually when there’s a character in a tv show whose main function is empathy, they’re constantly dismissed or their advice overlooked by characters in leadership positions. deanna’s authority being so respected, the enterprise crew waiting for her signal before acting or obeying her orders without question, just felt really nice.

my tumblr mutuals will take characters from media that is not very good & construct such rich & intricate inner worlds for them in their posts that i will go wow that sounds so compelling let me go check this out….& then the canon character will be like. relatively boring with very little interiority. but that’s okay because sometimes the real character is the one my tumblr mutuals hallucinated along the way….

The purpose of the Borg was always that they could only ever consume, cannibalising whatever they identify as useful and violently disposing of the rest. A perfect metaphor for colonial violence and how it destroys cultures. I think the inability to see that in Picard's "évolution" of the Borg does disservice to this metaphor.

I won't disagree, but at the same time, I think that the use of the Borg in Picard centered a different metaphor, one of the impact and legacy of trauma and overcoming it. That's something of a central message of the entire series, and so the Borg are used in service of that metaphor.

In Season One, we had the reclamation project, led by Hugh, working to help these victims - and we do have Picard acknowledge them as such, which ties in with things in the following seasons, despite the change in showrunners causing some clash in tone and messaging.

Season Two featured Seven's story where she was able to exist as purely human, no Borg implants drawing attention... For once, she wasn't "passing," she WAS, a trauma all its own. That culminated in both her reassimilation and Raffi arguing that she would always stand out. We also see the Borg attacking in the midst of Picard processing the trauma surrounding his mother's death, so serving as the literal "monsters" in that episode alongside the proverbial ones in Picard's head.

That goes in to Season 3, where the impact of trauma is center-stage throughout, with Crusher running away with Jack because of the trauma that comes from being with - having a child with - THE Jean-Luc Picard, a man who serves the Federation when called upon without hesitation, despite the dangers it puts him in. Riker and Troi are still grieving the loss of their son, a trauma no parent wants to ever experience. Raffi's struggling with the division in her family, caused by her, which has put her in a position where she is unable to be a part of her son or granddaughter's lives, on top of her initial assignment putting her face to face with the demons of her addiction. Shaw, of course, brings up the ghosts of Wolf 359, trauma inflicted by the Borg and led by Picard himself, which is a trauma all its own. Vadic, even, is a victim of the trauma of the Dominion War and the experiments performed on her and her fellow Changelings - by the sounds of it, they might even have been test subjects for the virus used to nearly exterminate the Link.

And of course, we have Picard himself - first of all, he is faced with his child, a child who he had no part in raising, and we know that he also had been very resistant to the idea of ever having children, at least up until Robert and Rene were killed in the fire, and he faced the reality that his family line would end with him, which is something almost certainly exacerbated by the trauma of his mother's illness and his unintended involvement in her ultimate suicide. And then he has to rescue that child from the manifestation of the greatest trauma of his adult life... the Borg. A rescue that, in the name of accomplishing, he willingly subjects himself to assimilation once again, despite its scars on him.

All that culminates in the defeat of the Borg, if not a final one (because, let's be real, Star Trek will never fully destroy its signature antagonist), then a powerful one, one led by the efforts of Picard, an act of overcoming his trauma and laying to rest the ghosts of it.

Yes, this meant changing the metaphor that the Borg were used to explore, but that's been the nature of 'alien races as metaphor' - throughout the Original Series era, the Klingons were used as a metaphor for the Russians, a metaphor that definitely didn't fit them as TNG and DS9 explored them further. While the metaphor that the Borg originally served is still one that I would definitely be willing to argue is still worth exploring, it's also natural for the evolution of new stories to find new uses for the established pieces.

Resident Evil Requiem | 2026

rigid lines drawn between "platonic" vs "romantic" relationships will kill the patient. she needs "okay but how important are they to each other" to live

People ask me how things are going lately n I don’t even know what to tell them. I’m just here

walking into dragonsreach to alert jarl balgruuf of the dragon attack on helgen

Have you guys noticed how much the internet/technology just does not listen to you anymore? I click “don’t show this artist” on Spotify and I get recommended a music video by them on the front page. I click “skip this update” on a pop up every time I open a file organization app and it’s right back there every time. O click unsubscribe on a newsletter and it keeps showing up in my inbox!! I click “delete my account” and the next time I open the website they suggest I “reactivate”.

🌻🌼🌷🌸🏵️🌹🌺💐🍀

Some flowers for anyone not feeling their best today

*is constantly unsure if people like me or not*

Reblog to tell prev that ppl like them

men make it absolutely impossible to practice humility

what you say: “I think this is the case”

what men hear: “I have no idea whatsoever, but here’s a totally random guess”

what you say: “I’m not an expert on this subject”

what men hear: “I don’t know anything about this subject and need its bare fundamentals explained to me”

what you say: “I could be better read in this area”

what men hear: “I have never read anything in this area”

like okay fuck it nevermind I’m actually an expert in every subject I’ve ever read or heard about. in fact I know everything.

If anyone's ever wondering why I come across as such an arrogant bitch on Tumblr it's because I used to work in science with a lot of men and never readjusted my communication style afterward.

This is one of my biggest seemingly low-stakes feminist soapboxes. Women are often encouraged to take hedging, consensus-seeking, and checking-in phrases out of their speech in order to seem "more confident". And listen, of course you do not need to say "I think" when you actually know for pretty damn sure, or double-check every little thing you say, or apologize for things that are out of your control.

But there are men in my life who I respect, who I think are generally good communicators, but who have admitted to me that if they do not know the answer to something they will just state their best guess in a confident tone of voice, with no hedging or clarification to warn the listener that what they just said was pulled from their ass.

I once asked my high school boyfriend what noise a platypus makes and he confidently told me "oh they quack" and I said "really? that seems like they'd have different noise-making structures than ducks since they're not birds" and he said "oh yeah you're probably right. I was just guessing." And had no idea why I was mad! I was like, so if I ask you a question you might just bullshit me?? What if I had believed you and gone and repeated that to other people? I could have looked like an idiot. I could have spread misinformation to a ton of people! But I have told that story to other men and had them say "oh yeah I totally do that."

This is so much worse communication than just saying "I don't know but I think..." There shouldn't be campaigns training professional women to sound "more confident," there should be campaigns training professional MEN to stop doing whatever THAT is!

[ID: Chidi Anagonye from The Good Place saying “okay, but that’s worse. You do see how that’s worse, right?” End ID.]

it always just blows my mind how foreign of a concept "a permanent weekly schedule" is in food service/retail/etc jobs, despite being the obviously best way to do scheduling

literally our parent company cannot comprehend that all our stores schedule this way and have no intention of changing because its the best

they were so adamant about "you HAVE to make a new schedule every week" that our director of ops basically had to say "just send me you permanent schedule every week and I'll say you're doing it"

which worked a little too well apparently because now they're giving us a new software to post our "weekly" schedules to so all employees can know when they're supposed to work. despite the fact that. they already know when they're supposed to work. because the schedule doesn't change.

and i really do mean it's the best way because from the employees side:

and from the management side:

and despite how many times we explained this to the higher-ups at Inspire they just. don't fucking get it. and keep finding new ways to waste our time pretending to run our stores the way the want. it's actually infuriating.

It's because inconsistent staggered schedules are useful for preventing labor organizing.

And that's why restaurant workers get paid jack shit