#029 - WE’LL BE GREETED AS LIBERATORS
You know what you shouldn’t put off until the morning when you need to get the strip put together?
Finding screenshots of Data emoting.
I ended up pulling some new shots from Descent, Part II, the season seven opener where an emotionally-buffed Data teams up with his robot brother Lore to lead a squad of rogue Borg on a mission to LITERALLY DESTROY ALL ORGANIC LIFE IN THE GALAXY. (Spoiler alert: they do not end up doing that.)
And it’s got some at least grumpy, accusatory Data, but no real hotheaded scenery chewing, so I’ll need to go back to the well some time to expand Kira-by-proxy’s emotional vocabulary. But it’s something. Baby steps, Data!
A question unlikely to be answered in the text of this comic: when Data roleplays, does he speak in the made-up voice of his character, i.e. do the other crew-members get to hear him doing his best Nana Visitor impression? It’s established on Next Generation that he can do that sort of thing without difficulty, but would the other players enjoy that or just find it unsettling? I can imagine Troi throwing some husky growl into her Quark, so it seems like fair play, but maybe it’s a bit uncanny valley.
Do you think Data ever got used like a youtube player during social gatherings? Sure, someone could dig out a datapad or whatever and call up that funny “Captain’s Pooplog” recording that’s been going around on subspace, but why not just ask Data to stand there, mouth gaping, playing it back like a boombox? He’s super smart and a computer, it’d be faster than looking it up, yeah?
tk
Over the course of the comic I struggle with having Data actaully inhabit Kira's voice vs. speaking in an easy-to-riff-on Data-like register. Sometimes I got there, sometimes I just...didn't. But it was fun to do for effect here, at least.
From the comments, on Data's use of contractions here:
Me: "Yeah, personally my take on Data is that there’s nothing fundamentally broken about Data’s ability to grapple with contractions in terms of his more generalized language processes — they’re not some magical kryptonite, some thing with which he is literally incapable of grappling — and the contraction thing is actually one of two things:
1 Data has, for whatever bizarre Soongian reasons, a contraction inhibitor hook in his speech generation pipeline that operates specifically and only when he is speaking extemporaneously and rewrites contracted forms with their expanded alternates, such that Data reflexively pronounces both the internally-distinct units “they’ve” and “they have” as “they have” at the moment he speaks. So if he’s reading a document verbatim, or reciting a poem, or performing (ad lib or otherwise) in another “voice”, that hook doesn’t come into play and its “its” until the cows come home.
2 The contraction thing is just a Kaufman-like stunt that Data has spent the last several years playing on everyone he knows, because if you were a high-functioning sociopath who had trouble relating to the humans constantly surrounding but forever distant from you, you’d have to make your own fun somehow."
Also, on the problems of the Universal Translator:
"This is the madness that comes from the good-for-TV, bad-for-thinking seamless real-time UT stuff. The idea as presented is so logistically impossible that you can’t even dig into the really interesting questions about how it would work in practice.
Like, granting that the UT is some sort of thing that does pretty much on-the-fly translation, okay: now we need to deal with modalities so that it doesn’t mistakenly translate things we wish to be heard literally, etc. If Picard lapses into a bit of Latin or French, it’d really suck the wind out of it to have the UT just turn it into English (or Galach, or whatever), but does the UT know better? Would it refuse to translate short island phrases in other languages on the assumption that that’s your intent? What about loan words? Would you have to white-list or black-list autotranslation of specific things? Would you use spoken escape sequences to demarcate translate-to or don’t-translate exceptions? Would there be corporate nannyfilters that would automatically UT dirty words into acceptable euphemisms?"
Good comment from IRFH: "Knock knock
Who’s there?
Interrupting Bajoran
Interrupting Bajoran wh-
This government will be gone in a week, and so will you."