#049 - In Soviet wormhole, orb scans YOU!
Riker really doesn’t like those orbs, let me tell you. Also, did I use the “leave of your senses” line for Picard already? I’m a little worried that he’s repeating himself. But maybe Bev is sort of used to that; I appreciate that she’s just plowing along in plucky fashion here even if Jean-Luc is getting tripped up by Geordi’s attempt to set up something weird.
And to be fair to Picard, this is new to all of them, and Geordi didn’t stop and explain that this sort of thing could happen or anything.
Maybe, also, Picard’s reaction is a reflection primarily of the conventions of holodeck scenarios? I bet it’s not at all common for a holonovel to pull this sort of “two people unknowningly see two different things” kind of gimmick; setting aside how difficult it might be to, I dunno, serve different images via polarized light directly to each player’s eyes (and differing simulated force feedback to their bodies) while accounting in real-time for dynamic player positioning and overlap and interaction, it seems like it just isn’t in the aesthetic mode of what we see as popular content in the shows. Co-op play tends to be more formal shared-narrative-experience stuff rather than experimental mind-bending trips, etc. Inhabiting the same scene of a story; fighting off training monsters together; navigating the same Ancient Western barroom. Very few Pink Floyd laser light shows, despite the marked improvement in the quality of the available lasers.
Unrelated! I was giggling at Larp Trek’s referrer search strings last night and posted a short round up of them (my favorite: “dog fugue womens”), so if you find that sort of thing funny, there you go.
And I’ve been thinking more generally about those news-type posts. I’ve made several over the last few months, but I haven’t done a ton of it partly because I wasn’t sure what role I’ve wanted them to play on the site and partly because they’re just not all that prominent on the site; they’re really only particularly visible from the front page, with a few recent ones mentioned in passing on the sidebar when you’re looking at an individual strip.
Would having them be a little more obvious (maybe more sidebar space, or a “most recent news post” blurb in the sidebar) be interesting to folks? I sort of assume people mostly come here specifically for the rather niche comic strip itself, but we do have some fun wandering conversations about Star Trek etc. in the comments so I’m wondering I guess if y’all would want a bit more free-flowing “here is some funny/interesting/odd Trek- or sci-fi or RPG or humorous nonsense in general thing I found, shall we discuss it?” news postery in addition to the thrice-weekly strip content itself that you’re currently reading this sentence in?
Share your thoughts. Your mind to my mind, etc.
tk
The actual show really does just fuckin' drop that duality-of-perception like a hot rock, as I recall. Another tick mark in the "well, this certain was a pilot episode" column.
As I'm writing up this commentary, I haven't sorted out what if anything I'll do about news post stuff from the site -- it's a seperate pile of content that I haven't looked back at all since probably I was first posting these. More generally, I'm not bothering, at least so far, to go back and edit the original posts to e.g. elide the references to off site stuff or comments that no longer have the immediate context available. I may revisit and neaten that stuff up at some point, at least a little, but for the most part my whole goal here is to just get an archive back in place, and it's gonna be a substantial amount of work just to get that done. I know myself enough to recognize that every "oh, and also..." addition to my self-assigned pile of work is one more chance to get derailed on this whole process.