On regular YouTube, the fact that they automatically make anything with music into a mix-playlist also isn’t great.

A lot of the time, I just want to listen to one track of something, and end up having to strip out the playlist argument from the actual link because I don’t want to get everything similar to it.

…But I sure DO miss storage media that makes a satisfying “Kachunk” when loaded, and could be forcefully ejected like a spent artillery casing.

Older computers just have a nice mechanical ambiance that newer machines don’t replicate quite as well.

I don’t miss having the time to go make a cup of tea whilst waiting for the computer to turn on, or having the monitor scream the entire time it’s on, but I do miss hearing the hard drive spin-up, and all the POST beeps and drive stepper noises when the computer’s booting up.

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They were also presented as being cheaper and more ethical. You didn’t risk being roped into paying a higher price because the cabbie deliberately took a long route, or be surprised by the price being different in person. You could order an Uber, and you’d pay only what was in the app.

On a related note, I personally hate the AI partner/friend ones as well, where it’s clearly preying on the lonely, insecure, or desperate. It’s dastardly, dystopian, and frankly, quite sad. How many children’s media show rich children as being quite miserable sods whose parents think that not having friendship can be resolved by buying their kids a friend?

You could easily see that being in a cyberpunk story, where you can rent a friend or partner from a megacorporation, but if you don’t pay the rent, they’ll be repossessed and deleted/destroyed. The data would be collected and used regardless.

It doesn’t help that a lot of it is simply so out of date now, that it’s considered the norm now.

We don’t exactly think all that much of Picard being bald, or Janeway being Captain of the Voyager. For us now, they’re normal, ordinary things.

Whereas back in the day, it was an unusual choice. There were many jokes about it being natural the Voyager would get into a space accident on its first voyage, because Janeway was in command, for example.

I don’t know if it was only a part. The world has moved on from the day, so a lot of what would have been in-your-face bleeding-edge progressivism back then no longer is.

The women could wear miniskirts. No-one was smoking. Uhura (African American) was not a maid or cook, but a well-respected competent peer, along with Chekhov (Soviet Russian), Sulu (Japanese), and McCoy (Caucasian American).

We may not think much of it now, and in the miniskirt case, think poorly of it, but back in the day, they were bleeding-edge social stances.

The translator tech is not very far ahead of what we have today.

I would disagree with the translator. On the surface, yes, but it is incredibly far removed from how any of our translation technologies work.

The universal translator works by scanning your mind/brain signals, finding universal constants within it, and then constructs a translation that way. In theory, a novel alien could be parked next to a universal translator, and it would still be possible to translate for them, in the absence of a linguistic database.

I also think the medical tricorder will some day inspire/shape new tech similar to the communicator with cell phones.

It sort of has, but more in the other way, where the devices are inspired off its functions instead of its form. Going off of wikipedia, there’s some speculations that a smartphone might well become our equivalent of a tricorder thanks to the massive amount of sensors that they have in them.

In the original Star Trek, that Alcubierre was inspired by, it wasn’t explained at all. You just had warp engines and impulse engines. Warp engines made it so the ship could go at warp speed, but go too fast, and they could come off the ship, or the ship would explode.

It was later series that tried to have an explanation for how they worked.

Although I don’t think the writers cared particularly much for whether they were theoretically possible or not, anyway. They work through subspace, and that doesn’t exist in reality, so a lot of oddities could just be brushed under that.

But since we’ve already got the fictional construct of subspace, the notion of a mycelial species that can extend through it seems…within the realm of truthiness, all things considered.

Especially since TNG already had creatures that lived within subspace, in Schisms. If humanoid-ish beings can live in subspace, fungal life doesn’t seem that much of a stretch.

The part I’ve never fully grasped is how one travels along the network, but then, I’ve never fully grasped how the warp coils are supposed to work, either.

IIRC, it’s like the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Hyperdrives. Once you get into spore-space/hyperspace, you get an infinite amount of choices to navigate through, but if you can figure out how to figure out your path, you can exit where you want. Though unlike the Heart of Gold, which tests every single possibility and impossibility simultaneously, the later iterations of the spore drive take a bit more after Dune, where a navigator can commune with the mycelial network and divine the way the ship should go, rather than needing inordinate amounts of computing power to brute force the solution.

How the ship is moved along the network after the navigator figures out the route is left as an exercise for the reader.

Although it might go both ways these days, since it wouldn’t be at all surprising if newer writers heard of Alcubierre’s warp drive, and incorporated that into Star Trek as a mechanism for how it works.

The mycelial network also exists largely within subspace. So far, we have yet to discover whether subspace exists or not.

The U.S.S. Discovery Spore drive, is it complete nonsense or is there a scientific theory I’m unaware of?

Both, since it relies quite heavily on Star Trek’s Signature Subspace Science, and there’s no real-life equivalent for it.

The spores are from the mycelial network, an organism/structure that exists in a subspace domain, and like subspace, is spread/connected throughout the universe/multiverse. The spore drive shifts the ship into that subspace domain, and uses the mycelial network to route the ship to the appropriate destination.

The closest things that might apply is the hyperdrives in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the space-folding drives in Dune, where you have a spanning extradimensional network that you can use to get to your destination, as long as you can find the right set of routes to get to where you want to go.

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It’s a very Roddenberry design.

I don’t know, TNG could be up there, but it was also generally influential as a whole, so both its good and bad ended up getting carried over.

The entire exploding bridge trope came from it, as did evil admirals. It also set up the Enterprise as the flagship, with the best and brightest of Starfleet. Which also meant that people generally assumed it to be the norm when it was the exception, and that the hero ship was some special ship, when it was a normal ship of the line in TOS.

VOY Borg are really bad compared to TNG Borg.

They are, but more due to issues with overuse more so than anything. In TNG, we saw the Borg for all of 4 times. In Voyager, they were shown much more frequently.

But as far as the timeline goes, it also wouldn’t make sense to show an earlier iteration of the Borg, not when they were severely affected by the actions of the Borg.

I heard PIC stinks because it makes VOY Borg the main villains

I’d honestly argue that which version of the Borg to be a minor issue in Picard. Picard’s bigger problem was that it didn’t seem to know what it wanted to be, and kept leaping between multiple different plots and story lines, which confuses it a bit.

It arguably have been better if it has taken one of those plots, and run with it for the entire show. Like the matter with Synths and former Borg drones being treated as subhuman, vindicating the concerns Guinan and Picard had in the Measure of a Man, or visiting the TNG crew and seeing where they are now. As it actually was, it seems like the writers/producers felt that now they had Patrick Stewart, they wanted to do everything before it was too late, and the result was a bit of a mishmash.

The issue with the Borg tends to be more that they really aren’t very much of a threat by the end of Voyager, and were dealt such a blow that it would be almost impossible to ignore.

Their greatest threat, assimilation, is trivially curable, and it’s now known that their assimilation abilities are one of their greater weaknesses. The Federation might have issues with infecting someone with a pathogen to make the Borg assimilate them and self-destruct, but others have no such qualms, and we know of at least one species that did use such methods (Icheb’s parents).

Their adaptation is a greater issue, but even older Federation ships, like the galaxy-class saw good effect just cycling their weapons frequencies. The Voyager’s ablative armour would be well-studied after they returned to Starfleet, and dedicated anti-Borg weapons would have both been in active development, and also use.

As of the events of First Contact, it’s also known that not only are there Borg ruins on Earth that may still be intact and active, but that Borg ships are not as truly uniform as they seem, with Picard pointing out a weakness in a Borg cube that dealt catastrophic damage to it. Local signals, what he felt, scans of what remains of the area, and everything would have been thoroughly studied to determine how to both find and exploit those weaknesses on other Borg cubes, without a former privileged Borg unit at the helm.

It would be difficult for them to retain much of the mystique and terror of their TNG appearance, with all of that now.

It’s also been 800 years since then. It’s the third millennium, the seat probably is the belt itself at that point.

Discovery definitely feels like it, especially since you have people still arguing quite animatedly about how it’s not Star Trek, and might have Ruined Star Trek Forever, though I would rather imagine much of it to be recency and accessibility more so than much else.

The other shows are a bit less accessible, even if they are newer, since CBS moved it onto their streaming service, and off of Netflix, whereas Discovery aired on Netflix around a time when Netflix was one of the bigger streaming platforms out there, and more people who aren’t as into Star Trek or other CBS properties might encounter it incidentally.

But for the most part, every single successor to Star Trek has always been controversial, and deemed to have ruined it forever, though most of it abates when the next show comes around, and is then deemed to have ruined Star Trek forever.

Though TNG was by far the least deserving of it.

I actually wonder about that. Most of the complaints, like the ones about Stewart being a shakespearean actor who wouldn’t be able to handle the rigours of serious television, or being bald were nonsense, but there was a lot of good reasons to complain about early TNG. A fair chunk of the early episodes weren’t very consistently good.

We know it to be better in hindsight, but if The Next Generation had started today, and not only is the second episode a rehash of a Star Trek (1966) episode, but the fourth was Code of Honour? I would also be inclined to criticise it for being quite bad. There’s a good reason why a lot of the advice for people watching TNG is to stick around until Season 3, or start from Season 3, since that’s when it gets better.

And if you don’t, that’s what subtitles are for. Hardly much to complain about.

I always thought the things on the side were jubes of some variety.