Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
oh wow. I was just thinking about Kasidy Yates, as one does, and I realized that the reason why I like DS9 so much more than any of the other shows is that DS9 has plenty of main characters who aren’t part of starfleet?
It’s such a simple thing but it changes so much, it feels like a much bigger universe and it isn’t one where everyone is defined by their relationship to the definitely-not-a-military-organization fleet
in a lot of star trek not being in starfleet is almost treated as a character flaw sometimes. But no in DS9 you can even go to art school. There’s other shit happening that isn’t related to the pajama people
most star trek doesn’t even explore the life troubles of military wives
being alive is like a whole fucking thing dude ive only been here 23 years and can only really remember like 10 of those years at most and yet im literally immobilized by fear and anxiety i have no clue what i want and yet i am mad at myself for not moving fast enough? like towards what? for who? who is even going to hand me a medal for living correctly? like what would happen if i was just content but like no one knew and i told no one. would that still count? i think it would
Every year I get angrier and angrier listening to Big Yellow Taxi because yeah, yeah you were absolutely right, Joni Mitchell. They did pave paradise and put up a parking lot. And nothing has changed about that in the last 50 years, Joni Mitchell. It’s still a parking lot. With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot no less. You were right about that. You were absolutely right. You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. Nailed it. That is true. And I’m frustrated about it.
I’m not sure where I fall on the “swans are evil” debate, but I kinda like this one.
This one is PARTICULARLY concerning because there is a distinct possibility that it KNOWS what the sign says and is trying to remove it in order to attract more victims.
Thank you so much for the excellent question!! I’ve been meaning to answer this one for a while, so here goes.
My favourite ridiculous piece of 90s technology is PocketMail! It wasn’t that ridiculous at the time, but it’s definitely something that could have only existed in the late 1990s / early 2000s. I actually have a PocketMail device, an Oregon Scientific PM-32 that I found on the side of the road in a box full of broken landline telephones!
PocketMail devices were essentially very basic Personal Digital Assistants that allowed you to access your emails without having to use a computer with an internet connection! Here you can see the basic screen and buttons for composing, sending and receiving emails.
But remember, this thing doesn’t have Wi-Fi - so how exactly can it access your emails? If you flip the device over, you’ll see a strange little speaker thing that flips out…
That’s an acoustic coupler! You had to hold the device up to the handset of a landline telephone! So if you had a PocketMail account (with a special email address ending in @pocketmail.com) and were away from your computer/office, you could simply dial the phone number for the PocketMail service on the nearest landline telephone, then hold the device up to the handset so that it can send and receive email data with the email server in the form of audio - and presto! You have just sent an angry last-minute email to your intern for neglecting to look after your Tamagotchi while you were on a business trip to sell Y2K survival kits.
But… what did it sound like? The phone service has long since been shut down after the rise of more capable and portable internet-connected devices, but if you press the little ‘Mail’ button on the top of the device, you can still hear the sounds of this poor, obsolete little thing trying to reach out and communicate in the only way it knows how to:
