Other People

We skipped the one with the weird future Borg drone, because it's sad. And also the plot makes no sense - how can Seven's nanoprobes make a future drone just by assimilating the Doctor's mobile emitter? The logic does not hold up. Anyway, we'll go back to that episode later.

Then there's the one where we're told that Torres has been spiraling for months and that Paris has been pushing for his new Delta Flyer for at least as long, but actually both those things show up out of nowhere because TV hadn't really committed to arc-based storytelling at this point. And they resolve just as fast, too! Chakotay cures B'Elanna by shoving her forcibly into a holosimulation of watching all her Maquis friends die and then giving her a tough love lecture about how much people care about her. This can not be a valid therapeutic technique! Seems more likely to make it worse. But it doesn't - she develops new motivation, shakes off those survivor guilt blues, saves the (extremely rapidly built) Delta Flyer and all aboard with her brilliant quick thinking, and then eats banana pancakes with enthusiasm and a renewed zest for life.

Also, if she's got the medical knowledge of a first year nursing student then why the hell isn't she the one picking up extra shifts in Sickbay instead of Tom? That man gets too much plot. (For that matter, when Harry was in that weird AU, we found out that if he hadn't been on Voyager he would've gone into ship design and done pretty well for himself. The building the Delta Flyer plot should've been his endeavor, properly spread out over several episodes. Harry doesn't get enough of the plot.)

But really, Voyager needs to hire a few nurses, hire an extra doctor, and hire a fucking therapist. The Alpha Quadrant cannot possibly have a monopoly on therapy. (And in the meantime, would medication help B'Elanna?) The nurses and doctor could be hired temporarily, exchanging work for passage in Voyager's general heading. There's sure to be plenty of people willing to take that deal. The therapist would really be better off as a more long-term gig, but if they'd stop for a few weeks and really look I'm sure they could find somebody qualified who'd like to do some serious traveling.

Also also: Back when we met the Malon, the garbage hauler was pissy about them talking to their government about those converters because, as he strongly implied, the government would absolutely accept this technology, especially if it came free, with help from experts in setting it up. But... did Voyager even bother to talk to the Malon government, because they seem to have written off the entire culture.

And then we watched the episode where it turns out Species 8472, convinced that humans are a serious threat, have replicated the Academy in order to learn how to infiltrate Starfleet and gather intel for future defense. Which... honestly, the evidence they have against humanity is pretty damning. They only really have ever met two other cultures, one of whom is the Borg and the other of which allied with the Borg in order to slaughter them. And yes, Voyager even has a Borg on their very ship, like, I'd be worried about this too!

But this time Janeway flipped a coin and it landed on "diplomacy", so they tried that and it worked beautifully.

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Any ideas? Should we give up and order new ones? What is that disgusting stuff anyway?

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Metafilter is having a, uh, lively discussion on whether or not this study proves that contemporary English majors can't read.

There's a lot of potential ways to divide the commenters into two groups, but the one I expected the most was "people who think the correct way to deal with unfamiliar references in literature is to immediately look it up" and "people who think the first group needs to learn to use context clues already".

As always, I am in the second group, and every time the first group appears in real life I find myself wondering if they somehow weren't taught this skill at school. I well remember the worksheets! (To be honest, they were a little hit or miss for me - 95% of the time they just used text with words they assumed the students would be unfamiliar with, which I was never actually unfamiliar with. But the other 5% of the time they used text with made up words or with blacked out bits of text, and that was fun, and presumably we all learned a great deal. Or at least in theory... one of the reasons I had such a good vocabulary as a kid was because I read so much and never looked anything up except for fun, so... well, the point is, my classmates probably learned something! And I use that skill every time I try to read something in Spanish.)

Anyway, I'm really posting this because of two reasons.

1. Somehow, nobody has posted about the lawyer cat from the pandemic. Did they all forget? Or not see that?

2. This paragraph: One of the interesting thing about the Inns of Court is that we have some early dance choreography and melody lines not found anywhere else, in a collection that was used there to teach the law students how to dance. Of course the choreography document predates Dickens by a couple of centuries...

Somebody needs to explain wtf is up with this because wtf.

Edit: No, I thought of a third thing, which I forgot because of the second thing.

3. When your kids are very little, every well-meaning person everywhere will tell you that it's all right for them to watch a little TV, just so long as you watch with them and discuss what you're watching, and ask them questions about it. Watch actively, and train them to do so. And it wasn't until the niblings were in middle school that I realized I wasn't actually doing that the way people keep saying - instead of talking about the plot and "what do you think happens next" my running commentary during TV shows and movies goes "Wow, that background music is awfully forboding for such an apparently hopeful scene" and "Ugh, he put a blanket over her, I guess they'll hook up now" and "That transition sure is cheesy!" and, once, "You think you'll be happy when you get to Omashu , but obviously not", which prompted the kids to ask why and I had to actually think about it. (Because they left the secret tunnel and then had to climb a mountain which blocked their view of the city while chatting about how amazing it'd be to get to the city. If everything was hunky-dory then there would've been no mountain, they would've emerged from the tunnel and seen the city right there.) I don't know if the way I did it was better or worse than what people kept saying to do, but it doesn't seem to have hurt the kids and their ability to pick up on foreshadowing!