Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
So I'm just going to come out and say it: My favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is "Conundrum." It's episode fourteen of season five, and I just deeply love it.
I don't know if it's because I literally just assumed Erich Anderson's Commander McDuff was a random Enterprise officer of the week (which we saw quite often during the show) when I watched it as a kid during the original run, so the twist actually worked on eleven year old me. I don't know if it's because I just like a good "everyone has amnesia" story. I don't even know if it's just because it's a good Ro Laren episode. I don't know if it's just because we learn that Starfleet doesn't give a crap about lasers.
I just like it. It's neat.
And I rewatched it last night, and feel that it holds up -- which is why I found it deeply weird that the folks who wrote the episode actually think it's not that good. My favorite episode of the entire seven season run of the show was a failure according to the folks who wrote it.
And maybe, as a writer and creator, I should remember that.
Like the hardest part of releasing creative works to the public is that often, after a while, I'll start to judge those things far more harshly than when I first made them. Or I'll compare it to the potential I thought an idea had in my head. And if I don't reach that potential, I'll think of it as "bad" -- when it might just be slightly different than that idea. I have one hundred percent published stories that I thought were just sort of okay and later had someone tell me how much it meant to them to read it.
*cough*I Hate November*cough*
So I should make sure I remember Conundrum. That one of my favorite things to rewatch is considered one of those failures by its creators. That the things I make might have value, just not in the way I originally thought they should.
It's just sort of how things work out.
Remember that on April 5th at 11AM Eastern/10AM Central you can join me for the Critical Thinking Witches' Collective's April Brew virtual event! Attendance is free, and you can register here!
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Wisconsin has a rich German heritage to it hence why it has a rich beer brewing industry. Maybe they are visiting relatives or something and they are on their back to Chicago O Hare or something.
Oh and according to google translate the guy said “you can not just go harass foreign in gas stations. we are not belgium.”
I think Google Translate may have been used to generate the dialogue to begin with. It’s the German equivalent of Engrish.
IT’S ALMOST AS IF I DON’T SPEAK GERMAN.
*Gasp!* Das kann nicht wahr seihen!
That’s not what Google translate outputs if you put it in as two sentences… and have the capitalization right (which admittedly doesn’t come through in the all-caps font I use).
If you feel like fixing the German, it should be something like, “Du kannst nicht einfach Fremde in Tankstellen belästigen!”
(As it is, the strip is really weird: why would these people talk to each other in broken German? Unless neither of them is actually German, but that’s the only language they both kinda know?…)