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.
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Hey look Trae there you are on the far right of the first panel.
Correction, 2nd panel.
…I mean, that’s fair. It’s not like you can plan on a car exploding, and once one does, there’s probably other things on your mind than the backup registration.
Oh hell, I’d be stricken absolutely speechless there. For once, something went wrong with reg, and it’s COMPLETELY UNDERSTANDABLE AND MAKES SENSE. This stuff is unicorn territory. I’d practically be in tears – for once the problems would have a logical, explicable, and sensible cause. It’s even one you could explain to cranky line-standers. It’s even one some of them are liable to accept! Maybe.
Plus, this accident seems to have at least temporarily slapped Garner into non-obstructionism. So he has that going for him, which is nice.
I don’t know about -completely- understandable (‘wait, the car just…. blew up?’), but it’s a far better situation than most.
Yep. Yep. Yep.
We make sure multiple people, not ont he same car or plane, travel with electronic copies of important documents, but quite often there’s only one printout. (Sometimes, SOMETIMES there’s two.)
This is honestly as good as a con can be expected to do. The Plan B has a plan C to back it up, and if plan C is inconvenient.. well, the sheer fact of its existence is good work.
This is why you do 2 copies of the hard copy held by 2 diffrent people
If the hard copy is Plan A, sometimes this is wise! We’ve done so.
If the hard copy is Plan B, heck nah. Don’t waste paper and printer ink you’re unlikely to need, especially on multiple copies, especially if you have a printer readily available to you. But having a thumbdrive and/or dropbox and/or Doogle Docs of assorted things? Heck yes.