   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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Sometimes just saying “Doin stuff” gets the point across well enough that you can stay relatively on the more appropriate side of a conversation so it doesn’t turn into a conversation on your sex life. Also Sarah must be very nervous to talk about all of this.
Good show, Sarah.
Language can be weird. There’s this mental block of ‘that’s a bad word, don’t say that word’ that lingers long after you’ve gotten used to whatever the word refers to.
Straight and not straight are not the only options, just sayin’.
Well technically they ARE — in the same sense that everything is either directly to your left or not directly to your left. Or everything is located in Des Moines or NOT located in Des Moines. Or all words rhyme with Mellon or they don’t rhyme with mellon. 😛
You do realize that one of the two characters in this conversation is asexual, right?
Actually, Trae’s right.
However, straight and gay are not the only options.
Exactly
While “straight and gay are not the only options” is certainly better phrasing, I disagree with the notion that “straight or not straight” is like the examples Trae gives above. The big differences is that unlike leftwardness or locations in cities, sexuality is a spectrum, so binary negation is just not applicable.
My examples work fine in the sense of “strict definition”/”not strict definition” — which is really the whole point. If you want to get into analyzing the need for looking at things as a binary (which is a complicated ball of wax) my “left” example still totally works… with the left/right binary and all.
Anywho, Ruth says what she says because Sarah made a pretty specific declaration a while back.
well damn thats oddly mature of her