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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Grin – haven’t drawn THAT duty since I took up working Con Ops. Possibly our busiest time, even just fielding “can we leave this here?” requests by people who should know better…
We always ran feedback in a separate room. I don’t think I ever saw more than 25 people. Once closing ceremony ended, we started tearing stuff down.
I’m always a little amazed how few people stay for the feedback panel.
And how many of those have one single issue they want to spend the whole panel talking about.
The feedback session is with the con chair and the vice con chair aka next year’s chair. Usually it’s not that full, but everyone present decides they want to monologue.
I really want to see how Veronica deals with monologuers.
Sadly we won’t get to see that this year, as I have to wrap up the con on Thursday.
Because next week is November.
We used to fun comments after closing ceremony, and it wqas routinely 50% “Your con is the best con ever” despite us politely telling people If you had a wonderful time, great, but we want to hear what we could improve on.”
Eventually, we just had an online comment page because we wanted to pack up after Closing ceremonies and get to the staff dinner and the boozings. Works good, we think.
Not to mention, if there are a lot of people waiting to comment, some might not get their chance to make a legitimate criticism because too many people ahead of them wasted time with praise and talking about how many years they’ve been attending.
Unless, of course, they want to praise Otakon’s Classic Video track.
Wasn’t present (or even on the ConCom thank Ghu) the time a convention which shall be left nameless because it was a looooong time ago had enough visible-to-attendees screwups that bard Leslie Fish turned up at the gripe session with a song about the lot and started singing. I’ve heard the song. Oh dear…