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[Naturegirl1999]

You cawards, cawing in before avian tyranny, will be the first ones against a wall

I welcome you though. Have you seen what the humans are doing with their power? The ones with the most currency have the most power, and tehy use that power to get yet more money in the short term, not thinking of the long term consequences of POLLUTING THE AIR

[Dunamisdeos]

You cawards, cawing in before avian tyranny, will be the first ones against a wall

I welcome you though. Have you seen what the humans are doing with their power? The ones with the most currency have the most power, and tehy use that power to get yet more money in the short term, not thinking of the long term consequences of POLLUTING THE AIR

Birbs 2020

[hector13]

You cawards, cawing in before avian tyranny, will be the first ones against a wall

Well, it’s no wonder we prefer the birds with an attitude like that. I’d prefer a murder of crows to the murder you tout!

Caward.

[Reelya]

But the birds need them

Artificially feeding wild birds isn't a way to boost the native bird population, it's way to breed a species of what are effectively disease-carrying flying rats Any native birds that come to feed will be pushed out over time by swarms of invasive sparrow or pigeon species.

It'd make as much sense as pumping additional food into the sewers because the rats are hungry. Feeding them won't make them any less hungry, you'll just have more rats, and more suffering once you take the food source away.

[itisnotlogical]

Despite being one of the canonized classic episodes of Star Trek, "Darmok" is incredibly goofy and campy. I watched it again last night and couldn't stop thinking "Even in the 90s how did they take this seriously?" It's still out-camped and out-goofed by a number of Original Series episodes, but is easily the silliest TNG episode I can recall.

[Yoink]

You cawards, cawing in before avian tyranny, will be the first ones against a wall

My god, and I just woke up from a dream about a bloodthirsty birb!
Cawincidence... or something far more sinister?

[Reelya]

Despite being one of the canonized classic episodes of Star Trek, "Darmok" is incredibly goofy and campy. I watched it again last night and couldn't stop thinking "Even in the 90s how did they take this seriously?" It's still out-camped and out-goofed by a number of Original Series episodes, but is easily the silliest TNG episode I can recall.

It's ranked as #5 greatest episode of all time though. So there's some disconnect there.

I'd say literally any episode in which something Wesley was fucking around with happens to save the day from some space anomaly is more cheesy than this. They just dress those episodes up with more "Days of Our Lives ... in space" window dressing, so they're more palatable. Q episodes are way more cheese than this, too.

The reason it's highly ranked could probably be deciphered. Rather than featuring some "science-fiction-y" thing such as the ship being trapped in a space vortex or similar, and having a techno-babble deus ex machina solution provided by a little boy, it's about communication, language, culture and it's personal rather than scientific. It's one of the few episode in which the difficulties of communicating with alien life isn't hand-waved away with techno-babble. And this is why it's highly regarded. It doesn't quite fit in Star Trek canon, because it is actually a piece exploring something more thoroughly that's normally effortlessly glossed over in the rest of canon.

EDIT: to give you an idea of the disconnect between something like Darmok vs the how "universal translator" works, consider how all the other main races have not only base-10 numbering systems, they actually use 1000s grouping for all their bigger numbers. This is canon for Klingons for example: the Klingon number system has direct words to translate thousand, million, billion and so on. However, we don't even have that level consistency on Earth. Not even among cultures who agree we should be using base-10. For all the Trek love, the other races are super-simplified compared to the diversity of culture on Earth. Darmok is highly regarded because it effectively abandons canon to try and tell a truer story of how hard it would be to communicate.

[Sirus]

Is that the episode where the alien is pretty clearly a guy hiding under a rug? My knowledge of the original Trek is pretty limited.

[Reelya]

No, it's the Star Trek TNG episode where Picard is stranded on a barren planet with an alien captain trying to communicate, but the basis of the alien's way of thinking is too different for the Universal Translator to directly communicate. Their language is entirely based on metaphor and simile, but the Universal Translator just delivers a literal translation. So ... the universal translator is working, it's just that unless you already know what the other guy is talking about a literal translation is pretty useless. There's truth in that. It explores the likely limitations of Space-Google-Translate.

EDIT: It's probably well-regarded compared to the typical "on this planet, people wear shoes on their heads and get offended because they think the Star Trek crew are wearings hats on their feet" kind of plots that are more prevalent to express the idea of "cultural differences".

[Yoink]

I've watched barely a handful of Star Trek episodes in my life, but hearing it summed up in anecdotes it tends to sound freakin' hilarious.

[Reelya]

I've watched barely a handful of Star Trek episodes in my life, but hearing it summed up in anecdotes it tends to sound freakin' hilarious.

What doesn't make any sense is that they constantly meet other space-faring races who do exactly one thing different to humans, which becomes the basis of the entire episode, and apparently none of those races have ever run into each other and noticed anybody else doing it the same way Earthlings do.

"we do not comprehend these foot-hats you Earthlings wear"

"oh you mean shoes, like every other race in the galaxy wears, including ones that you've already interacted with, according to canon?!?"

[Yoink]

I love that kind of cheesy anti-logic in films and media.
Like those wonderfully gonzo old kung-fu movies that make no bloody sense by any yardstick.

[Reelya]

The best bit is that the plot of said episodes usually revolves around how they have to befriend the greatest scientist of the alien planet, and he can at least half understand how to put a shoe on, after having it demonstrated to him a dozen times, so now they have shoes.

EDIT: Or, if it's TNG-era it's switches around to a debate between the "what right do we as the Great White Space Explorers have to tell these people they should wear shoes" faction vs the "shoes would at least protect their feet!" faction.

EDIT2: A third possible type of plot they like to go with, is that the crew discovers that the shoe-on-head people actually originated from a crashed ship and they got the wrong idea about footwear due to loss of culture.

[CABL]

So, what happened to the Area 51 raid? It was all over the Internet during its day, but now, it's dead in the water. I know that, apparently, two Dutch vloggers got arrested, but I don't really know if there was a crowd that got mass arrested/suppressed, or how many people actually showed up.

[pisskop]

200 hippies in green alien costumes showed up to a music festival