Benjamin Matthew Victor is an American sculptor and Artist-in-Residence and Professor of the Practice at Boise State University. He is also the only living artist to have two works in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses – but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms – they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.
“there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.”
I just died
I lost my shit at “toasts your bread after you’ve eaten it”
Oh please please someone write this
the best thing about this post is that the way it’s written – by multiple human authors getting over-excited about ridiculous, wonderful, impossible ideas that ought by rights to be terrifying – is itself proof that we’re like this
“One of the serious problems with planning against Federation (especially human) doctrine is that Starfleet officers do not read their manuals nor do they feel any obligations to follow their doctrine.”
Bruce: When I moved in, he insisted on funding all of my research. Except, you know, ever since The Incident, all my work’s been theoretical. It’s not actually that expensive. I’ve started just spending all the extra on fruit pies, just to see if he was keeping track. He isn’t. There are a lot of unused rooms in this building, and at least three of them are stacked floor to ceiling with fruit pies. He hasn’t said a word.
Natasha: It turned out Pepper and I both speak French. Tony doesn’t. Now, whenever he walks in, we just start whispering in French and giggling. Half the time we’re just exchanging recipes. He pretends not to be eavesdropping, but the other day I caught him asking JARVIS what ‘des oeufs’ meant.
Clint: I bought this big bag of little plastic flies, right? And whenever he’s not paying attention, I throw them into his drink. Half the time he doesn’t even notice and just drinks the damn things, but the other half? He starts checking all the house filtration systems, the exterminators, the works. He can’t figure out where all these flies are coming from. He’s fumigated three times in the last month.
Thor: I attempted to provide assistance with a project, but Stark assured me that it was ‘very technical’, and that I would not understand the intricacies. I can see why he would think so, as I am a mere Prince of Asgard, taught such basic engineering when I was a child and his ancestors could not yet walk. It has been five weeks, and he still has not corrected the misaligned condenser coil causing the problem.
Steve: I don’t know what Howard taught that kid, but he seems to be under the impression that homosexuality was invented in 2000. He keeps leaving magazines and pictures lying around like the sight of two men holding hands is going to give me a heart attack. I don’t have the heart to tell him about the Greeks.
Interviewer: So how are things in Avengers Tower?
Tony: How are things? I have no idea. I really don’t. There’s some kind of insect infestation in the vents and I think a spy is trying to seduce my girlfriend into moving to France. I tried to prank Captain America with gay porn, but him and Thor just started trying to reverse-engineer workout routines. The other day I went into one of the spare rooms, and I found some kind of one-armed sex hobo sitting on a throne of empty fruit pie boxes. I just walked out and closed the door. I don’t even wanna know.
ealdor 