March 31st is Trans Day of Visibility!

This is a drawing I made for Pride Month last year, and I want to bring it up again to remember that this is a safe space for trans and non-binary folks.

My own head canon for why a lot of the tech in Star Trek TOS looks primitive by today's standards (eg the consoles in the bridge) is that tech in the 2260s is going through a strong minimalist phase as a reaction to the excesses of prior centuries. They've realized you don't need tons of information shoved into your eyeballs every waking moment. And they've rekindled an appreciation for tactile controls. #startrek #tos #headcanon #startrektos

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the gatekeeping criteria for first contact and Starfleet's Prime Directive. Allowing contact only when a species develops warp drive is not about them achieving some threshold of maturity or technological sophistication that would mean they are somehow "ready" to be contacted and deal with the reality of living in a galaxy full of starfaring alien civilizations.

The reason that achieving warp drive is the checkpoint for contact is that there's no longer any way to avoid it. As soon as a species gets warp drive, they will be out among the stars and will soon encounter alien civilizations. There's no point in trying to keep them isolated when they can just fly to another star and meet aliens there.

So, in my interpretation, the first contact rule is entirely pragmatic, and not based on whether a civilization is "ready" for contact. When it's obvious contact will happen one way or another, that's when you should step in and do it under controlled circumstances.

My kid and I have a running head-canon that cats are actually higher-dimensional slug monstrosities that our human brains can't fully comprehend.

The "cats" we know and love are actually an anglerfish-like protrusion that pokes through into our lower-dimensional spacetime.

The saliva they coat themselves in contains a mild hallucinogen which produces a calming effect that helps mask their true natures, so they can lure humans closer to feed off the kinetic energy of headpats.

Tags for the people

Which #AnimalCrossing villagers do you think would be queer, and how?

@actuallyautistic Reasons why I #headcanon #tangotek of #hermitcraft as a #gifted #autistic icon:
- he rarely „smiles“, he rather smirks
- very subtle humour, rarely ironic
- he‘s very deep into minecraft tech (#specialinterest ?)
- he built a game in game, controlled by a computer in a game
- he‘s hugely organized with occasional chaotic spots (#audhd ?)
- he always streams at the same time
- always wears the same shirts, same coffee mug
- he‘s actually an #itprofessional & #gamedev

As cool as they look, holographic interfaces in sci-fi media have always bothered me, because the utter lack of tactile feedback seems like it would make them entirely unusable if you weren’t looking directly at them (much like how some automakers are, thank goodness, moving back towards physical controls rather than touchscreen everything because it’s so much safer to drive if you can make adjustments by touch and don’t have to take your eyes off the road).

So my #headcanon for their use in the modern #StarTrek shows (#PIC, #DIS) is that they’re not merely coherent light holographic, but use similar tech as the holodeck, so that there is some form of tactile “physical” controls for the operators to engage with.