#QuestionOfTheDay what's the most tedious fandom/hobby argument you've ever been apart of?

[otherdracula@mastodon.social]

@zhinxy @ami_angelwings I still maintain that a better question is, why doesn't Harley Quinn kill the Joker?

[bytex64@awesome.garden]

@ami_angelwings “What is pixel art?”

I actually refined my definition quite a bit based on the discussions, but it just never stops coming up. You can argue it forever.

[mdhughes@appdot.net]

@ami_angelwings Most tedious: The Star Trek transporter argument. Almost 60 years, and it's still: You either believe in Ship of Theseus & don't believe in magic souls; or you're scared of transporters. It will never be resolved past that, and some people are literally insane over it.

Most interesting varies, I like a lot of deep dives into single-auteur books & shows; whether that's Heinlein, or Serial Experiments Lain, or whatever. Franchises have no depth.
#fandom #anime #startrek

[flargh@mastodon.social]

@ami_angelwings I have to think on the second question, but hands down for the first: "Star Trek is too woke."

[lockelyfox@meow.social]

@mdhughes @ami_angelwings

It does not help that Trek muddies the waters as much as it does over the entire series lifetime.

Somehow, both Second Chances (TNG 6x24) and Realm of Fear (TNG 6x02) are both canon and entirely contradictory as to how the transporter works. You can't be both entirely conscious through the transport process and basically whole, AND be capable of duplicating into two people.

[ami_angelwings@urusai.social]

@lockelyfox @mdhughes yeah they get weird about the transporter buffer

According to the TNG technical manual (which I own), they take you apart molecule by molecule and that gets put in the buffer and then they physically send those molecules to wherever you beam to so they're not killing you and sending data of yourself and reconstructing you from that data

[lockelyfox@meow.social]

@ami_angelwings @mdhughes

Oh I know, I'm Team Transporter Isn't A Murder Machine, but fuuuuuuck the writers make it hard sometimes.

Like, I quote Realm of Fear all the time because Barclay is conscious through the entire process *and* is able to pull people stuck in the phased state out of it before they go into the buffer.

Combine that with The Next Phase (TNG 5x24) and it feels to me regardless of what the tech manual says, its more likely that your matter gets phased and compressed before being *shifted* to wherever you're being sent and then uncompressed and unphased.

I love Trek but the transporters are basically magic.

[foolishowl@social.coop]

@ami_angelwings I don't know if it counts as tedious, exactly, but in the 90s, on the Traveller Mailing List (for the TTRPG), someone suggested that the civil war called the Rebellion could be quickly ended if someone put reactionless thrusters on an asteroid and accelerated it to a large fraction of light speed before it collided with Capitol, killing Emperor Lucan and billions of other people. Arguments about physics and ethics raged. I took a break from the email list for over a year; when I came back, they'd recently made it a rule you weren't allowed to talk about the asteroid anymore.

The most interesting was on the Elder Scrolls fan forum, when Michael Kirkbride talked about a step beyond CHIM: "No one has achieved Amaranth yet. Except for the one being or idea that no one has found yet, which is still just sitting there." This led to several months of intense discussion of pretty much the whole of Elder Scrolls, trying to figure out what he meant.

[mr_briney@universeodon.com]

@lockelyfox @mdhughes @ami_angelwings my head-canon is that you maintain consciousness so long as the matter stream remains coherent, so for most normal transporter use. It's when something out of the ordinary happens that you get stored in the buffer

[phantomkitty@retro.pizza]

@zhinxy @ami_angelwings Given how often that Joker escapes, I am surprised that Batman has not asked Superman to send Joker to the Phantom Zone. It stays within Batman's no killing rule and puts the Joker some place where he can't escape.