data1701d (He/Him)

“Life forms. You precious little lifeforms. You tiny little lifeforms. Where are you?”

- Lt. Cmdr Data, Star Trek: Generations

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  • 651 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: March 7th, 2024

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  • TLDR; Daystrom did bad stuff but under mental collapse, and it’s very much in part Starfleet Command’s fault.

    I think also, as much as Daystrom had much responsibility for those deaths, it was not as intentional as something like slavery, genocide, or sexual assault. He was fundamentally in a state of psychological distress partially beyond his control. Depending on when Daystrom Institute was founded (touched on above), he may have had decades for rehabilitation and redemption.

    Additionally, Starfleet command probably had ample opportunity to avoid this very early on, like:

    • Looking over Daystrom’s reports to consider potential risks of using engram imprints in a manner similar to a university’s Institutional Review Board - (Though perhaps Daystrom was rather secretive about it and kept it from reviewers.)
    • Running the M-5 in simulations. We know the Kobiyashi Moru existed, so we could probably create a wide range.
    • Not running the test on the Federation flagship, literally one of Starfleet’s most powerful weapons.

    While it’s possible Starfleet took more precautions than we see onscreen, Commodore Wesley’s enthusiasm in “The Ultimate Computer” almost suggests an over-enthusiasm in Command, possibly one that caused them to skip necessary precautions. In fact, we had almost this exact scenario happen in Lower Decks “Trusted Sources”/“The Stars at Night” with the Texas class a century later. Ultimately, Starfleet Command likely bears a non-negligible amount of responsibility in the M-5 affair.

    Of course, the above does not reduce the wrongness of Daystrom’s actions and perhaps only serves to deflect from the OP’s question. However, I feel Starfleet’s potential role combined with Daystrom’s mental condition may be mitigating factors that would make Richard Daystrom less unworthy of having an institution bear his name.



  • It looks like this rulebook was released 2 months before the Discovery episode.

    Honestly, I think I’d personally consider the Disco naming a canon goof up - Daystrom was only 37 years old at that point. While he’d certainly done a lot in his career by then, it still feels weird to name such a major part of Starfleet after him when he’s still relatively young.

    I think my headcannon, and a reasonable retcon in my opinion, is that there was a predecessor organization to Daystrom, somewhat like how there was NACA before there was NASA. When Discovery mentions Daystrom, they should actually be mentioning the predecessor organization.






  • That’s nuts. I was just up in LA a couple of days ago to see They Might Be Giants. Stopped by the TOS cast signatures in the concrete in the walk of fame.

    I’ll have to see if I can get that in next time, although it’s a bigger detour than simply jealously checking out the Micro Center in Tustin, which we have had nothing like back where I live since Fry’s Electronics shuttered (and frankly, Fry’s staff never seemed so nice).




  • I think my very first exposure to Linux was when I got a Pi 3 for Christmas when I was 10; by next year, I was trying out Ubuntu 16.04 in a VM.

    However, it took several years before I began daily-driving; I had thrown it on an old laptop during my sophomore year of high school that I mostly used from the couch.

    I then did a “test install” of Debian Testing on my main desktop pater that year, which just became what I used every day and quickly just became my main operating system.

    I soon installed it on everything else I owned and haven’t looked back.


  • Exciting, as always. I just hope they can eventually add CMYK support.

    I get color spaces are hard and there are workarounds involving Scribus, but I wonder if one could just have a custom SVG attribute that would be ignored by a standard SVG renderer (we’d have a similar placeholder RGB color, which we maybe would allow to be manually modified) and read by Inkscape when rendering to a format for print like PDF.