• verity_kindle@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    Wasn’t there a bit of backfilling lore that Earth’s feline population died as a side effect of an biological weapon released during the eugenics wars? They couldn’t bring back the genus because of the ban on genetic engineering. That’s why Worf didn’t know the word. …that would make Spot the rarest animal in the galaxy. Or he’s not a domestic cat at all…

      • verity_kindle@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Excellent point, but you’re a Lemming, you’re highly literate. Federation Standard might be his second language, I speak a decent amount of Spanish and I don’t know the Spanish word for “woolly mammoth”. 🐂

        • Klear@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          I just spent a while thinking how to say “woolly mammoth” in my second language, only to realise it’s “woolly mammoth”. English is my second language.

          • angrystego@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Hi there, slightly off topic, but speaking of translators, I recently saw the Discovery ep. where the translator is broken and I realized not everyone on the ship speaks Federation Standard. And now I can’t stop imagining Picard speaking French the whole time on TNG.

            • verity_kindle@lemmy.world
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              7 months ago

              Or everyone using native regional accents instead of Received Pronunciation…it would be glorious chaos, worthy of a season closer/opener two parter…“Dorme vous…Data…dorme vous.”

              • Klear@lemmy.world
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                7 months ago

                Now I’m imagining that Scotty’s accent is the best the universal translator can manage to do with what’s actually a stream of incomprehensible Scottish gibberish.

                • Chill Dude 69@lemmynsfw.comOP
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                  7 months ago

                  Oh, I like that. That’s fully in my head-canon, now. Scotty is blasting out waves of full-on Scots lingo, and the computer is barely able to chew through it.

    • Chill Dude 69@lemmynsfw.comOP
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      7 months ago

      Well, this motherfucker DID switch sexes, turn into an iguana, and suspiciously look like four or five very different orange cats, over the years. So, ya know, you might be onto something.

    • gregorum@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      i remember reading a reddit post several years back postulating that the most rational - and horrifying - explanation was that Spot was, in fact, several different cats in a series, all named “Spot”, representing Datas various failures in pet ownership, and that whenever we saw a “different” one, it was because the previous “Spot” had met some inglorious end off-screen.

      :'(

      • Chill Dude 69@lemmynsfw.comOP
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        7 months ago

        Oh god. The first thing that came to mind was how many “feline supplement” variants Data had programmed into the replicator. The way they’re numbered implies that there were at least 221 of them.

        Maybe some of them were WAY TOO EXPERIMENTAL.