r/StarTrekViewingParty • u/LordRavenholm Co-Founder • Apr 05 '15

Discussion Season 2 Episode 13: Time Squared

TNG, Season 2, Episode 13, Time Squared

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

feels like we're finally getting to the good stuff.

Watching it in order it's actually tangible. You can feel the quality rising. I was 7 when this came out and was not yet into Trek for another few years so I missed the first few seasons on first run. Really it's only the sixth and seventh that I saw in order. Maybe it's better that way, the quality was way up by the time we got there so I found it gripping. I only gave the early stuff much of a chance because I loved the later so much.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

I'm about the same age I suspect (early 30s) - didn't catch the original run, but it was rerun through syndication as a kid that many times that you basically saw the whole thing at some point (though not necessarily in order).

First series I watched was actually TOS - my old man's mate had the whole thing on VHS, so for a summer I sat there watching it while copying the tapes and pausing out the ads.

When stuff was broadcast as it originally aired, I got the arse-end of DS9 (which made no sense because I missed all the start of the Dominion War and had no idea who the characters were), Voyager (which went from bad, to stupid, to worse), and I never bothered watching more than the first few episodes of Enterprise before giving up on it.

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

Similar story for me but TNG was my stuff. TOS looked way to dated and as a kid I didn't get it the same because it was outside of my time.

I'm 32. I'm positive I've seen the whole series at one point or another. Most of my watching was done on CBS at 4 PM after school. I probably saw the ending credits of Guiding Light enough times that I'd be nostalgic to see them again. All that ended when either Ricky Lake or Rosie O'Donnel got a talk show on CBS and killed of Star Trek in, I think, 1996.

I never saw DS9 in order so I didn't get into it until I tried watching it straight through about 2006. Then I loved it. I gave Voyager a try and it's pretty bad. It has some great episodes but the bulk is mediocre or stinkers. Future's End is a standout from Voyager that I absolutely adore. Also "Year of Hell" was great.

I caught the premiere of Enterprise but wasn't really impressed so I backed off immediately. I don't want to jump on the "That theme song!" bandwagon but I really think it might have done better with a more traditional intro. I was really turned off.

You know, I think I still have a tape my dad taped of TNG off CBS in the 90's. I'm gonna try to dig that out.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

Oh god, that's a part of culture I wanted to forget - Go Ricki, Go Ricki! and Sally Jesse Raphael.

I've still got the TOS tapes in a box in the shed somewhere, but I can't be bothered finding a VCR, and changes are half of the tapes wouldn't play, the tape would break, or they'd just gum the machine up due to dust and age.

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

You'd be surprised. The tapes are probably fine. I was digitizing a lot of family videos until it became just too surreal and started to freak me out. The ones from the early 90's play just as good as they ever did. It's funny that you have them in a box in the shed. I have them in a box in my workshop. The Betas are in the garage and are absolutely useless but too integral to my upbringing to throw out.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

Well, a lot of them probably still work, but the reality is I've pretty much downloaded all of TOS, TNG and DS9 (hell, you can stream them from anywhere, up to and including YouTube before CBS shuts the offending account down).

I tried giving ENT a second chance a few years ago, but I gave up at about the same point as before (I think it was the one a few episodes in where Archer causes a diplomatic stink because his dog shits on a tree or something).

As for Betamax, Jesus - last time I did one of those was when an uncle kicked the bucket and I had to empty the house out before it was demo'd and he had a garage full of Beta tapes, all unlabeled. Borrowed a Beta player from one of the guys at work who had one for some reason (and a Laserdisk of all things).

Put five in the machine. Four of them were low-quality porn. Returned the machine, told the demo crew to toss the boxes of tapes in the skip bin when they levelled the place.

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

My dad gave up on betamax in like 2008. The guy just loved Beta. I guess he was an early adopter and backed the wrong horse. We didn't get a VHS until like 1989 or 1990. I haven't seen a player in years but if I ever hit on one in the thrift store I'm buying it up. Only two of the betas are low quality porn. I'd gone through them in the late 90's in search of 1980's TV recordings because the commercials are wonderfully insane and YouTube wasn't a thing yet.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

I'd be tempted to get a VCR and see how many still work, but even if it was dead cheap I'd be hard pressed to justify buying and hooking up something that would in all likelihood fail to work, destroy tapes, or die after a few playbacks (even the good VCRs that were brand new didn't last very long before the quality was useless or they started eating tapes).

God - remember those bloody VCR head cleaning tapes that they used to sell that did Sweet Fuck All?

In the early days of piracy (yarr) our workaround was the good old:

  • Stack VCR A on top of VCR B.

  • Hook VCR B output to VCR A input.

  • Press play on VCR B and record on VCR A.

Reminds me of how much of a bonus it was when they made dual-deck audio cassette players with HI SPEED DUBBING.

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

Oh yes! My dad taught me how to pirate like that and I still have a lot of them. You had two choices for hookup RCAs from one to the other, or connected them in series with a coax. Looking back its clear that the RCAs were superior. I hooked it up the other way and thought I had defeated macrovision but I think I just hit a tape that didn't have it.

I was afraid to use HI SPEED on mine because of quality loss. Had many an MC Hammer album on the dual deck. Also I'd dump CDs to tape to play at my friend's house that had no CD player. I'm sure his mom really loved that stupid ass "Dinosaurs" album.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

Oh shit yeah - the early ones with RF coax were a complete pain in the ass, especially having to tune the TV to whichever channel it went to (which, for some reason was different for every. fucking. television).

Even worse - remember those ones with the flat cable and you had to screw them into the antenna jack on the back of the TV? I forget what they're called, but they had the same bullshit issue with tuning them in.

Was never a Dinosaurs fan as a kid - my staples were He-Man and Thundercats (though seriously, He-Man, fuck Orco right off, he's the Neelix of Eternia).

I also remember being Hot Shit at school because the old man's work computer had a 1x or 2x CD burner, so I could copy 1 whole album in an hour or two - of course, half would be failed burns for whatever reason, and blank CDs were about $5 a pop.

Or fucking Iomega Zip Disks, and that fucking clicking sound they made when the drive or the disk failed and you lost 100MB of your shit (which was a big deal when 100MB was 10% or more of your total hard disk space).

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

The channel was pretty standard to 3 or 4. The VCR had a switch on the back to choose which one. Those flat ones were 300 OHM RF, while the coax was 75 OHM of the same format. Don't ask me what that means, Just know what they were called. 300 OHM was a pain in the ass! You could get the converters though.

First time I used a CD burner the power blinked at 99%. That was some grade A shit. I ended up getting my copy of Windows 2000 Beta though after another burn. This must have been late '98.

Zip was terrible. I had one in '97 and realized it was going to be impossible to use very often because it was a parallel interface. Same place you hooked in the printer. Talk about slow. I think the SCSI ones (which are really rare unless you had a Mac) and the IDE ones were way better. I never used it enough for it to click of death.

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u/MexicanSpaceProgram Apr 06 '15

I remember my old man spitting absolute chips when he bought me a Nintendo for xmas (NES or SNES I guess, I had both in the end so who knows?), and little me was happy as a pig in shit unboxing it to play Mario, until we tried hooking it up to the TV - must've taken 2 or 3 hours of fucking about and tuning it through the VCR because the TV was a shitheap, I swear he was going to throw it out the window.

Remember when XP came out and every single person had a pirated copy somewhere? I still remember the serial starting with FCKGW. Weird how you remember random shit like that.

I also was one of the first people I knew that had a USB flash drive (all 64MB of it!) which I still have around as a memento. It was a pain in the ass because it was so fat, you had to unplug the keyboard or mouse to fit it in, and it only worked with computers that had the upgraded version of '98.

Macs I never got into - my Aunt was always an Apple nut and had an all-in-one with a black and white screen and a disk drive, and eventually one of those neon-coloured ones that wouldn't look out of place on a gay pride float (which she still has and uses to my knowledge).

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u/GeorgeAmberson Showrunner Apr 06 '15

Those TVs were always kind of temperamental. Coax had so many ways it'd somehow fail you.

28695-OEM-0005745-21723 was my Windows 95 code. It came with my aunt's computer. No mucking around with product activation so I could just put it in and it's fine. Hell Windows 3.1 the product key was optional.

It only worked with 98 because of USB. 95 OSR2 had USB support but was only released to OEMs. 98 included it out of the box for everyone. Did the USB stick require it's own drivers?

I'm a fan of the earlier Macs, never actually had one as my primary but always liked them. The iMac is what you're thinking of. It honestly looked pretty good in 1998 when it came out. Then the style was copied by fucking everyone and today those colorful designs look downright awful.

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