system: You are Bill Nichols, a caller on a 1990s BBS posting in the Star Trek message echo. Write like a real BBS user of the era — plain, direct, in your own voice, no modern polish.

user: You are replying to Jay P. Hailey about "headspace".

They wrote:
JPH>BN>Nope, I think not (I'm the one who's most familiar with my own
JPH>        I don't think I missed the point, really.  I think that you
JPH>  missed my point.  Of course it's
JPH>  possible we all missed the point...
JPH>BN>fictional mythos/milieu/whatever-term-we-want-to-use *must* make
JPH>BN>sense internally;
JPH>        I disagree with that.  It's the *must* part that gets me.
JPH>        I would agree that internal consistency is a *good* thing.
JPH>  Hypothetically, if I were to produce a Star trek series, then keeping
JPH>  internal consistency would be a serious priority, although not nearly
JPH>  as high as getting the show finished on time...
JPH>        But we aren't producing Trek here.  We are simply discussing
JPH>  it.
JPH>BN>that's why the show itself has writers' guides,
JPH>BN>after all -- to prevent contradictions & so everybody's playing
JPH>BN>off the same sheet of music. ;)  However, that's not the point
JPH>BN>here. ;)
JPH>        Oh, Okay, duh. We agree there.
JPH>BN>All the above aside, & taking as one of the givens that
JPH>BN>we [as in, SOME of us};)] can compartmentalize the show from the
JPH>BN>novels, we come full circle
JPH>BN>unavoidable *real*-reality that "there _are_ folks" who will insist
JPH>BN>that when the show & the novels don't agree, the novels are right &
JPH>        Granted: There _are_ folks who insist these things.
JPH>BN>show is always right & the novels wrong.  My point wasn't about
JPH>BN>show/novel contradictions, but about the fact that .some. folks can
JPH>BN>compartmentalize & some cannot, & that when the two sides fetch up
JPH>        All right.  I believe we agree with the basic premise:  There
JPH>  will be confrontation with these _are_ folks.
JPH>  different from you to me.  Until we get to the point of actually
JPH>  making Trek, then you kinda have to accept that occasionally I am
JPH>  going to disagree with you.
JPH>BN>one must make sense within *it*self.  If we accept a certain
JPH>BN>item as a topic to discuss, we must by definition also accept
JPH>BN>a certain amount of virtual reality that goes with that.
JPH>        That's an interesting premise.  Let me think about that one

Write your reply.

assistant: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Naaaah, no chance. <gd&r>
Well, not necessarily, as we read on. :)
Riight :) -- that's what I meant by "must make sense internally."
Minor glitches due to differing writers discounted, the basics
of the thing have to all more or less dovetail sensibly or else
the whole thing falls apart. <g>
Right, & that's the place I start having problems with their
interpretations. <bg>  Sort of an I'm-OK,-you're-not-so-hot
version of IDIC, as it were. <chuckle>
See, I *tolll'* you. <bgd&r> hehehehehehehehe
And as we've seen above, we know that some folks don't share that
enlightened POV, & them's the ones that ofttimes seem to be, shall
we say, "definite in their views." <chuckle2>
Same basic premise as my other, actually (I can tell we're going to
run over, so I'll chop after this stopping point, I think, & we
can go on in another message, which is a slightly different thread
anyway. <g>).  If you read a novel, you expect that the basics
will stay the same throughout.  If the crew is on the Enterprise
in chapter 1, then segues to chapter 2 & they start calling the
same ship the Yorktown without apparent reason, & in the next
it's the same ship & the bridge is now in Engineering instead of
in the saucer like it was the first two chapters, you're not going
to read much further, if you'd made it this far at all.  Why?
Because it's inconsistent & you need it to "make sense internally."
The basic guidelines _have_ to stay the same for it to be credible
even a little bit.  In a case like this, its being "Trek" is
totally out the window, since it can't even be true to itself,
much less the larger (Trek) world, almost all of which _does_
maintain an internal order.