I typically write these strips a few at a time, several weeks in advance (I’m currently up to episode 72.) I’ve spent the last 17 strips or so not-so-subtly mocking just how utterly reckless and irresponsible our current “Captain” and his cronies have been in response to the COVID-19 epidemic, but there’s usually 3-4 weeks between me reading about the latest bit of idiocy in the papers (then trying to find a suitable TNG episode to tie it into), and it showing up here.

Which is my way of saying that the events of the last two weeks have not gone unnoticed.

COVID-19 is a pretty horrible thing, and quite frankly, I’m amazed that I’ve even managed to make light of it at all, but this…. there is nothing even remotely funny about systemic racism, oppression, and violence, and it would be disrespectful for me to even try.

Before the whole COVID thing, this webcomic was mainly about dissing on Star Trek for all the technobabble elements that are either scientifically impossible given our current understanding of physics, or at least wildly impractical and/or dangerous. Some may call my outlook cynical, but if there’s one thing, one thing, that I hope Star Trek has got right… it’s that in future centuries, the utterly preposterous notion that the amount of melanin in your skin somehow dictates your worth as a human being will finally been relegated to the dung heap of history where it so rightly belongs, and we can finally grow the hell up as a species and begin “investing in ourselves.” And by ourselves, I mean every last one of us.