Thread by @AlexandraErin

This tweet made me look up Geordi La Forge's canonical birthdate and he apparently missed it by three days, so he's only on the cusp.

https://twitter.com/oranicuhh/status/1340876649642881025

The thing about Geordi treating Data like a person is that's just how he relates to technology; Data is the first machine to love him back.

The writers had him fall in love with a hologram he made of a married woman and the journal entries of a supposedly dead woman. Not only were his romantic plots with inanimate simulacra, but simulacra of unattainable partners.

It is an interesting subversion to have the ship's engineer struggle to get what he wants from the computer because he insists on trying to phrase things like lighting levels and music it in terms of human moods instead of with Vulcan-like precision, mind you.

Jean-Luc Picard just programmed his tea temperature preference once under the shortcut "hot"; the ship's engineer is like, "Computer, hot chocolate, maybe kinda... cozy?", which he describes "Like when you've been out playing in the snow at your grandma's house and you come in."

It's one of the little things the show is very consistent about. The holodeck knows exactly what Will Riker is asking for when he requests a "bone" (it gives him a trombone) but when Geordi asks for something it's goes about the same as him explaining frolicking to Data.

The fact that the ship's computer gave Will an exactly-to-specifications instrument when asked for a "bone" is part of my larger theory that when he gave Tom Riker "their" trombone, it was actually one he'd had replicated to replace the real one he had long since left behind.

Space really is the final frontier on Star Trek; one of the few things that they can't just pull out of thin air in their post-scarcity society is physical storage. William T. Riker had spent his whole career learning the value of letting go of things when he got a new assignment

Thomas Riker, though, hadn't had that experience, and had spent years making do with very little, forming connections to the same objects and hoarding every precious resource he had available.

To Will, stuff is fungible and replaceable. To Thomas, it was precious and finite.

So Will gave Thomas "their" trombone, knowing he could just have another one replicated from the pattern he'd stored before recycling or giving away all "their" old junk years ago.