Unimatrix Two

A Modern TARDIS Traveller

The phrase “modern TARDIS traveller” popped into my head, and about 90 minutes later this followed. I’m not going to apologize to Gilbert and Sullivan: they’re cool.

—

I am the very model of a modern TARDIS traveller,
I am a timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly plot unraveller,
I know the queens of Venus, and I fight the villains terrible
The Daleks and the Cybermen in battle armor wearable;

I’m very well acquainted, too, with genius spatio-temporal,
With Omega and Rassilon and others far less sensible,
I understand the tricks of navigating ’round the Time Vortex… (erm… erm…)
But still have some confusion ’bout the motives of the fairer sex!

(But still have some confusion ’bout the motives of the fairer sex – but still have some confusion ’bout the motives of the fairer sex – but still have some confusion ’bout the motives of the fairer-fairer sex!)

From Earth I’m pledged to keep marauding nightmares safely far away,
Including massed invasion by the Time Lord planet Gallifrey
And as a timey-wimey-wibbly-wobbly plot unraveller,
I am the very model of a modern TARDIS traveller!

Harassment

Whether it be a fan con or a lifestyle event, from this day forward I will do everything in my power to make sure that every convention with which I am involved has an anti-harassment policy in place, well-publicized, and enforced. For decades, I have been under the impression that my subcultures were better than the everyday rank-and-file, and we didn’t do that crap. Over the last few years, I’ve had this mistaken impression corrected.

Today, someone actually said directly to me, “Cons don’t need anti-harassment policies because the women are always lying anyway.” And that does it. I don’t want my life polluted by these kinds of people, much less the lives of my friends. I can’t fix it myself, but I can be one more drop of water in the inevitable erosion of this mountain of idiocy. So yeah, I’ll be checking.

And I can name two events off the top of my head that have beat me to the punch: Intervention in fandom, and Debauchery in lifestyle. Since day one, neither event has been willing to put up with harassment against gender identity, skin color, or any similar method the greyfaces use to try to split us up. These conventions aren’t the only ones willing to stand up for their attendees, and more are joining the tide. Rising Star, Black Rose, and Virginia’s MarsCon either have or will soon have such policies with the eager support of their staffs.

I hope anyone who reads this is with me. Eventually, we’ll reduce these fucktards to the impotent, whining fraction they should be.

BorgSpace Interplanetary

Since the days of my first Lego set, I have never lost the joy of building something – having a goal for how something should look and feel and function, then correcting and tweaking until what I was making came as close to that goal as possible.

Kerbal Space Program takes that thought and expands upon it, by offering one all the parts to build a neat-looking airplane or space rocket, then challenging you to make it fly. And once you make it fly, to do something with it: can you reach the Pole? Can you reach orbit? Can you reach a moon or another planet? Can you land a rover or build a base on another world?

I’m thoroughly addicted. And I knew I was cursed to a few late nights when the idea popped into my head of building an imitation of a Valkyrie space fighter from the Macross anime… and then making it fly. Did I succeed? Well…

Threads of a Dilemma

Yesterday, I saw a trailer for a Fox Network “comedy” in which a lady wore the Japanese schoolgirl outfit known as a fuku, or seifuku, and I was repulsed by the sight. I have friends who own seifuku costumes. Heck, I own one. Why was I so horrified?

I knew I liked looking at ladies in various unlikely outfits at least as early as my introduction to Dungeons and Dragons. If you look at how they dressed female characters back then, “practical for fighting monsters” is the last concept that would cross your mind. I could only assume that the chainmail bikinis had to include some kind of magical deflector shield to be usable armor. Back then, I found the idea silly, but this was just a game, and it didn’t bother me.

Once I discovered anime, the seeds of doubt took root. I still loved some of the even more-implausible outfits, but seeing the characters move and be voiced by humans changed my perspective. I felt somehow more obliged to believe that someone would really wear this, and that was a bit of a stretch. Japan isn’t the most sexism-progressive country, and I wondered how women felt about being depicted in these costumes designed only to draw in the male gaze.

At fan conventions, I began to find out – or at least to become further confused. There were ladies all over the place wearing these costumes – at least the ones which could physically be hung on a human being’s body. I wanted to look, but was it okay to look? Which emotions were acceptable while I looked? What expression should I maintain to not seem creepy? The whole thing confused the hell out of me. If the costumes were not sexist, then why were there no obvious male equivalents? Why did they seem designed solely to encourage sexual thoughts in the viewer? And if they were sexist, how could these women – many of whom I knew to be intelligent, capable, and unwilling to take crap from anyone – be wearing them, and having such fun doing so?

Now I have an answer. There may be other answers but this idea has cleared up a few things. I’ve been into costuming since I was little, but in recent years I’ve chosen to wear rather more flamboyant outfits, for reasons which could be several blog posts on their own. Now some would call these outfits degrading when worn by any gender, but I stumbled upon a secret: if I’m wearing a costume *because I want to*, it’s not degrading at all. Someone else can try to convince me it is, but that’s my decision to make; and if my costume choice makes me feel appealing, confident, and happy, then people’s negative opinions don’t matter much.

And that’s the answer to my dilemma. If anyone wears something that makes them happy to wear, then I’m free to enjoy it. The inverse also holds true: no matter what the garment, if someone’s wearing something they don’t feel good in, something they are forced to wear to cater to another person’s whims, it’s bad. And these can be the exact same outfit, because at the end of the day, it’s just clothing. It has no power besides what we allow.

That’s how a seifuku on Fox turned my stomach. The lady didn’t want to wear the outfit, it was forced on her by someone to make it clear they had no respect at all for her. Hell, the costume was more over-the-top sexualized than you’d ever see at a con – which on its own doesn’t have to be a problem, but here was meant to say, “You are not a person, you are an advertising prop.” Nauseating.

So I’ll go back to looking with a clear conscience; I only hope that the wearer is having ten times as much fun wearing it as I am looking, because that’s how it works for me when I’m dressed up. I still can’t recommend the chainmail bikini for actual monster fighting, though. Dramatic poses only!

The Science of Doctor Who: s01e08, “Father’s Day”

The Doctor takes Rose Tyler back to the day when her father died, an event she was too young to witness and understand. In an impulse, Rose interferes with the death, and Time starts to unravel with fatal consequences to everyone nearby.

There aren’t many scientific concepts explored or mentioned in this episode, though Alexander Graham Bell is misquoted when cell phones start repeating “Watson, come here, I need you.” The proper quote is supposedly, “Watson, come here, I want you.” But on the other hand, Time’s damaged, so maybe it’s an alternate Bell speaking? As nitpicks go, that’s easily addressed.

I’m more interested in the way this episode treads in dangerous waters by discussing the way time travelers may interact with the world in their past and future. It’s a question that rarely bears serious examination, because things quickly don’t make sense. The show has contradicted itself many times over the decades, and will continue to do so as the seasons progress.

The Doctor tells Rose they can’t change something they’ve witnessed themselves, which fits the general tone of the show and prevents tension-killing easy answers to the many plot problems the characters have faced. But just what can we say is “witnessing”? Is a transmission over closed-circuit TV something one may change, but physical line-of-sight is not? What’s the range? If Rose looks at a star 1,000 light years away in the night sky, then visits a planet around that star 1,001 years ago, can she be certain that the supervillain won’t be able to blow the star up because she saw it perfectly healthy a “year” later?

Once again, you can figure out that there’s no way to answer these questions fairly and rationally because it makes the TV show impossible. And we don’t want that, so in the immortal words of the MST3K theme, “Just repeat to yourself, ‘It’s just a show, I should really just relax.'” But that doesn’t mean we aren’t allowed to think about the problem. We can set it aside for the duration of an episode, but entertainment doesn’t have to reflect reality perfectly. And I feel perfectly comfortable gently poking my favorite universes this way – it’s done with love, and I’m hardly going to stop watching.

The Science of Doctor Who: s01e07, “The Long Game”

It’s the year 200,000, and the Doctor, Rose, and Adam arrive on an Earth-orbiting space platform that has somehow become inhabited completely by the mid-21st century. Well, that’s not quite the plot, but it’s a sin that current sci-fi TV keeps committing over and over. Fashion, food, and entertainment are all exactly as we might expect them to be a decade or two from now, and while the plotline suggests that Earth’s cultural development’s been held back, this is a bit much.

Can’t I have just a little space fashion, space food, and holographic display tablets? I know it may come off as a bit silly, but silly beats lazy any day on Doctor Who. (Okay, “kronkburgers” are mentioned, and are an in-joke from old Doctor Who comic strips. So maybe the food is a *bit* futuristic, but the burger stand hasn’t changed in 198,000 years.)

Moving on past that, some people on Satellite 5 have dataports for high-speed super-broadband wireless data streaming directly into their brains. Sure, that’s very cyberpunk and an integral plot point; I don’t have any problem with that. However, to add “ew, ick!” factor for the eight-year-olds, they made the dataports into little doors that open up directly to the surface of the brain. Immediately, I started thinking “Well, there’s a fatal infection just aching to happen.”  And why bother, given that there appears to be no hardware installed in the brain itself? You should be able to find an electromagnetic frequency that would pass through skin and bone well enough. While the transmission shows a visible beam, that would have to be a side effect: if the information is carried on visible light pulses, the brain tissue itself would block them. Brains aren’t transparent.

Now we head up to Floor 500, where we discover that the satellite is owned by a giant slug shark, managed by New Scotty, and operated by frozen zombies. Oh, dear, zombies again. Let me quote myself from “The Unquiet Dead”: “centuries of embalming technology has blinded modern humans to one fact: dead bodies decay. Shortly after death, various chemical processes in a body are no longer inhibited or controlled; it doesn’t take long at all before eyes are useless for seeing, internal organs are useless for digesting food, brain tissue cannot carry electrical charges, and muscles will no longer flex and pull.” And let me tell you that freezing the dead tissue doesn’t make it any better at doing any of these things.

Frost-encrusted dead people should have been about as useful to the operations of Satellite 5 as a frozen pack of convenience-store beef jerky, and about the same consistency, but as a culture we just can’t seem to get rid of our zombies, can we? Wouldn’t it have made just as much sense, and in fact be a delicious irony, for the Satellite operators to be alive and mind-controlled though the very dataports they were so eager to have installed?

Oh, and Adam is kind of a weasel, isn’t he? Of course, he was written that way in “Dalek”, so fair enough.

Next: an episode that will have repeated repercussions for Rose Tyler.

30-Day Cosplay Challenge – Day 1: Your First Cosplay

I don’t have any trouble at all remembering my first costume. I can’t tell you exactly how old I was, though I know I’d have been at least five years old. I suspect I was closer to seven or eight at the time; there was a friend of mine who lived probably three or four blocks away – a long walk when I was that age – and he was just as crazy about Star Trek as I was. He insisted that I always be Mr. Spock in our little innocent role-playing, and eventually my mom agreed to make the costume for me.

I don’t think she made the blue shirt, though I might be wrong about that – she was certainly good enough to do it. I can’t remember clearly if she put the black collar on it – I originally thought not, but upon further reflection she might have done so after all. I do remember she found exactly the right gold braid for the sleeve rank, and made sure it matched the Commander’s pattern in my treasured Starfleet Technical Manual. (I still have that, by the way, almost four decades later.) I think she hand-embroidered the department arrowhead symbol on the front – she did so again later for a Scotty shirt. I appreciate that so much now looking back!

Of course, I outgrew it soon enough. I was active enough as a child that I’d have worn it out if I hadn’t outgrown it. There aren’t any pictures that I know of, which is a darn shame. But that shirt meant so much to me, and my lifelong love for costumes and cosplay began back then. Thanks again, Mom.

The Science of Doctor Who: s01e06, “Dalek”

Remember these? It’s only been a gap of nearly three years, after all, hardly a blink in the overall scheme of space and time and universes. And while my focus will remain on the science issues of the scripts, there’s likely to be commentary on plot elements too. There’s simply too much to talk about as new Who evolves. So lets talk about one of the best episodes of the Ninth Doctor, and probably the best Dalek episode since 1963.

The Dalek itself doesn’t pose too many science problems. It’s a mobile armored life-support unit for the Kaled mutant inside, and while some of the construction materials and power sources might be a little implausible, there’s nothing especially offensive there. However, I would like to know how the Dalek regenerates itself simply by “extrapolating the DNA of a time traveler”. I’m willing to accept that there’s a cloud of strange energy following time travelers around because of their exposure to the Time Vortex and the energies powering the TARDIS. I have more trouble that a simple touch from Rose could provide the Dalek’s nanomachines (of course it’s nanomachines, right?) with enough energy and raw materials to repair all the visible damage. Just how much time-zap do Rose and the Doctor carry around, anyway?

“The Dalek’s downloading the Internet!” Well, that’s great. But here’s how the Internet works: There are a bunch of files on a computer somewhere which make a game or a web page. Your computer sends a request from your home connection, to your Internet provider, to the big telecommunications networks, to the other computer’s provider, to its connection, and finally to that computer, which sends you the file(s) back over a similar path. Each part of that path can only send so much data so fast, so it doesn’t matter if your computer and your connection can download the Internet in an hour unless all the other parts of the path can.

And, well, even if super-rich guy has the special private uber-connection into the big telecoms, it doesn’t help. You still are limited by the capabilities of the local networks and computers from which you are downloading. So, sorry… no downloading the Internet in an hour, even if you are a Dalek. (And by the way, they’s why the “I own the Internet” line makes no sense whatsoever. Own all the big telecom companies? Well… maybe. Maybe. He sure as hell doesn’t own all the ISPs and the computers attached to them. Sorry, big guy.)

Oh, and could someone tell van Statten that we’ve invented all sorts of machines even in real 2005 that can scan someone’s biology without causing them excruciating pain? X-Rays, MRIs, tomography machines… van Statten’s clearly a bit of an idiot who doesn’t care how much he’s damaging the thing he’s “studying”. Hell, if he took proper care “studying” his specimens, he’d probably have learned so much that he really would own the planet.

And speaking of which, what sort of idiot kills people on a whim if they fail to amuse him? He’s a monster, and it’s played for a giggle but is really not funny. The guy’s lucky one of his own men hasn’t shot him in desperation by now if he’s been making a habit of this. And don’t tell me van Statten isn’t really having them killed: if your memory’s been wiped clean, your body may still be alive, but you are gone. You are never coming back. He’s a murderer on a whim, and I can’t say I’m sorry he gets the same done to him. (Yes, that means that Bail Organa and Owen Lars are also cold-blooded murderers, and no I’m not kidding.)

Still this is a great episode. Rarely has a Dalek been this terrifying; we can see that stairs really don’t bother them; and as someone said, this is the episode where a Time Lord acts like a Dalek, a Dalek acts like a human, and a human acts like a Time Lord. Some excellent acting all round, and this is one of my favorites. See you soon for “The Long Game”.

February: A Con Odyssey

Just did Farpoint in Baltimore, and MystiCon in Roanoke back to back. Both cons are five hours away from my home. Pro tip: don’t do this.

Farpoint was the second stop for Luna-C, so as usual I spent most of the weekend preparing for the performance in one way or another. Of course, I simultaneously love live performing from the depths of my soul and it triggers my anxieties as only a job interview can, so it’s both relief and regret when the show is done. Regret must win, though, since I’m always eager for the next show. We premiered my “Lonely Villain” skit which I think is quite funny; and I got to play Scotty again, which has been one of my lifelong dreams.

I also premiered the My Little Pony “Twilight Sparkle” costume at Farpoint, and I must say it was a pretty big hit. I’ve known since the fandom took off that I would need an MLP costume before long, so of course I had to do it in my own special fashion.

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Instant Death, No Saving Throw

In 1974, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson created Dungeons and Dragons. Sometime around 1978, I acquired a copy, and my leisure time pursuits were changed forever. I owe the both of them a debt of gratitude I can never repay (and a debt of finance as well).

They made one mistake, though, and my gamer friends and I have been dealing with that mistake since then. I don’t know how it got into the game originally; in fact, sometimes I wonder what it was like gaming with them under this philosophy. The attitude is never openly stated in the books, but the early game materials make it clear: the Game Master is the other players’ enemy.

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