Quack
There were ducks napping right outside my front door last night when I got home. This makes me happy. I like ducks.
The Leiji Matsumoto fans on my flist (I know there are a couple) really need to check out this iTunes link… Look! More cool-looking TV I don’t have time to watch!
Wish I could make the Yeager Anniversary picnic this weekend. There are real disadvantages to living 5 hours’ drive away from the fandoms I grew up in. I do feel like I made a modest contribution to the history of the chapter, and I’d love to see everyone again, but it’s not to be this time. Hope everyone has a great time!
Explosive Devices
How to identify a complete Trek geek, #117:
The use of “photorp” as a verb, e.g.: “They’re actually adverstising phaser eye surgery now, so I figure the next step is getting your eyes photorpped.”
In other news, the gnome mage/engineer Mirandala finally reached level 60 last night. Though this accomplishment is no longer as cool as it was two months ago, it’s still a wonderful milestone.
Hardcore World of Warcraft players manage this in 6 weeks – it took me about 18 months of casual play. If it’s an addiction, it’s one with a very weak hold on me 🙂
IMDB Justice and the STS
Wil Wheaton is reviewing old ST: TNG episodes for a website known as TV Squad. He’s just reviewed Justice, and my trivia sense tingled; Brenda Bakke, the half-naked actress who gleefully welcomes Worf as the “Huge One”, also played Nim, the Texas Air Ranger in Gunhed.
This, of course, contributes nothing at all to your day.
Slighlty more interestingly, astronomer Phil Plait has posted that tonight’s 9:35 launch of the Space Shuttle will be visible over most of the US’ east coast. A link to a similar opportunity from ’97 suggests that Norfolk viewers might be able to see the STS reach 12 degrees over the south-southeast horizon, while Roanoke area space buffs will only see the engine glow for 5 degrees (possibly discounting intervening mountains).
(I’ll probably forget to go look, though.)
Reboot! -whap-
It’s pretty easy now to find copies of the J. Michael Straczynski and Bryce Zabel proposal for re-booting Classic Trek. This series would not have had to deal with 40 years worth of continuity unless it wanted to from time to time, and would have had technology more believable to the 21st century viewer; as well, it could have been interesting to see new actors and scriptwriters putting their spin on Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. (The authors even throw out the idea of a female Scotty or Sulu, just to cut down on the sexism a bit.)
But would it have been Star Trek?
I don’t actually have a problem with a single revision they suggest – lots of it would have been quite interesting, and I think their season arcs had much more potential than Enterprise‘s. No; what I’m worried about is the current angst-ridden quality of Sci-Fi right now, and the idea that this show would bring that to Star Trek. That simply doesn’t work right.
Star Trek‘s main message was: “If we ever get a grip on ourselves, the future’s gonna be great.”
TNG: “In fact, with a little more time, it’ll be even shinier and comfier. Though we will talk a lot.”
DS9: “And once in a while, we’ll have to make nasty decisions and put ourselves on the line to keep what we’ve worked for. Worth it, though.”
(Then things came apart a bit)
VOY: “Of course, this future society will produce a few spoiled brats who, in a crisis situation, will manage to be smug and whiny simultaneously. Hell, let’s look at boobs and funky alien tech for a while.”
ENT: “And for a while there, we were just whiny, and everyone in the universe hated us and had cooler toys. Wow, we sucked.”
—–
While the main message of B5 and the current BSG seems to boil down to, “Humans (and the aliens who are like us) suck. We’ll muddle through somehow, but we suck now and forever. Deal with it.” Perhaps, a more realistic message, but I’d prefer to fight for the great shiny future, myself. Would this Star Trek be a gritty, realistic, angst-ridden examination of the flaws of humanity? If so, I don’t think I’d want any part of it.
Fact-checking
I just found an entry on Star Trek: TNG from “TeeVeePedia, the Internet TV Encyclopedia”.
Highlights:
“Star Trek: The Next Generation is set more than 100 years in the future from the original series, when […] the toupee technology employed by the original series’ Capt. James T. Kirk has been banned following the Hairpiece Wars of the late 23rd century.”
“Wesley Crusher (Wil Wheaton): An instant hit among fans, the character of young genius Wesley Crusher became so popular that Wheaton was forced to leave the show in its third season, after producers could not meet his skyrocketing salary demands.”
“Guinan: Whoopi Goldberg portrayed the Enterprise’s bartender, the last surviving member of a race that went extinct after being devoured by their own enormous, sentient hats.”
I’m pretending I don’t have to leave for work
It’s web video linkage thingy time!
“Cap-tain… Jean-Luc Pi-card… U-S-S… Ent-er-prise!”
How does the average WoW player feel about Murlocs? Approximately how Gimli felt about orcs. Now, here’s a complete Flash Murloc RPG to give you the fish-man perspective.
And Samorost, where I don’t know what’s going on yet ’cause I haven’t played enough. Cool looking, though.
Making adaptations
It has always been a good thing for my spare time that World of Warcraft won’t install on my laptop. (Actually, I did make it install one time, but only got one video frame every 4 seconds or so, so off it went again.) Unfortunately, Monday night a friend’s casual reference reminded me that the laptop’s specs were well up to another piece of software, and last night, I put Starcraft on it. Maybe now I can finish the darn Terran campaign and play the other two-thirds of the game.
Blizzard does not own me. But I think it’s trying to acquire controlling interest.
The conspiracy theorist in me wonders if Alan Moore and the Wachowskis have manufactured this little tiff they are having just to make sure V for Vendetta retains a brighter blip on the geek radar. As someone recently pointed out, any author who has sold thousands of copies of professional fanfic (I refer to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when bitching about other creative folks modifying their characters and storylines.
You know, a book is not a movie is not a comic is not a TV show. They all have different rules and must make adaptations if they are to flourish in a changed environment. “Spamalot” is hardly a scene-for-scene copy of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, for example. If SciFi ever makes that rumored miniseries of “Ringworld”, they’ll have to change quite a bit to keep a good novel from being very dull television. (Knowing SciFi, they probably won’t – they’ll follow the advice of some uber-fan who wants a line-by-line copy.) I wish fans were better at judging material on its own merits, instead of what they wanted the material to be. (I also wish more fans understood the difference between “This is poor quality” and “I personally don’t like this much.”)
Speaking of which, some website recently applauded the Enterprise-D as one of the most iconic spaceships in visual science fiction, making the note that “not a lot of thought was put into the original television Enterprise.” I hope the ghost of Matt Jeffries hunts this person down and explains a thing or three to him.
And he looks *dang* good for 68, too
Halloween’s a holiday dedicated to things that aren’t what they seem, so it’s a bit appropriate that George Takei is choosing it to come publically out of the closet.
http://www.frontierspublishing.com/features/feature_second.html
Good for him! I can’t help thinking that some of the people involved with RoVaCon way back when would have been less excited about inviting him had they known… but that’s far in the past now.
I haven’t decided yet what to wear to Mandy & Krys’ party tomorrow night. I do wish VTSFFC Halloween wasn’t 5 hours away. I also wish Rain didn’t work Saturdays and Sundays, making a 2- or 3am Rocky Horror evening this weekend a bit impractical.
In good news, Rain welcomed me home last night to a spotless living room lit by candles, served me an excellent dinner, and snuggled down with me for a romantic evening of TiVo’d MythBusters. (Hey, mad science is too romantic.) It was a good way to wrap up the day.
A low-tech solution
In last Saturday’s Doctor Who, a spaceship has crashed somewhere in London, and the Doctor doesn’t know exactly where. His cunning plan is to ask around, but his companion Rose is disappointed in him: “Not very ‘Spock’, is it: just asking? I think you should do a scan for alien tech. Give me some ‘Spock’! For once, would it kill ya?”
If only Enterprise was still on, and we could somehow have a crewman refer to an alien as “one of those mindless killer ‘Dalek’-types”. Then the circle would be complete 🙂
