Star Trek

Trek has been part of my life since I was an infant. I have bookcases full of Trek books. One of my tattoos is the Vulcan calligraphy for “kol-ut-shan” (IDIC). This is my home fandom.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock The Making of the Classic Film by John and Maria Jose Tenuto

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Book 51 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The third in Titan Books’s series of Star Trek films “behind the scenes” coffee-table art books, and the second from the team of John and Maria Jose Tenuto. It’s always fun to see all the production art, photos of models and setups, and all the skill that goes into the films. As with the prior books, much of the information I knew, but there are always some gems and stories that I hadn’t come across yet.

Me holding Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: The Making of the Classic Film.

Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio

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Book 47 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Ordered this just after it won the Best Graphic Novel Hugo award this year. The combination of choose-your-own-adventure plotting and Lower Decks humor works really well. Lots of humor and various Trek callbacks, but with some surprisingly dark moments as well, all leading to a fittingly Trek-ish end. Much fun!

Me holding Warp Your Own Way.

Balance of Power by Dafydd Ab Hugh

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Book 33 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️

This is the third book I’ve read by Ab Hugh, and the third to get two stars. It’s obviously supposed to be comedic, but isn’t funny (the conceit of a Ferengi who speaks entirely like it’s “talk like a pirate day” may be hilarious to some; to me, it was increasingly annoying), there are numerous typos and inconsistencies, and it was just a slog. Not looking forward to when I get to more by this author (though I’ll read them, because I’m a stubborn Trek completist).

Me holding Balance of Power

Toward the Night by James Swallow

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Book 29 of 2025: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

We haven’t gotten an Ortegas-centric episode of the show yet, so it’s fun to get a bit more of a peek into her and her background through this adventure. A mysterious alien artifact, a dangerous planet, ornery Klingons…all in all, quite the fun Trek adventure.

(Very mild spoilers: The only flaw for me wasn’t actually a flaw with the book, but a happenstance of my reading: I’d just read the TOS ebook novella Miasma, so this made for two Trek stories in a row with a landing party trapped on a rainy, muddy planet being chased by swarms of hungry giant bugs while cut off from all communication with the Enterprise. I had to keep reminding myself it wasn’t quite as derivative as it seemed.)

Me holding Toward the Night

Weekly Notes: April 7-13, 2025

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  • 🚀 Almost to Norwescon! So, lots of that when I’m not doing other things.

  • 🥚 While we’re not terribly religious, we do like the cuteness and spring celebration of Easter, so since Norwescon takes place over Easter weekend, we continued our annual tradition of celebrating spring a week early. It was a gorgeous day, so we took a nice walk in the morning, and then dyed eggs in the afternoon.

📸 Photos

Eighteen eggs dyed bright colors sitting in an egg carton in the sun.
Colors and speckles and eggs, oh my!

📚 Reading

📺 Watching

We got sucked into the reality tripe of Million Dollar Secret. It’s ridiculous, many of these people are horrible, and it’s keeping us entertained.

🔗 Linking

  • Online Markdown is a pretty impressive web-based Markdown editor. I’m starting to find some annoyances with Markdown (it focuses on presentational markup rather than structured markup — for example, _using underscores_ to add italics adds italics as <em> tags rather than <i> tags, but since I’m often marking up book titles, <em> is the incorrect tag to be using), but until/unless I decide to go another way, this looks like a good tool to know about.

  • Daniel Hunter at Waging Nonviolence: What to do if the Insurrection Act is invoked: “With the Insurrection Act looming, now is the time to learn how it might unfold and the strategic ways to respond — including the power of ridicule.” I’m hoping this is just paranoia, but afraid it isn’t.

  • Nicholas Barber at the BBC: ‘It was a magical chemical balance’: How Monty Python and the Holy Grail became a comedy legend: “An independent British comedy made on a shoestring by a television sketch troupe? It sounds like a film destined to be forgotten within weeks of leaving cinemas – assuming it reaches cinemas in the first place. But Monty Python and the Holy Grail is still revered as one of the greatest ever big-screen comedies, 50 years on from its release in April 1975.”

  • Nancy Friedman at Strong Language: “Smut”: “Although the lyrics reflected a set of social and legal circumstances specific to mid-1960s America, their sentiment has proved to be timeless. In honor of its 60th anniversary and Tom Lehrer’s long, remarkable life, here’s our salute to ‘Smut.'”

  • Ex Astris Scientia: Design Issues of the Original Enterprise: “The article discusses problems or uncertainties about the design of the original Enterprise by Matt Jefferies, as it appeared in TOS.”

  • Tim Hardiwck at MacRumors: How to Adjust Mac Volume and Brightness More Precisely: “Before you press the volume or brightness controls, hold down the Option and Shift keys together on your keyboard. Now go ahead and make your adjustments, and you should see the onscreen indicator move forwards and backwards in smaller increments (four over each segment).” I’ve been using macOS since it was Mac OS, and I never knew this trick.

  • Bauhaus Clock: “A Bauhaus clock screensaver for Mac, designed to be present even when you’re not.” Pretty! But apparently I should have downloaded it sooner; the page is now saying “currently unavailable”. Oh dear….

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Season Three Teaser

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Star Trek Strange New Worlds title card.

You can only get so much from a one-minute teaser, but hey! First glimpse of season three!

Okay, sure, first impressions are pretty good, and we have two strong seasons to build off of, so I’m inclined to trust them.

But….

  • I’m still not really sold on the whole Gorn thing, and they’ve yet to do anything to explain why and how the Gorn were so unknown in TOS’s “Arena” if Starfleet had had this much contact with them before that time.

  • A holodeck episode? TNG’s “Encounter at Farpoint” established pretty well that this was new tech that everyone was amazed by. But here we appear to have the full interactive holodeck experience, complete with yellow-gridded black box room. Can they really not come up with any other way to tell similar stories?

We’ll find out this summer.

Weekly Notes: Feb 17-23, 2025

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  • 🇺🇸 On Monday we took advantage of having the day off to hop the light rail into downtown Seattle and go to the Save the Civil Service / 50501 protest in front of the Federal building. Lots of people showed up, which was great (though I do wish we didn’t need to do this). I uploaded a Flickr album with photos of signs and the crowds.

  • 🤖 I’ve added a short AI disclaimer for this blog to the sidebar. In short: No generative AI, traditional/iterative AI for video captions (first pass only, then manually reviewed and corrected before finalizing).

📸 Photos

Protesters carrying signs stand on a wet plaza under buildings that seem to loom and bend over them.
Protesters are seen reflected upside-down in a puddle on a herringbone pattern brick plaza.
Even at protests, I can get a little arty with my photos sometimes.

📝 Writing

📚 Reading

Finished three books (well…a graphic novel, a government pamphlet, and a magazine) this week:

And I’ve started reading Lucy Worsley’s A Very British Murder. It’s good to get at least one non-fiction book in each year.

📺 Watching

  • Our current reality show is season 19 of Project Runway, and then we’re continuing to get caught up on Law & Order, Law & Order: SVU, and NCIS. All three of these shows are great for watching people having worse days than us. Scrubs continues to keep things a little light.

  • After a long pause, I picked back up with my ongoing project to watch all of Star Trek in chronological order (current progress 30.57% complete), and started season two of TNG. Two episodes in (“The Child” and “Where Silence Has Lease”), many, many to go.

🎧 Listening

  • I’m finally getting started practicing for DJing at Norwescon this year, and as always, I’m recording and posting my sessions. Here’s Difficult Listening Hour 2025.02.22. These are always random, seat-of-the-pants, unplanned sessions, so the song selections are a bit all over the place.

  • I also decided to sunset my DJ Wüdi blog (one gig and a few practice sessions a year doesn’t really need its own separate blog), and moved all of the posts that were there over onto this blog. All my mashups and mixes are now part of everything else here on Eclecticism.

🔗 Linking