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.

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

The End of Section 31

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The more I think about the Section 31 movie, the more I think that there’s a possibility that it might have one good outcome: Solidifying Section 31 as being nothing more than a run-of-the-mill black ops/special forces/Delta Force/Seal Team Six/Mission Impossible/whatever department, and therefore 1) not the Big Scary Thing it was originally presented as, 2) not something we really need to be terribly concerned about or excited by, and 3) not something we really need to spend any more time on.

As Edgar Anderson (@pithyphrase.net) noted on Bluesky:

In Deep Space Nine, it was never 100% to me whether Section 31 actually existed or Sloane was just a very capable but insane person acting on his own. I wish that ambiguity had been maintained.

As far as I’m concerned, this — or perhaps something that’s a little bit of both — is the best way to look at Section 31. While the “sooper sekret ‘good bad guys’ doing the dirty work so you fragile little snowflakes can have your Federation utopia” idea fit with DS9’s take on the Trek universe, for me, Sloane’s ambiguous nature is part of what made DS9’s Section 31 bearable. For a concept that was so very antithetical to the established Star Trek universe, having it be presented as a “…wait…really? Or is he…no. But…maybe?” thing worked, and worked well. Maybe it was a thing. Maybe he was a very talented psychopath.

William Sadler as Agent Luther Sloan in Star Trek Deep Space Nine.

But then, over the years, particularly with Discovery diving down the Section 31 rabbit hole in ways that made no sense with the concept (the super-secret covert ops branch of the Federation that almost nobody knows about, exists only in the shadows, and will be denied at every opportunity if mentioned, has its own all-black comm badges and fancy ships, for V’ger’s sake), and now this particularly “meh” attempt at merging Mission Impossible with Star Trek, it’s time to give up on the concept.

Just write it off as a special forces unit that, both on the individual member level and the institutional level, let its ego get far too out of control, and while it has occasionally been useful, it has also occasionally been dangerously embarrassing and embarrassingly dangerous, and it needs to be disbanded. Both in-universe and out here in the real world.

Let it go.

Star Trek: Section 31

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Michelle Yahoo as Philippa Georgiou, dressed in leather and sitting on a chair with her foot resting on a body.

🎥: Star Trek: Section 31 (2025): ⭐️⭐️

Well, that was definitely a movie. Strip out the Trek references and call it “Generic Space Spies”, and it would be an entirely acceptable and inoffensive, if not particularly groundbreaking, direct-to-video movie. As a Trek film…well, it’s a generic space spy movie with Trek references. Doesn’t break anything, but doesn’t really add anything to the franchise, either. Michelle Yeoh is always fun, the cast does acceptable jobs, and it’d play in the background during a “Trek movie marathon while I clean the house” session just fine.

For more spoilery thoughts that I jotted down as I was watching it, see this Mastodon post.

Harm’s Way by David Mack

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74/2024 – ⭐️⭐️

Though officially a TOS adventure, this is really mostly a part of the Vanguard spinoff book series, which I read so long ago as to have forgotten both characters and key points. As a result, it felt like I was reading a mid-series book, and missing much of the necessary context. The primary foe is so overwhelmingly powerful that there’s an extended battle sequence in the latter half of the book that feels very out of place; perhaps it works within the greater Vanguard storyline, but to me, it was just troubling and very un-Trek. Klingon characters include pre-“Day of the Dove” Kang and Mara, which does expand their characters in interesting ways and hints at background motivations for future Federation/Klingon developments, but also doesn’t really mesh with what I remember of Kang and Mara’s actions in the episode (though, admittedly, it’s been a few years since I watched it, and I’m relying partially on Memory Alpha’s plot summary here). All in all, an uneven Trek adventure, and not one of my favorites.

Me holding Harm’s Way

Asylum by Una McCormack

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72/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

As always, Trek is at its best when it’s looking at modern issues through an SF lens. On the surface, this is about Pike and Number One at Starfleet Academy, paired with a later mission that ties back to those experiences. But when dealing with minority ethnic groups reacting to years of oppression, there’s a lot more there as well. Plus, of course, some very entertaining ties to wider Trek lore.

Me holding Asylum.

Living Memory by Christopher L. Bennett

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69/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

A mysterious and dangerous astral phenomenon threatens the Earth, and Spock, Uhura, and Chekov must try to solve a mystery that ends up being tied to Uhura’s forgotten past. Meanwhile, Kirk, overseeing Starfleet Academy, has to deal with some problematic new cadets. The Kirk-centric B-blot is okay, mostly interesting for fleshing out more of Kirk’s time between the films. The primary plot is more interesting, especially as it picks up the thread of how Uhura was affected by her loss of memory during the Nomad incident, something never (or very rarely) explored. That part of the story I very much enjoyed.

Me holding Living Memory

A Contest of Principles by Greg Cox

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67/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This one was a particularly interesting and on-the-nose bit of “exploring today’s issues through SF”. Published in 2020 (and so, assumedly, written in 2019), the Enterprise is called into to observe the voting process for a planet having its first democratic elections. The contest is between a hardline conservative near-fascist military general whose followers use intimidation and assault, and a liberal reformist challenger who (minor spoiler) eventually steps down after a controversy and turns their candidacy over to a younger candidate. There’s a separate, more standard Trek adventure where Spock has to try to rescue McCoy and Chapel from other planets in the system, but reading the primary political plot just over a week before our election (between a hardline conservative fascist and a more liberal challenger who took over from the prior candidate) was an interesting experience. I can only hope we handle our election as successfully as this fictional planet does.

Me holding A Contest of Principles

No Man’s Land by Kirsten Beyer and Mike Johnson

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64/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Somehow I missed the bit in the blurb telling me this was a script for an audio play, so that was a bit of a surprise, though not a bad one. Short and quick, this follows Seven and Raffi just after season one of Picard as they deal with saving artifacts and a senile historian from a Romulan…though it’s really more about the first steps of their relationship. Fun to read, and I’m somewhat tempted to find the audio production to see how some of the more visual elements of the script translate.

Me holding No Man’s Land