Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
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.
Wil pointed to a Star Trek Personality Test based on the Myers-Briggs system. I wasn’t sure what to expect for an answer, but apparently the author did a surprisingly good job of translating the Myers-Briggs questions to a Star Trek format, as I ended up scoring as an ISFP — the same result as when I took an online version of the actual Myers-Briggs test!
Anyway, here’s what the Star Trek test said about me…
Did you know that you could Google in Klingon? Completely bizarre. But cool.
(Seen in the .sig for this /. post, by codexus)
Wow.
The new full-length trailer for Star Trek Nemesis is up.
I am so there.
Set a course for Earth…
…kill everything.
There’s a page for everything on the ‘net these days — even gay robots:
Data — Starfleet’s first official Android, Lt. Comdr. Data has been a valuable part of the Capt. Picard’s crew aboard the U.S.S. Enterprise. “Gay-ta” and his high-profile are no surprise, since Star Trek has always been a leader in expanding society’s tolerance of issues previously considered taboo. (Women’s rights, Interracial romance, etc.) Although his first intimate experience was with a woman (Lt. Tasha Yar), Data has always exhibited curiosity toward many human customs. His first experience with emotion occurred after he choked a strong male enemy (Borg) to death. Data admitted feeling pleasure, indicating a fondness for S&M activities. Other homosexual characteristics include: neatness, good grammer, shiny hair, and an unwillingness to use violence unless necessary.
(via MeFi)
A series of quotes from something I just watched:
History has shown us that strength may be useless in the face of terrorism…
These aren’t people we’re dealing with here. They’re animals. Fanatics, who kill without remorse or conscience…who think nothing of murdering innocent people.
I guess the event that really opened my eyes took place only a few days after my arrival. A terrorist bomb destroyed a shuttlebus…sixty school children. There were no survivors. [They] claimed it was a mistake. That their intended target was a police transport. As if that made everything all right. That day I vowed to put an end to terrorism…. And I will.
Don’t you know? A dead martyr’s worth ten posturing leaders.
That shuttlebus I told you about…the bomb was set by a teenager. And in a world where children blow up children…everyone’s a threat.
“…the difference between a general and terrorist is only the difference between winners and losers. You win, you’re called a general. You lose….”
“You are killing innocent people! Can’t you see the immorality of what you’re doing? Or have you killed so often, you’ve become blind to it?”
“How much innocent blood has been spilled for the cause of freedom in [your] history…? How many good and noble societies have bombed civilians in war? Wiped out whole cities. And now that you enjoy the comfort that has come from their battles, their killing, you frown on my immorality? …I am willing to die for my freedom. And, in the finest tradition of your own [history], I’m willing to kill for it too.”“…it appears that terrorism is an effective way to promote political change.”
“I have never subscribed to the theory that political power flows from the barrel of a gun….”
“In most instances, you would be correct. But there are numerous examples where it was successful…. Then, would it be accurate to say that terrorism is acceptable when the options for peaceful settlement have been foreclosed?”
“…we cannot condone violence.”
“Even in response to violence?”
“These are questions that [we have] been struggling with since creation.”“They’re mad.”
“I don’t know any more. The difference between a madman and a committed man willing to die for a cause…it’s begun to blur….”…there’s a hint of moral cowardice in your dealings…. You do business with a government that’s crushing us. And then you say you aren’t involved. But of course you are. You just don’t want to get dirty.
“You didn’t have to kill him.”
“As a prisoner he would have been a focus for violence as his followers tried to free him. Now, he’s a martyr, but the death toll may be lower — at least in the short term. An imperfect solution for an imperfect world.”
I’ve been watching the new Star Trek show, Enterprise, off and on for a while now. I haven’t caught every new episode, but those I have, I posted my thoughts on. It doesn’t look like I’ll be doing this anymore, though.
Wednesday evening I turned on my TV to watch the show, and as it turns out, my reception here at the new apartment is actually worse than it was at my old one. So, watching the broadcast isn’t an option, and there’s no way I’m going to pay for cable access just so I can watch one show. At first I was kind of disappointed by this, but something else has happened this week that made me realize that I probably wasn’t going to miss Enterprise all that much.
This Tuesday marked the release of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation in a very nice DVD box set. I picked up my copy on Wednesday on my way home from work, and when I found that I wasn’t going to be able to watch Enterprise, I started watching TNG episodes.
The thing is — I’d forgotten just how good this show really was! Sure, it was their first season, everyone was still getting the hang of their characters, and the special effects were fairly horrid (and that’s not just hindsight talking — I remember being extremely unimpressed with the effects in “Justice” at the time it first aired) — but even with all that, each episode I (re-)watch drives home more and more just how good TNG was…and just how much Enterprise pales in comparison.
Watching the first season of TNG now is actually much like watching it for the first time. I watched TNG almost religiously when it first came on the air — it first aired during my sophomore year in high school, and for quite a while it became a ritual for my group of friends to gather at someone’s house (usually Tammy’s, though I think Royce, myself, and some of the others hosted the gathering from time to time) and watch whatever the newest episode was. However, by the time I graduated in ’91 and moved out to live on my own for the first time, television was less and less of a priority, and I ended up missing the majority of the last few seasons of TNG. In the ensuing years I’ve caught the occasional episode of one Trek show or another in reruns, but those times have been fairly few and far between. I remember bits and pieces of the shows I’ve seen, but much has faded in the mists of memory over the years.
In essence, then, it’s very easy for me to compare watching the first season of Enterprise fresh out of the bottle to watching the first season of TNG the same way — and I’ve gotta say, ENT just doesn’t compare. Up until now, I’ve been somewhat of an apologist for ENT, doing my best to give it a chance, and one of the most common arguments when someone says that ENT just isn’t that good of a show is that it’s still their first season. Often someone will offer up, “remember just how much better TNG was after a few seasons, and how shaky their first season was?” Well sure, it was better after as it went on (which makes me look forward even more to those seasons being released on DVD later this year) — but that argument was a lot easier for me to accept when I hadn’t actually seen first-season TNG since 1987. The episodes and dilemmas presented therein are much more interesting, the characters are more engaging — about the only point that I can see that first-season ENT really has over first-season TNG is the special effects, and much of that is the simple fact that it’s 15 years later (side note — 15 years later? Ugh…I’m feeling old again!) and modern-day F/X technology is that much better.
Perhaps ENT will mature as it goes along, and perhaps it will grow into being a truly worthwhile addition to the Star Trek universe — it’d be nice to see that happen, as I still think that some of the new ideas and directions they’re exploring in ENT could be very interesting (the new take on the Vulcans, for example). However, at the moment — I can’t say I’m going to really miss not being able to watch it anymore.
I’m trying to figure out what surprises me more — that someone in the UK is writing an article that appears to be seriously promoting eugenics in the near future, or that in the resulting MeFi discussion nobody thought to mention the Eugenics Wars of the early 1990’s, leading to Khan Noonien Singh‘s bid for world power in 1992, and his departure with a band of followers in 1996. Or maybe I’m just a big Star Trek geek.
I’ll always have a soft spot for the original, but Paramount has just released the first promotional artwork for Star Trek X: Nemesis — a redesigned Romulan insignia! Gotta say, doesn’t look bad at all.
The Enterprise hosts a group of Vulcans who, unlike T’Pol and the other Vulcan High Command, are eager to embrace and experience their own emotions. When one of their rank tempts her to adapt their more free-spirited approach to life, T’Pol finds herself faced with a confusing and intriguing dilemma.
Another good episode (what is this — three weeks of episodes I’ve actually really liked in a row? “Dear Doctor“, “Shuttlepod One” and now “Fusion” — if they’re not careful, they might actually have a good Trek show on the air again!), though I’ve got some issues with the events.
Finally…after 16 episodes of interesting but non-typical behavior (as far as we know) from the Vulcans shown on Enterprise, we finally get a show exploring a bit more about Vulcan culture…albeit in an unusual fashion. Good stuff, and Jolene Blalock (T’Pol) is turning out to be a lot better than I initially thought she would.
It seems to me that either the writers are working with how she’s portraying her character, or there’s been some planning for her character that hadn’t been revealed yet. One of the constant complaints that I read over on the TrekBBS is how non-Vulcan she is — obviously emotional at times (just not overtly emotional). Many of the complaints just boil down to how she’s ‘not Spock,’ which I just think is kind of silly (see this post on the HTF for more of my thoughts on that). This time, we got to explore not just a little of why she is how she is, through some visiting Vulcans that were experimenting with embracing their emotions, rather than rejecting them. One of the visiting Vulcans started pressuring T’Pol into exploring her emotional side, remarking that her emotions weren’t nearly as buried as most Vulcans are, possibly as a result of spending as much time as she has among humans. While she eventually decides that this approach is not for her, it was a very interesting look into just why logic has become the creed of Vulcan life.
I was, however, somewhat disturbed by how T’Pol was treated by both the visiting Vulcan (none-too-subtle pressure leading up to what could easily be considered mental assault or rape) and by Archer, with his constant remarks that she should be more accepting of these emotional Vulcans’ way of life. If he’d been merely advocating acceptance of a different viewpoint, that would have been one thing, but it came across as more pressure for her to try to explore her emotional side. For all the preaching of acceptance, Archer certainly didn’t seem to willing to let T’Pol be how she prefers to be, which got to bug me a bit. Thankfully, by the end of the show, he seemed to have backed off from that stance a bit, even remarking that he thought he understood a bit more of why she chose to stay with the more traditional Vulcan way of life.
I did think it was interesting that at the time of Enterprise, the Vulcan Mind Meld is so little used that the procedure has to be explained to T’Pol. Since we saw at least two TOS-era Vulcans use the Mind Meld that I can think off off the top of my head (Spock and his father Sarek), the impression was that it was a fairly well-known procedure at the time. Now I’m a little curious if Spock’s family’s use of this technique was more unconventional than we’d been led to believe, or if a more common acceptance of the technique had become standard by Kirk’s day.
Anyway, another strong episode in the can for Enterprise.