Star Trek

Norwescon Thursday Dance Sneak Peek

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Video still showing Star Trek's Enterprise behind graphics of audio being played.

My Thursday night dance at Norwescon is going to have a “Star Trek vs. Star Wars” theme, so I put together a video to play behind me of starship shots from the movies. I alternated clips between franchises, and most of them have been in the 10-20 second range; a few as short as 4, a few as long as 40.

In my alternating, when I made it up to the refit Enterprise reveal in The Motion Picture, you may be surprised to read that I restrained myself, and did not just drop the full eight-minute sequence in there.

Cutting out Kirk and Scotty’s reactions and some shots that are mostly spacedock scaffolding got it down to two minutes, fifty-one seconds.
I’m biased, and I’m not even sorry about it. 😆

Here’s a two-minute sneak peek (originally posted to Facebook, and so is silent so as not to run afoul of their automated audio copyright bots; feel free to listen to whatever audio you wish as you watch) of my background graphic setup for the Norwescon Thursday night dance. This will be playing on the big projection screen/video wall on the stage behind me.

The background video is 2 hours and 12 minutes of mixed Star Wars and Star Trek spaceship and battle shots (space and space ships only, no on-the-ground battles, so no Hoth or Endor). Two hours of that goes back and forth between Trek and Wars, but the last ten minutes is all Trek, because I was only pulling from the theatrical films, and there are two more Trek films than there are Wars films.

The “vinyl” platters at the top left and right automatically update with the cover art for whatever track is being played, and rotate as if they were actual turntables.

The waveform display at the top is live waveforms of the audio being played; the top waveform is the left turntable, the bottom is the right.

The title and artist of the currently playing track at the bottom automatically update.

The graphics on the t-shirt that the mini-cartoon-me is wearing randomly change every few seconds, with a selection of mostly (but not entirely) Trek or Wars themed images.

Some slightly more technical details for those who may be interested:

All the elements are assembled in OBS, and when I’m DJing, I’ll be pushing that video stream out to the the on-stage screen behind me.

The turntables and audio waveforms are pulled from djay Pro using OBS’s window capture feature, cropping down to the elements I need, playing with the color levels, and adding an alpha channel to turn dark/black pixels transparent. Cover art with dark/black pixels that become transparent is accounted for by placing the turntable graphics over PNGs of black circles to act as “platters” and black out the background video.

The “now playing” text also comes from djay Pro; in this case, djay Pro automatically creates a “now playing” text file, and I tell OBS to read and display that text file.

The Norwescon and DJ Wüdi logos are simple static PNG files.

The cartoon me is a static PNG file with a plain black shirt. I point OBS to a directory with small square white-on-black images that it randomly picks from on a five second rotation to create the “print” on the t-shirt.

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

The Higher Frontier by Christopher L. Bennett

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57/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Set between TMP and TWoK, this adventure primarily ties together three threads: The Medusans as introduced in TOS, the Aenar as introduced in ENT, and the New Humans as introduced in Roddenberry’s novelization of TMP. Those three threads are woven together with elements, references, and in-jokes from throughout the Star Trek screen and literary universes, as Bennett so often does in his books. It’s also interesting when reading these more recently written books that are able to find ways to drop in references to the newer shows. All in all, another good adventure with some really neat approaches to tying together previously unrelated parts of Trek history in unexpected ways.

Me holding The Higher Frontier