I have to admit that I bought into the Two Minutes [Plusdoublegood] Decades hate for the Boy Wonder, a.k.a. Wesley “Wes” Crusher, when I watched TNG. In retrospect, I no longer hate Wesley, since Wesley did have some redeeming characteristics (see: “The First Duty“) despite the bad writing on part of writers who didn’t know how to write a teenager.
And what prompted this blog was the following:
O'rly?
And with the line about Ashley Judd, I have resumed my hatred for Wesley Crusher. The damn bastard kissed Ashley Judd. I can forgive him saving the ship when trained Starfleet monkeys or the freaking Tin Man couldn’t do it, I can forgive him for wreaking havoc with his pet science projects, but the bastard swapped spit with Ashley Judd. Frakker.
And could we have possibly procured a more goofier picture of Wes Crusher in the striped sweater? Thank the Gods he didn’t have a scarf to go with that ensemble.
“Mourn the dead later. Right now, the best thing we can do is get this ship into the fight.”—William Adama
Yesterday seemed to be a very down day. People dying and all that. You may have heard it blasted ad absurdum on the news. Or what makes for news networks in this FUBARed country.
Well, I hate to break it to a lot of ya, but there are people who die every day and do not have the luxury of having their lives looked back upon on some Gods-forskaen 24 hour news network.
What disgusts me more than anything else is how the sensationalist media harps on Michael Jackson, yet ignores the larger issues this world faces: nuclear weapons proliferation, life-changing bills being passed by Congress, various crises over seas, and a government that seems more out of control than it was under the George W. Bush Dick Cheney administration. And while the rest of us go out and stimulate the economy by buying Michael Jackson’s CDs or mp3s from iTunes, we should mourn the dead later and pay attention to what’s happening in the world.
And I know why this is… because we let it happen. We need to hold the media accountable for their actions. Support independent media that actually cares to report the news that affects us. The death of a pop star is worth reporting on an entertainment channel, and worth a brief mention on the news, but not the incessant attention that it is given.
So change the channel. Boycott advertisers. Do what you feel is right.
But most of all, pay attention, take care, and control.
Bill Maher made an excellent point on last Friday’s Real Time with Bill Maher, namely that Obama isn’t the socialist that the right has endeavored to make him out to be, and that the Democratic Party has turned to the center-right. This would leave the Republican party somewhere in the sanitarium, which is where most of them belong. For a party that advocates the reduction of government in our lives, the Republicfraks have done their very best to enlarge the scope of government over their eight years in power. The consequences of this enlargement and entrenchment into our lives have yet to fully manifest themselves, but the day of reckoning when we realize what this has done to our civil liberties and constitutional rights is not so far off in the future, sadly.
And while I tend not to get political about such things, both parties are responsible for sowing what we are now reaping in terms of economic and social failures that are occurring in this country. And this has not happened since 9/11, but has been happening for the past three decades. If not more.
Oh, and I know that Obama is neither Jesus Christ or, better yet, FDR. I knew this when I “voted” for him. Regardless, Obama is, sadly, better than John McCain and the inept airline stewardess who has a great view of Russia, whose only reason for being thrown on the McCain ticket was to recruit “scorned” Hillary Clinton supporters. (And had she never opened her mouth, the Republicans may have succeeded in winning the White House.) Honestly, had McCain chosen Mitt Romney as his VP, then I would have voted for that ticket.
Why? The USA needs to be run more like a business, particularly with runaway spending and the fact that we are borrowing money from a Communist country. Romney was able to govern one of the most “liberal” states of this union and bring that spending under control. I may not care for some of the social policies or views of that (sadly) non-existent ticket, but… you cannot have everything, and you have to prioritize.
And, going back to the video above, I don’t agree with everything Maher says… but his program honestly allows for some of the most honest dialogue out there, better than anything CNN, MSNBC or Faux News can spew out via their own “programs” whether they be the idiotic Hannity, O’Reilly, Olberman, et al.
Ok, I’m now sick. Frak politics. Sorry that you had to read this.
My free copy of the Caprica soundtrack from Fandomania arrived today. I am listening to it as I write this, and what I can tell you is that the music is stellar. It is a minimalistic, somber score with emotional depth, like the Caprica pilot itself. The music conveys the emotional, rotting decadence of the technological and hedonistic Caprican people with the tragedy experienced by Joseph Adama and Daniel Graystone, as well as the creation of the first “Cybernetic Life Form Node” (Cylon).
Bear McCreary and the Hollywood Symphony Orchestra were able to create something quite wonderful here. While the music is not action packed the likes of BSG’s “Wander My Friends,” “Storming New Caprica,” “Battle of the Asteroid,” or “Prelude to War,” Caprica is able to do what a good soundtrack should: compliment the story that is being told and tie the story into the pre-existing universe of the re-imagined BSG. In this, McCreary is successful; the track entitled “Cybernetic Life Form Node” ties in very well with Richard Gibbs’s “Inbound” score from the Miniseries and other leitmotifs from this universe’s “future.” After listening to it, it automatically “clicked” in my head that thisunique story was in the same universe.
This is NOT the appearance of the Big Brother you should worry about.
Big Brother (or Big Sister, or even Big Sibling if we want to get P.C. about it) is a damning concept that has permeated our culture since the introduction of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Before the Internet numerous SF fans, conspiracy theorists, the counter-culture and cyberpunkoids have toyed with Big Brother as being the control mechanism of a totalitarian government or a large corporation.
That was the 20th century.
Here in the 21st century, we are faced with a more damning fact: anyone can assume the mantle of Big Brother in our lives. Living in the age of connectedness that we share today, thanks to cellular telephones and the Internet, we find ourselves gobsmacked by the possibility that we were too narrow-minded in the concept of an all-seeing, all-knowing force in our lives. I am not referring to a deity or deities here, however technology has made damned sure that they are capable of achieving feats of that stature.
If you mix the de-centralized nature of the Internet with entrepreneurial spirit, capitalism and someone with a few basic facts on you, someone—your neighbor, a mentally deranged person you’ve pissed off online, your ex, your boss(es), family, friends, nerdlingers—can find out most anything they want on you. Googling people you know is only the first step. There are now sites out there that can dig deeper than you had likely thought impossible. Lifehacker has a list of sites whose sole aim is to allow people to find out anything on anyone, regardless on how careful you believe you have been in guarding your personal information, even if you use those privacy controls in your social networking sites, such as Facebook.
Short of reading your mind and extracting genetic samplings from your body, these systems will pull up anything that been electronically entered: posts on old bulletin boards, newspaper clippings that have been digitized, public records (divorce filings, speeding tickets, etc.) and information from social networking sites. I am astonished that these public systems have yet to link into medical records, internal files kept on you by your employer, and the Social Security Administration, but that’s only a matter of time. Such systems already exist and are used by the government, and the private sector has access to these things as well, which makes you pause.
It’s scary, but inevitable and damning. The technology we employ in our daily lives has outpaced our hearts, our ethics, and any anachronistic concepts we have of privacy. You can’t stop information on you from getting out there, but there are ways to control the types and what information can be pulled up by these systems.
My friend Amy has a few suggestions on this front, and there are numerous resources available online to help control what information can be indexed on you. The aforementioned Lifehacker is a good stepping stone, as is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
You can be scared, but don’t let it paralyze you. Take this as a lesson in paying attention and being proactive in your privacy and connected life.
Yes, I finally broke down and saw the new Star Trek movie. The movie was, with few exceptions, awesome. The exception I take issue with is the deus ex machina of “time travel,” which bugs me to no end as simply its implementation in the movie is utterly lazy.
For those of us that (maybe sadly) are familiar with Trek in all its various incarnations, time travel is easily one of the most over-used and abused plot devices ever used in the 40+ year history of the franchise. It is easily the second worst plot device in the history of science fiction, if used incorrectly—as is the case, most of the time. I’m not big on time travel itself, unless there are strictures on how it can be used.
For instance, the short-lived series Odyssey 5 (created by Manny Coto) that aired a few years ago employed time travel. However, physical time travel was noted as not being possible, but the transference of memories was possible. As such, the five survivors of the space shuttle Odyssey (who had witnessed the destruction of Earth by an enemy of a technological nature, known only as the “Synthetics”) were sent back in time five years into the past. They only had the memories, which were essentially downloaded into their bodies as they were five years before.
Another notable instance is in the show Quantum Leap, when Sam Beckett jumps randomly throughout time. However, the time travel is related to fixing what once went wrong in people’s lives, and was otherwise uncontrollable. Further, the time jumps only occurred during Beckett’s lifetime, with maybe one notable exception if memory serves (Beckett jumps into his great grandfather, who served in the Civil War).
And to go back to an Irwin Allen production of the 60s, the short-lived series Time Tunnel focused on two people lost in a swirl of “past and future ages,” but their travels were erratic as the U.S. hasn’t a clue on how to return the two travelers to their own time.
What I am getting at is this: when you travel in time and fubar something, you can go back and prevent an event from occurring, assuming the following two conditions.
You have the means available at your disposal.
There are no rules or strictures to time travel that prohibit it.
Sadly, the universe of Star Trek has already established that both of the above are true: timelines can be restored, whether it is some random quantum anomaly of the week, the Guardian of Forever, or simply doing a “time warp” around the sun. And “Spock Prime” knows how to do two of the three! Why bother to restore Vulcan the hard way when you can restore it with a quick hop and skip into the good ole Guardian? Eh?
If you don’t think about time travel all that much, aren’t much into the Trek canon (either on a limited or expert, die-hard Trekkie basis), and if you don’t think that deeply about the movie long after you’ve seen it, then you’re in for a treat—ignorance is truly bliss. The movie is a good popcorn flick. The movie is well cast, although I will say that Chris Pine reminds me of a younger Ben Browder, and may have watched a lot of Ben Browder’s performance on Farscape in preparation of the movie (so as to differentiate himself from WIlliam Fucking Shatner).
There are a few issues I have with the movie. One is the engineering room, which looks like a contemporary processing plant for biochemicals, nuclear reactors, or something along those lines. This is something you’d expect to see on Battlestar Galactica, not Star Trek—particularly in stark contrast to the Apple-inspired interiors of the bridge and other areas of the good ole Enterprise.
The second is the design of the ship, which doesn’t turn me on at all. There was very little wrong with the Enterprise-A version of the ship that was seen in the movies! That ship was beautiful. You could smooth a few lines out here and there, sure, and add the rotating phaser cannons but… never mind. Not worth going into, since I’m entering the anal Trekkie zone, and that’s not where I want to head. It’s done. Ain’t gonna change a thing.
Despite the above logic problem and the two issues I’ve mentioned with aesthetics, I’m very happy that J.J. Abrams and his cohorts were able to reboot the dying Trek franchise from the pathetic Rick Berman and Brannon Braga years. Overall, the film looks great, is cast very well, had a coherent plot, and it reminds me about the best parts of Star Trek—which have nothing to do with technobabble, talking heads, or political correctness. I do understand why they used the time travel shtick here with old Spock, and that was in an attempt to get most who knew of the old Star Trek shows into the movie theater seats… and that’s fine, I understand that, still I wish they threw in some indication that time travel to fix the timeline was impossible. That was not done here, and would have greatly aided the story from the logic standpoint for those who mulled over the aforementioned shtick.
In my search for a quote, I found this from Maya Angelou, one of America’s better contemporary poets. Thought I’d share it with ya!
“I don’t know if I continue, even today, always liking myself. But what I learned to do many years ago was to forgive myself. It is very important for every human being to forgive herself or himself because if you live, you will make mistakes—it is inevitable. But once you do and you see the mistake, then you forgive yourself and say, ‘well, if I’d known better I’d have done better,’ that’s all. So you say to people who you think you may have injured, ‘I’m sorry,’ and then you say to yourself, ‘I’m sorry.’ If we all hold on to the mistake, we can’t see our own glory in the mirror because we have the mistake between our faces and the mirror; we can’t see what we’re capable of being. You can ask forgiveness of others, but in the end the real forgiveness is in one’s own self. I think that young men and women are so caught by the way they see themselves. Now mind you. When a larger society sees them as unattractive, as threats, as too black or too white or too poor or too fat or too thin or too sexual or too asexual, that’s rough. But you can overcome that. The real difficulty is to overcome how you think about yourself. If we don’t have that we never grow, we never learn, and sure as hell we should never teach.”
And here’s another:
“I’ve learned that no matter what happens, or how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow. I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles these three things:
a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights. I’ve learned that regardless of your relationship with your parents, you’ll miss them when they’re gone from your life. I’ve learned that making a living is not the same thing as making a life. I’ve learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands; you need to be able to throw some things back. I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. I’ve learned that every day you should reach out and touch someone. People love a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back. I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
This is my reply to Mojo’s blog post regarding the regrettably, overly deep analysis that some honest, loving fans have done over the run of B-Star Galactica when it comes to star patterns seen fleetingly in the background. If it passes moderation, you’ll see it as a response to his blog… but without some of the corrections I’ve made after the fact in terms of misplaced commas and the like. Enjoy!
Mojo,
I want to take this opportunity to thank you and the amazing CGI/FX team at Battlestar for the wonderfully consistent work on BSG, despite the hectic schedules and the fast turn-around time that you guys need to meet when working on a television budget. (I do have issues with the CGI for “Daybreak,” but I won’t go into that. I understand that the special effects were finished a day before the episode aired, so I understand it.)
While I understand the astronomy or science buffs for being a bit miffed over the so-called “starfield clues,” they need to understand that the sole purpose of a television show is to entertain and, from a financial standpoint, make cubits for the network. (I believe the field you are in is referred to as the “entertainment business,” and as a business there are investments and the expectation is that there is a return on said investments in the form of recouping the initial investment and, ultimately, profit.) If these fans wanted real hard science fiction, then they could go to the library and look into the works of Carl Sagan, Issac Asimov or other golden age SF writers to read. Further, they could simply watch the Discovery, History Channel and other educational shows. The fact that you guys and gals cared enough to be consistent under hectic television schedules and other stresses shows your true dedication and passion for the art of making a television show.
The sad part about these fans (which are less than 0.01% of us, but yet are the most vocal) is that they have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding about what the people in the entertainment trenches of television production go through. I do not for one minute believe that this disrespect is intentional, but rather out of sheer ignorance and, borne from that, misunderstanding. I really wish the fans could go through what I experienced up in Vancouver when prepping for the first BSG auction before the production wrapped after “The Plan” and “Face of the Enemy,” as then they would have had their eyes opened to what actually goes on behind the scenes. Even my personal minimal exposure to this process has nurtured a greater respect for what EVERYONE in the production staff goes through just to make the show happen! Color me “biased,” but at least my opinion is informed.
I’ve always maintained that there are very few fans who (dangerously) read far too much into things in the show, whether it be the way something is said, or into the minute details in the background. And while it’s easy to say that “people will always nitpick at everything and so you must account for that,” it needs to be understood and accepted that you guys cannot account for these things. The conditions that, again, you’ve laid out in your blog post demonstrate that this is impossible. You will never please all the nitpickers, and it isn’t worth your time to do so.
So, yes, the constellations in the Tomb of Athena were a scientific mistake as Grazier admitted and, yes, Gaeta’s comment about them matching in Earth 1’s orbit were also a mistake… however, BSG is an “elseworld” and should be treated as such. After all, the Cylons don’t exist, there’s no William Adama, there’s no “other Earth” and it is all a work of fiction that miraculously lasted longer than its original source material. So what’s to say that the constellations seen in the Tomb of Athena WEREN’T the constellations over the Kobollian Cylons’ homeworld? Hmm…
Regardless, you all have done well for yourselves. Sure there were mistakes, but as BSG is a mirror of the human condition, this is to be expected… and, in a perverse sort of way, cherished and respected.
To those of us who complain and belabor things ad nauseum (and, honestly, to no point)… Be thankful that we received four seasons, two movies, webisodes and a spin-off. It could be worse. You could be watching Galactica 1980 for four seasons, as we could have a spin-off with just the descendants of the “Super Scouts” jumping for joy as they throw seeds into trenches made by lasers as they sing a space scout chantey.
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