#whatever like i KNOW star trek has a lot of inconsistencies

[appavevo]

okay bear with me here:

in the tng episode "datalore" from the 1st season, data mentions that he can tell some work station belonged to "dr. soong." to which both riker and la forge are like who? and wait, you don't mean NOONIEN soong right?

so from that dialogue, it stands to reason that the fact that noonien soon is the creator of data either wasn't known, or wasn't common knowledge. Since data is super unique and mentioned in several biomechanical textbooks, i feel its unlikely that riker wouldn't know about noonien soong, especially since riker said in read through data's file in the pilot.

ANYWAY, this sort of suggests that it wasn't known that dr noonien soong was the creator of data. which is a funny idea to me

BECAUSE

so in the first season of tng, data says he was found 26 years ago. we know from that episode that noonien soong failed to create a positronic brain, and disappeared. after disappearing, he was successful to varying degrees, with b4/lore/data. so i'm going to estimate that his disappearance happened about 40-50 years before the episode "datalore", and about 20-30 years before data was discovered right?

so imagine: you are a middle age cyberneticist working at star fleet. you remember noonien soong from a long time ago, as a weird but smart man who seemed to not be able to handle failure, but that was a long time ago, no sense thinking about it now. then you hear the news: an artificial being has been discovered, possibly one with sentience. This being has requested to join star fleet, and there are currently trials being conducted to determine whether or not to permit this. You think whoa! i gotta go check this out. so you see this mysterious android, whom no one seems to know the origin of, and you think huh......this guy

sure does look familiar......?

eh, probably just a coincidence.....

[sodiumlamp]

Picard

We're in the final stretch of the first season, and the gang finally makes it to the mysterious planet Soji recalled from her dreams. I haven't spent a lot of time on plot holes and other inconsistencies, but a pretty good example of my problem with the writing is how they found Soji's homeworld.

The Romulan agent finds out she's capable of dreaming, then gets her to tell him enough about the dreams to figure out that she's dreaming of home, then he gets her to do some sort of Romulan meditation technique where she can interact with the dream while awake, so she can look up at the skylight in her "father's" laboratory, and identify two red moons and constant lightning in the sky.

I mean, it's not a bad way to extract this information. The problem is that not even Soji knew what she knew, so it makes sense that the answers would lie in her subconscious. My gripe is that it's a tad convenient that her originworld would be so distinctive that this simple description would tell you everything you needed to know to find it. What if the planet had no moons, or whatever the usual number is in Star Trek? What if the planet had clear, unremarkable weather? What if the lab had no skylight? Also, why is the dream taken so literally? Soji saw her father working on a life-size wooden doll bearing her own face. That didn't actually happen so why would the two moons and lightning thing be true?

To be fair, we could argue that the dreams were purposely designed to contain information Soji could use to find her way back home, except the whole point was to suppress that kind of information for her mission. The Romulans discovered her dreams and exploited them, which makes it seem like more of a bug than a feature. But this all happened in Episode 6, and I'm here to complain about Episode 9.

So, the gang arrives at Soji's home planet, Coppelius, and while there's two moons, the weather seems quite ordinary and Earthlike. The Memory Alpha article even points out this contradiction, almost like they're making a joke, but maybe I'm imagining things.

"While Soji Asha was undergoing the Zhal Makh, she had a vision that this planet had electrical storms as part of its weather patterns, though the natural environment was quite sunny, with a hot desert-like environment."

I mean, everyone located the planet based on the details of her vision, but the vision itself was bullshit. Why wouldn't you just put some lighting storms on the planet? We know they can do that effect because they already did it when they produced the scenes of her dream. Just do it again.

When they arrive, all the other androids welcome her back and their leader is Noonien Soong's son. Not an android, like, his biological son. He's a cyberneticist too, so when the ban on synths went down 14 years ago he and Bruce Maddox ran off to Coppelius to make a bunch of androids. Then Bruce made Soji and Dahj and they went off on a mission to......

What the hell was their mission? I think Dahj and Soji were meant to infiltrate the Daystrom Institute and the Borg Reclamation Project respectively, but to what end? And Maddox was up to something on Freecloud, except his lab got destroyed and Jurati killed him before we could find out what he was up to. I think the idea here is that the Coppelius androids would have been better off if Maddox had stayed put, but I can't tell. Instead Maddox and Dahj are dead and Soji has returned to tell them that a Romulan armada is following her to destroy them all.

The crux of the episode is when everyone compares notes and the Coppelians learn about the "warning" the Romulans discovered that convinced them androids will ruin everything. They soon determine that the "warning" was misinterpreted, as it may have been intended for synthetic minds to comprehend. They perceive the message as a promise, one left behind by fellow synthetics, who claim that organic life forms will inevitably create, envy, and betray synthetic life forms. The message contains instructions to contact the ancient synthetics, who will come to rescue any synthetics who are being persecuted. Also, they might just wipe out the persecutors.

So the androids (and Soong) are like, cool, let's just call those god-machines and let them take care of business, but Picard tries to convince them to evacuate in his ship instead. He makes a bunch of pie-in-the-sky promises about Federation protection and getting the synth ban overturned, but Soong calls bullshit because no one listened to Picard before, and no one listens to him now.

So this could be a decent payoff on the whole "warning" business. The Romulans have been worried about it this whole time, but I was afraid we'd never get a clear answer on whether their fears were justified. Now Coppelius has the means to actually summon the horror that the Romulans were afraid of, so at least we'll find out if it's a real thing or not. My guess is that they'll make the call and no one will answer, or at least the answer they get will be much less awesome and terrible than anyone feared/hoped. It's the only way to defuse this, unless a Star Trek show seriously intends to call down God to settle things.

Don't get me wrong, this show still sucks. They spent most of this episode just sort of reacting to Soji's people, Soong, etc. Jurati makes a lot of funny faces and that Romulan guy kills an android by ripping her eye out, so this show still maintains its throughline of dumbassery and violence. The cliffhanger here is that Picard is placed under house arrest, so he won't be able to stop the Coppellians from summoning the machine-gods and he won't be able to evacuate them before the Romulan armada arrives. But that's stupid. The Coppelians took that Romulan guy prisoner and he immediately escaped. Yet we're meant to believe they can hold Picard against his will for more than ten minutes? It's just sloppy and dumb, and it takes way too long to get there.

For instance, there's a scene where the ship loses power on its way down to the planet, and it's dark inside, and then Rios uses his lighter to see what's happening. But he can't just do that, it takes several tries to get a flame, so we have to put up with several cuts to different characters with each flash of the lighter. And for what? This isn't a big dramatic moment. The ship's inoperative and there's nothing they can do about. But they waste a bunch of time like they're building up to something, as if Jason Voorhees is gonna appear behind them in the dark. The whole series is like that. It really sucks.

Now you might wonder why I'm still watching this crap. The show is really, really bad, and I don't think it's worth the trouble, so why bother sitting through the whole thing? What's the point? Well, take a look at this shot of Bruce Maddox's room on Coppellius.

Like Jurati's desk in Episode 1, it's got a lot of labware, but they actually took the time to get some decent looking props instead of just slapping some present-day beakers and flasks. Maddox has the same blue and red liquid in unfamiliar containers that Dr. Crusher had in TNG. There's some other stuff too, which looks vaguely familiar but not easily identifiable. Someone actually went to the trouble to make some convincing props here. They probably looked up photos of real lab equipment and designed things that would look just similar enough to look appropriate, but strange enough to be unrecognizable. I have no idea what this stuff could be used for, but it still looks like a workspace. Like I could see a person sitting at this desk and doing things with this stuff.

And that's growth right there. Don't get me wrong, this doesn't redeem the gripe I had with the Daystrom Institute set from Episode 1. This set only proves my point. They knew what to do and how to do it right, but they just chose not to do that until later in the show.

Still, it's encouraging to see a mistake corrected, even in a sloppy shop like Star Trek: Picard. I had to dig pretty deep for this moment, but it's worth it. Sometimes bad shows are worth watching just for these kinds of experiences.

[sapphosewrites]

It is June 5th, which means it is officially one full year since I posted my first fic on AO3. I’m feeling emotional, and being the person that I am, I’m going to write an essay about it. You’ve been warned.

I am not a person who is good at having free time. Typically, if I do, I fill it with work. When the pandemic hit, I had a full-time teaching job where I habitually didn’t leave school until 5 or 6, plus various theatre gigs on the side. For fun, I might go out to eat with friends once a month, maybe. But my district wasn’t prepared for remote learning, live shows stopped, and restaurants closed, and I had quite literally nothing to do. My newly acquired therapist gave me a homework assignment: get a hobby.

At the time, one of the things I had started doing to entertain myself was reading Star Trek fanfiction while also watching DS9 for the first time. I hadn’t really written stories for fun in a few years- probably since college? I stopped sharing it with people, and that was a lot of where the joy came from. So, at my therapist’s suggestion, I tried writing a story and posting it.

In came comments, from many of you wonderful people! (Dillards, did you know you’re the first comment I ever got?) And it was amazing. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced, because I’d never shared writing on the internet before. I was still convinced my writing was garbage, and here were all of these wonderful and immensely talented writers saying nice things! I started posting bits of writing that had been unfinished forever. For a period of time I was cranking out a new piece every couple of days, although it slowed to once a week when work started asking more of me, and now is inconsistent.

Thanks to cemetrygatess, I made a new tumblr, and discovered the delightful, vibrant Star Trek community on here. I started talking to many of you, who fuel my ideas and inspire me to post, even if I’m nervous. I tried things I’ve never tried before, like writing a sequel to someone else’s work and being a beta and having a beta, and fandom shenanigans like Fuck Form Friday. I’ve been connected to opportunities I wouldn’t have had otherwise, like talking to Una McCormack.

In one year, I have posted 57 pieces on AO3, in 6 different fandoms, for a total of 210,594 words. That’s longer than Moby Dick. I have user subscriptions! Some of you have actually just subscribed to get an email every time I post something, which is wild! I certainly don’t think my writing is just garbage anymore.

I wanted to tag some of you for thanks, but I realized there would be too many people, because it’s not just individuals who have made a difference in my life this year, but this entire incredible community.

It has been much harder to have time and energy to write since we went back to school in-person. I don’t know what the next year will hold or look like (who does?). But I have more stories planned, and I hope that whatever this year brings, it is full of stories, Star Trek, and all of you

<3

[doopcafe]

The Michael Burnham Show: Die Trying (3x05)

Summary: Michael Burham collects seeds to earn the trust of a Starfleet admiral, above.

Comments: I was so disgruntled from that awful Voyager holodeck episode that I "convinced" Akina to return to Season 3 of Discovery (note: one does not simply convince Akina of anything).

Okay, so we left off with Adira recovering her memories on Trill in Episode 4 and giving Burnham the coordinates to future!Starfleet.

So let’s get this “plot” out of the way first. Discovery meets up with future!Starfleet and the admiral in charge recounts some recent history of the Federation for the audience: they’re down to just a few dozen member worlds, and “without warp,” they’re unable to contact others or coordinate their organization. Skipping over subspace communications and the fact that there were ships warping around the first couple episodes, the admiral thinks the Discovery crew are temporal agents and up to no good. The episode shoves in some dying aliens the first chance it gets and Burnham concocts a plan that drives this episode: She’s gonna use Discovery’s spore drive to jump to the last known coordinates of a seed ship (a seedbank spaceship), get some seeds, then return to cure the nameless aliens (with the seeds). Spoilers: they collect the seeds, cure the aliens, and earn the admiral’s trust.

This show feels like I accidentally wandered into the funeral of a stranger. Everyone is crying, people are expressing heartfelt condolences, and there’s lots of hugging and crying. But... I don’t know any of these people. Sure, I can feel sorry for these people, but can’t feel sorry with these people. I’ve never had the chance to get to know any of them in any meaningful way.

Continuing the analogy, someone tells me that the deceased was a beloved husband, father of four, yadda yadda, which helps me understand what’s happening at a cognitive level but not at an emotional one. Who is this guy that died again? Did I know him? Maybe someone I once knew in high school, or...?

That’s the feeling of Star Trek Discovery. There’s a scene in this episode that illustrates the idea. Nan (?), the security chief (?), decides she’s gonna leave Discovery. On cue, Burnham cries and then Nan cries and everyone cries (and hugs) and talks about friendship and feelings but like... have we met this lady? She came aboard with Pike, right? What has she done since? I vaguely remember Nan saying “yum yum” in response to Georgiou saying something about “joining her in making Leland scream” in the middle of kicking things. See, I remember that because it was emotional. Sure, that emotion was overwhelmingly “cringe,” but it was still an emotion and I remember it. Nan says super cringey, sexualized things at inappropriate times. Got it.

But here (in this episode, as an example), some character is leaving the ship and I’m just watching the funeral of Star Trek that I accidentally wandered into. Yes, I understand that maybe Burnham and Nan got drunk together a few times, played pranks on Saru or whatever, and shared a few laughs together, but we never get to see any of that shit. So... Who is this lady again? Why should I care?

Anyways, they just leave Nan on the ship that’s running on auxiliary power right next to an ion storm. Yup, just left her aboard, alone with a fatally wounded psychopath who wants to kill himself. Nan and Burnham emerge from their unearned emotional embrace, Burnham’s like “one to beam up,” then Nan walks over to the window and by the time she gets there, Discovery is already spore jumping away.

Jeez, I hope they transported over some emergency rations or supplies or something. No one aboard questioned why Burnham was returning to Discovery alone?

Anyways! Georgiou only kicks one thing in this episode and it wasn’t even sentient, so that was a nice change—

Wait a minute... In the scene when Discovery wanders into future!Starfleet HQ and there’s ships all over the place, the Discovery bridge crew is, well, having an Unearned Emotional Moment™ about some of the ships. Then someone—Tilly I think—notices the USS Voyager... but with registration number suffix of “J,” the eleventh generation of the ship.

How does the Discovery crew know what Voyager is?

They’re from before Voyager’s time, right? And the Sphere data they’ve collected is also from before Voyager’s time... so while the crew might know what Trill are from the Sphere, the Sphere could not have collected data on Voyager, right? And they jumped way into the future, well after Voyager’s time. Did I miss something again?

Look, these are all small things, but the occurrence is so prolific that it’s extravagantly clear the writers have no knowledge of canon or use for internal consistency. Which, honestly is fine... if you create something better than the original. But if you vomit garbage, that second nail in the coffin (internal inconsistency) just hurts a little more than the first (poor writing).

My enjoyment: 1/5

Did all the lower-ranked crewmembers aboard Discovery also travel to the future? Jeez Burnham, literally everyone on the ship must really love you.

[duhragonball]

Plot Holes

I really haven’t known what to write about on here lately.   Part of the trouble with that is that if I go too long without writing out my thoughts, I start to get ansty, and mull over the same topic over and over.    So I’d like to take this time to off-load some stray observations about Star Trek: The Next Generation, and why I shouldn’t be too hard on my own writing.   

I’ve been getting recommendations on YouTube for clips from the episode “Chain of Command Part I.”   Part II is the one where Picard gets tortured by David Warner while they argue about interior lighting, and it’s probably one of the best episodes of the whole series.   Part I sets up how Picard got captured in the first place, and one of those dominoes is a new captain, Ed Jellico, who fills in for him while he goes on a secret mission.    Jellico always interested me, because his whole arc is about how he doesn’t get along well with the other characters.   You’re supposed to think he’s a real dick, mostly because he’s not too hot about Commander Riker as a first officer, but the episode doesn’t really succeed in getting that across.   He orders all these big changes to the ship and crew, and expects everything to get done within two days, but he’s got good reasons for all of it, and... he’s the captain now.    Riker accuses him of wanting to “control everything and everyone”, but that’s literally the captain’s job?  Besides, by the end of Part II, all of Jellico’s decisions seem to pay off.   He foils an invasion and saves Captain Picard.   I don’t know why he needed a four-shift crew rotation to pull that off, but he made Troi wear science blue so it’s worth it. Jellico’s a good dude in my book.   

So I rewatched the whole two-parter this week, because the thing I couldn’t remember was why the Cardassians captured Picard in the first place.    His mission led him into a trap, and it’s all part of this byzantine plot to interrogate him about the Federations defenses of a planet that they want to conquer.  Jellico realizes this when he tries to figure out why they went to so much trouble to capture one specific guy, and he recalls that the Enterprise would be the lead ship in the sector if there was ever an invasion.   So the Cardassians assumed that Picard would have knowledge of how the sector would be defended, and if they could force him to reveal that information, they could win easily.   

Except Picard doesn’t know those supposed defense plans.    At least, he says he doesn’t know, and Part II seems to suggest that the guy torturing him doesn’t even care.  He just wants to break Picard for the sake of it, and things look bad for Picard because he can’t betray the Federation even if he wanted to.   

I’m left with two possible interpreations here.   One is that Picard genuinely had no idea what the defense plans would be, and the Cardassians just pulled a boner by going to all that trouble based on a reasonable guess.   If that’s true, then how would that have worked?    Would Picard only get those defense plans until the moment an invasion ocurred?    Or is the “plan” just to let him figure it out as he goes?    That’s basically what Jellico does in his stead.   He figures out the enemy fleet is hiding in a nebula, so he fills it with mines and forces them to leave. 

The alternative is that Picard really did know those defense plans, and he just denied it so convincingly that it’s taken me 28 years to consider the possibility.  That adds a new layer to the ending, where he admits to Troi that he very nearly did break, and it just so happened that he was released in the nick of time.   So maybe he might have actually given up some important secrets if his ordeal had gone on any longer.   But how did he resist their truth serum, then?

The other thing that struck me about “Chain of Command” is how much it resembles “Best of Both Worlds”, in the sense that an invading enemy does terrible things to Captain Picard in order to get an edge against the Federation.   There’s some important differences, but I think I’d feel a little self-conscious if I had written both stories, like the second one is redundant.    I don’t think anyone has ever levelled this critique against the show, though.   Maybe if they aired back-to-back instead of two seasons apart.    As it is, it’s just One Of Those Things.   

I see plot holes in other episodes a lot.    For example, in “The Pegasus”, Admiral Pressman is trying to salvage a secret and illegal cloaking device, and so he won’t tell the Enterprise crew what he’s after, and the only other person who knows is Riker, so he orders him to keep it under wraps.    Pressman’s plan is to use the cloaking technology to get an edge against the Romulans, even though the Federation agreed to never use or develop cloaking devices in a treaty.    So yeah, he really doesn’t want Captain Picard to find out, except that he would have to tell Picard about this eventually, right?    Sooner or later, his plan would involve putting cloaking devices on every ship in the fleet, so everyone in Starfleet would have to be told about it.    Maybe he figured he could sell his superiors on the idea later on, but it still seems fishy to me.    Then again, it suits Pressman’s character that he’s too obsessed with his plan to consider all the contingencies.  

I just watched “The Next Phase” today, because that one’s always bugged me, because Geordi and Ro spend most of the episode in an invisible, intangible state.   They can see and hear and touch each other, but no one else, thanks to a transporter accident involving another experimental cloaking device.   Except they can’t fall through the decks of whatever ship they’re on, and they can still breathe.   So shouldn’t Geordi be able to get someone’s attention by stomping on the deck until someone hears the noise?   Wouldn’t the ship’s life support system notice that more people are breathing than there are on board?   But the episode is just too damn good for me to care for very long.   Ro thinks they’re ghosts, and Geordi might agree with her except he’s a cyborg and he’s pretty sure you don’t take your prosthetics with you when you die.    It’s this neat interplay involving faith.   Ro never believed in the afterlife until now, and Geordi is convinced that he and the crew can still save each other.

The main moral I run into here is that it doesn’t have to be this airtight thing.   I’ll write things and feel like they don’t work because they feel like retreads of things I’ve done before, but sometimes that’s okay.    Sometimes it’s a theme, or a motif, or a refrain or whatever.   It doesn’t always have to be a matter of not being creative enough or original enough.    Sometimes things need to be repeated for emphasis.     And sometimes things are de-emphasized, to the point where inconsistencies may not get addressed.   A lot of times, the villain’s plan may seem extremely short-sighted or half-baked, precisely because it’s doomed to fail early on, so it really doesn’t matter how it would have held up in the long term.   That kind of thing.  

And if it’s okay for TNG to do it, then it shouldn’t be a big deal when I do it, so that’s what I need to remind myself of here.

[ninety6tears]

tag game

Rules: tag 9 people you’d like to know better/annoy a little with silly games lol.

Top 4 ships: (Having done similar lists, in the interests of not being a broken record this might be slightly weighted/arbitrary, but)

Cassie Maddox and Rob Ryan (Dublin Murder Squad). I love almost every word/character Tana French has ever written, but it always goes back to these two. I know what it’s like to have a complicated, familial yet precariously close to unhealthy intensity in a friendship and it’s not the individual characters as much as the palpable tells of commonality and instinct between them that feels like that but blown into uniquely epic proportions. This relationship is written in some of the most beautiful prose I’ve ever read and even giving fanfic for this series the old college try is always a bit daunting; even though I’ve never not been in the middle of a book it was an obsession which was kind of the beginning of literature making up a good deal of my fandom writing/activity, so, formative at the least, life-destroying at the most.

Barnaby Brooks Jr. and Kotetsu Kaburagi (Tiger & Bunny). I think the reason this is one of my favorites is that it’s one of those extremely unlikely pairings (not so much in the sense of sexuality but their personalities, their histories, that age difference which actually isn’t as big a gap as I initially thought) which isn't really that unlikely when you take a closer look at the way they canonically and potentially complement each other. Even though this is overall a pretty lighthearted series with funny characters that you wouldn’t immediately credit with much subtlety, it impressively draws both guys in this partnership as having maladapted, in occasionally melodramatic but mostly everyday, sublimated ways, to traumatic losses, and these two characters are almost incidentally shoved into each other’s lives when the only self-prescribed recourse is to bury their heads further into isolation. When this series was first airing a lot of the discussion circled around Barnaby (positively or negatively) as a Bruce Wayne woobie type, but look, they’re both the woobie in very different ways (and neither of them is that reductively comparable to any superhero character I know), and they manage to build love and trust between them that withstands the fact that the timing for dropping the emotional bombs is never good.

James T. Kirk and Nyota Uhura (Star Trek). I mean, my longest (and longest-running WIP) fic ever is partly about this pairing and they’ve been living in my head on and off for...ten years. I like these two in TOS too (though mostly in the uh, less gendered moments) but AOS fandom will always have a special place in my heart no matter how much hate other people have for it and I lost my mind over the potential angst and growth and chemistry of this ship. Can’t say I’m unhappy it was never canon though.

Natasha Romanov and Steve Rogers (MCU). So the first Avengers movie came out and they had some brief but very chill interactions and she was being all reformed-murderer and he was being all “ma’am” and I remember having a talk with someone like, man, that would be such an avenue for them to go down exploring an unlikely relationship but then I thought nah, they’ll never be each other’s designated love interest so that would never get explored, right? And then the Russos gave me The Winter Soldier, and they are now without question my favorite relationship in any of these movies. And I love that it’s a male-female friendship that is very close without making those loud self-conscious clarifications about “ugh, it would be like kissing a sibling” because oh no viewers don’t understand complicated/ambiguous/mature relationships between the two genders (discounting that shit in AOU when Steve was like, the designated bro who had to give Bruce the disclaiming permission to pursue Nat or whatever bleghyeahno). There isn’t really a way for me to believe them that isn’t sad or bittersweet, I’m not so on board with them getting married and HEA, but I think...it’s complicated.

Last song: The Vaults cover of Alt-J’s “Hunger of the Pine”

Last movie: Jumanji: The Next Level

Reading: Too many things at once, but I just started Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments. I have reservations about this sequel, with how it’s in a kind of dialogue with the TV series and what that implies (though I think there are also some inconsistencies which just has me confused), and it does seem like an unnecessary return to what was a deliberately open-ended masterpiece timed to the success of the adaptation. Still, Atwood can write pages and pages made up mostly of somber world-building and make it mysteriously compelling. 

Craving: Hugs.

I was tagged by @cosetteferaud <3

Tagging YOU!

[self-critical-automaton]

Whats Been Going On With Me Lately

So basicly the TLDR is:

I’ve been super ill in weird and new brain ways since about mid-december, when withdrawal from my antidepressants resulted in strange intense psychological events, and I’ve been dealing with the fallout and day-to-day distress ever since. I’m terrified that i might have suffered permanent alterations/damage to my mental state, but who can say.

Details under the cut for anyone who wants to know how ive been doing, or wants to hear about what happens when you quit a high dose of fluoxetine cold turkey after five or six years.

Or for anyone who is going through something similar and wants some info/hope, since withdrawal experiences seem to be super idiosyncratic and variable and its almost impossible to find detailed descriptions.

I’d really appreciate it being read, esp. by people in my life, but dont feel compelled or whatever idk i dont make the rules but srsly please read it if you can it took a lot of time and effort

PS: this and several other articles on that blog were a huge help to me getting through the first couple phases, if you’re having trouble with withdrawal please go read PPS: fine to reblog, in fact please do

In 2017 I started getting painful physical side effects from my antidepressants, which gradually got worse until in lateish-2018 I decided to stop taking them outright. Everyone ever says you shouldn’t quit antidepressants cold-turkey, and they are right, but I’d been taking them inconsistently due to the pain, and I was beginning to suspect they’d stopped helping me anyway, so it seemed the best option.

I quit in probably mid-October and for a couple months felt much the same as usual, but then around the 13th of December it all kicked off. At first I had no idea what was happening, and I thought I was suffering a sudden and intense flu coinciding with a bad depressive spike, but after a couple days I figured out that withdrawal can be offset by weeks or months in rare cases, and decided this is what must be happening. That first round of Withdrawal Time had a few soft-edged but distinct phases (lasting about a week each), and I went through by far the worst experience in my entire life, closely followed by the second-worst and then third-worst.

Round One Start! Phase One: intense existential dread

It kicked of very suddenly, around the 13th december, getting rapidly worse over a couple days. I was paralysed with fear as my mind sunk into thinking in infinite circles, unable to do anything other but endlessly contemplate and debate morbid philosophical topics, forced to confront the inevitability of death, emptiness of life, terror of oblivion, impossibility of afterlife, and so on. I also suffered sensory experiences similar to those ive heard described by people who take drugs like LSD, or very severe fever dreams. Sensations of expanded perception, becoming trapped in imaginary scenarios on other planes, that sort of thing.

In this phase I ate almost nothing, and over that week lost 4 or 5 kg. I also had some flu symptoms, mostly as fevers and chills, and could ony, really sleep in short bursts of a couple hours each. There was very little I could safely occupy myself with, as almost all media (books, games, film, fiction and nonfiction, everything really) would in some way trigger me into thinking about an existential topic, and then the terror would resume. I spent what time I could working to fix the problems with my life that I had suddenly become aware of (my social isolation, my medial issues, my mental health, etc), so I made a lot of phone calls, doctor visits, and applied to some mental health counseling services. I also started looking for avenues to make friends and acquaintances online and in person, and did a lot of research on antidepressant withdrawal.

Towards the end of this phase, the dread got more manageable and began to ease off, and I found I could play simple puzzle games to help occupy myself during the day. Listening to certain podcasts also was a source of relief and distraction. However, things remained bad in the morning and evenings, and I ended up referring to these times as ‘morning hell’ and ‘evening hell’. Also, I began to keep a basic daily log of my symptoms.

Phase Two: generalized anxiety

As I segued into this phase, the existential dread mostly withdrew during the day, leaving instead a sense of severe generalized anxiety. I’ve had issues with anxiety in the past, but it’s always been event-related or social, so Generalized Anxiety Disorder style anxiety was an interesting addition to my mental health cocktail. I still suffered the existential dread, but primarily during the Morning and Evening Hells, and as occasional spikes during the day. Mostly, I felt like it was off to one side somewhere, and felt anxiety about thinking about existential topics.

I got little done, but was able to occupy myself with podcasts, housework, simple games, and (oddly enough) Star Trek: The Original Series. Almost anything else I tried would worsen the anxiety, and threaten to trigger existential dreads. During this time I started sleeping more normally, but also began waking every night with chest pains and leg pains, which of course caused a great deal of anxiety about heart issues and blood clots. I also began to feel like I had begun to ‘wake up’ after having sleepwalked through the past year or so.

Phase Three: misc badfeels and weird sensory effects

As phase 2 segued into this one, around christmas day, the anxiety started to recede during the day. I’d get a window of safety varying from half an hour to a few hours, usually starting in the early afternoon. I began to leave the house more, going for walks with my partner, which could occupy me safely during bad feeling times. During those windows, I often still felt bad, but it felt like a ‘normal’ bad, like depression and ennui, rather than the very active generalized anxiety or severe dread. I also began to be able to read again, and to play games more widely. I committed to attending some local social events (some board games/RPG things, and a support group) and mostly tried to get on with life. 

I was frequently quite sluggish and slow, and didn't usually get much work done, even napping occasionally. As my days improved, my nights worsened, with bad sleep and bad dreams. I would also have odd brief sensory effects, such as hallucinations and waking dreams. For the first time since withdrawal started, I began to worry that I was slipping backwards and getting worse again. Up until that point, I had felt like, as awful as I was feeling, there was a slow but consistent improvement.

By early January I was having inconsistent bouts of the existential stuff and the generalized anxiety in the day, but looking back probably not as intensely as in the earlier phases.

Phase Four: inconsistent rehash

Phase four was similar to phase three, except without the consistency that phase three had (at least earlier on) of ‘morning bad, day safe, evening bad’. It also lasted longer than the ‘about a week’ of previous phases. I had ups and downs of general bad feelings throughout the day, with occasional spikes or longer bouts of existential fear or generalized anxiety, and I developed an aversion to going to bed (as most mornings would feel worse than evenings). I usually slept badly, and I started waking up during what I’m pretty sure were sleep-panic-attacks an hour or so after going to sleep. Chest pains and so on were very common and worrying, so I talked to the doctor a lot and ended up on some cardio waiting lists.

I had some depressive episodes which felt very much like the kind of depressive episodes I’ve had over my life, and about the same topics, though more intensely. It was almost comforting, in a back-to-normal sort of way.

Frankly, this whole phase felt like a random jumble of previous phase symptoms and pre-withdrawl mental health stuff, almost like dimming lightbulbs on an old electrical system, fading in and out and going on and off randomly and unpredictably.

Towards the end of January, I had a bad bout of flu, but during that time I felt a lot better in mental health terms. I don’t know if this was due to the distraction of a big obvious ‘thing to survive’ or if it was a natural upswing as part of the arc of that phase. After I got over the flu, I had a couple days of existential stuff reasserting itself, and I was worried that it was a second bout of Phase One, but I stopped recording my log on the 5th of February, so it’s hard to recall anything past this.

Interstitial Period

I’m pretty sure that for most of February, I felt ‘back to normal’, and was feeling more-or-less how I had been before withdrawal kicked off. That said, my capacity to occupy myself has not really recovered. I’m occasionally able to play games or read, but I often have a bad sense of ennui. This may be my natural yearly Seasonal Affective Disorder, or a natural depressive episode (I have consistently if infrequently had times where I’m unable to occupy myself and suffer ennui, just as part of being a depressed person), but I’ve not had one this long before.

I have a strong fear that my cognition/way of being/mental state has been permanently altered by that first phase, that it in some way ‘opened my eyes’ and now I will never be able to go back to how I was. I’m scared that I might never be free of this existential dread lurking in the back of my mind, but also trying to dissemble, forget, or distract myself feels like a foolish naivety. Its something we all have to face, so postponing the inevitable is pointless, but also I can’t overcome or accept it, so I’m trapped in a limbo.

Round Two?

After feeling mostly ’back to normal’ for a while, I’ve been having some bad times again. For about a week or so (end of febuary/beginning of march), I’ve been having existential fears and the ‘big mix of generalized bad feeling’ again, on and off during the day, and especially in mornings/evenings. I was very afraid that it was the beginning of a downslope into a full repeat of this entire cycle, but it’s been pretty consistent so far, rather than getting worse.

I’m hoping that this is indeed Round Two, and that its just a lot less bad than Round One, which would be consistent with what I’ve read about this stuff.

Final Thoughts

Phase one was the worst thing ive gone through in my life, but on good days I feel somewhat optimistic that it’s had a ‘rock bottom’ kind of effect, that I can find some positive things to come out of it.

It’s given me some perspective, and it’s helped me come out of a sleepwalking time in my life. I feel what i’m missing in my life much more keenly (social isolation/ lack of friends, lack of passion, lack of purpose/drive/meaning in my life), but I’m also able to work on them to some extent for the first time in years.

That said, I know these take a lot of time and work to fix, but it’s hard not to look at the glacially slow progress i’ve made as ‘no progress in basically three months’, and sink back into the things-will-never-get-better-so-why-try kind of depression.

I’m gonna keep trying, though.

[douxreviews]

Star Trek: Discovery - ‘Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2′ Review

"Let's see what the future holds."

By nature I love brevity: Star Trek: Discovery delivers on the promises of the season in its dramatic finale that warps off into Season Three ready to try something new. My predictions were mostly correct, with a few surprises. Some of those surprises were substantially more welcome than others.

Last week's episode made us a whole lot of promises and set up a lot of things to happen here. All the emotional stakes of that episode hinged on the fulfillment of those promises and set-ups, though, so no matter what, if they didn't follow through we were going to feel cheated. I went into this finale with a small bit of trepidation that they might fake us out and not deliver, but those fears were happily quashed. If nothing else, I want to applaud the show for delivering on its promises, and for doing so in a way that provided entertainment and diversion for an hour and left me feeling mostly satisfied.

But, of course, I do have to talk about what went wrong. Most of this episode's problems, and indeed the whole season's problems, are the result of logical inconsistencies. For example, if they had a map of the red bursts the whole time, why couldn't they figure out where each burst was going to appear? Even if they didn't know which burst corresponded to which one on the map, after the first three they should have known the location of all seven. That was the main thing about the season as a whole that bothered me.

The biggest and most egregious problem in 'Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2' is the entire situation involving Cornwell and the torpedo. How contrived can you get, really? This seems to me to be the most stupid and pointless sacrifice since Captain America: The First Avenger, and it's certainly the dumbest thing this show has ever done. I can't even begin to fathom why anyone would think that little tiny door could do anything at all when we were told it would take out four decks/half the ship. If the door is so powerful, why isn't the whole ship made out of the same material? How is the window still intact after the blast? For that matter, why the actual heck did they put a window in a blast door? Even the reason Cornwell decided to stick around in that room with the torpedo was hopelessly contrived. Pike made some very good points about time travel and his future, and she dismissed them for no reason at all. Very disappointing and completely unnecessary. Jayne Brook and Admiral Cornwell deserve way better.

The second major issue involves Controlland and his death. First and foremost, if the Control AI was destroyed when Georgiou killed it, why do they even still need to go to the future? If destroying Control was as easy as magnetizing a whatever for a few minutes, why not focus your efforts on that rather than the time travel stuff? They even had a golden opportunity to solve all these problems and bring back some nice continuity at the same time. Why not just have Georgiou use the spores to send Controlland somewhere else, like Lorca did with Burnham way back in 'Context is for Kings'? Plus, the magnetizing the whatever solution is really dumb and sounds contrived.

All this makes it sound like I hated 'Sorrow II.' I didn't. It was largely entertaining, and despite those two major things that grated on me and a few other minor gripes, the finale did its job well. It managed partly to earn the melodrama of 'Sorrow I' and to wrap up the season's arcs in a neat and tidy manner. Let me dive further into the things I liked.

Firstly, Olatunde Osunsamni's direction was on point this week. His stylistic, swooping camera and weird, dynamic directorial choices are actually really well-suited to big action setpieces like this one. While I may not like his apparent vow to never allow the camera to be still at any moment, even in dialogue or other low-energy sequences, Osunsamni gets to infuse his energy here into a show that warrants it. On that same note, all the action was quite good and interesting to watch. The production values on this show continue to be absolutely through the roof, and it works really, really well.

I also loved, though it can very easily be dismissed as fan service, the ending with Pike, Spock, and the Enterprise. The show is certainly leaning into fan hopes for a show centered around them, for no clear reason. Clearly, they could very well do something like that, and it would be highly anticipated and probably very well received. It's ultimately up to the producers, but I really think that if they do intend to do it, it will have to be really far down the pipeline. If it were coming in the near future, we'd have heard something of it by now.

The portion of the end that deals with Discovery's supposed breaches of canon was a long time in coming. I think I'd made my peace that time travel would fix it all about a month ago, so bringing my feelings about it back is a bit difficult. If the writers had all this planned from the beginning, then kudos to them. If not, then at least they found a decent way to fix everything they'd broken. One of the things that's in the grand tradition of Star Trek is taking mistakes and discrepancies and using them for the benefit of later stories, so I'm quite pleased that this occurred here. Did they have to force it because it was necessary for the show? Yes. But let's not lose sight of the fact that it was necessary for the show.

A few surprises lurked in this episode, even though the resolution went more or less as anticipated. The first of these was that Georgiou was on the Disco as it went off into the wild blue yonder. I had expected, since Michelle Yeoh's Section 31 series is coming, that Georgiou would be left behind in the past in light of that. Not so here. This raises many questions about that Section 31 show, what Yeoh's role in it will be, and how she will play into DIS Season 3, so many that I won't go into them all here. Suffice it to say, I was surprised, and I will be interested to see where it goes from here.

Secondly, I was surprised at the arrival of everything the rest of the season had done, now coming back to help the Disco accomplish its mission. Although I suppose everything did have to be a part of a grand design like Pike and Spock have been saying all along, I was not expecting Siranna and the Kelpiens in particular. A nice touch, certainly, as was the timely arrival of L'Rell and her Klingon armada. Speaking Klingon under heavy makeup does tend to work much better when it's being yelled angrily at one's enemies in the heat of battle than it does when discussing Imperial politics while sitting at home. Plus, Mary Chieffo got to say 'Today is a good day to die' before the show left her behind.

So overall, I think I liked it. It did what it needed to do, and not a whole ton more. What more it did was mixed material, but so is this show in general. I left it feeling satisfied, and even excited for the road ahead. Take her out, folks. Let's see what she can do.

Pensees:

-Holy crap, that's a lot of shuttles. Voyager's jealous.

-I half expected Reno to die, and Po to go to the future. I'm not sad that those things didn't happen, though.

-Keep on being sassy as heck, Dr. Pollard.

-I thought Burnham and Spock's goodbye was just fine the first time, in the shuttlebay. At the end of the episode it was terribly overdone, although Ethan Peck did his darnedest to help it along.

-Is Anthony Rapp's return to the show for Season Three in doubt? They left his life still in danger at the end of the episode. I hope not; I like Stamets. His resolution with Culber felt a little out of place amid the chaos of the episode, though.

-Lots of visual cues to Star Trek: The Motion Picture in this episode, from Burnham's travel through time to the same streaky-light wormhole effect when the ship does the same.

-That really is a dang useful blast door. Voyager's jealous.

-Number One STILL doesn't have a canonical name. Why couldn't she just have given it in the debriefing scene. It's not hard!

-So Tyler has been made the head of Section 31 for now. I guess that means he'll definitely be in Yeoh's series, right?

-Clean-shaven Spock in uniform was great to see, and the shot that panned out from the bridge to the ship in space was a definite nod to 'The Cage.'

-Props to Jeff Russo for his awesome mix of the classic TOS theme and the DIS theme. I really like the music of this show in general.

Quotes:

Po: "First, I invoke diplomatic immunity for stealing this shuttle."

Reno: "I'm going, I'm going! Get off my ass! Sir! Get off my ass, sir!"

Saru: "Promise me you'll be safe." Everything: *continues exploding*

Burnham: "So you're asking me to take a leap of faith." Spock: "One that is only logical."

Controlland: "Where's my data?" Nhan, searching for the most useless response possible: "Hell!"

Controlland: "This doesn't have to be this hard!" Georgiou: "Not hard is boring, and I hate boring."

Number One: "Plans A and B didn't work. This is the Hail Mary part of the operation."

Burnham: "Find that person who seems farthest from you, and reach for them. Reach for them."

4.5 out of 6 really useful blast doors.

CoramDeo is a reviewer, not a bricklayer.

[sieben9]

“only you”/“an untold story” impressions

{Quick request to anyone reading: I’m watching OUaT for the first time, and I want to avoid spoilers. So, if you want to discuss something spoilery, I’d be grateful if you could start a new post for that. Thank you!}

Yes, both in one post. Mostly because I watched them in one go. And because they’re really just one long story, anyways.

please feel free to insert your own episode-relevant pun here

Before I get into anything else: NO MORE UNDERWORLD LIGHTING! I’d almost forgotten how much that stupid red filter bothered me, until I didn’t have to stare at it while going through my screenshots. Dobby is freeeee~

Anyways, to my intense surprise, especially after the mess that was “Last Rites”, I really liked this finale! Not as a season-finale, because it wasn’t, but it was a very solid, fun two-parter that feels like it should have aired halfway through the hiatus between seasons. (I have Opinions™ on the “season finale followed by a mostly-unrelated epilogue/setup for the next season” format, and not one of them is positive.) The setup for the next season did get me cautiously excited, though. Not quite the “holy crap, I have to watch that!” of the s4 finale, but still good.

Just for clarity’s sake: I will be referring to this two-parter as one episode, just for ease of conversation. I have not slept this weekend, and I refuse to juggle grammar.

OK, just so I have it out of my system:

Gay roadtrip!

“i know we spent the last ten episodes getting my boyfriend back from the dead, but there isn’t room for four in the bug, so bye!” — emma swan, apparently

My joyful little shipper heart aside, the Emma/Regina bits in this episode were just fantastic. From their little heart-to-heart about Regina missing Robin (and Emma actually properly empathising this time) to the oddly even more personal topic of Regina’s constant battle with her “evil” side, it was all that I might have wanted and more.

The scene also left me with a weird feeling, because on the one hand, sure, it’s hard to constantly have to censor a part of yourself in order to be accepted in the company of the people you love (and who love you), but on the other hand… if that part of yourself has “kill it with fire” as the first response to any and all annoyances, maybe, just maybe, that’s something that you should censor. That said, Regina, you should definitely make an appointment with Archie. That sounds like his cup of preferred beverage.

And now to maybe my least favourite part of the episode, so we get it over with… the actual “main” plot. Or the excuse plot, as I will call it, because, really, the whole “Henry destroys magic” thing never really felt like a credible threat. It was more something to get everyone into motion so they could do the actually interesting stuff.

Don’t get me wrong, Henry snapping after losing yet another person—even by proxy through his mother—is perfectly understandable and realistic. That he’d turn his anger on magic as a whole isn’t exactly out of left field, either. He’s done this before, after all. At least this time, he didn’t try to blow up the magic well. I like that well, recent drama notwithstanding.

instead, we get the reverse-cornucopia of magic, apparently

But the plotline itself seemed far too rushed and low-energy to really grab my attention. And the resolution was… ::sigh:: there’s a dilemma for me, here, because I unabashedly love cheesy “The Power Is In You” moments, and the scene at the well did hit that button. It just felt unearned, which is why I couldn’t really enjoy it. (Also, I don’t know what New Yorkers are like, but I know how people from around here would have reacted to a performance act like that. Ah, well. Never Mind All That.)

the real magic was convincing so many people to throw away their spare change

I don’t even know what to say about the Dragon cameo. Nice to see he’s not dead, after all, but everything else in that scene... Nick, if you’d be so kind?

OK, that’s over with. Luke-warm excuse plot with some nice elements to it. I’m not sure if Violet needed to be in this, but I guess Henry needed someone to talk to.

Just as a pick-me-up, I want to give a shoutout to one of the best-executed bits of comedy on this show so far:

“Guy on the third floor is involved in some kind of satanistic ritual and dumped his food on the floor. Pretty polite and tips well, though. 8/10”

Just… very good performance and comedic timing on both parts. I liked it.

Aaaaand over to the “they got sucked through a portal. Again.” part of the episode.

ah, zeppelins; the easiest shorthand for “alternate universe” there ever was

I do kind of like the sound of the Land of Untold Stories and I really, really hope this gets a little more fleshed out in the coming season. How do people end up there when they’re not sucked through Yet Another Portal Accident? Is this what happens to all stories that haven’t been written down by an Author, yet? Is Harry Potter in there somewhere?

So many questions, so little screentime… I’m not sure if I would have liked 8 episodes of stumbling around in this new world, but I would have liked to find out if I did. …listen, it made sense in my head.

This plotline included what is probably my biggest complaint about the writing this episode: Snow selling out Belle. Just… with little to no hesitation. Which is why blaming the writing and not her. If this was supposed to be some kind of big, dramatic moral dilemma, I expect we’d have seen at least some semblance of guilt on her part. Instead, she just told this clearly violent individual about the defenceless, sleeping-cursed pregnant woman within nanoseconds of him threatening Hook. I know Snow’s characterisation has been a bit inconsistent recently, but come on. This isn’t her, and I am disappointed that the show even tried to sell this to me.

And I think I would have believed the version where Snow just blurts out the information about Belle and later feels awful, because holy crap, how could she? (There’s… some precedent for poor judgment on Snow’s part when it comes to sharing information, after all.) But this wasn’t even a Thing for her. I just… ::frustrated noises:: why, show?

So, yeah, the Bad Guy kidnaps Belle. Well done, there. By the way, wasn’t it incredibly difficult at some point to make portals to the Land Without Magic? I get why portalling to Storybrooke would be easier—it’s got magic, after all. But hotel room 318, New York? I guess you could argue that the crystal brought the magic along, but still.

i giggled at this bit, i’m afraid. fellow cat owners will understand.

So, I’m not sure what the “intended” reading here is, but I find it interesting that Rumple seems to understand himself so much less than Hyde apparently does (prediction: they totally know each other; mostly because Rumple knows everyone—guy gets around…) So he went to protect the magic crystal, because what else would the thundering teleport-vortex of doom have come to steal? As has been noted before, Rumple doesn’t really go after people through their loved ones, with one very recent exception, and he had to ask his dad for help to come up with that one. The idea that someone would kidnap Belle to get whatever the hell they want from him, doesn’t seem to occur, even though it has happened multiple times, already. Just… maybe you should have kept that box in your coat pocket, my friend.

Yeah… this is sure going to be fun, I can already tell. What does Hyde want with Storybrooke, anyway? It’s been established that it has one of the least-fun-to-rule populations, and everyone and their dog has magic. Seems like a bad pick, overall.

You do you, though.

And from Jekyll and Hyde, we finally come to this…

that still looks so very unpleasant.

I’m… ambivalent about the personality split, and I really want to wait and see how it turns out. Clearly, this is a good way to have the Evil Queen around again without also having to sacrifice Regina’s redemption arc, which I’m grateful for, believe me. It’s bad enough to have one of my faves on a redemption-yoyo—no need to add a second one.

is it bad that i missed her?

OK, look I’ve seen this Star Trek episode. Ten bucks that it turns out the Evil Queen isn’t “just” Regina’s evil side, she also got many of her more forceful, but overall positive character traits, and both are less without the other, leading to them re-fusing or something. (Yes, wrong fandom. So sue me.)

…obviously, I’m willing to be surprised, but I like this version a lot more than the idea that you can just siphon out the “evil” parts of yourself. (Even Hyde wasn’t really Jekyll’s “evil” side—just the collection of his socially unacceptable traits made flesh. I only read an abridged version of that book, and that a while ago, but Jekyll still seemed like a bit of an ass to me.)

While we’re here: shoutout to Snow and her flask of cocoa-fortifier. That got a surprised (and amused) laugh out of me.

Also, do we want to talk about whether or not it’s healthy to be so at odds with a part of yourself that you think killing it is the best way to deal with it or…? ‘cause, honestly, I would like to talk about that. Seems like Regina is a lot less OK than she’d like others and herself to think…

yeah, that’s not a “finally i’m free!” face

So, cautiously optimistic about s6 so far. The villains definitely seem interesting, and this episode was a good reminder of what I liked about the character dynamic in the first place.

An addendum about 5B:

Goddamn, but this season dragged. There seems to be simultaneously too much plot for too little time and not enough plot to fill ten episodes. This is probably based in my personal biases for and against certain characters (and the fact that I was insanely busy and couldn’t watch the season all in one go), but… yeah, I’m kind of relieved it’s over, to be honest.

[actionfigurebullshit]

Time?

It’s not a new idea.

FIN

...

Sorry, I just thought that’d make a nice, neat post. I’ll move on. What I mean to say is that I’ve had this... feeling, of late, that it might be time to make an attempt to continue “Chaos Corridor”. It’s not the first time in the past couple of years that I’ve felt this way, so I’m not sure there’s that much difference. I was using unused phones from friends to do those last animations, but a little over a year ago, I joined the 21st century and got a smartphone of my own. I’ve done a few animations on it, since. A couple posts back is something cryptic about “P. Carr”. I had an idea to do an AFB-ish take on Star Trek Picard. I had the Farmer Picard action figure... What if Pappy Gabel was from a maternal line, and that his last name was actually Carr?

Anyway, not much came of that, though the animation appeared in two TC videos, the most recent one being “4000 Posts-B”, which also had A Very Extra Special Cameo by the AFB gang. It wasn’t just special because it was that set of action figures, but because it was also the realization of something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, and that was do my own stop motion animation from those ABC Saturday morning bumpers.

The P. Carr animation was mildly disappointing, but there wasn’t much thought put into it, and while there wasn’t much put into the “Bumper” stuff, I did plan it out like I did in AFB- at least, as far as I can remember doing it. Because the bumper clip had audio, and things connected with the audio, I was able to look at each second of that audio clip and think how I can spread out that action across 10 frames. A reminder- it’s called Action Figure Bullshit for a reason, so 10 is pretty good for me. AFB was supposed to be the spiritual successor to an older project I did on VHS which had a setting on it allowing me to do some awesome four frames a second animation. WOO! It was actually awesome because it meant that it was a guaranteed shot. I had another camcorder before this one- probably better in many respects, but you had to do the animation by clicking the record button twice. A little record animation would appear and you could use that to time the shots. Overall, my animation fps was superior, but the shots were inconsistent. Sometimes shots were too long, or didn’t make it in because there wasn’t enough time between pressing the record button. If I suddenly found myself in 2002 again, and forced to remake this stuff, I’d be tempted to animate things a little more carefully between quarter second and then fast forward the video tape in a way that wouldn’t garble the screen, and record THAT VCR fast forwarding through the video and add your audio. For analog stuff, that’d be a nightmare and would require an impossible amount of perfect timing... at least, for what I had- aging home entertainment system components for lower class rural America in the year 2002...

I still think about making videos that way, though, all the different things I could do with it today if I dared.

Anyway, AFB was never meant to be more than just a tiny bit better than those animations. My old 2007 digital camcorder could take low resolution pictures. It seemed the easiest way to take images- it has a remote, it goes on my tripod just fine, and I have oodles of ways to import and fashion those pictures into animations. As I continued to work on it, the animation got... SLIGHTLY BETTER!

So, being out of AFB action for so long, I thought aiming for 10 was a bit lofty, but it was just the easiest thing to do. How long does it take for the characters in the ABC claymation to turn around when the music starts? A second? Okay, how can I have Moxie, Greta, and... Douglas? Mimic that in 10 frames. It was a good way to get into it.

I was a little unsure with the rest, and I wasn’t going to worry about making the animation too complicated, so Trent merely spins around with the “drumsticks” rather than, you know, hitting it like a fucking drum like he should. Then it devolves into silliness, which is a hallmark of my animation- go back and watch AFB. When a scene goes on for a while, it will end with something bizarre and silly. Case in point, in some of the earliest animations in the TV room before Moxie and Newton arrive, Greta starts laughing, and then flies away, and it’s quite obvious Douglas and Trent are confused by what just took place. That was one of the first animations done during that “film bonanza” of October 2015. That date in Back to the Future, Part II? On that date, I was filming this stuff, though I think I was several days past that scene...

All that filming actually became my much needed exercise. It’s very physically demanding to film all that stuff. The lowest weight I’ve been in six years came from those days. Naturally, filming those 40 frames was extremely taxing on my neglected body. I was shaking towards the end...

But I was so glad I did it. I put aside doubt and rumination and just went for it, one and done, we’ll see what happens. 20 minutes later, I had my frames, and when I got to my last cut, I ended up with 10fps, even though I made 40 frames for 5 seconds. Somehow, it works. That’s the nice thing about not having to be too precise with these animations. It’s a lot like pairing music and visuals- there are so many different ways the pairing can pop. I found something that worked.

I’m in between creative projects, and fearful of falling into a depression since I just finished a project a few days ago- all those pages from Purp4e that actually got TC to 4,000 posts. I’ve thought about a lot of intermediate things I could do before trying to make an attempt at Chaos Corridor Continues, but what if all that just ends up being hoops to jump through, stumbling blocks? Why not seize this moment and just go right into it?

For sure, there’s prep work, but really, we’re talking a few minutes, and then when it’s film time, it’s like Vamos Pest Management- it’s completely set up, used, and then broken down. That will have to be a condition of doing this- there will be a strict time limit, and in order to meet it, clean up time has to be considered. This is kind of discouraging to me because I like having those moments to really space out and think about what I’m going to do before I go do it. Perhaps there’s no need to do that with Chaos Corridor since, like the ABC bumper commercial, it’s all put together already- the audio part, anyway. I may recruit the Trent actor to do some sweet audio mixing with me when the time comes, but I think the placement of the audio is going to be the same, and if it isn’t, refer to what I said earlier about how the animation has many ways it can fit in with the audio. It’ll work, no matter what happens... or... maybe I just bomb at it. I’ve had a few failed attempts- the animation just doesn’t come together, or despite some supposed production, it doesn’t feel right, it doesn’t feel like it’s time to go to the next scene. For whatever reason, it just doesn’t work, and sometimes that’s all there is to it. If it keeps breaking down, then I know now is not the time and I can move on.

Oh, but if it works... like I said, it’s all set up. There’s quite a bit that takes place in this scene. This will keep me busy for a long time, another reason I want to get to it now, rather than later. I don’t want this to be something I’m still thinking about in the future. Do I want to make other AFB videos? You bet. This one. Please, no.

...

Here’s an idea:

PREP WORK

I’ll get the box. I’ll get the other box. I’ll clear the cheap Wal-Mart coffee table off. I will figure out a way to store the big box down here. I will track down the AFB notebook, I will...

What else do I need to do to get filming immediately?

Let’s see how far away from “ready” I am by this time tomorrow.

[marsnmango]

Things that take me out of fanfiction (as a fanfiction writer)

Aside from the obvious (poor grammar, formatting errors, etc.) these are a few of the things that make me pause and reconsider whether or not I really want to continue reading the thing that I am reading. 

Mis-characterizations; it’s impossible to know with 100% certainty how a character is going to react in all scenarios, but some things are tough to overlook. Characters that are incredibly strong struggling with a weak enemy, for example- that sort of thing can be done, but you’d better set up the context correctly. Or it can throw (me) your reader off. If there’s a reason why your character’s behavior is diverging from what is canonically accurate, explain it! Don’t be afraid to just straight up say it. People (including myself) like to know what they’re in for when they start a fic. 

Inaccuracy. Now it is fiction, so lots of liberties can be taken with this, but if you cannot adequately describe something that your character should know how to do... it’s going to stand out. For example, if your character is a working adult, but you are not, and you do not know how to go to the bank and get cash out of it... Maybe avoid writing that specific scenario. Write around it. Describe it vaguely. 

Politics. You can tackle real issues through writing, if you know how to do it and can do it well. But please, please do not have one character mention [Real world (usually American) political figure] and have everyone else in the scene unanimously agree and rip on that political figure. Unless it’s something completely in-character and reasonable for everyone involved... Even if I agree with everything being said, it’s just annoying. 

Poor/Unrealistic Dialogue. Colloquialism is something that is naturally ingrained in every culture, but please try to keep in mind the differences in a conversation between 2 thirty year olds and 2 teenagers. When I read a story featuring a supposed adult, who speaks as if he is a freshman in high school giving a power point presentation for the first time... it’s. weird

Memes. That’s right, I said memes. I love memelords just as much as the next guy, but unless it’s a story that is very clearly focused on something that would involve that subject matter, I don’t want memes. First of all, fanfiction becomes outdated, fast. A Damn Daniel meme is going to 1. date your story and 2. completely throw me for a loop in your story that is based in Ancient Egypt. The 2 second chuckle from a handful of readers is not worth it. 

Non-existent/Unrealistic Consequences. Problems do not magically go away overnight. In order to avoid leaving any loose ends, list off the primary list of problems that your protagonists are going through. Then when you write the conclusion, double check that it eliminates or addresses each of these problems; whether or not they’re going to persist after the story ends or whatever else the deal might be. If a character struggles with addiction (for example)--make sure the conclusion mentions something about how the character is going to handle (or has handled) this problem. 

Handling tough subject matter lazily. This is tricky for anyone, but if you have never experienced a traumatic situation, but your intention is to portray this situation as realistically as possible... do some research. If it’s a little outside of the realm of reality (parents murdered by shark wolves), research the stages of grief. How people within your protagonist’s age group cope with it and how they don’t, and whether or not your Granted, not all fanfiction strives to be as accurate as possible when it comes to trauma. Some people just genuinely love to torment the hell out of characters they like, and that’s fine- just preface it in the tags or summary. Trigger warnings help as well, that way people know to avoid reading about things that may draw overwhelming or unpleasant feelings. Or a past trauma, worst case scenario. 

Inconsistency. Your dragon-queen alpha wizard raven way had the regeneration ability 3 chapters ago, but now that she lost her hand it’s suddenly the end of the world? If this is the case, there needs to be a reason why it is true this time but wasn’t every other time. You can bend the rules, but make sure there’s a reason (even a ham-fisted one) why they’re being bent. 

Poor/Lazy Characterization. This sort of goes hand-in-hand with inconsistency. If a character is an asshole, who is proudly an asshole and nothing but an asshole... he’s not going to tip his waitress? He’s not going to internally monologue about how the servers work hard and deserve to be paid well, unless he is genuinely a decent person on the inside. Even if the author does this in an attempt to allude to the fact that he is going to become a better person later on, there are better ways to go about it. Your asshole-character would likely be more subtle in his approach, or use misdirection. Throwing a crumpled up $1 bill at a waitress is far more likely and expected of bratty/asshole behavior... “But at least they left a tip?” Not-so-Slow Burns. If you sign up for a slow burn, it might be helpful to focus on the slice-of-life behavior and how the characters gradually get closer throughout. If you rush straight into the romance, it’s not a very slow burn. They don’t generally start feeling doki-doki true love by the third total encounter they’ve ever had in their entire lives. Sometimes, maybe. But handle with care, and keep in mind that people need time to change. If they’re refraining from a relationship or whatever because MC 1 is anti-humanity, your MC isn’t going to become a people-loving pope overnight. A timeskip might help you out there, but it’s risky if it’s unexpected or random. I AM NOT THE FUN POLICE. In the end, even if you borrow the characters- your story is your story. I’ve done almost every single thing on this list, some things more frequently than others depending on the nature of my story. You are allowed to do whatever you want and have as much fun as you want. I’m offering this list mostly to the people who want to receive feedback, because I’ve been there. You’ve finally got your grammar down. You’re working on your vocabulary and formatting and yet..... you still don’t feel any growth or significant change in your audience. It can be frustrating. Making a note of these things and how often you do them will help you to gain a more enthusiastic audience about your work. People like to read fanfiction that feels as though it could stand on its own. This is especially helpful for those fanfiction authors who want to publish their own novels someday.  Also, not all of this falls on the responsibility of the author. If an author consistently updates their tags/summary/notes, etc, then there’s no reason that a reader should walk into a Slow-Burn and expect hasty passionate smut in chapter 2. Or read a story titled “THE GORE OF WAR” and complain about...y’know, gore. Most readers tend to have a pretty good grasp on what the atmosphere of a story is going to by the first paragraph. And the atmosphere may change over time, which is fine! Just keep your readers in mind before your lollipops & sunshine rom-com becomes a last minute zombie apocalypse. Maybe make a note of that in the notes; give people a chance to bail, and trust me, you want them to bail. 1 more hit on your work isn’t worth the 3-paged flame you’re about to receive.  Above all, just have fun and keep writing. The more you write and the more willing you are to constantly adapt to feedback/growth, the better your work is going to become! Nobody starts off writing like R.R. Martin. He probably started off with really shitty star trek slash. 

[impromptu-manifesto]

The Future of Travel in the age of COVID

The Future of Travel After the Coronavirus Pandemic

Travel and tourism will be changed forever. We asked seven leading thinkers for their predictions.

BY

JAMES FALLOWS, VIVEK WADHWA,  PICO IYER, ROLF POTTS, ELIZABETH BECKER, JAMES CRABTREE, ALEXANDRE DE JUNIAC

JUNE 13, 2020, 12:00 PM

EDITOR’S NOTE:

As we enter the first summer of this new era of pandemics, a tenuous easing of travel restrictions has begun. This month, the countries of the European Union will reopen their internal borders, and they plan to allow travel from outside the block some time in July. Singapore and China have begun permitting essential travel between them, but only for passengers who test negative for the coronavirus, use a contact-tracing app, and don’t deviate from their itinerary. Iceland will allow tourists, but it plans to test them for the virus at the airport.

Grounded for many months, airlines are beefing up their summer schedules—though the number of flights will be a fraction of their pre-pandemic frequency. Airports are still mostly ghost towns (some have even been taken over by wildlife), and international long-distance travel is all but dead. Around the globe, the collapse of the tourist economy has bankrupted hotels, restaurants, bus operators, and car rental agencies—and thrown an estimated 100 million people out of work.

With uncertainty and fear hanging over traveling, no one knows how quickly tourism and business travel will recover, whether we will still fly as much, and what the travel experience will look like once new health security measures are in place. One thing is certain: Until then, there will be many more canceled vacations, business trips, weekend getaways, and family reunions.

To look beyond the summer and help us think about how the pandemic will permanently change the way we travel, Foreign Policy asked seven prominent experts to look into their crystal balls.

The Collapse in Travel Will Bring Long-Term Changes

by James Crabtree, associate professor in practice at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore and the author of The Billionaire Raj.

Just as mass unemployment leaves indelible scars on labor markets, so the current global travel collapse will bring long-term changes to patterns of international movement for both business and pleasure.Countries with strong pandemic records will deploy them as tourism marketing strategies: Discover Taiwan!

Airlines and hoteliers hope nascent “travel bubbles”—small groups of countries reopening borders only among themselves—and “green lanes” for pre-screened travelers, such as those with antibodies showing immunity to COVID-19, will allow a gradual re-opening. They also hope that roughly normal travel will then resume next year. More likely is that a new system of interlocking safe zones will operate for the foreseeable future, or at least until a vaccine is widely deployed.

Travel will normalize more quickly in safe zones that coped well with COVID-19, such as between South Korea and China, or between Germany and Greece. But in poorer developing countries struggling to manage the pandemic, such as India or Indonesia, any recovery will be painfully slow.

All this will change the structure of future global travel. Many will opt not to move around at all, especially the elderly. Tourists who experiment with new locations in their safe zones or home countries will stick to new habits. Countries with strong pandemic records will deploy them as tourism marketing strategies—discover Taiwan! Much the same will be true for business, where ease of travel and a new sense of common destiny within each safe zone will restructure investment along epidemiological lines.

The Pandemic Caused Us to Fast-Forward Into the Future

by Vivek Wadhwa, co-author of From Incremental to Exponential: How Large Companies Can See the Future and Rethink Innovation, to be published in September.

Over the past month, I’ve spent time with more CEOs than I would meet in a year. They were relaxed, engaged, and attentive. We could brainstorm on ideas for them to reinvent their companies without having gatekeepers or naysayers torpedo the discussions. These were the most productive talks I’ve had with C-level executives—and as you may have guessed, this was all done from the comfort of our homes.Our business meetings, family vacations, and leisure activities will increasingly move into virtual worlds.

Two months ago, it would have been inconceivable to be meeting over Skype or Zoom; now it is the norm. The pandemic caused us to fast-forward ten years into the future and there is no turning back. This is the way a lot of business communications will stay.

We may not realize it, but the videoconferencing technologies we are using are right out of science fiction. Remember the TV series The Jetsons? We now have the videophones that George and Judy used.

The next leap forward will come from virtual reality, which is advancing at breakneck speed and will take us by surprise. Our business meetings, family vacations, and leisure activities will increasingly move into virtual worlds. A trip to Tahiti or Mars, perhaps? The holodecks from Star Trek are on their way.

Travel Could Become Unaffordable for Many

by Elizabeth Becker, the author of Overbooked: The Exploding Business of Travel and Tourism.

Overnight, much of the world went from over-tourism to no tourism. Since then, locals have seen how their lives have improved without those insane crowds: clear skies with vistas stretching for miles, a drastic reduction of litter and waste, clean shorelines and canals, and a return of wildlife.Whatever our income level, travel will take a greater slice of our disposable income.

But business after business went broke without those tourists, revealing how much the global economy depends on non-stop travel. The economic devastation will mean far fewer people can afford to travel. Whatever our income level, travel will take a greater slice of our disposable income.

So be prepared for two dramatically different trends.

Some national and local governments will redesign their tourism strategies to keep down crowds, keep more money in the local economy, and enforce local regulations including those protecting the environment. Many health protocols will become permanent.

Other governments will compete for the shrinking tourist dollar by racing to the bottom, allowing the travel industry to regulate itself, using deep discounts to fill hotels and airplanes and revive over-tourism.

Smart travelers will trust places with good governance and health systems. They will take fewer trips and stay longer. They will see this pandemic as a forecast of what’s to come from the climate crisis. They will act like responsible citizens as well as passionate travelers.

The Freedom to Travel Is Vital to the Post-Pandemic Recovery

by Alexandre de Juniac, the director-general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) and a former CEO of Air France-KLM.

It’s too early for long-term predictions, but when the first travelers return to the skies, they will find measures that have become commonplace adapted to flying: reduced personal contact, enhanced sanitization, temperature checks, and social distancing. And where sufficient distance isn’t possible—onboard aircraft or in airports—masks will be required.Measures that have become commonplace will be adapted to flying: reduced personal contact, enhanced sanitization, temperature checks, and social distancing.

Within days of 9/11—the last great inflection point for aviation—flying resumed securely. But two decades later, we are still ironing out some of the inconsistencies and inefficiencies of security procedures. This time, months of being mostly grounded have given the airline industry more time to plan and prepare.

With the support of IATA and others, the International Civil Aviation Organization developed a global restart plan to keep people safe when traveling. Restart measures will be bearable for those who need to travel, with universal implementation the priority. It will give governments and travelers the confidence that the system has strong biosafety protections. And it should give regulators the confidence to remove or adjust measures in real time as risk levels change and technology advances.

The freedom to travel will be vital to the post-pandemic recovery. My hope is that we will come out of the crisis with a better passenger experience by moving people through airports more efficiently and increasing confidence in health safety. I am optimistic that this will be a winning result for travelers, governments, the airline industry, and the economy.

We Forgot How Fundamental Travel Was to Modern Life

by James Fallows, a staff writer for The Atlantic and the co-author, with Deborah Fallows, of Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America.

Because the process of travel was so routine and often so aggravating, people of the pre-pandemic era rarely concentrated on how fundamental that process—high-volume, high-speed, relatively low-cost human movement—was to the very idea of being modern.What might be lost with a long interruption in easy-connectedness is only now becoming evident.

Students took it for granted that they could aspire to an academic program in a different region, country, or continent—and still go back to visit their families. People who had emigrated permanently, or left their countries for a few years of work or adventure, knew that their homeland was still in relatively quick reach. Children saw their grandparents up close. Families could gather for weddings, births, graduations, funerals. Businesspeople from remote locations went to conventions and conferences to make deals and coordinate plans. The world’s cultural and touristic attractions became open to people from all corners of the globe. For Americans, air travel and international exposure were once such rarities that the now-absurd-sounding term “jet set” actually meant something when it was coined in the 1950s. The commodification of travel allowed people of ordinary means to compose a “bucket list” of sights they wanted to see—and to assume they’d be able to.

Before the lockdown, it was easy to recite all the harm mass travel had done, from the throngs overwhelming Venice or Machu Picchu to the standardization of hotel-and-airport life worldwide. What might be lost with a long interruption in easy-connectedness is only now becoming evident.

There Will Be a Boom in Domestic Travel

by Rolf Potts, the author of four books, including the bestselling travel-philosophy primer Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel.

One startling detail about the ongoing coronavirus pandemic is that areas with concentrated outbreaks are called hot spots—which is exactly the same phrase the commercial travel industry has used to denote popular and fashionable destinations. This uncomfortable parallel reminds us that travel, in our globalized era, enabled the spread of the virus in a historically unprecedented way.I doubt the desire to go to so-called hot spots or top-ten-list destinations will drive the next wave of travel.

For many people, travel is synonymous with vacations—and that’s fine, but somehow I don’t see vacationers as the model for post-pandemic travel. A constant source of travel headlines in recent years has been tourist overcrowding in places such as Venice and Bali, and I doubt the desire to go to so-called hot spots or top-ten-list destinations will drive the next wave of travel. It will be the desire simply to go, and to figure things out along the journey. Think road trip or backpacking adventure, not package tour.

No doubt the new world of travel will see a boom in domestic travel. Many will go by van or recreational vehicle—and that makes sense, given that one is a lot more self-contained when one travels that way. International travel will also return—and it will be pioneered not just by savvy backpackers and independent travelers going on their own pace and seeing how the journey plays out, but also by working-class folks around the world seeking out family back home, whether that’s in Nigeria, Ecuador, or Poland.

We Will Keep Traveling Because Curiosity Cannot Be Expunged

by Pico Iyer, the author of 15 books that have been translated into 23 languages, most recently Autumn Light and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan.

For all our good intentions, we are creatures of habit—and of increasingly diminished attention spans. And COVD-19 has reminded us how little we can confidently say about tomorrow, or even tonight. But my suspicion is that, for better and worse, we will be traveling—and living and making predictions—in June 2021 much as we did in June 2019. For better and worse, we will be traveling in June 2021 much as we did in June 2019.

To some extent, we have to. I was obliged to take three flights in the middle of the pandemic, from Osaka to Santa Barbara, where my 88 year-old mother had just emerged from hospital. A few weeks earlier, I had to fly from Japan to California—for a day—for a public event to which I had long been contractually committed. 

It would be a blessing for the environment if we all traveled less. And anxiety about travel will be greater next season, and prices higher. 

But globalism, having spread from person to person for so long, cannot be reversed. 

Cultural curiosity cannot be expunged. My trips to North Korea have shown me what happens when people cannot get to see the world first-hand.

[the-no-good-moonite]

cortana, find “how to remove STD”

So yeah here’s my thoughts on Star Trek Discovery as of the ninth episode:

its ugly, sounds like trash, is terribly badly written and probably smells weird if in a physical format

but allow me to elaborate a bit a lot

the sound and visuals are the smaller problem admittedly; I like plenty of things that looked arse when they were first made and look like double arse now, so if the writing wasn’t so bad I would be willing to accept this as a flaw of the series and concentrate on the rest of it. as it stands...

the music just kind of being “there” is nothing new (see: large chunks of the other series), but it’s still disappointing. the sound design being terrible on top of that? that’s trash. nearly every time a ship opens fire we get minor variations on generic and ill-fitting turbolaser sounds... I mean come the fuck on. you don’t want to be restricted by tradition, go nuts, but if that’s the best you’ve got to offer you shouldn’t have 

(I realise that choice is likely a result of a directive from on high and not entirely the sound team’s doing, but it’s still executed poorly)

as for art direction... well, John Eaves is a very poor choice for how much they’re giving to him (most of starfleet it looks like? not sure who’s doing the klingons but what little I can see of them isn’t impressing me either). I don’t hate his stuff outright like some people do, but he’s very “safe” and has exactly one aesthetic that has worn out for me and compares badly to what they’re making it contemporary to here

the art direction in general is quite bad though - there’s so much nebulous shit that glows blue in the same kind of way that it legitimately confuses as to whether or not it is the same thing - and the way it’s all shot is boring and unremarkable at best. 

(and oh look, it’s another trek villain who has a colour scheme of mostly metals and neon green. get the fuck out of here)

the... space fight choreography (not sure what else to call it?) is absolutely the worst part though, it’s almost claustrophobic, everything’s jammed together like it happening in a bloody fish tank. the camera has no great desire to give us a clear view of what’s happening, or of any object other than the discovery and the ship of the dead. they almost appear to be going out of their way to avoid giving a clear look at anything else, which makes me think they’re not being given the time or budget to make models that will withstand close examination... which would be expected, but still laughable as ever

the spore drive and all the effects associated with it are ugly as sin and conceptually terrible also; I will accept no dissent on this point

sets and props are kinda “eh”, but i’ve not seen anything overtly wobble, and that’s apparently the only metric that matters so uh, good job there

so! the writing. the horrible, horrible writing.

I’m going to mostly ignore the actual dialog here, because while it is deserving of flak, it’s mostly stock phrases and interactions you’ve seen significantly better or worse versions of. so not a lot to actually say about it. I don’t like much of it and the attempts at humour are pretty lame.

what I take issue with is the overall construction of it... like they’re doing a “maybe the federation isn’t right about how it does things?” kind of thing and im onboard with that, asking questions on if the federation is really what it presents itself as has potential. but they’re not actually asking any specific questions.

and this kind of attitude pervades the whole show; there’s vague noises about stuff - maybe both sides are wrong - or whatever and the odd “aren’t we explorers?” but ultimately the show has little to no opinion on any of it (or doesn’t yet anyway), just making enough of an effort to try and get you to think it does, and then let you fill in the answer you agree with most... 

if it sounds like im leading in to a “intellectually hollow centrist liberal” kind of comparison, you fucking bet I am, because that’s pretty much what it feels like to me

I mean I expect someone’s going to try and claim they’re just going for moral ambiguity, but I struggle to think of many actual examples of that in anything, and it DEFINITELY looses any claim to such when you have characters being told that actually no, Their War Crimes Were Entirely Justified and then nobody says any different

(star trek has no substantive claim on moral consistency, but that’s just fucking indefensible, and it shouldn’t be left even slightly ambiguous if Lorca was in the right for saying that. which is kind of a recurring problem with that character, contradictory as that may appear for me to say that right after my previous comment...)

then you’ve got the portrayal of the klingons as man-eating space orks... who are doing a holy war... even if that didn’t conflict horribly with the (for star trek) more complex portrayals of klingons in the past, on it’s own it feels like it’s undermining the claims to progressiveness  just a little bit 

(well it’s part holy war and part MQGA [Make Qo'noS Great Again] but you know what I mean)

and plotwise now we’re doing... voyager? maybe in the mirror universe? I don’t know. I guess they won’t stick with it for long enough to redo voyager’s worst mistakes but why am I having SG:U flashbacks all of a sudden

funnily enough I actually like SG:U more than discovery, though that may be partly not having watched it since it aired

lost my train of thought here, uh, characters bad?

or some characters bad anyway. I like maybe half of them to some degree actually, despite the dialog and how inconsistent the portrayal of nearly everyone is in between - or within - any episode (another old problem for trek, but it’s really grating with the format here)

there’s plenty to criticise though; i’m really unsure the writers have any clear idea of what Tilly’s “deal” is (only socially awkward? on a spectrum? just “weird”? who can say!) or if Stamets is an asshole or a just good-hearted grump... there’s other things like that. maybe they’ve detailed stuff in interviews, but the show itself is terrible at communicating any clear intent

but Michael and Voq’s fake personality Ash are definitely the worst characters, so i’ll focus on them

I will maintain that Michael’s backstory is rubbish, making her Spock’s secret sister is amazingly unnecessary rubbish. on top of that, we’re told she’s a top of the line member of starfleet which is then immediately undercut by her doing something stupid and reckless that almost gets her killed (after which she then presumably irradiates everything between sickbay and the bridge...) followed by doing something stupid and reckless that gets a lot of people killed and starts a war! this is arguably the most prominent trait of the character

she kind of comes off as a suicidal maniac, is my point.  Captain Georgiou is quick to jump to a suicidal option too (and im just gonna say... most prominent asian person in the series to date... suggests a suicide attack...) 

does this version of starfleet just not do psych tests until you hit admiral? of the two that have actually done things we’ve had two walk into obvious traps, but one of them seems comparatively well adjusted

anyway, so we’ve got Michael, a pet character of some writer who changes personality every other scene and totally not Voq, we swear and Ash. who is about the most blandly likeable love interest possible, and definitely Voq infiltrating starfleet, how long are they gonna drag this secret cylon constructed memories bullshit out just bloody kill me already and also a survivor of sexual abuse (and torture) with PTSD. 

they heavily implied this was the case when they introduced the character, and then in episode 9 it was confirmed explicitly by the character in question... that’s all fine, feels like a bit of a cheap grab so they can be a “mature“ story but let’s see how it plays out... and oh.

they went and showed (what was framed as but aren’t necessarily) the events in question. this is, at best, tasteless and inappropriate

now, i’m not going to say they’re going to handle this in the worst way possible, but what they’ve done so far is making me really fucking uncomfortable! I do not have faith that this will resolve even remotely well

and then there’s the whole thing where his memories are likely 100% manufactured as cover, which has a good chance of giving this whole situation an unpleasant taste all on it’s own

I also really had no need to see these new klingons naked anyway, or any naked klingon really, and in context cable drama nudity is absolutely the worst thing they could’ve copied from game of thrones without thinking about it

anyway, that’s [however many, I don’t want to check] badly formatted and often grammatically incorrect words to say: 

The show is bad. You disagree? Ok. I disagree with you. Now nobody is happy. I would prefer to be happy. I am not.

Goodnight.

[games-benedict]

Destiny 2 Is As Beautiful As Ever

Destiny 2 is out. I’m not sure what I’m hoping to find there. At this point, it’s pretty clear Bungie’s never going to make the Destiny game I want. But I’m going back nonetheless because 1) the guns still feel great and 2) there’s some damn pretty stuff to see.

After getting to spend a fair bit of time with the game last night I ended up with quite a few screenshots, so rather than go on a long rant about how this series is still a mess, I’ll try to keep my list of grievances to a minimum and focus instead on some of the cool world building that happens in the game despite itself.

There are all different types of science fiction, but I think Destiny’s version tends to come off as inconsistent and off the wall. But really it just reminds me of the illustrations artists would do for old sci-fi paper backs or even astronomy coffee table books. It’s not built around a particular technological question, or hypotheticals about life in the future. Instead, the game’s approach is to simply take the Wikipedia page for a planet or astronomical phenomenon, dream about it, and then start throwing lines and colors on a page. On the surface, Mass Effect Andromeda seemed to be doing the same thing, but in reality the results ended up feeling much more engineered and modular; the difference between scanning a planet from above and painting it from below.

Destiny’s backgrounds are great. Especially because they’re always balanced with a middle ground you can actually get to and nearby objects that contrast in volume and help frame the vista ahead.

The early part of Destiny 2 veers heavily into Lord of the Rings and I sort of dig that.

Bungie knows how to take good looking scenes and really make them pop by adding dramatic lighting effects. The Sleeping Beauty bramble cave below a pedestrian looking aluminum silo is also cool.

Whatever you wanna call it--instagramification, neon-drenching, etc.--I think it works and helps give Destiny 2 a visual identity apart from the first game. Fighting uphill in the woods below a pink and teal sky against camping aliens is better than a lot of the alternatives. 

I've really missed this series’ skyboxes.

Titan is definitely my favorite location to date. Even if it was giving me hard Gears of War 3 flashbacks, and most of the fights weren’t as good as Gears of War 3, trading empty expanses for narrow corridors and ledges was a nice change of pace. 

Destiny is also at its best when there’s extreme terraforming involved. In this case, Titan basically functions as a combination of Star Wars’ Cloud City and Minos.

More teal! But also lemon yellows and sun baked sheet metal. There’s been a subtle shift in Destiny 2 toward big industrial equipment which, intentional or not, helps give some actual shape to some of the backstory about what civilization was up to before the fall. Giant turbines, hydro-pistons, and big alien drills draw a nice contrast with the sleek space ships and magic armor; more Alien than Star Trek.

I’m not sure what exactly it is about the designs on Titan, but felt very IKEA to me. Maybe it was just the yellow, or the rain at sea on a rig (all of which I weirdly associate with Scandinavia). Between the first game’s old Russia Cosmodrone and Destiny 2′s European Dead Zone, it all feels a bit eurocentric.

This is my favorite tunnel in the game so far. And there are a lot of tunnels.

Skyboxes with giant planets in them are even better.

Seriously though, Titan’s the best.

The giant biodome has a very Logan’s Run feels to it and, assuming there are some interesting side missions, strikes, or (fingers crossed) and eventual raid there, it will immediately jump toward the top of my list of best post-apocalyptic malls.

7066 Nessus is a small Vex rock, and as such, looked equal parts beautiful and re-used assets from Venus. The hazy teals and electric blues are once again in full effect, but I’m down with it. While the rest of the game seems content to double down on the “log on and shoot shit with your bros” appeal, the art direction in Destiny 2 commits much more strongly to the series’ trippy sci-fi vibes.

The eye motif that follows the Vex around is one of my favorites, even if it makes Nessus look like the GLaDOS home world. 

Otherwise, here are some quick thoughts so far, in no particular order:

The writing is bad. Destiny’s writing was mostly silly nonsense, but Destiny 2 tries to invoke this feeling of being under siege, especially in the beginning, that makes it feel like you’re supposed to be taking it all totally seriously

I’m not the only one to point this out, but anytime you tell the player not to die and then let them respawn seconds away the first time they die after that, there’s probably some holes in your design.

To that point, why even bother to Metroid the player if you’re going to re-introduce the bulk of their powers a few moments later with no interesting obstacles in-between? Not being able to run, jump, or throw grenades is a very jarring thing in Destiny, and yet that brief survival-horror sequence is played mostly as a walking sim. Normally that’s something I’d encourage, but in this particular type of situation, it seems to completely miss the point.

I’m so tired of loot boxes. Overwatch and PUBG have ruined us. Especially since most of the loot boxes that appear in Destiny 2 are full of tedious junk.

The environments are big and beautiful but still mostly empty. 99% of interactions boil down to “Hold square to spawn monster closets.”

You can tell Bungie really wanted to go for it this time in terms of the linear narrative, but it feels completely uneconomical given the dearth of plot throughout the rest of the game. Too many of the cutscenes don’t advance the story or tell me something I couldn’t have guessed before. More importantly, they don’t introduce more questions. This was a problem in the first game, but it feels even more acute in the second given its apparent emphasis on getting us to care about these characters and their struggle. Basically, every time Bungie has a chance to build out a mystery it chooses to make a bad joke instead.

It’s a sequel, so stuff is bound to be different, but I got the sneaking suspicion on more than one occasion that stuff was changed from the first game to the second simply to make the second feel like more of an upgrade. I don’t see the point of the new skill tree look, for instance. At bottom it’s still asking you to make the same trade-offs as before and not allowing you any greater degree of customization. While there are plenty of small graphical and quality of life improvements, there’s also an awful lot of crap that looks like it was given a fresh coat of paint just cause. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it feels hollow and overly conservative on Bungie’s part.

Finally, what’s up with Zavala and his crew scattering to the four corners of the solar system? Shaxx is on Earth still? Nathan Fillion (sorry, Cayde-6 literally doesn’t exist as a character) crash lands on a jumble of No Man’s Sky assets to look for a teleporter? One thing Destiny 2 has done a good (read: slightly better) job of is introducing a certain amount of skepticism and dissension within the ranks. The three principal Guardians all have slightly different priorities and interpretations of the game’s central premise (is that big ball in the sky good, bad, or indifferent?), and there are some regular old humans who think the City (run by the Guardians) was kind of a sham. It would have been easy to explore that tension more explicitly and then send Zavala et al scattering on account of those divisions. Instead, Destiny’s just like, yea they all ended up on random planets, guess you need to go track’em down *wink* *wink*.

[great-pan-is-dead]

Saw @bi-astrial do this and I’m gonna do it now bc I have nothing better to do (ty for this opportunity on shameless self babble) and there’s never much personal on my blog (why would anyone wanna know let’s be real)

Rules: answer these questions, and tag 20 followers that you would like to get to know better. (no ty if you wanna do it do it my friends I wanna know about yous)

Name: Emmeline

Nickname: Emmie gets used a lot, Eline a bit less but no one ever hears my actual name right the first time so most variations of E starting with ns and ms name imaginable

Zodiac sign: Aries

Hogwarts house: Ravenclaw

Height: 5′3″ or there abouts. not quite formidable enough

Orientation: haha I’d say lesbian but everything is everywhere right now. I’m allowed a confusion period ok ok so some have it at 14 but I’m 18 and I don’t have crisises anymore. Crisises have me. I know what I want to want but do I really know but nothing is simple idc

Ethnicity: White (whiter than sinner’s tea) British before the Scots cut themselves off this damn island

Favourite fruit: I’m more a vegetables (so many) gal but I quite like clementines? or sultanas til I die if dried counts

Favourite season: All of them?? spring always feels good tho 

Favourite book series: I don’t even have one anymore because I don’t read series but I was blown damn away by Phillip Pullman’s  His Dark Materials trilogy and every bugger likes Harry Potter let’s face it

Favourite fictional characters: ?????? Spock maybe bc science! logic! guy! big inspiration but let’s face it don’t make me choose. Vince Noir from The Mighty Boosh maybe comes after that

Favourite flower: Every flower how dare you. But I dig bluebells a lot.

Favourite scents: Baking bread is on there. Love warm damp spring scent and all. That balmy warm scent of the Mediterranean. When it’s soaked and muddy and in the highlands. Cinnamon. Chilled ground coffee. Tea leaves of all kinds. I’d be here all day.  

Favourite colour: Most shades of purple and blue. Red. The entire bloody visible light spectrum and the infa red and ultraviolet  if they want to feel included okay don’t make me discriminate

Favourite animal: Animals aren’t really me because I have a lot of fur allergies and I’m heartless but I’ve always liked owls and birds are cool if a bit intimidating with all the sharp bits

Favourite artist/band: I’d write a freaking book but in a vague order, New Order, A Flock Of Seagulls, Fleetwood Mac, The Human League, ELO, Kasabian, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, Panic At The Disco, My Chemical Romance, OMD and that’s not including composers,,,

Coffee, tea, or hot cocoa?: Aggressively tea

Average sleep hours: About between 7 to 9 or I’ll die

Number of blankets I sleep with: A duvet with maybe an extra blanket if it’s extra cold because Britain doesn’t mess around

Dream trip: I don’t really have one? Never really have. Anywhere, everywhere, I’m easily pleased. I love just about everything.

Last thing you googled: Serials of the second Doctor because I was having an emotional rant on The War Games and Jamie. I need those at occasional intervals. If there’s any volunteers, I’m always down for some Two & Jamie dynamic screeching

Blog created: Two years ago? I think? Maybe three. back when the username was good old lestat-has-the-mjonir or whatever shitposty sounding thing that was

How many blogs do I follow:  174. Not enough

Number of followers:  249. smol humble bean with an inconsistent amount of posting, humour and interaction. Love all of yous. I don’t really. I hate you all, please delete this hellsite.

What do I usually post about: I’ve been considering splitting to two blogs of one “Trash Grandma by Day” and one “Glamour Nanna by Night” side, but usually classical art, period dresses, aestheticy things, pretty photography, The Vampire Chronicles and Oscar Wilde and whatever books I’m reading, and then space and some science stuff, Star Trek and bits of Doctor Who and Noel Fielding’s face when so compelled.

Do I get asks regularly:  Never in my life so if anyone wants to start I will talk about literally anything because I always have too much to say for myself and I wanna interact with all three and a half of you out there

What is your aesthetic: *sweats nervously* Technicolour sparkly soft space and science vibes, labcoats and hubble space telescope pics and lots of things about planets, neat n sharp written pages of maths and physics equations, 18th/19th century French/European, most things found in any given Oscar Wilde story, just seem to have a thing for those damn crossdressing boys, boys in make up bc the daring British pop trends of 1985 need to make a comeback, good hair, curly hair, long haired boys, renaissance aesthetic  girls, tea and flowers and candles and girls of many descriptions and terrible caterpillar pathetic moustaches and old books and velvet, cathedrals and old synthesiser music that sounds like older religions, orchestral music that makes me want to pick up myself and dance, and I’m sure you see how endless this can get Mutuals/followers who wanna do this DO IT but tag me so I can nosey all about you love y’all here’s more drivel about me than you ever needed SORRY THIS IS SO LONG

[ryanashcrawford]

How I Mastered Time and Space.

‘Where the f**k did you find time to write a book?’ asked literally everyone I’ve spoken to over the past year.

Well, contrary to the opinion of my best mate, it wasn’t by manipulating space/time (Though I totally could if I wanted to).

No, to write PULSE: The Trial and the sequel, ‘PULSE: Moonlighter’ I did three simple things.

Plan. Write. Adapt.

I planned out what I would write, when it would be written and where the writing would take place.

Then, I wrote some shit. And I kept writing some more shit until there was lots of shit on the all the pages.

Finally, because it was shit. I kept adapting until it was shit no more.

But that’s not actually what I meant by adapt. Adapt means to find a way to plan and write no matter what circumstances you are in. I can illustrate this by recounting for you what one of my busy days looks like and how I squeezed writing in everywhere it was possible.

Here goes:

5AM - Wake up. Just kidding. Go back to sleep because its 5AM.

6AM - Actually wake up. Run 5K. Because fitness. Achieve terrible time because too much time was spent mentally choreographing Stella’s next fight scene.

6.45AM - Shower. Because hygiene.

7AM - 5 month old son tries to wake up. Put him the f**k back to sleep.

7.15AM - Abandon breakfast plans because 2 year old daughter wakes up. Get her ready for nursery. It’s world book day and she wants to go to nursery dressed as Elsa? Why the f**k not?

7.45AM - Nursery run. Try my best not to verbally or physically assault anyone in front of daughter.

8.10AM - Kiss gorgeous wife. Play with son. Ensure that I’m late for work.

8.30AM - At train station. 8 minutes till train. Planning time. Here I use google drive to go over my notes for the next scene. It’s all been worked out in advance, so this is just a refresher course. Train is delayed. F**k southern rail. But at least I have another 11 minutes to straighten out some inconsistencies in this scene.

8.49AM - On the train. Crammed in the seat nearest the toilets that smell like someone is raising a litter of pigs inside. F**k southern rail. Approximately 38 minutes till I have to change trains. Switch to Google Docs. Write the shit out of this scene while being elbowed by the 6’8” man sitting next to me reading the financial times.

9.35AM - Arrive at depot. You didn’t think the train was going to reach its destination on time did you? Bless your naive little heart. Additional minutes spent polishing this scene. Delete character development. Replace with unnecessary action. Boom. 10 minute walk to tube station. Work synced to Google Drive. Continue reviewing scene on the move.

9.45AM - Bumped into 17 people while on the move. It’s London so… who gives a f**k. Jump on the tube. No mobile data. Switch to Google Keep. Here I keep a list of everything wrong with what was just written and new ideas as they crop up. I tick off the list of things I’ve already fixed and chalk up some new changes.

10AM - Arrive at actual work. Because money.

1PM - Lunchtime. Socialising. Small talk. Hell nah. Time to write. Another half chapter smashed out.

3PM - That big important presentation that is critical to my role in the company… can go to hell because I’ve been thinking about the best way to describe someone’s getting mauled by a dinosaur. Luckily, my sub-conscious has been hard at work preparing what to say. Presentation NAILED.

6PM - Train home. Make sure I’m first to board at the depot by slipping in between the elderly and pregnant passengers, then avoiding all forms of eye contact, thus ensuring myself some prime seated real estate. (Just kidding, I’m a mother fu**ing gentleman out here in these streets.) Another chapter comes into existence before, finally I return home.

7.30PM - Clean those kids up. Recount tails of an extraordinarily greedy caterpillar to put them to sleep. Prepare astoundingly good cuisine for the Mrs. Then gossip about everything and everybody we know.

9PM - Catch up on the Walking Dead and Supernatural. (Hahaha. Oh, Dean. You get me every time.) Miss out on crucial story developments while updating my plan for tomorrow on Google Keep.

Originally posted by littlehobbit13

Tomorrow. Rinse. Lather. Repeat.

The moral of this story. F**k southern rail. But also, there’s always time.

Someone once told me that time is like a predator. It’s stalking you. Time is going to hunt you down and make the kill.

But I like to think that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey, and reminds us to cherish every moment… because they’ll never come again.

Yes both those quotes were from Star Trek: Generations. Whatever.