Patrick Stewart’s incredibly personal and powerful story about growing up with an abusive father.

Make it not so.

wilwheaton:

jenniferdeguzman:

He said Star Trek is too “philosophical”? Screw that noise.

mechcanuck:

I don’t know when this interview happened but I AM SAD AND ANGRY NOW 

The philosophies in Star Trek are kinda part of the actual setting. If you don’t get that, why are you allowed to make Star Trek movies.

Sigh. The whole point of Star Trek is that it’s philosophical. If you don’t want philosophical Science Fiction, there’s plenty of that for you to enjoy, but Star Trek is philosophical. Philosophy is part of Star Trek’s DNA, and if you’re given the captain’s chair, you’d better damn well respect that.

I guess that’s why I like Trek. In addition to aliens and space travel, which the kid within me loves, it has some philosophical meat, that the grown up (such as it is) within me loves.

If I think about it too much, I get very depressed that the future is turning out to be more like Planet of the Apes (with humans playing the apes) than Star Trek. I would have liked to explore the universe with Picard. Hell, I’d even settle for Kirk. Instead, I’m stuck here watching apes fight over guns, gods and all other sorts of medieval nonsense. I really don’t think I belong here sometimes.

That’s the hard part about the future. It’s never here yet, and sometimes it looks like it may not be what you hoped when it finally does arrive.

Still… It’s all we have to work with, so best make the most of it. To bed, and hopefully pleasant dreams.

Trekful Tuesday

I often feel like Picard in a galaxy full of Klingons, Kirks and Qs. 

karinanotcinerina replied to your post: I love SciFi, but…

Well, Star Trek (TNG etc) was in a society that had no more internal conflict so the screenwriters had to generate problems with new aliens and mechanical problems.

Well, Star Trek (TNG etc) was in a society that had no more internal conflict so the screenwriters had to generate problems with new aliens and mechanical problems. If there were no bad aliens in Trek, the show would have become very boring, very quickly, which led to the “bumpy foreheaded alien of the week” cliche. I remember a couple episodes where other humans were the problem, but not many. I sometimes wonder if a society envisioned by Roddenberry (or imagined by John Lennon) is really possible, given the state of human nature. Even when people are given every freedom, luxury and opportunity to better themselves (i.e. the “American dream”) a great many will find ways to be unhappy. …or worse.

I think part of the secret is that people have to concentrate more on making themselves better and less trying to make others better. If we all do the first part, the second should happen on its own. As Goethe said, if everyone sweeps in front of his own door, the whole world will be clean.

This was a gripe of the Tumblr bellyaching system. Had this been an actual rant, you would have been instructed what you were doing wrong, and where you could shove it. This was only a gripe. 

Don’t Cross and Prosper. 

So I watched Star Trek (the 2009 JJ Abrams movie) last night on my new high def TV. I saw it before, alone in a theater, when it first came out, but at the time I walked away not liking it much. I think it was because (a) my expectations were unreachably high, and (b) it was a particularly ugly time in my life, so I was in a miserable mindset to begin with. Anyway, I appreciate it much better now.  That said, I have some observations. I’m sure others have made these already.

• Why does the Enterprise look appropriately updated and futuristic in most places (such as the bridge) but yet large swaths of its interior look like a brewery? It has big shiny tanks, catwalks and pipes bolted together with…  well… bolts. I’m thinking “budget constraints” was not the reason. 
• When the captain of the USS Kelvin enters the space shuttle en route to his doom, why does he pass through a plastic curtain like he’s entering a meat locker? 
• What’s with future Spock’s spaceship? It looks like a 24th century drain unclogger.
• 2009 Kirk is just as much an arrogant unlikable douche bag as 1960’s Kirk.  In other words, awesome portrayal by Chris Pine! 
• I’m sure Scotty’s little alien friend was meant as some sort of comic relief, but he seemed pointless and irritating. 
• When Nero ‘invited’ Pike to come visit his ship, why didn’t he insist young Spock tag along, too? Surely, he would have relished the opportunity to torment two Spocks for the price of one. 
• Why bother to drill a hole to a planet’s core to implant a black hole to swallow up said planet? I would think just dropping one at the surface would do the trick nicely. For that matter, dropping a black hole on Pluto would make for a bad day on Earth. I’m surprised Nero didn’t have a tankful of sharks with frickin’ laser beams on their heads. 
• Even in the 23rd century, with starships and aliens, Iowa still looks kinda boring. 

I’m not a Star Trek fan in the ‘Trekkie’ sense, but I did like show. One of my favorite episodes was a Next Generation one called Tapestry, in which Picard is given a chance by the omnipotent Q to change something about his past; getting stabbed in a fight by an alien and thus requiring him to get an artificial heart. Q sends Picard back to the past, and this time Picard walks away from the fight. But when returned to the present,  Picard finds he is no longer captain of the Enterprise, but instead a low-ranking, go-nowhere, junior lieutenant. His former subordinates now all outrank him, barely remember his name and don’t think much of him. He asks them about getting a promotion, but is told that while he’s a good and reliable worker, he’s shown no initiative, taken no risks, and just doesn’t have what it takes to get ahead. After all these years, it’s a bit late for him to make it up now.

Lately, I’ve been feeling a lot like Picard when he suddenly found himself a lieutenant nobody. I wasn’t stabbed in a fight but I had somewhat of a career equivalent. Years ago, while trying to climb the corporate ladder, I transferred around to a bunch of different positions, chasing promotions and salary increases, until I eventually ended up in a bad place and was laid off. I was out of work for a year and half when a former colleague from my first job at the company told me of an opening. Since I was well remembered, I was rehired back in my original unit, but at a lower level, and significantly lower salary, than I had enjoyed before the layoff. I didn’t care at the time, I was just grateful to have a real FT job again.

But on this Second Act of my career with the company, I did things differently. I didn’t take any chances, or any risks. I had learned my lesson, I told myself.  Keep your head down, work hard, keep your job this time. I’ve been back in current job for almost 7 years now, not trying to get a promotion, not trying to post to other areas.  I did my job well.  I was good and reliable. Every review said so. But here I am, little better off than I was 7 years ago when I was hired back. Most of the people I originally started with 20 years ago now outrank me. They’re either managers or directors or whatnot. What my boss told me at my latest review last week sounded a lot like what lieutenant Picard’s former subordinates told him; You’re good, but you need to be great to get ahead here.

Back on Trek, Q gives Picard another chance in the past, and this time he doesn’t walk away from the fight, gets stabbed as he did the first time around, and returns to the present as captain once again, ready to sip Earl Grey and make things so.

But I don’t have a Q to help me do things over. I’m on my own, here and now. It’s time to take risks again. It’s time to be great.  I don’t want to retire a lieutenant nobody …a pathetic “might have been.”  But the afternoon shadows are long now, and I have a lot of catching up to do. I just hope it’s not too late for me.

deejaybird:

“Uhura” comes from the Swahili word UHURU meaning “freedom”. Uhura was pretty much the first ever black main character on American television who was not a maid or a domestic servant in 1966. TV network NBC refused to let Nichelle Nichols be a regular, claiming Deep South affiliates would be angered, so Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry hired her as a “day worker,” but still included her in almost every episode. She actually made more money than any of the other actors through this workaround, and it was kept secret from the other actors, but it was still a humiliating second-class status. The network people made life hard for Nichols, constantly trying to pare down her screen time, purposefully dropping racist comments in her presence and even withholding her fan mail from her.This deplorable state of affairs led Nichols to make the decision to quit after the 1st season, but then she happened to meet the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who pleaded with her to stick with the show because as a Black woman she was portraying the first non-stereotypical role on television. I had a crush on Uhura as a kid. LOL.

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I can’t even imagine. I suppose future generations will look back on our current (but thankfully fewer) prejudices with the same kind of head-shaking disbelief we look at this past shameful behavior now.

Way back in 1999 I wrote and submitted a couple of Star Trek Voyager scripts which Paramount Studios liked so much that they invited me out to pitch other ideas to them. Although they never bought any of my work, I’m convinced that they borrowed a concept from one of my scripts. I can never prove it, but I choose to believe I had some influence over Star Trek history.

I used to have the scripts up on the web on the old Geocites site, but that’s been gone a while now.  I’ve just put them up on another site, in case anyone has any interest in reading them.