Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

*sigh*

Pity that The Money really doesn't listen that much to the fan base, they'd make a lot more money. Instead, they pull stuff like this and close down projects that they didn't explicitly authorize that cost them nothing and make fans happy.

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/08/30/paramount-dmcas-star-trek-fan-project-apparently-deaf-to-the-history-of-star-trek/

Produced by BBC Vulcan, of course.



With thanks to Ysabet for posting a link to the the link to the.... You know how these things work.

I have been pissed about the Enterprise being destroyed time and again like it's some trivial amount of resources to construct such a thing. How often do you hear about aircraft carriers or battle ships being lost? Well, in a full-out war, it's not uncommon. But a ship on a mission of exploration?

And the same Captain having the same ship shot out from under him on multiple occasions? I don't think he'd be likely to be given another such brand-new incarnation. (Granted, two different film series, still....)

Yep, henceforth the USS Enterprise is now the USS Kenny for me. I think my wife might go with the USS Sean Bean.

Leonard Nimoy passed away Friday, and there are so many links that I'm not going to bother with one.

It cued an interesting moment. I'm now working full-time, and my wife bought me a really nice BluTooth speaker called an OontZ (by Cambridge Soundworks) so I listen to music most of the day. Yesterday I was listening to all of my Beatles, it was actually the second day of this and I finished up.

Well, I had not yet heard the news. Our network/system admin Rob came in and told it to my boss, whose office is directly across the hall from mine, and Rob turned around and told me.

I was kinda gobsmacked. I remember when Dee Kelly died, and I wasn't surprised as he was the oldest member of the regular cast. James Doohan had a massive heart attack a couple of years before he passed, again, no big surprise. And Majel Barret's passing, for some reason, was just 'another celebrity death', which is sad because she's one of the few cast whom I've seen in person.

But Nimoy had a different stature. The odd thing was that I'm not sure that I saw the original run of Star Trek, I think perhaps the first thing that I remember him in was Paris in Mission: Impossible. I know I was watching Trek in the initial reruns as we were constantly playing it in '71 when I was in the 3rd grade, and the series ran from '66 to '69. So that's probably my oldest memory of ST:TOS. And I always preferred Spock over Kirk, and my pursuit of computer science has probably reflected that.


So here's where the Beatles come back in to the picture. As Rob told me about Leonard's death, my phone was playing In My Life. I can be very sensitive to music, and I feel myself softening and being close to tears just thinking about the lyrics.

There are places I remember
All my life though some have changed
Some forever not for better
Some have gone and some remain
All these places have their moments
With lovers and friends I still can recall
Some are dead and some are living
In my life I've loved them all.

Several songs affect me for various reasons: Jackson Brown's For A Rocker always puts a lump in my throat, Manfred Mann's Runner can also. So now I think I have another association.


I was the president of a science fiction/fantasy film club in Phoenix for over 20 years, and I'm still a member and still in contact with the treasurer who really runs the thing. And I sent him a link to the NPR story about Nimoy this afternoon. He replied that he felt fortunate to have seen Nimoy give a presentation at a ComicCon, I believe the Phoenix one, and he talked about his life, including a stint as a taxi driver and picking up one John Fitzgerald Kennedy.


Leonard Nimoy was definitely an amazing person and leaves behind a lot of great work that we can remember him by.

We went and saw it last night, our final night in Phoenix, so we could see it in a really good theatre. And frankly, I was disappointed. It was good for a summer action movie, and it wasn't bad for science fiction, but some aspects of the story I was very unhappy with. My wife and I talked about it all the way home, well, all the way back to my parent's house. We had some similar complaints.

And since it's a new movie that some may not have seen yet, I'm putting the rest under a cut.

And if you want to read some criticism of the science, take a look at the Bad Astronomy blog: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/05/17/bad_astronomy_review_star_trek_into_darkness.html

And frankly, this diminishes my interest in seeing what Abrams does with Star Wars. I expected a lot more out of his Trek reboot, for me he did not deliver.

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Clips from the original series done to the Knights of the Round Table song!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luVjkTEIoJc&mode=related&search=