Section 31, Item 7

Okay, so on Monday, I was talking about how Section 31 was just one guy. I listed the facts we knew about Section 31 from their original appearance in Deep Space Nine and how each incontrovertible element of Section 31 could be equally or more plausibly explained by a single rogue actor than by a secret conspiracy that had remained undetected for over 200 years. The final item, Item 7, was more complicated so it has its own post.

7. Sloan was party to a plot that required the cooperation of a. one Starfleet Admiral and b. a high-ranking Romulan intelligence agent.

It comes from the seventh season episode, "Inter Arma Silent Leges," which features the only intelligence operation we ever see Section 31 perform. Sloan manipulates Doctor Bashir and Admiral Ross to place--spoilers, BTW--a high-ranking Federation agent into the highest levels of Romulan government.

Item 7a is easier to prove than the self-evident manipulation of Bashir. Admiral Bill Ross is a dull as all the rocks in a Zen garden. He's awful. I could convince Bill Ross that I'm the agent of a massive conspiracy which violates the principles of The Federation, and I'm from 250 years ago! The man's credulous and having him snookered requires no suspension of disbelief or further explanation.

Item 7b is a real killer. Toval is the leader of the ruthless Tal Shiar intelligence agency. He's apparently a Federation sympathizer who is feeding intelligence to Starfleet. He cooperates with Sloan to undermine a political rival. He then pretends to interrogate and shoot Sloan to cover the human's escape.

FFS, Section 31 is Just One Guy

For those you who didn't watch Deep Space Nine, Section 31 is an amoral intelligence agency that cites the Section 31 of Starfleet's Charter to do whatever it takes to protect The Federation*.

Deep Space Nine introduced Section 31, and since that time every shit author with a Star Trek license has tried to use it in some way. Think of it as Star Trek's version of "Batman, but he kills people!" It's shown up in Enterprise, the comics...there was even a novel line about it explaining how not only did every Captain from every TV series meet and know about Section 31, but Kirk created a secret cabal that fought them for over a century! Man, fuck Section 31.

So here's the deal. When you watch the three episodes of Deep Space Nine with Section 31, it easily reads as just one incredibly talented guy, Luther Sloan, who fucked with Bashir a lot. My burden of proof for this is light indeed; whatever theory I put forwards merely has to be as credible DS9's Section 31, a secret organization that's been perfectly hidden for over 200 years.

Yeah, about that well written.

The Battle for The Hugos

Every year since 1953, the World Science Fiction Society has given out The Hugo Awards for notable works in science fiction. Categories like Best Novel, Best Graphic Story, and Best Dramatic Presentation have been given to Star Trek, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and even The Avengers.

Nominations and winners are voted on by members of the society, who either pay to attend the World Science Fiction Convention (WorldCon) or who buy a membership. A few thousands folks and a handful of rules assign some of the preeminent awards in science fiction to works and writers. 

Like most election systems, The Hugo Awards are not, nor have they ever been, marks of absolute quality. They designate the works which are able to garner the votes of the most WSFS members. They're marks of what's most popular that year among a handful of science fiction fans. Granted, you'd be hard-pressed to argue against the quality of those winners.

Hell, you pick one.

Back in 2011, a writer by the name of Brad Torgerson lost the Hugo for Best Novelette to Charlie Jane Anders, noted female and LGBT+ proponent. The following year, Torgerson teamed up with fellow Hugoless writer Larry Correia to address a problem Torgerson's website characterizes as

"...the Hugo voting skew ideological, as Worldcon and fandom alike have tended to use the Hugos as an affirmative action award: giving Hugos because a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) characters."

Houma Movie Club: Phase 7 and the future

If you hadn't noticed, I haven't put up a Houma Movie Club since Hook. Google started phone authentication for Hangouts On-Air and since I try to reasonably limit the personal information I give to capricious slapped-together, social media platforms, we're done with using Google Hangouts.

We're just doing some regular chats right now, but if we can all get Skype together I'll probably start recording them and putting them up either as podcasts or as videos with some still photos over them. Open to input.

So it's time for Phase 7. As we do, there is no theme aside from a minor, voluntary "spooky" theme because it's October. Standard rules apply: on Netflix, released in the past five years, 90 minutes, and no more than one of us can have seen it already.

Voting is open. Two votes per person. The voting results are also going to be hedged a bit. Last phase Josh worked on the weekend we did his movie and that's weak so in the future if someone who chose a movie can't make it, we'll try to swap movies or skip a week.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010, 89 minutes)

The premise of Tucker and Dale vs Evil is that the real monsters are photogenic college kids with mediocre acting skills spending a weekend in the woods. And if think about it, that kinda shakes out.

The New Doctor Is gonna be a Badass,

and that's okay. 
Remember my first blogspot blog? At that time, I’d seen most of Series 1 of the new Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi channel. I liked it and accepted a lot of the campiness as an integral part of the series.

Anyway, then there was this new guy they wanted to be The Doctor. 

I hated him. He was nothing like The Doctor! All…handsome and fighting people. Mr. No-second-chances-I'm-that-sort-of-a-man.

I’m sorry; Doctor No-second-chances-I'm-that-sort-of-a-man.

But while the Ninth Doctor played by Chris Eccleston will always be my Doctor, his successor, David Tennant as the Tenth Doctor, is my favorite. Perhaps even more than Nine, Ten bore the scars of The Last Great Time War, which appeals to me personally for a lot of reasons.

After that, we had Eleven and I didn’t like him either, but I knew that was an unfortunate side effect of having a good Doctor just prior. So I waited for Matt Smith’s Doctor to win me over and moment by moment, bit by bit, that didn't happen. There I was at the end of “The Time of The Doctor” waiting for the love to come even as The Doctor went.

Progress Report: 30 DEC 13

So, I have something of a history of heaping too much onto my plate. So I was thinking about what would happen if I kept a record of all of that stuff over the course of a few days so I can see where I'm getting shit done. Not exciting, but good for a few laughs. 

Maybe.

Probably not.

Nerding Out of The Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Special

As you know, I love friggin' Doctor Who.

Or maybe I don't talk about it much because I'm afraid it'll creep you out, much as it has done to my roleplaying group. Aaanyway, I do and I saw the 50th Anniversary special (plus or minus fifteen years of being off the air) and I thoroughly enjoyed it. That said, I'm a fucking insatiable nerd prick, so I've got some nitpicks the size of a fucking planet to bring up. A nit for each Doctor, actually.

It's perfectly natural, as a nerd, I have a locked (deadlocked, some might say) emotional progression in response to good things:

I first noticed this paradigm when I heard that Victoria Hand was going to be in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Surprisingly, her role was so understated, I never really around to hating her. AoS is definitely progressing in tiny, steady steps.

MASSIVE FUCKING SPOILERS BELOW:

Tabletop: The Resistance

Nerd Overload Videos

These came up yesterday, but even posting them now, you'll probably have seen them by now.

Trusty Lord: Trust in RPGs

So, as you know, I've been running a roleplaying game (if I had my stuff just a little more together, you'd be reading about that right now instead of this). I originally wanted to do a 26 part series on roleplaying theory, the FATE system, and the specific Steel, Sand, and Sunsets game I'm running. Life happened and now I'm running that game instead of theorizing about it.

Trust. When you think about it (or mistype it like I just did), it reminds you of the word "truest." Generally, players do want characters that are true, as it's a virtue. Having a player that's trusting is considered a drawback. Earning trust is a sign of power; giving it is a sign of weakness.

Hurdles of S.H.I.E.L.D.: We're keeping the name

So, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has been getting incrementally better. Last week had an episode with real-life superpowers. Even better, it moved the awful, shallow, irritating Rising Tide story that much closer to completion. Once it safely fades into the background like The Maquis, maybe we can finally focus on major villains like...ugh, "centipede."

The previous week was very good. Quite possibly the best episode of the series yet. Sure, the superpowers were just some advanced technology, but it was played well, the story was clever and it was a joy to watch. I mean, you have to deal with the time that the total badass was having a knock-down drag-out fight and then totally stood there looking around in complete darkness for ten seconds while her opponent causally picked up a gun, but it was a great episode.

Wait, is it Wednesday Already?

Dang, this one just got away from me. I know I've been spotty-to-not-at-all on putting up the blogs, but--

Look at the monkey!

I'm also working on a roleplaying setting which takes place in the aftermath of a civil war that leaves The United States...well, not united. And there are no guns. But there are trains. And cannons. It's a work in progress.

But hey, io9 put up an article asking about the coolest sword in fiction. My money is on Scott Pilgrim's sword of love, because it's a manifestation of Scott's own growth, but Frostmorne probably gets it on a technicality.

Nerdgasm on Jonathan Ross

The Doctor (11th), Tywin Lannister, Ygritte, John Snow, and Gandalf the Magneto sit down with the guy who writes America's Got Powers.

Skiltao's Dice: Return of the Comebackening

Some weeks ago, I went over some numbers that Skiltao mentioned on his blog (Part 1 & Part 2). I didn't do any rigorous mathematical analysis on them—what I did was more akin to recognizing the geometric qualities of dice probabilities—but I did manage to illuminate the qualities of the dice rolls and why certain relationships existed between them. Whenever I was done, Skiltao asked about alternative dice relationships, for example, if different-sized dice would have similar relationships or how dice which have repeated numbers would be affected.

The first question is straightforward. The odds of a tie between, say 1D10 and 3D4 being expressed as a certain value on a 1D10 + 3D4 roll is easy to test.

1D10 ranges from 1 to 10, while a 3D4 ranges from 3 to 12. The odds of a tie are the compounded probabilities of a set of values on the table below:

1D10      1D4 #1        1D4 #2        1D4 #3
[ 3]      (1)           (1)           (1)
[ 4]      (2)           (1)           (1)
[ 5]     (2,3)         (2,1)          (1)
[ 6]    (2,3,4)        (2,1)         (1,2)
[ 7]     (3,4)        (3,2,1)        (1,2)
[ 8]     (3,4)         (3,2)         (1,2)
[ 9]     (3,4)         (3,4)        (3,2,1)
[10]      (4)          (3,4)         (2,3)

Linkstorm: Nerditry

 
io9 has complied a list of great performances in geek and sci-fi roles. I don't know acting, but this article definitively proves that you can list about five of the ten shows on this list and I'll still agree with you because I'm preparing for an age where no one knows what Star Trek is anymore.

Hugh Jackman. Psy. It's cool.

The Discussion Continues

This debate about girls who cosplay and the men who claim to keep the gates to the geek mantle is apparently continuing on a few different websites. It surprising to me that it's taken off like it has, but reading over the discussions has given me some words I've been grasping for on the "real geek" argument, and about identity arguments in general.

That blog will come later though. Right now, I actually got some net downvotes for contributing to one of these discussions. As I'm not a troll, I didn't really expect that. I guess next time I'll either adjust my message to make it more effective, make sure I'm saying something that contributes more to the discussion at hand, or admit that somewhere along the line I was wrong and subsequently reevaluate my views.

...or I guess I could throw a giant hissy fit and claim everyone's too stupid and corrupt to understand my genius. It seems like that would cheat me out of personal growth without actually changing the results, but damn, it'll feel great until my next foray into a comments section.

Everybody is Free to Cosplay

So I guess yesterday was Cosplay Appreciation Day. That's good because I'm binning the post-election blog I was going to write about in favor of something I've been aching to hit up ever since I saw a Wonder Woman cosplayer a while back.

Image courtesy of nathaninsandiego at flickr.

I'm not posting all of these images. I know a lot of you are at work and can't click all the links, but because these pictures are of cosplayers, some of whom actually make a living by creating costumes and making appearances and some of these pictures are taken by professional photographers for their portfolio, I'm trying to be very careful about the permissions here.

So anyway, some D-bag on Tumblr mentions that Wonder Woman isn't Asian. Now, I can only conjecture about his thought process on this, but I imagine it went something like this:

Disney/Star Wars

So between trying to shoot a short video for the RPG I'm running, NaNoWriMo, getting some important paperwork in order (for money), and paying lots of money so my car doesn't kill me, I haven't been the best on blogs lately (And also Minecraft, but that's not important). Anyway, the "Disney buys Star Wars (and Willow, I guess)" thing has been bafflingly contentious.

While I did enjoy The Phantom Menace and have never been fashionable enough to love Jar-Jar Binks, I'll be the first the queue up some Mr. Plinkett Star Wars Reviews to watch the detailed, no-stone-unturned documentary revealing the prequels as a visually pleasing creation with fly-by-night fundamentals created with no artistic vision as a means to further get money out of a popular franchise.

Geeks and Sports

The craziness that is the conversation about the ability of athletes to speak their minds is still ongoing.

What's weird is that, after watching a few episodes of The I.T. Crowd, I realized what a fucked up status symbol it is for nerds not to like sports and sports fandom. T. Campbell was ahead of the crowd by about a decade when he termed what was then the narrow sub-culture of science fiction and fantasy "fandom." Now, we refer to "geek chic" when we talk about people who love everything from Cougar Town to Twilight, and man, neither of those two things are geek as I understand them. Hell, check out this Comic Critics from a few days ago. Same fucking thing, but from a different angle. Yes, I know that sports, as an interest, is more mainstream than comics or sci-fi and that there are a lot of loud, obnoxious idiots who like sports and can't wrap their heads around why anyone would not love it, but fuck, that sentence is also an exact description of people who like Star Wars so fucking much they reciprocate those feelings towards sports fans.

Massive Mass Effect Week: Nerding Out

As much as I love Mass Effect, there are some serious flaws with it. Sexism, racism, thematic inconsistencies, grinding, and the morality system all periodically mar my enjoyment of just gettin' missions, shootin' dudes, and leaving Ash Williams to die.

In some respects, it's intellectually difficult to bring up The Asari as an example of sexism. With only one gender, you can't really call them "female," but they've...you can see...

female.

Granted, there are fewer questions to be raised about Asari gender roles than about the evolution of a race designed to breed with species from other planets. A species which is completely hairless, but still mammalian enough that most of their members possess what I can only describe with my limited experience as "rockin' tits." Even though few to no Asari are ever portrayed as victims, many of them work in the contextually respectable fields of table-dancing-as-implied-stripping and consorting-as-implied-prostitution.