Pacific Rim

This Scene Had to Have Happened

Rewatching Star Trek: Silicon Avatar

Sorry about the inside joke, non-Star Trek people:

Click through picture for more detail.

1,012 Word Brief Review of The Dark Knight Rises

I've been running late on this and I haven't felt much like writing lately, but here's a quick review of The Dark Knight Rises:

Blog in 4000 Words: Understanding

Blog in 4000 Words: Gone Fishing

That's a Common Thing, Right?

You ever search your hard drive for an innocuous word and find it in half the erotic fiction you've written?

Yeah, like that.

News News: Crime and Punishment

Most mornings, I sit down with my cup of coffee and open up a long list of news sites. The news doesn't always affect my daily life or educate me about the world, but it does reliably fuel a daily two minutes of cathartic hate. In an ongoing effort to entertain inform my readers, I thought I'd highlight some of this week's past stories.

Also, the images are designed for display on the blog. If you're reading on an RSS feed, you can set your background color to #222222 and/or your radio frequency to 104.15 to view it properly. 

In The Hauge, former Liberian President and alleged Lord of War, Charles Taylor was finally found guilty by an international court on 11 counts of aiding war crimes, including charges of rape, torture, using child soldiers, and murder. 

In 1989, he began a rebellion in Liberia, taking control of most of the country within an year, and supporting a rebellion in neighboring Sierra Leone within the next. His services to the Sierra Leone rebels by supplying them with fighters and trafficking Sierra Leone diamonds. The court found his aid was rendered with knowledge of their war crimes, despite his claims that he tried to lead the rebels to a peace deal.

When shitbags like Slobodan Milosevic and Kenneth Lay dodge an open trial because even their hearts don't want to be near them any longer than necessary. When there's no trial that would expose their crimes and publicly label them as the criminals, then others see that there are no consequences for men of power who let their greed and ambition hurt others. Even Muammar Gaddafi and Osama Bin Laden got off easy with bullets to the face. The only development close to this one was the trial and hanging of Saddam Hussein, but I guess here in the States, we don't often equate hangings with justice.

Still though, awful lot of assholes going down these past ten years.

Comics v Terrorism

As you might have heard, convicted terrorist Tarek Mehanna credits Batman for inspiring him to plot against American forces (and allegedly against American civilians here in the states).

I've made passing reference to the similarity of superhero ethos and terrorism before (something that's hard not to do when talking about Marvel's Civil War). Quite simply, the desire to punch the world until it behaves is common to both superheroes and terrorists.

Both of them tell the world it's not good enough. Both want to use their power to bend it to their will. Both break the law to do what they think is right. 

You could argue the difference is scale. Terrorists seek to affect political change through fear; constructing like-minded governments, removing foreign influences from their territory, suppressing criticism, and/or simply dictating the social structure of the world around them. Superheroes usually punch out the guys that regular governments and law enforcement can't handle.

Exit Past Through Doors on Right, Part II

Last Monday, I started a blog with the intention of talking about the best things of 2011[1], but ended up waxing nostalgic about one of Earth’s few female specimens which had gained my attention and respect.

After the assertive, confident woman I'd come to expect act so demure in a new setting, uncertainty was all I had. To this day, it's all I have. This isn’t a story where an omnipresent point of view reveals the full depths of each person’s character and the audience comes away with a clean resolution and an appreciation behind the A-Type personalities they encounter every day. It’s a real story, and like most real stories, we can only read the tea leaves and divine our own meaning from it.

People aren’t constants; a person isn’t a static value impervious to other factors. It’s easy to see people that way:

Megas XLR Wednesday: Kiva

Kiva is the warrior from the future who acts as the straight man to all of Coop’s absent-minded, self-important, materialistic idiocy. Kiva acts as an all-in-one recap/exposition/outsider, often by reminding her painfully oblivious cohorts of the dangers of the situation they’re in. Megas XLR prophetically pokes fun at the irrelevancies of first world culture, years before The Jersey Shore managed to explode those irrelevancies with a metaphorical violence no giant robot could hope to match. It’s Kiva that expresses certain levels of distain for these cultures, even while she learns that there are benefits to a world where constant warfare isn’t…um, constant.
 

Megas XLR Wednesday

I like Megas XLR. Yeah, it's mostly sci-fi references wrapped around three stereotypical characters and plenty of giant robot fights. But if you like sci-fi references, giant robot fights, and characters who are 90% stereotype and 10% surprisingly deep character built within that framework, you will like Megas XLR.

I daresay, you will dig it.

Blog in Exactly 1000 Words: Deadpool is edgy

 

Image courtesy of Bully Says Comics Should Be Fun.

Original image courtesy of Fantastic Four #10(credit for those credits go right back to Bully's Blog).

Megas XLR Wednesday

I like Megas XLR. Yeah, it's mostly sci-fi references wrapped around three stereotypical characters and plenty of giant robot fights. But if you like sci-fi references, giant robot fights, and characters who are 90% stereotype and 10% surprisingly deep character built within that framework, you will like Megas XLR.

I daresay, you will dig it.

This is the setup for most of the series.

It's the Magic: Tests

A few months ago, the guys at Magic did a reality show/recruitment drive called The Great Designer Search 2 to find new designers. I was interested and did some research on the first GDS they'd done. One of the challenges from the original Great Designer Search was to make six cards, according to the following guidelines:

1. All five colors must be represented.
2. All six card types must be represented.
3. Converted mana costs one through five must be represented. (One spell should cost one, another two, etc.)
4. Two of the cards must be appropriate for common; two for uncommon and two for rare. (Make sure to label the rarity – put it in parenthesis after the title.) 

I was eliminated early (in the first round, actually) on in the second one, so I can't really say that designing the cards was of any benefit, but hey, who doesn't love showing off their homemade Magic cards?

X-Men as a Metaphor

I was recently reading MGK (who is awesome) and he wrote a piece on the X-Men and why they aren’t so great. I’m with him 50/50 on that, but what was noticeable about the comments (aside from being comments on the internet and making me sad inside) is that someone mentioned that the X-Men don’t work as a metaphor for oppressed minorities because oppressed minorities can’t shoot lasers out of their eyes.

Considerations for trolling aside, it’s worth a few words about why the X-Men are potentially representatives for minorities that are discriminated against and why they haven’t really done that so well thus far.

The concept that mutants shouldn’t be trusted because they are ‘persons of mass destruction’ is a fallacious one. It assumes that mutants are dangerous and non-mutants are not. Most people are dangerous; any one of us could, at any moment, probably take one of the unsuspecting drones around us down. I guess the concern of scale could be brought up; if Colossus went on a rampage through a shopping mall, you’d need a tank to stop him. Naturally, you’d want to follow him with a tank at all times. That would probably prevent him from going on any rampages at all. If he wants to go somewhere that you can’t bring the tank, he just shouldn’t be allowed to go there.

That’s obviously all wrong. In The United States, citizens are allowed to own firearms. We are allowed to buy all manner of things that we could turn into destructive, damaging weapons (chemicals, trucks, trebuchets). We have a pact with each other that we just aren’t going to hurt each other. The goal of a successful society isn’t to keep people from having the ability to harm one another, but to have people who wouldn’t want to do so.

News Flashes

Man, some days you work really hard to make up jokes. The rest of the time, you can take a few news articles to their natural conclusion and repost the rest.

Arguing about Star Trek

Tasha Yar, Ro Laren, and Kira Nerys are tough female Star Trek characters with bad histories. My friend Skiltao (check out his site), has submitted that they are the same character. I would--in the finest manner of nerds debating things on the internet--differ (Yes, you're missing a Prisoner blog for this. Take that as you will.)

At the age of fifteen, Natasha Yar (played by Denise Crosby) left the anarchic violence of her home world behind on board a Starfleet vessel. When we first meet her, she's chief of security on the Enterprise, a formidable fighter, and a courageous woman. More importantly, because of her background, she appreciates the compassionate, cooperative, rational world of The Federation and has little time to waste with idiots who cannot do the same. In fact, she dies because she refuses to dither around with the baiting, idiotic, mysterious asshole Armus while two of her ship mates might be dying.

DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS!

Ro Laren (played by Michelle Forbes) is a Bajoran. Years ago, Cardassians conquered her people, driving many of them from their homes to become a disenfranchised diaspora. When she was a child, she was forced to watch Cardassians interrogate, beat, and kill her father. Ro Laren is angry and ashamed of her people for their status, and it drives her to do everything she can to solve problems on her own, ignoring the virtue of patience, the voices of experiences, and the help of others.

People make fun of Batman for the influence of his parents’ death on his mythos, but if Ro was a character in the DC Universe, she would be the over-the-top Batman, screaming about the death of her parents at every turn. In fact, I want a Dark Knight Returns movie written by Scott Kurtz with Michelle Forbes unapologetically playing the role of Bruce Wayne/Batman. Get this done internet. Well, hey, I’m always looking to commission artists to create the things I imagine, so maybe I’ll do that one day.

"I am the night, Captain Picard."

Eventually, Ro betrays Starfleet and joins the anti-Cardassian rebel group, The Maquis.

Kira Nerys (played by Nana Visitor), like Ro, is a Bajoran. Unlike Ro, she isn't one of the Bajoran Diaspora, but a native-born Bajoran who grew up directly under the brutality of Cardassian occupation. Kira fought against The Cardassians since she was twelve, operating somewhere between freedom fighter and terrorist. When The Cardassians left, she joined the Bajoran government, but remained vocal about its flaws. When The Federation came to assist, she was reluctant to have outsiders on her planet, but agreed that they were a necessary, if temporary, ally.

I can't deny that Kira is based on Ro (they wanted Michelle Forbes to be in Deep Space Nine, but she declined.) or take refuge in the fact that for every two episodes that either Yar or Ro were pictured in--even via clip-show or hologram--Kira was a main character in nine, giving her slightly more development.

*Alright, not technically ten years, but I don't invoke Grosse Point Blank lightly.

Yar and Ro both left their bad situations behind and joined Starfleet. Yar did it because it represented something better than the world she grew up in. She believes in The Federation because she sees the good that it can do. It gives her a picture of a brighter alternative and the potential of mankind. Instead of just curling up and hating the universe for not doing enough to make itself a better place, Yar engages it and improves upon it. Ro Laren wants flee her people and break the cycle of victimhood by being a dick and acting more "real" than everyone else in super-white suburbia that The Federation sometimes seems like.

My point is, if she hadn't gotten killed trying to save two shipmates, Tasha Yar would've snapped Ro in half like a wrinkle-nosed slim-jim(TM) thirty seconds after she came on board. If Ro Laren was Batman, then she's this one.

Ro Laren blames her people for being beaten by the Cardassians and blames The Federation for not doing more to help. She blames The Cardassians too, but until she joins The Maquis, Ro Laren doesn't give a single fuck about helping Bajor or the Bajorans, above gabbing to others about how they aren’t helping enough. She's a pissed off teenager looking for the opportunity to rebel because she believes it will make everyone sorry they see how obvious wrong they were for ignoring her all the time. Meanwhile, no one cares except for some self-recrimination over trusting her.

Pretty much this.

Kira Nerys fought to expel The Cardassians from her planet every day. She never lost faith in her people or in The Prophets. She scrapped and fought and even killed Bajoran collaborators because she felt it was the right thing to do. When The Cardassians left, she put down her weapons for the same reason. Kira Nerys isn't a warrior or a killer; she's a believer. She is a woman of principle with a foundation set deep into the soil of Bajor. Her integrity rivals that of icons like Picard or Spock, and even surpasses that of her own Emissary, Benjamin Sisko.

Regardless of what the card game says.

Kira was also quite passionate in her personal life; connecting with others around her rather quickly, depending on circumstances. While it's counter-intuitive to think of someone who isn't the life of the party like Jadzia Dax, especially someone so combative, as being very sociable, Kira was. Even if you don’t believe that, at the very least she had a healthy balance between her personal life and her work.

Natasha Yar, on the other hand, has a very hard time showing her emotions. She pushes herself to be a Starfleet ideal, but her personal life suffers. Even when she's seeking companionship under the effects of an intoxicating virus, given the entirety of the Enterprise-D crew to choose from, she picks the safest, least threatening person on board, one who (of course) politely and discreetly accedes to her request that they never speak of their encounter again.

Yes, the entire crew.

Blog in Exactly 1000 Words: Stewie Jaguar

It's gonna be another day or so until I'm back in my proper form here. Enjoy Stewie as a member of Clan Smoke Jaguar.