Unsolicited Advice

It's been a rough couple of weeks. Discount Cheeto Hitler is refusing to admit he lost the election, which he did, by a fairly wide margin. The response of the Biden campaign to Trump's refusal to concede is -- and I am quoting directly here -- "[T]he United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House". On the personal side of things, one of my housemates is having (non-virus-related) breathing problems off and on, and at the time of this writing is in the ICU again. We're waiting to be COVID-evicted on the first of January, because none of us can get enough work to pay for anything. I have started feeding the rats entire sandwich cookies for brekfiss, because it makes me feel better. So you will all forgive me for thinking way too hard about Star Trek . I've seen conflicting reports on whether the novelization of The Motion Picture  is canon or not. Roddenberry seems to have thought it was, inasmuch as he wrote it an...

The history of slashfic as the internet knows it today, is in large part, the history of Star Trek . Queer readings of literature have existed since approximately five minutes after literature did; Frederic Wertham interviewed gay men in the '40s who read Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson as a couple, fans have been speculating about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson forever, and I'm sure there was a bard somewhere in ancient Sumer who was renowned for their smutty stories about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. But Kirk and Spock were the first couple to go "mainstream", at least on the convention circuit, with stories and essays on the topic published, samizdat -style, in mimeographed fanzines. The term "slash", in fact, comes from the punctuation in "K/S", which is what the stores and 'zines were marked. Star Trek is unusual in that it's a science-fiction property based very much in the ideals of the 1960s that has survived into an era when many of the t...

Visual designer Ralph McQuarrie has just passed away, aged 82. I relayed this fact to my roommate when I read it on io9. "Do I know him?" sez he. Oh yes. Yes, you know him. You just don't realize it. There are not a lot of visual designers known to the public. It tends to be a behind-the-scenes job, where if you're lucky some guy might someday ask you a few questions for the DVD release extras, and if you're really  lucky they'll even spell your name right on the captions. Ralph McQuarrie was an exception. Even if you don't know the name, you most certainly know his work. He was responsible for Darth Vader's distinctive armor. His story boards illustrate key scenes from all of the Star Wars films. His matte paintings provide backdrops for many locations in the films, one of the most beautiful being the wide vistas of Cloud City on Bespin. He worked as a visual consultant on Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home . He designed the alien ships in Close ...