Nevinyrral
Artifact - 4

1, Tap: Destroy all credibility

Larry Niven has launched himself off the deep end:

Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.

“The problem [of hospitals going broke] is hugely exaggerated by illegal aliens who aren’t going to pay for anything anyway,” Niven said.

That's right, folks, the best way to deal with hospital funding is to dissuade the largest racial minority in America from using it through lies and fearmongering. Good one, Larry. Why don't you just say exactly what you mean? "We can solve our problem by grinding up all the fucking wetbacks for Kzin chow!"

-pb

I've just learned that for the 4th Edition of D&D, Bard is no longer a character class, Gnome is no longer a character race, but Tiefling and Dragonborn are.

They rolled a 1.

-pb

Joss Whedon needs to do at least one more episode of Firefly, one that stars Terry O'Quinn.

Because with the exception of Firefly, every television show that we own on DVD has at least one episode featuring Terry O'Quinn.

That'd be, LOST, The West Wing, Millennium, X-Files and Earth 2.

Hell, Millennium is like "Spot the LOST Cast Member."

-pb

More questions, no answers...

( LOST musings )

-pb

Gary Gygax died yesterday after attaining Level 69.



If you don't know who he was, please make an INT roll.

You know how translating a book to film is 99.5% guaranteed to screw something up and leave you wondering why they bothered?

About a year ago, I heard that the Dragonlance Saga was finally going to be set to film. Not live action, either. Animation. When dealing with fantasy, I prefer animation because (in theory) you can do so much more. You don't have to worry about an impressive CGI budget, if the people you cast actually look like the characters, hiring stunt men for ridiculous feats, etc..., etc...

The announcement of the movie came with some casting notes. Lucy Lawless as Goldmoon, Kiefer Sutherland as Raistlin. OMG!

So, after all this, I was ecstatic. Not just because it was Dragonlance, a series I love, but because it meant that if sales were good enough, they might do the same with the Dark Elf Saga. Wonderful comic books for both series have come out already with fantastic artwork and very good writing and direction.

The release date was August. This came and went. Finally, I hear it's coming out this month. I almost preordered it, but held off because I don't typically do stuff like that.

leigh137 introduced me to Dragonlance about 16 years ago, so it's only fitting that she pointed me to the trailer.

Three words explicitly described my reaction: What. The. Fuck.

I looked up the reviews on Amazon, where (currently), 1 and 2 star reviews outnumber 3, 4 and 5 star reviews 25-24.

I'll let some of the reviewers tell you the tale of woe:

The animation is a horrendous mix of CGI dragons and hand-drawn animation, with NO attempt at combining the two. When I first saw the fights between the CGI draconians and the hand-drawn heroes, I double-checked to make sure I wasn't watching some pre-visualization production sequence in the "extras" menu. It's bad, really bad. There's one sequence where the CGI character suddenly has 2 arrows appear in his back, stops animating, and just falls over. It's painfully laughable. It looks as if the cel animators and the CGI animators did their parts without ever communicating with each other, and then both works were handed off to a 3rd group to try and mash them together.

To add insult to injury, several final scenes were rendered incorrectly, resulting in a problem known by editors as "field reversal." You'll see it in certain scenes where characters are moving left-to-right or right-to-left, and they appear to flicker forward and back in a very artificial and unappealing way. This type of technical problem reinforces that what we are seeing here was an unfinished workprint, which was all that was finished when the money ran out.

irstly, as others have noted, this is drawn and animated in the style -- and (ahem!) quality -- of a rushed Saturday morning cartoon. You could throw a member of the Scooby Doo or Superfriends casts into the crowds and chances are no one would notice.

The character portrayal was equally resplendant. I doubt you could tell High Lord Verminaard from Skeletor or Lex Luthor with your eyes closed. Laurana was reduced to a cartoonish valley girl. Tanis was just Fred from Scooby Doo, but with a beard. And the list of flat stereotypes goes on and on. I need to repeat this: these are NOT the characters you meet in the books! Given the cast of proven actors, I can only blame the director for this amateurish mess.

As if a badly drawn and badly acted cartoon weren't enough, the storytelling was just as disastrous. Scenes that inspired fear and awe in the book were bland yawn-jerkers. Scenes that brought a tear to your eye in the book now had all the emotion of a grocery checklist. Long voyages to distant lands were made to feel like a brief stroll around the corner.

I'm just horrified at the way they've managed to destroy the epic Dragonlance Saga. I didn't actually need to see the reviews to know this was going to be bad. I just had to watch the trailer.

-pb

By way of whedonesque, word from Ron D. Moore concerning Battlestar:

http://www.rondmoore.com/Site/Blog/Entries/2007/11/17_Galactica_wraps.html

I refuse to believe that we won’t finish, that we won’t be back to film our final stories, but I know and accept there is that possibility.

...

Galactica’s coming back, I frakking promise you that. But I am ready to put the rest of the story on the table and take the risk that I’ll never be able to tell it, in support of this strike.


Like Adama says, you make your choices and then you live with them.

Urgh.

-pb

Forgot to post this last week, but Heroes, yeah.

I totally called the end of last week's eposide at the end of the season premier. Yeah, I rock.

-pb

I came to a conclusion last weekend while watching SciFi's show Eureka. Willful Suspension of Disbelief actually has two thresholds, and how close they are to each other goes a long way to determining how good a story is, particularly science fiction.

The first threshold is the level of disbelief the story is asking me to suspend. The second threshold is the level of disbelief the story is requiring me to suspend.

Take for instance this miserable episode of Eureka, a show I'm currently watching like a train wreck. Eureka is a town where the greatest minds in America live and work and have all manner of scientific mishaps. That's the premise. What the show is asking me to suspend is my disbelief that there is this remote community where scientific advancements, perhaps a hundred years off, are commonplace. Alright, I'll buy that.

In this episode, we learn that the town has some sort of electro-magnetic bubble around it. In an effort to meet a deadline, a scientist steals the power source for her 15-year-old daughter's science fair project and integrates it into a security system. This interfaces with the E-M bubble, supercharging it.

Ok, I'll come along. That's what the show has asked me to suspend. Of course, in that request is the idea that this is real science, just used in ways we haven't yet imagined, but fully plausible. Protective E-M field around an entire town? Ok. Could happen. Might be possible now with a big enough power source.

So, now that they've asked me to suspend my disbelief at one level, the story suddenly demands, with no explanation, that I suspend it farther. The E-M field has gone into overdrive, and it begins pulling objects out of orbit.

Mind you, this super-powerful field isn't yanking cars off the road 20 miles away. It's only pulling stuff from orbit. And what happens to this stuff? it falls right on the field like meteorites, interestingly at a number of angles, indicating at least a 180° field of effect. So, you've asked me to believe that scientists are doing all this fun stuff, but then, inexplicably, you've demanded that I ignore the rules of science and just accept your version. Two thresholds. Nowhere near each other. Bad story.

I won't even go into the rest of the episode, because the resolution is even worse. Not to mention the fact that apparently, the writer of the episode hadn't seen a single previous episode and wrote the characters in any way he saw fit. Main character an average everyman surrounded by geniuses? Let's have him act like a retard! What? He's never acted like a retard before? He's probably the smartest character on the show despite not being a genius like everyone else? Bah, we need to make an IQ joke!

And it's not just Eureka. A lot of stories do this, and don't even think about it. Take the movie Twister. You had me pretty much until the end, and then you rode out the center of an F5 tornado by strapping your belt to a pipe, and survived with nary a scratch. Yeah, ok. You asked me to suspend my disbelief at "Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt aren't actually Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt, they're part of a team of tornado chasers." That was it. There was no mystery or unreasonable science. But then, whoa, you demand I believe that they're some sort of super-humans capable of defying nature by driving a truck into a mile-wide tornado and then outrunning it. Sorry, you lose. Go back and rethink that ending. It worked great until then.

-pb

( More musing on Potter )
-pb

So, I just finished reading Book 7.
( Arr, there be spoilers here. Seriously. )
-pb

The interesting part about pre-release spoilers is that there is rarely any context to the point being spoiled. More importantly, you typically have no idea if the spoiler is actually correct, or if it's just speculation designed to look authoritative.

Consider if someone were to blurt out on their journal, say, that one major character in an upcoming book lives, another one dies, and a third plays a role you didn't expect, you've got two questions to ask:

1. Is this person telling the truth, or making it up to toy with you?
2. What exactly are the circumstances behind these events?

In either case, you have only one way of answering those questions: you're going to have to read the book. Just like the people running about screaming "SNAPE KILLS DUMBLEDORE!", they didn't explain why Snape killed Dumbledore (at least to the extent that the book described it), and hearing that (and finding it the second the book was in my hands) didn't detract from my enjoyment. In fact, it made me more eager to read the preceeding 600+ pages to find out why.






Incidentally, on page 624, about halfway down, Krum proposes to Hermione.

-pb

Harry lives. Neville kills Voldemort. Ron dies.

-pb

So, to commemorate the fifth installment of the Harry Potter film franchise (and likely the fourth installment of "we didn't read the books before we made this movie!"), I deliver unto you ladies pictures of the obviously-not-fifteen, obviously-not-an-awkward-boy Daniel Radcliffe:

If these were pictures of Emma Watson, they'd be totally NSFW, and I'd be hoarding them.

Obviously, book 8 will be "Harry Potter and the Leatherbound Lasher".

h/t to egyptian_spider

-pb

So, we're running a list-building promotion here, and the integral part of it is a flash demonstration piece that cost a shitload of money to make. Once the prospective customer suffers through 1½ minutes of jabber about our products, they get to an entry form. It's very straightforward, and (after a lot of head-beating on the part of the Flash developer), it tells you very nicely to please, for the umpteenth time, enter a valid fucking email address, asshole. Well, it says it a lot nicer than that.

So, this thing's been live for over a week now. The contest ends on July 10th. Suddenly, someone got freaked out that there's no tech support number listed on the thing. zOMGWTFBBQ!!oneoneeleventy! No phone number?! SWEET JEESUS. Planes will fall from the sky.

So, instead of contacting our tech support or customer support departments, who would just kick it up to us anyway, it's decided that the number will go right to the source. DIRECTLY to the source.

That's me.

This thing is so brain-numbingly easy to figure out that MONKEYS could do it. Not even smart monkeys. Monkeys who's primary pasttime is shit-flinging, jerking off and drooling on themselves. Retarded monkeys.

So, I'm just waaaaaiting for the first sub-primate to call up and say "I can't get this thing to work!"

-pb

Alrighty, folks, I finally got off my ass and put up my professional portfolio. Now, hopefully, I can use it to score myself some freelance gigs. And by freelance, I mean paying, not trade. Because trade hasn't been working out too well. It's hard to use trade stuff as a resumé builder (which is primarily why I was doing trade stuff) if the web site you spent all that time developing never goes live and then you find out that they went and got someone else to do their site for them.

So, if anybody knows anyone that's looking for a freelance web developer, let me know!

-pb

Someone was sending a fax a minute ago from the fax machine around the corner from me. The sound really took me back to those heady, halcyon days when (no lie) I could actually tell the connection speed of a modem just by the sound of the handshake.

Oh yeah, I was totally that geek.

-pb

In the course of my life, I have encountered people who, in their time, became very important in my life in one regard or another. Friends, roommates, and/or lovers, there are more than a few that wounded me greatly. Sometimes, the pain was sharp, like a paper cut that doesn't even bleed. Sometimes, it was like a deep knife wound with plenty of blood and pain. These are the people who, in conversations with them in my head, I address starting with

"Of all the people I hope I never see again, you're the one..."

One, in particular, has been on my mind recently, and I don't exactly know why. His wound was different. Instead of a paper cut or a knife wound, his wound was that strange wound where you realize you're bleeding, and it takes you ten minutes to figure out from where.

So, Chuck, of all the people I hope I never see again, you're the one I miss the most.

I haven't seen him in almost seven years. Chuck is an extraordinary guy. He had this amazing capacity to laugh and get others to laugh with him. He's the kind of guy who'll gladly sit up until all hours of the morning listening to your latest existential or love crisis, and then openly fantasize to you about fornicating with your grandmother. Chuck's a merciless kidder. He'll use any subject matter, no matter how vulgar, crass, or beyond good taste, to roast you. But there's no malevolence in it, he's just a sickly funny guy. He'd give you the shirt off his back, and then gleefully run around naked. Sometimes his humor ranged into the frightfully annoying, but damned if I don't laugh sometimes when I hear "doughnuts!"

For all his pros, Chuck had a lot of cons. The first being his perpetual employment (or lack thereof). Chuck lived with me in Perkasie, and in those two or so months, had something like three jobs. I moved to Lansdale, and the next thing I know, Chuck's right there. I think I kicked him out of my apartment twice - he just kept coming back, and I'm the kind of sucker who won't put someone out, especially if they come with a pot of some of the best chili known to man (Chuck's an excellent cook).

I met Chuck in 1997 and last saw him in 2000. Two paragraphs don't even begin to do justice to the (simultaneously) great and horrible person that I knew him to be.

That three-year span was probably the most self-destructive part of my life. I was on a straight shot to nowhere, and having a whole host of people around that were on the same path didn't help me much. Despite that, I was the responsible adult. How that happened, I don't know. I was the one who worried about paying the rent, and I was the one eventually stuck with the bill when it didn't get paid. Chuck, in his place in the mythology that my mind has created for itself, is the embodiment of that self-destruction. The part of me that wanted to sit around and wait for the world to deliver, the part of me that wanted to just exist, that's the part of me that Chuck represents.

So, Chuck's been on my mind lately. I heard a piece on NPR about a guy who was offered the job of "head dishwasher" in a restaurant in New Orleans. I can't accurately explain the context of that, but Chuck used the term "head dishwasher" to roast one of the other roommates (who really deserved it). Chuck, last I heard, lives in New Orleans. I just got back into collecting Magic: The Gathering, something that Chuck and I blew hours playing. Other than that, I can't really explain it. I don't know why he's on my mind.

Chuck is one of the few people who were important enough to get on list of people I hope I never see again. But, there's a big part of me that wants to take him off that list. I'd love to see him again. I'd love to hang out with him.

I just don't want to find him living on my couch.

-pb

J.K. Rowling, who became the world's first billion-dollar author on the back of Harry Potter's success, has given the go-ahead for the creation of a Florida theme park dedicated to the schoolboy wizard.

Hopefully, there will be a ride wherein you get to repeatedly use Unforgiveable Curses on Harry. That would be awesome.

Maybe in the "adult" section of the park, there will be the Virtual Reality "Evening in Snape's Dungeon" and "Lupin and Sirius Revue".

Lubricato!

-pb

It is by will alone I set my mind on edge.
It is by the juice of coffee bean that hands aquire shake,
the teeth aquire stains,
the stains become a warning.
It is by will alone I set my mind on edge.

-pb

So, back in November, we purchased two new laptops. They came with a free upgrade to Windows Vista Business Edition when it launched, so I figured "what the heck". It took a while, but Vista finally came. About three weeks ago, I finally got around to installing it on my system. I've become quite the expert in backing up systems, and with the network I've got set up, it's really easy to send files to the main file server and retrieve them later.

Since computer manufacturers feel the need to be inimately connected to every aspect of your computer, they didn't just send a Vista Upgrade disc. Noooo, they sent me a HP Upgrate Utility Disk and a HP Windows Vista Upgrade Disc. So, I followed their simple steps to cramming Vista on my system.

Three hours later, I wiped the harddrive and went back to XP.

Vista looked pretty, but it was a disaster on my system. It didn't "upgrade", it just chucked all my old files into a directory and cleaned everything else. Then, the thing wouldn't deal with the wireless network at all. The network configuration was arcane, at best. After a while, I just gave up and went back to XP.

Well, aarik suggested starting from a clean slate. Since the recovery disc to go back to XP wiped the hard drive, this wasn't a bad idea. My Office installation was all borked up anyway, so I was going to have to do something, and uninstalling and reinstalling Office was not working.

So, yesterday, I wiped the hard drive and installed Vista. Less than an hour later, I was cruising along, online, connected to the wireless, and busily reinstalling all my software.

From an upgrade standpoint, Vista (probably with a lot of help from HP) blows. It cucked my system up something fierce, and going back to XP didn't help, either.

From a clean install standpoint, Vista is as smooth as butter. Installed in a flash, connected in a flash, and was generally easy.

So, now that I've got it installed, here's my take:

1. That Mac commercial with the PC and his Secret Service agent asking for confirmation on everything? Yeah, that's pretty much the case. It's a bit annoying at first cleaning up the programs menu and installing programs, but once that's out of the way, it rarely comes up.
2. I've only encountered two compatibility issues, both ironically Microsoft products: Money 2006 and SQL Server 2000 Client Tools. Money was just a matter of installing Flash (?), and Enterprise Manager works just fine despite Vista claiming that it wouldn't work at all.
3. The Aero theme is really nice, great touch emulating the Mac look and then improving on it. The glass effect is sweet, and the program scrolling is very nice. Overall look and feel is much nicer than XP. Trillian is incompatible with Aero, though, and if I load it, it defaults back to the Basic theme. Basic isn't so bad, but once you see the look of Aero, it's kind of bland.
4. The Alt+Tab function is awesome, integrating one the the things I love about the Mac: instead of XP's style where you just tab and tab and tab until you get what you want, now you can mouse over the tabs and click the one you want. You can still tab tab tab, but this makes it much easier. One of the tabs that it gives you is your desktop, which is even better.
5. The gadgets are interesting, but they're kind of useless. Once you open a window, they tend to disappear. There's no point on the screen that opens them, either, just an icon on the task bar. The default ones are not very customizeable. There's a CPU/RAM monitor, but you can't configure the color, style, or size. The clock is analog, and while you can select from about 7 different looks, they're all the same size. I found a digital clock and a more customizeable CPU monitor. Shoehorning them in there was hard, but I managed to fit those two, a weather bug, a moon phase monitor, a remote desktop link, and a calendar on the first tab.

So far, those are my issues. Hopefully, that'll be all that I encounter.

-pb

Some of you might remember my... long... post about Why I Hate Star Trek with a Passion. Well, I went back and cleaned it up, cited some sources, and reworded whole parts of it. Check it out and feel my loathing!

-pb

Ok, Canada is fucking awesome. Here's one reason: Hockey. Yes, I know it's a stereotype to link Canadians to hockey, but I had the choice of three different channels to watch Devils/Lightning game 6 (ok, one of them was the NBC affiliate out of Plattsburgh, NY, but whatever). Hockey Night in Canada? Fuck yea. No American coverage has ever come this close to hockey, not by a longshot. I used to think that there was two ways to watch TV: go to a game, or see it on TV. HNIC actaully introduced me to a third level. It's like being at the game, but they give you stats, too. They showed the announcement of the opening lineups. Hell, they don't even do that for football here in America except on local radio. Just awesome.

And then, just to cap it off, while flipping through the channels up here, I came across a commercial for some sort of pizza akin to Digiorno, and it's got Martin Brodeur. It was all in French, but it was hilarious. And it was Marty B. Canada, Fuck Yeah!

-pb

So, I'm trying to get a game together again. Since I've been unable to do this in small groups, I figure I'll let the entirety of Electric LiveJournal Land help me out.

I'm available to game Thursday and Friday nights, and Saturdays. I'm looking for a regular game (that is, twice monthly at least) that's relatively local to me. Every week never tends to work, but if enough people are up for it, fine. Instead of everyone screaming out random answers, just fill out the poll and then shout out clarifications.

Have at it:

Poll #954043 Gaming
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

What days work better for you?

Would you be willing to run or play?

Would you be willing to host?

What game genre?

-pb

And how!

So, Saturday morning I finally relented to victoria_fusion's incessant weekend demand to go out for breakfast (Me: You do realize, 99 times out of 100, I'm going to say 'no', right? Her: There's always that one time! Actual conversation). We settled on Alfredo's on Main Street. We walked in, ceased breathing, and then left. Their smoking section, despite having three people smoking already, was actually more breatheable than their non-smoking section. So, we headed to another joint down the line.

Then, we went to Target in Oaks to get some new clothing for me. After loading the cart various girth-covering fabric (they were fresh out of Muumuus), we were wandering about. Always the geek, I stumbled into the electronic section to dream of things I'll never bother to buy. After a minute or two, I notice victoria_fusion staring at the tag on a flat panel TV. Then, she starts comparing two of them. So, like the man I am, I started doing the same. And suddenly, I stopped and said "wait, are we actually shopping for a TV here?!"

And she said those four words that every man longs to hear: "Let's go ha... err, "Well, yeah, I guess".

So, the quest for a TV was on. We price shopped there, then headed off to the CompUSA in KOP which is going out of business. No better deals there, so off to Best Buy. Nothing good there, so on to the Target next to the Best Buy in Plymouth Meeting. They didn't have what we wanted, so we took the 25-minute schlep back to Oaks, and grabbed a cashier.

They didn't have the TV in stock.

So, we grabbed the one right next to it which was pretty much the same thing without the detachable speakers for $20 less. Then, we did something that I haven't done in over 20 years. We bought a CONSOLE. For the first time since I was the proud owner of my (used with 30 games) ATARI 2600, I own a THING WITH JOYSTICKS. We bought an Xbox 360. It didn't come with 30 games (I got Halo 2 and NHL 07), but strangely enough, like that 2600 system, it has wireless controllers.

My logic behind this was we wouldn't have any place to put the DVD player, but we could tuck the Xbox behind the TV. Yay for man logic!

Of course, then we needed yet another remote control. I found a Logitech Harmony that's specifically made for the Xbox. It's programmable (has its own USB cable), and it actually controls everything! It can't figure out the TV input settings exactly in automated functions, but whatever. It's better than having four remotes, that's for sure.

So that's my weekend.

-pb

Monday Fun Fact!

Did you know that there are over 320 unused valid area codes in the North American Numbering Plan, accounting for nearly 2 Billion available phone numbers?

Apparently, all of those will be gone by 2030, so they need to do something to add new ones. One idea I didn't hear bandied about:

Add a three-digit regional prefix. 101 for New England, 201 for Mid-Atlantic, 301 for South and so on and so forth. Ten-digit dial like normal within your regional code, and add the regional code for calls outside that. It'd be just like the difference between seven-digit and ten-digit dialling previous to mandatory ten-digit dialling that most areas now have. Hell of a lot simpler than making area codes 4 digits long, and it would supply like 9 trillion more numbers.

-pb

WTF?! You mean to tell me that Claire Bennett wears ASBESTOS UNDERWEAR!? I don't care if she's only 15, I WANTED SKIN.

In other news, Sulu is a total badass.

And:

"That bastard! He's thinking in Japanese!"

"WHY ARE YOU THINKING IN JAPANESE!?"

-pb

I want to game. Someone needs to run a game. I want to play Trinity AEon.

-pb

Ok, I know there are people on ye olde flist that have more networking savvy than I do. So, here's the question:

Here's my current network setup:

Yes, the network and all connected computers are named from Greek mythology. It's a thing I do.

Here's the problem: I can't get Kastor and Polydeuces to talk to Hermes and Orpheus. Things were fine when I just had Hermes connected directly to the wireless router, but since I've added Orpheus, I had to add the second router to act as a switch. The wireless router is on the second floor next to the DSL modem. Hermes and Orpheus are in the basement, and there's a single Cat5 cable running between them, hence the need for a switch.

So, how do I get Hermes and Orpheus on the same network as Kastor and Polydeuces?

-pb

There's a gremlin in my cubicle. I swear. My PC wouldn't boot up today, so IT has had it for most of the day. Then, I just noticed that my Mac wasn't connected to any of my network drives, and the time was displaying Oqp"34<49"PO, which changed to Oqp"34<4:"PO a minute later. Fun fun fun! At least that's better than Friday, when it was giving me a BSOD. Seriously, my Mac had a BSOD. And it kept giving me that, even after I rebooted. After a few hours of being powered down, it decided to play nice.

-pb

or, what I'd fix given a green light on a new series and $1 million per episode

Anyone that knew me in high school knows that I was a over-the-top Trek geek. I liked to think that I was a Trekker, but no no no, I was a Trekkie. I just didn't have enough money to get a uniform. I'd have worn it in public, though, of that I am convinced. To put it succinctly, I didn't see anything wrong with hanging out with a group of people wearing uniforms (and Vuclan ears) at Dorney Park, and certainly didn't see the sick irony of riding The Enterprise ride thus garbed. Yeah, I was that bad. Sweet Jumping Jesus, where was my head at!?

Not too many years later, my insane, wretched love for Trek turned into bitter, self-flagellating hatred. Hatred for everything Star Trek. Like a compulsive eater sobbing while shoveling mouthful after mouthful of Double Chocolate Fudge ice cream into their mouths, I still watch the occasional Star Trek show while railing against it.

Will I see the next movie? You bet your sweet ass, I will. I will be first in line to get tickets. Will I piss and moan about how bad it was? Again with the sweet ass wager.

So why do I hate Star Trek? Oh, let me count the ways. Star Trek is supposed to be a story about the future. It’s supposed to be a story about Humanity. Unfortunately, to be able to write anything convincing about the future, you have to have some concept of the past and present. To write a story about Humanity, you have to have a good grasp of what it is to be Human. Apparently none of the writers of Star Trek have had these concepts down pat.

Peace in Our Time
Neville Chamberlain said it, and then bombs started falling on London. Star Trek originally starts in the 23rd century, sometime around 2254. Now, this was originally a story told in 1966, so they had 288 years to work with. Under the simplicity of the Original Series canon, this is plenty of time. However, things start to get weird as the franchise goes on. What we end up with is a very compressed field of time for many things to happen.

For starters, there's this (last) world war in the mid 1990's, the Eugenics Wars¹. We’re led to believe this war followed by a nuclear war that is then followed by the Post-Atomic Horror². During this time, Zephram Cochrane developed his warp drive “space-tourist” moneymaking scheme in 2063³.

WWIII ended in 2053. 98 years later, we have a unified world government and a space exploration group. I can tell you with a fair amount of certainty that even a small-scale nuclear conflict would simply not have been recovered from in under 100 years. We’re still dealing with the repercussions from World War II in the form of Russia and the post-Cold War mentality that’s led us into a new conflict with global terrorism. We’re certainly no closer to a unified world government. Nuclear war isn’t going to precipitate that. Obviously, the specter of nuclear war pushed us farther from it.

The socio-political implications of say, Iran and Israel lobbing bombs, or a Indian-Pakistani nuclear conflict, would cause long-lasting worldwide consequences that would take decades to recover from. Of course, we’re not talking about something as simple as India and Pakistan dueling nukes here: we’re talking about the collapse of North America’s political structure into warring factions. Regardless of how you consider America’s involvement in the world, what’s not debatable is what would happen if America, its military presence, its political presence, and its humanitarian presence, were gone. Even if another power rose into that vacuum, we’re still left with an entire continent at war… and the cleanup from a nuclear war. Former Bikini Atoll residents will gladly tell you that doesn’t happen overnight, or even after 50 years.

So, the timeline so far goes as follows:

Mid 1990’s: Eugenics wars.
2026-2053: World War III.
2053-2079 (at least): Post-atomic horror.
2063: Zephram Cochrane breaks the warp barrier. Vulcans land, drink whiskey.
Early 22nd century – Chaos still reigns⁴.
2151: With no help from drunk Vulcans, a completely united humanity breaks the Warp 5 barrier.

So, in 150 years, we go from Supermen to lobbing nukes to warping around the universe. Riiiight. Oh, did I mention that those Supermen were launched into space in frozen exile as a result of the Eugenics Wars? That means that from 1966-1990’s, humanity figured out at least the precepts of deep-space long-distance travel, and were actually sending people off during a world war. Maybe the writers have forgotten what exactly happened during the first two World Wars. Humanity pretty much stopped for a few years to participate in a world-wide orgy of absolute bugfuckery. They didn’t sit around going “let’s go off into space!” They put all of their thought into “how can we massacre the most people at one time?” But no! We’re already out colonizing the Moon, Mars, the rest of the Solar System, and we’re on our way to establishing extrasolar colonies by 2069⁵ (in the middle of a nuclear war)

I built a working spaceship in my basement!
I'm left wondering how a bunch of scientists holed up in a nuclear silo in Montana managed to conceive, build and fly a warp-capable spacecraft without access to every resource of NASA, the ESA, the Russian Space Program, every last bit of academia support, and every spare nanosecond of processor time available. But, for the sake of simplicity, let's just say that 50 money-grubbing naturalist astrophysicists managed to build, test and fly a FTL ship in a bunker with no outside resources.

After a global war with nukes being flung about, the world economy would be in the proverbial shitter. North America (and the largest economy in the world) is in a state of factional civil war. It must be assumed that the rest of the world is in a piss-poor state, as well. Ultra-fascist governments with drugged military forces have sprung up and the world is in chaos. Parts of the world look like Mel Gibson is going to come driving a tanker full of sand through them at any moment, and will, until at least 2079. Billions of people are likely dead. I'll give a conservative whack at it and place the death toll at somewhere around 2.5 billion, after nuclear war, conventional war, disease, famine, and all the other four horsemen goodies. (Of course the cannon says that just over half a billion die, even though 140,000 died from the bombing of Hiroshima alone (including aftermath), so I’m just going to chalk up the 600 million figure to “uneducated understatement”. Regardless, the picture I’m trying to paint here is of a giant shitstorm. But hey, nevermind that! Zeph comes along with his plan to get filthy rich selling warp-technology to nutty guys in gyrocopters and eight-year-olds wearing loincloths that speak in grunts! And what becomes of this? He meets Vulcans! Of course, there's still another two decades of Mad Max reruns before things are going to get any better.

Now, we fast-forward 88 years, and what do we have? World peace! Troi tells Cochrane that it comes in the next 50 years (sometime around 2113). North America once again sports verdant pastures of corn. Earth is united. Everyone is happy and jolly because our stony faced, flawless-English-speaking, emotionless vegetarian pacifist friends with pointed ears came down, flashed some jive Hebrew hand signs, and said "Live Long and Prosper". Bang, problem solved.

Hold on, back up. After 150 years of Hollywood telling us that aliens from space have nothing more than conquest and consumption of human flesh on their agenda, humanity in the midst of the aftermath of the worst war in its history greets these newcomers with open arms, world peace and a lot of alcohol? What were these writers smoking? Whatever it was, I want some, because that’s got to be a hell of a trip. You lost me at "Live Long and Prosper".

The Vulcans listed Earth as “mostly harmless” until Zeph broke the warp barrier, regardless of the fact that we’d been chucking exploration ship into space for at least 67 years. Of course, given the level of barbarism, the internecine conflict and the sad state of our planet, I'm pretty sure the Vulcans, being the logical beings that they are, would have armed photon torpedoes and vaporized the Phoenix quicker than you can blink. Vulcans would have taken one look at that ship, realized that it meant we were about to start exporting our particular brand of destruction, and incinerated it. Then, they would have powdered the installation it came from. Look, you don't go totting off for tea with the residents of Thunderdome, you kill them before they kill you. Or, at the very least, you neutralize them as a threat until they can play nice. Humanity was busy killing itself in 2063, what made the Vulcans think for a second that they would be any nicer to a group of snooty, pointy-eared aliens with a superiority complex?

Ok, so that’s “present day” to “the future”. Makes no sense so far, but it gets juicier.

Now that we’ve got peace what are we gonna do… with it?
It's 2151, and the new Earth fun-pals government is chafing under the Vulcans treating them like children. They head out into space. They piss off the Klingons. They meet up with the Xindi, and get into a fight with them over some lies perpetrated by a bunch of time-traveling nitwits. The Xindi then unleash massive destruction on the newly renovated and completely rebuilt sparkling new Earth, carving a 4,000 mile swath through North and Central America. Humanity, in perfect human fashion, has the damage fixed and wiped from their history books within five or so years. The Xindi are never heard from again. Meanwhile, sometime around 2166, humans meet, fight a war with, and make Cold-war style “peace” with the Romulans. However, despite having perfected ship-to-ship visual communication at least 15 years earlier, they never actually see them! They meet up with the Romans… err… Romulans again in 2266, where humans are still pissed off about how the Romulans killed their relatives. Well, the writers got one thing right, considering that there are people in the Middle East still pissed about the Crusades.

Timeline update:
2151: Earth heads out into the wonders of space with their first long-range ship. Their first act is to piss off the Klingons (no hard task there).
2152: Earth-Xindi war (all a big misunderstanding, really)
2166: Earth-Romulan war

Two wars and antagonizing a major race in the span of 15 years. The Vulcans must be wondering why they didn't pull the trigger in 2063.

Now, over the course of the next 100 years, we learn that Humans are no longer concerned with God, Money or Politics, and Earth is one of the founding members of the United Federation of Planets, the biggest, happiest family of planets that anyone could ever have imagined. If it weren't for those pesky Klingons and Romulans, shit man, we'd be in fucking Space-topia.

There are eight letters that perfectly sum this up: B U L L S H I T.

Humanity, in the wake of a slap-down, drag-out nuclear holocaust, would not drag itself up by its bootstraps, get itself into space, break the speed of light, and become the harbingers of peace and prosperity to every Tom, Dick and Gleex'rzed in its interstellar neighborhood, and they certainly wouldn't just sign on to our nifty little space government. It just wouldn't happen. I know this is science fiction, but I like a little science in my science fiction. By 2266, we might have a few colonies in space. We might have even managed to fight off aliens who would rightly see us a easy marks. We certainly wouldn't have a stable united government. Not if you figure a nuclear war. Even in the Original Series, a global conflict, World War III if you will, is mentioned. 280 years later, I seriously doubt that Earth would be the power on the block in the Alpha Quadrant.

You people are all alike
Ever notice how every race that humanity encounters is a walking stereotype? Klingons are like Vikings in space. All of them. Romulans, to the last, are crafty, conniving, deceitful bastards who would rather stab you in the back than shake your hand. Ferengi are all profit-obsessed weasels. Vulcans are all stone-faced, logic spouting tight-asses. Cardassians are all… Cardassians. Except Humans. Humans are the very definition of diversity. Sure, there’s the occasional exception. There’s Nog and Rom and Tuvok and a few others, but they’re like Siamese twins: an interesting anomaly. Typically trotted out for a plot point. Star Trek is horrifically racist. Look, Klingons! They must want to fight us! Ha ha, we shall oblige! FIRE! Look, Ferengi, those sneaky bastards are going to try to sell us a used car… wait, back up, I think I’ve heard this before. There’s no diversity among the races in Star Trek. There’s not even an attempt at diversity. On the bridge of the original series, you had a black woman, a Japanese man, a Russian man, and a half Human/half Vulcan. There’s your diversity. You didn’t really expect them to hire a non-white actor to play a Vulcan, did you? They had their black quota wrapped up in Uhura. Get to the back of the bus, darkie.

Civilians or Military? MAKE UP YOUR MIND.
So, is Starfleet a civilian organization? Is it a military organization? Who knows? This is a glaring issue that is really never addressed. Starfleet is spoken of as the exploration wing of the UFP. However, in TOS, the Enterprise, one of twelve starships (charged with seeking out new life and new civilizations, mind you) is loaded for space-bear. Phasers, photon torpedoes, ship-to-ship and ship-to-ground firepower. It's a beast, and it can blow shit up when it wants. It has a crew of about 430, and it is the perfect vehicle for finding brave new worlds… and then starting wars with them. It is not, in any capacity, a capable exploration vessel. It's a military vessel. It is crewed with an inordinate number of officers bearing Canadian Naval ranks. Notice how almost everyone is at least an Ensign? The Mirror Universe had it right - advancement through assassination. How the hell else is Ensign Ethnic supposed to advance in rank if, as an officer, he's the third-lowest ranking crewmember out of four hundred thirty? For chrissakes, figure it out. Janice Rand, a Yeoman, must have been scraping toilets when she wasn't taking notes for Kirk or dreaming of hobbling Spock's knob. If Rand was on the Enterprise-E, she'd have committed suicide after realizing that Wesley Crusher outranked her just because he was the doctor's kid.

So, Starfleet is at best a stupidly-organized military organization, which pretty much explains why no one ever obeys orders. 99% of episodes involve some sort of insubordination, dereliction of duty, failure to obey orders, or whatnot. Admirals are routinely told to shove it by rogue Captains, Commanders tell Captains to piss off, hell, even 12-year-old Ensigns tell Captains where to get off. Who the hell is running this military?! Who’s flying this thing? In other shows, regardless of the outcome, when someone disobeys orders, someone kicks their ass (even if they pat them on the back later). There's a clear chain of command. Adama is in charge, when he says "jump", you shout "how high SIR?" on the way up, regardless of your rank, because he outranks you. You don't say "Nooo! Teh Cylons will kill us unless I save the day!", unless he has specifically instructed you to save the day, or he will rip off your head and shit down your neck

That's how the military goes. In Star Trek, we have an unprepared and ill-equipped exploration vessel run by an incompetent military complex that goes around picking wars. Humanity is surely in good hands.

Did anyone think to bring chips and soda?
Ok, now, I have this problem with most space-cruiser based sci-fi, but Star Trek exemplifies it. The Enterprise, according to technical manuals that exist in the canon, is slightly shorter, slightly wider, and almost as tall as the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Enterprise, which sports a company of 3,500 and a