Gameholecon - Martian Dice

Whoa....I don't think I realized I had quite so many photos of Gameholecon, and that's after pruning the duplicates, the bad photos, and the uninteresting ones.

Here we are playing Martian Dice. The folks who run the game library - the Milwaukee Company of Gamers - put on a tournament and gave us free dice.  The concept is simple.  You're the Martians.  If tanks show up, you need as many death rays to offset the humans.  After that, you get a point for everything you abduct: humans, chickens, cows.  If you get at least one die from each set, then you score an extra two points.  But you have to either play a death ray or another set you don't have each time.  First person to 25 wins.

Eryn setting aside some dice.  Those are all my tanks in the foreground.  That was a real roll.
 

I made it into the semifinals.  One of the Milwaukee gamers was dressed as a yeoman from Star Trek. 


Ming not happy with his dice.  Or else getting lectured by that wagging finger across the table.


Ming happy with his roll.

Sunday Morning Ride

Yesterday, Kyle and I went to Cook in St. Paul to try out their breakfast.  It was raining mightily, so I drove up there instead of pedaling.  I don't do lightning and/or thunder.  Wet is fine.  Electrocuted is not.  Great breakfast.  I had a Frenchcake which was part hashbrown, part pancake, and topped with poached eggs and served with a side of french toast and duroc bacon.  Way better than I expected.  Kyle had the Korean pancakes which set off some Facebook exchange with my sister about things that look like breasts.  Fortunately, before the cops came in to eat, Kyle pointed out to me that I was bleeding.  Not a little, a lot.  I think the barber nicked my neck the day before and I'd scratched it.  The result was blood all the way down the back of my neck and washing across the left front side of my neck.  I looked like Dexter.

So today, I tried to make up for my lack of bicycling breakfast by pedaling to Colossal in south Minneapolis.  Unfortunately, it was perhaps the first time in two years I didn't have cash with me and Colossal only accepts cash or local check.  So that was a no go and I'll have to try again.  The Hot Plate didn't open until 8:00, fully 45 minutes later, and although I started to hoof it up to Longfellow, I changed my mind and decided just to go home instead.  A bowl of Trader Joe's pseudo Cherrios was not a great alternative to breakfast at a new place, but I fixed it by making buckwheat and blueberry pancakes and banana and mango pancakes for lunch and storing a bunch for the week.

It is WET out there.  Hmm...I think I mushed my pictures a big.  Flickr doesn't link the same way it used to (well, the navigation is different) so I'm still ironing out some news kinks.  Fair trade for it being free.  So here's what I saw on the trail near the Mendota Bridge.  Enough rain that the cliffs are starting to be unstable.  You could hear it yelling about what a bastard the cliff on the other bank was and that it was going to throw all it's shit out the window and that was my sister for f*ucks sake! and more.  I'm sure they're finding it a competent therapist.

It doesn't surprise me it's unstable.  Last time I went down into St. Paul there were a few large rocks next to the trail and one on the trail.  It's obviously getting a bit wet and dangerous.


This is near Lake Nokomis and Lake Hiawatha.  That garbage in the near part of the frame is everywhere along the walking trail.  It's like it cleaned up everywhere, and then dumped it on the tar.


Here's a better picture and you can see all the flotsam and jetsam.  No Ariel though.


And here it is on the trail at Lake Hiawatha.  I went offroad at that point.


I forgot to mention it was darn cold as well.  A nice cold front rolled in on Saturday, so at 5:45 a.m. there was a ton of fog and it was chilly enough to make my hands ache and the dew bead up on my track suit (just the top - I'm not a wise guy).  This was much later; closer to 8:15.  At least at this point I could see the cars coming about the time I heard them.  Earlier I'd hear noise and not see anything until it was on top of the intersection.  I find it difficult to believe anyone drives around in pea soup fog without lights on.


I zoomed in a bit to catch the church on the far side of Mendota Bridge.  Downright Cotswolds in nature.


So a nice ride.  We rounded out our weekend with Edge of Tomorrow: Starship Troopers meets Groundhog Day, which both Eryn and I really enjoyed. Eryn caught The Fault In Our Stars, which I managed to avoid, with mom.  We played Settlers of Catan and Compounded at Ring Mountain (and found a quart of reserved Chocolate Chili Pepper Gelato for me!).  And today, as a graduation gift, I got Eryn Star Trek of Catan which she spent hours mulling over and playing with, despite only having one family game.  I'm getting a reputation as a bit of a pain in the ass when it comes to gaming because I win so much in our family games.  I got lucky in Star Trek of Catan because I used Nurse Chapel to steal a resource from Pooteewheet, which resulted in stealing longest road, and then I couldn't get rid of Nurse Chapel (you have to use it against someone with more points, and that act put me in the lead).  But it worked out well because it locked her down and no one was taking the excellent resource distribution I was getting late in the game.  On the bad side of things, I discovered the drive on my lawnmower isn't working appropriately anymore and I had to push mow the hill that is the back yard.  So I'm feeling fully exercised.

Lolani

io9 is right, the second episode of Start Trek Continues, Lolani, is getting pretty close to spot on as far as mimicking the original episodes.  Fun to see both Grant Imahara and Erin Grey in the episode, although I'm not sure how they got Katy Perry to play the Orion slave girl (that's a joke). How they handle the music shifts and some of the character interaction is spot on.  I laughed at the early interaction between Kirk and the female crew member helping Lolani when Lolani questions their interaction.  And when Lolani apologies to the transporter engineer for holding a knife to his throat and he dreamily says, "You remember me!" it felt like someone channeling the originals.  A great job.

Someone who looks like someone I know....

We were watching a little bit of the old Burt Ward and Adam West Batman and Robin and Batgirl showed up to help the dynamic duo punch out some bad guys near their Londinium Batcave.  A little while later, she showed up as her alter ego, Barbara Gordon, and I said to my wife, "You know who she (Yvonne Craig) looks like?"  She responded, "Audrey Hepburn."

"Absolutely," I replied.  "If you crossed her with Ming's wife."  

"She does!" she exclaimed.

Here's Yvonne looking like she did as Barbara Gordon.  Ming, does your wife know martial arts and have a secret batcycle?  When you go to wedding dances, does she only seem to know the Batusi?

Yvonne was also Orion Marta in the original Star Trek episode, "Whom Gods Destroy".  Yep, the green woman.  Rachel Nichols of Continuum (Netflix-able) played her in the new movies.

The Batusi, in case you don't want to look it up yourself:

That's a lot of emotion, Mr. Spock

I love this Star Trek photo of Nimoy and Shatner that was on The Chive.  It makes me happy.

Let It Snow - Picard Style

Captain Picard sings "Let It Snow!" with supporting cast.

It's a Nice Day for a Spock Wedding...

If targeted marketing really worked, this would have shown up on my front step with a bill from Hallmark, because they would have known I'd buy it, even at a semi-ridiculous cost. What do Spock and Kirk fighting have to do with Christmas? Absolutely nothing...but it makes me happy and it will find a place of honor on our tree next to Eryn's Harry Potter pensieve ornament.

As a bonus, if you've never heard this before, I'm offering it up for everyone's enjoyment. I don't know who made it because I can't find it anywhere on the web and, according to the file date, I downloaded it in 2000. It may have actually been before that - 2000 could just have been the day on which I moved it to the "new" computer when we lived in Richfield.
Spock Wedding

Scooter's new Hallmark ornament:

In Which I May be at Odds with 95% of the World

I've been thinking about this carefully, and perhaps I'm not at odds with the rest of the world quite as much as I think. My contention is about the 2009 Star Trek movie. I don't think I like it as much as everyone else. That's not to say it isn't worth watching, and I would recommend it, but that whole 95% approval on RottenTomatoes makes me feel like I should rate it about 95% as good as a movie can possibly be, whereas I'm more of the opinion it was about 65-70% on my movie meter. But in RottenTomato parlance, that makes me part of the 95%. So it's difficult to say where that puts me.

I've held off for a while so that I'm not spoiling it for anyone (HUGE spoilers warning), and hopefully it's been out long enough that geeks won't harass me for my opinions, because I'm just not the sort to argue science fiction obsessively. I have watched more than my share of it - way more. But my interest is always in the macro, the themes and how they're being handled, and how their treatment compares to other similar treatments and the era in which the story was told and the story itself, whether it's good and compelling and consistent thought is given to the whole weave and weft. Not the micro. I could care less if someone f's up a minor consistency issue as long as they tell a compelling story and don't engage in enough inconsistency to yank me out of the story. And I don't particularly care about those little "aha" momments that are supposed to make me feel good because I obsessively watched the previous episodes/series. I want an incredibly good and cohesive story with strong, unique characters.

So...I can clarify. I felt the care given to the main characters ranks about a 95%. That's pretty much par for the course with Abrams. However, I felt the plot and science ranked more around a 20%.

I'll iterate my issues:

1. I hated the villain. HATED HIM. Why even have him? They'd have been better off forgoing a villain altogether. If Kiki's Delivery Service can get by without one, so can Star Trek 2009. I get it that his part is to come back in time and rewrite the present in order to rewrite the future, allowing the characters to have different personalities among other things. But he was so damn lame. I was listening to MPR or some other radio station (see, I'm not attuned to specifics) and one of the directors or writers noted that they wanted the villain from this Star Trek to be a villain on par with Khan. That appealed to me. But that's certainly not what was delivered. He was a miner. The sort that crushes rocks. And any depth he was supposed to have was poorly delivered, poorly conceived, and unbelievable. I'm pretty sure I could do a better job feigning angst about the death of my wife and child. You know what other movie has a bitter, villainous miner? My Bloody Valentine. I didn't believe his motivation for pursuing Spock, for blowing up one planet, for trying to blow up another planet, for destroying a star ship...nada. Give me Ricardo Montalban any day of the week.
2. Simon Pegg as Scotty. Actually, very good. But several times I found myself thinking, "Hey, it's Simon Pegg as Scotty!" That's incredibly distracting and yanked me out of the story. I was thinking zombies and sillly cop buddy movies. Maybe that's a deficiency on the part of my imagination. At least I wasn't picturing him as he was in Run, Fatboy, Run, because I've been fortunate enough not to see it.
   
3. Let's go back to the villain. How is that a mining ship...IT'S A MINING SHIP...and I don't care that it's a mining ship from the future, they haven't added jamming weapons and cannons to anything we've developed in the way of mining tools so far, and given the premium the Federation puts on tricking out their warships, no one goes willy nilly militarizing their ships, they just wait for them to get attacked before sending help, or dispatch an escort...can drop it's drilling wang through the atmosphere of two home worlds without so much as a "how do you do?" Are there ground based lasers attacking this miner? Particle weapons? Sattelites? Numerous layers of defense? Defense systems acrete outward and you'd expect them to be strongest at your home planet. Why the hell was anyone ever at war with the Klingons if the only thing the Klingons or the Federation needed to do was drive up next to the other's home planet and calmly get down to business? Maybe I'm out of line? Maybe they did? We win! No, WE win! No, we do! What? We're here, we win! We win back! As near as I can tell, defense of earth involves a bunch of cadets running out of Earth Federation Central, pointing at the sky and going OOOOOO.... There wasn't even an intraatmospheric attack on the drilling dong.
4. Why did Spock need a gigantic ball of red matter when only an eyedropper was necessary to create a black hole and eat up a planet? How many black holes was he going to create? And it's a black hole, so telling me he needed enough to create a "bigger" black hole is idiotic and you know it. And why did it have to be injected into the center of the planet by the mining ship's gleaming love sword? Stability issues so it doesn't hop off and go somewhere else? You need a nice even eating from the center for aesthetics? It didn't consume Vulcan evenly if that was the intent. Consuming the atmosphere and everything around and working centerward isn't enough of a planet shattering event?
5. Why do you need to dig a hole to the center of the planet when the center of a planet is just a big ocean of molten rock? WTF? Even if the intent isn't that it has to be injected at the core, but rather just below the mantle, we're back on #4.
   
6. And why did Spock allow them to capture the red matter in the first place instead of just imploding his ship? I'm pretty sure they weren't sporting red matter trapping equipment on their mining ship, or they'd have had their own red matter in the first place and could have just stopped the super nova. And they didn't seem to be near a planet in the opening that would have been in danger of a big ball of red matter. And screw you if you think a logical Vulcan (the old Spock, not the kissy new one) wouldn't sacrifice a star ship to prevent a lunatic from getting his mitts on enough red matter to eat up a few thousand planets. The needs of the many outweigh the few, or the one - that was him, remember?
   
7. Why did they drop Spock off close enough to Vulcan to watch it get sucked up (I'm sorry, that just didn't seem as villainous to me as I think it was supposed to)? And as he was on such a close moon/planet (Vulcan was huge in the sky, much larger than our own moon), why wasn't the planet he (and Kirk) were on affected by the total destruction of a nearby world. I don't believe that the shredding of a planet, despite its mass being subsumed by a black hole and theoretically still there, would fail to have an affect on another planet/moon close enough to watch the event.
8. Back to the red matter. Spock was going to stop a supernova with it by introducing a singularlity. This I believed was possible. Until they decided to use the red matter to stop the wave front, not the actual star pre-supernova. No. You cannot throw a rock at Lake Superior and expect the waves to stop, or at a tidal wave and have it turn back. Doesn't work.
   
9. Spock and Uhuru. What? Kirk's father's death had nothing to do with Spock or his timeline. Butterflies are limited to the world in which they reside, their wing fluttering does not carry over into other atmospheres. Kirk's father's death would not make Spock randier. I admit that the new Uhuru is hot and any humanity in Spock should respond, but presumably she's the same Uhuru as in the old Trek universe, so he should have been all over her in the old series. Maybe he was but they were concerned about the interracial issues?
10. Kirk was in Iowa...I think there should have been a gay wedding. I joke. But I saw blatantly hetero characters throughout the movie. I'm sad that future Iowa/Federation doesn't include any blatantly homo characters. If you're going to mix it up, go for broke.
11. Mean Mr. Mustard convinced me my issue with Kirk was off a little. I was bit disappointed that he (Kirk, not MMM) spent most of the movie getting choked, getting saved, or getting fortunate in some life-saving way. MMM noted that this is the "new" Kirk and he can have a different personality, and holding on by his fingertips is an integral part of that personality. Fair enough. I buy that. But luck is finite. And he seemed to have a lot of it, and that can only be interesting for so long if the character isn't actively resolving his/her own problems. So maybe there will be a change by the next movie. But if there's no growth there, I'll be disappointed. I think back to some of my favorite sci fi, and there are incredibly deep characters who do layer upon layer of planning, only to find out that fortune is a harsh mistress and with all those lasers and diseases and aliens and all that red matter sitting around, even having a full proof plan plus luck can't save you. If you've got luck and no plan/issue resolution skills, you're SOL.
    
12. I don't know what Kirk's rank was prior to his promotion, but it all seemed incredibly dubious to me. Field promotion to first officer of a star ship? Before anyone is dead? Despite what must be officers with seniority on the ship - considering his father was on a star ship before he was born so it's not like it's the first star ship ever? Despite all the trouble he was in prior to his field promotion? I believe this was probably a jumpstep promotion and I imagine they don't happen much now when there isn't a multi-trillion+ star ship involved.
13. There's other bad science, which I leave up to Phil Plait.
    

Hard to believe I enjoyed it, eh? I'm just hoping that they tighten it up by the time they get to the next one.