(1) HEARTS MADE OF TIN. David Brin says robots will be so charming they won’t have to conquer us physically, in “Endearing Visages”.
I’ve been pondering Artificial Intelligence or AI a lot, lately, with several papers and reviews pending. (Indeed, note who is one of the ‘top ten people followed by AI researchers.’) One aspect that’s far too-little discussed is how robots are being designed to mess with human emotions.
Long before artificial intelligences become truly self-aware or sapient, they will be cleverly programmed by researchers and corporations to seem that way. This – it turns out – is almost trivially easy to accomplish, as (especially in Japan) roboticists strive for every trace of appealing verisimilitude, hauling their creations across the temporary moat of that famed “uncanny valley,” into a realm where cute or pretty or sad-faced automatons skillfully tweak our emotions.
Human empathy is both one of our paramount gifts and among or biggest weaknesses. For at least a million years, we’ve developed skills at lie-detection (for example) in a forever-shifting arms race against those who got reproductive success by lying better! (And yes, there was always a sexual component to this.)
But no liars ever had the training that these new, Hiers or Human-Interaction Empathic Robots will get, learning via feedback from hundreds, then thousands, then millions of human exchanges around the world, adjusting their simulated voices and facial expressions and specific wordings, till the only folks able to resist will be sociopaths. (And sociopaths have plenty of chinks in their armor, as well.)
(2) READERCON. A lot of good tweets coming out of Readercon this weekend. Here’s a small sampling.
https://twitter.com/fran_wilde/status/751843287242268676
Warning at Readercon panel "Belm-Martin-Wilde Food Science Extravaganza" at #readercon pic.twitter.com/1O8pbjvYxN
— Sara (@leprechaun42) July 9, 2016
(3) THE TWINKIE OFFENSE. Hostess has marketed two new Twinkie flavors to celebrate the release of the new Ghostbusters movie — Key Lime Slime and White Fudge Marshmallow.
The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man wouldn’t be able to contain himself! Or maybe he would — isn’t that kind of like cannibalism? Either way, if you like marshmallows, you are going to like these Twinkies.
(4) FEZ CLAIM TO FAME. Closed for renovation in 2012, the world’s oldest library in Morocco reopened this year.
A wealthy Tunisian merchant’s daughter, Fatima al-Fihri, founded al-Qarawiyyin University as a mosque in 859 CE. By the 10th century, Atlas Obscura reports, it grew into a full-fledged university with a library. Today, it’s considered to be the world’s oldest existing and continually operating institute of higher education, as well as the first degree-awarding educational institution. Eventually, the University of al-Qarawiyyin moved to another location in Fez, but the mosque and library remained at the original site.
(5) CROTCHETY DOESN’T MEAN WRONG. Steve Davidson has a point – “Pay for the Privilege” at Amazing Stories.
…sometimes a new way of doing things comes along and it is Just. Not. Right.
Take the internet as a perfect example.
Why are we all still individually paying for it?
It watches and records us without our consent. Data miners have found all manner of ways to entice us into revealing even more behaviors and data through the internet of things. Those useful, free apps and games aren’t really free, are they?
Aggregated data and its derivatives are both earning and saving business concerns billions of dollars annually. And we’re just in the infancy of this technology.
(6) MONKEYING AROUND. Those with Facebook accounts might get a kick out of the Turner Classic Movies video of Dr. Zaius sharing stories about working with Charlton Heston on the set of Planet of the Apes.
Dr. Zaius
(7) NOT AS ANIMATED AS THEY USED TO BE. How old are your favorite cartoon characters? Artist Andrew Tarusov has created a gallery of favorites who show their age.
(8) PHYSICIST WHO DID FANAC. Sidney Coleman remembered on the Not Even Wrong blog.
A couple months ago there was a session at an APS meeting with the topic Sidney Coleman Remembered. Slides are available for talks by Coleman’s student Erick Weinberg and colleague Howard Georgi. Georgi has recently posted a written version of the talk here. He also a few years ago wrote this biographical memoir about Coleman for the National Academy of Sciences.
David Derbes and collaborators [see comment section for details] are putting together a book version of Coleman’s famous lectures on quantum field theory, hope to be finished with this by the end of the summer.
Coleman was a long-time Boston fan and a founder of Advent:Publishers.
Sidney, Dave Kyle and James White at the 1987 Worldcon in Brighton. Photo taken and copyright by Andrew Porter.
(9) FEYNMAN TALES. Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek writes in Quanta Magazine “How Feynman Diagrams Almost Saved Space”. The story begins in 1982 when Wilczek asked Feynman, “Why doesn’t empty space weigh anything?”
I asked Feynman the most disturbing question in physics, then as now: “There’s something else I’ve been thinking a lot about: Why doesn’t empty space weigh anything?”
Feynman, normally as quick and lively as they come, went silent. It was the only time I’ve ever seen him look wistful. Finally he said dreamily, “I once thought I had that one figured out. It was beautiful.” And then, excited, he began an explanation that crescendoed in a near shout: “The reason space doesn’t weigh anything, I thought, is because there’s nothing there!”
(10) BEAGLE COMING TO SDCC. Peter S. Beagle will be at Comic Con 2016, participating in a panel entitled “Creating Your Own Universe”, in addition to signing autographs and meeting fans at his table.
His first novel in well over a decade, Summerlong, will be released September 15 on Tachyon.
(11) SULU STILL BEING DEBATED. Adam-Troy Castro answered a reply to his post about Sulu being revealed as a gay character in Star Trek Beyond.
Concerned STAR TREK fan in a thread, on the revelation of Sulu’s sexuality:
“It is also pointless for the story to just make the character gay for no other reason than to be so. Is important to the plot? Does it advance the story somehow? This is ultimately the only way it would make sense.”
What you’re talking about is the principle of Chekhov’s Gun. Not Pavel Chekov, but Anton Chekhov, who held that if you put a gun on the mantelpiece in one scene, then at some point somebody was going to have to take it down and fire it.
What perplexes is just how any STAR TREK character’s homosexuality could possibly “be important to the plot” or “advance the story somehow.”….
In the original series, one crew member being Asian, another being Scottish, another being a southern gentleman, another being Russian, another being African, was all texture. It was there, and then for the most part unremarked-upon, because Gene Roddenberry wanted to establish, within the boundaries of his time, that in the far future he wished to present, this was nothing unusual. (And even then, we had manifestations of his time’s near-sightedness, as when Janice Lester bitterly complains that the profession of starship captains is closed to women.)
Similarly, that brief shot of Sulu’s husband does not “advance the plot;” chances are that there will be no action climax where the ship can only be saved by the two of them having sex atop the warp nacelles. It does, however, provide more texture to the hypothetical universe around them, by establishing for the first time ever that Sulu has a personal life, that he must leave his family behind every time he goes on some mission for Kirk’s glory, that in the utopian world where he lives a marriage like his is just something that exists and that it is not remarked-upon as unusual, by anyone.
Texture….
(12) ALL’S QUIET ON THE DRAGON FRONT. Nominations for the inaugural Dragon Awards close on July 25, just a little over two weeks from now. If anybody’s excited about that, they’re mostly keeping it a secret from the internet.
Declan Finn wrote a long post about what to vote for so that he could ask people to nominate his book Honor at Stake (which is absolutely fine under the rules). Then he used the Sad Puppies list as a memory prompt for the rest of his suggestions.
Alfred Gennesson’s picks for the new Dragon Awards led off with John C. Wright, Larry Correia, and Rod Walker (published by Castalia House). Then he signed off with these thoughts —
I like the Dragon Awards already. Quality indicators for the year are going to be more honest than Hugo/Nebula, just in nomination process. And those ignore games. When you play Social Justice, the world loses.
Two other writers are looking for support on Twitter —
Still time to vote in the Dragon Con awards, and yes #Steeplejack and #Sekret Machines: CS are both eligible 🙂 https://t.co/6L8EF8uRFK
— A.J. Hartley (@authorajhartley) July 7, 2016
Nomination Deadline: July 25th – ANY FAN CAN NOMINATE! https://t.co/ARsDHwRGGm #DragonCon #DragonAwards pic.twitter.com/wDeZKKv7Xy
— Princess General Alethea Kontis (@AletheaKontis) July 8, 2016
However, since June 1, the only tweets about the Dragon Awards other than from people already mentioned were generic calls to vote from Larry Correia and Daddy Warpig.
(13) FELAPTON SPEAKS. Camestros Felapton reviews all five Hugo-nominated Novellas.
I think this is one of the most interesting categories this year. Each one of the nominees is a plausible candidate as a finalist but there isn’t a real stand-out winner. Three out of the five are by well-established writers and two are by newer writers. The least good (IMHO) has some excellent writing and made me want to read more by the same author. The best felt lacking in places and didn’t hit knock-your-socks-off great.
(14) STATE OF MIND. The Publishers Weekly story poses the question “Was Philip K. Dick a Madman or a Mystic?”, but do we really have to ask?
In The Divine Madness of Philip K. Dick, Kyle Arnold delves into the complicated psyche of one of the 20th century’s most important writers. At the center of the subject is the profound vision Dick experienced in 1974, which he referred to as “2-3-74.” Arnold, a psychologist at Coney Island Hospital and Clinical Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, explains the experience and its significance.
In February of 1974, Philip K. Dick was home recovering from dental surgery when, he said, he was suddenly touched by the divine. The doorbell rang, and when Dick opened the door he was stunned to see what he described as a “girl with black, black hair and large eyes very lovely and intense” wearing a gold necklace with a Christian fish symbol. She was there to deliver a new batch of medications from the pharmacy. After the door shut, Dick was blinded by a flash of pink light and a series of visions ensued. First came images of abstract paintings, followed by philosophical ideas and then, sophisticated engineering blueprints. Dick believed the pink light was a spiritual force which had unlocked his consciousness, granting him access to esoteric knowledge.
(15) ASIMOV SINGS! Fanac.org has uploaded a third segment of sound recording of the 1971 Hugo Banquet at Noreascon.
Banter and badinage from Robert Silverberg and Isaac Asimov, and the awarding of the Hugos. Asimov sings!
(16) RENT LONG AND PROSPER. Treknews featured this movie-related promotion.
In the commercial, entitled “Business Is Going Boldly,” Enterprise employees are shown beaming, speaking Klingon in the break room and renting the Starship Enterprise to customers.
Remember, the Romulans always get the damage waiver.
As we’ve previously reported, select Enterprise locations will have Star Trek related signage, plus Enterprise airport shuttle buses in New York City and Philadelphia will be wrapped with images of the U.S.S. Enterprise and the phrase: “Until We Can Beam You Up, We’ll Pick You Up”.
The dialect jokes are amusing, but should Enterprise Rent-A-Car really be renting starships to Klingons?
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Martin Morse Wooster, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Steve Davidson. (OK Steve – now it’s up to you whether you record a hat trick.)]
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No. I had made contact with a Dragon Con committee member who knew about the workings of the awards, and I quoted what he had to say in a post here. The commenters, not unexpectedly, responded rather virulently and I’ve never gotten an answer to my subsequent questions.
I’ve just thought of a way to introduce the idea of Sulu being gay. The Enterprise encounters some leftover Eddorians. As we all know, Eddorians don’t have any sex. This makes them a race of sex researchers. They have a Sex Warp Drive which causes all organic life to think of ALL THE ALTERNATIVES. Kirk notices something may be wrong when Spock starts dressing entirely in black leather. You can imagine what happens to Sulu. Everything would be one fine orgy except that no two crew members have the same orientation. Some have orientations that weren’t originally designed for humans. The situation will persist for about 35 minutes until Kirk does something stupid to defeat the Eddorians.
Who says you couldn’t do the K and S Show on television?
(7) I was a bit disappointed in that the pictures only covered Disney characters- yeah we know, they’re old. But what about some other, more modern characters?
The Scooby Gang: Age 63
(Assuming they all were 16, the minimum age to drive) (in fact, you could assume Mystery Inc is made up of the original gang’s children)
Jonny Quest: 62
Scott Summers and Jean Grey (cartoon): 41
Peter Parker (cartoon): 53
Dexter: 28
(Assuming age 8 at the start of the series)
Kim Possible: 29-30.
Power-Puff Girls: 18
Beavis and Butthead: 38
Dib Membrane: 35.
Wow, the 90s were quite a time for cartoons.
Fixed now — thanks for the correction. Appertain yourself a beverage!
This makes them a race of sex researchers. They have a Sex Warp Drive which causes all organic life to think of ALL THE ALTERNATIVES.
Envisioning a story where nobody opts for het sex. “All The Myriad Gays.”
@Mike
Euro 2016 final about to start so beverage time approaches.
Between the British Grand Prix, Wimbledon final and the Football I’ve barely moved all day which I’m sure is ironic on some level.
Further on #11
OK, I just can’t let this go. Start Trek (as a franchise, and ignoring for the moment that a number of different creative individuals are involved) has shown consistent cowardice when it comes to representing sexuality. Deciding to ret-con a largely off-screen same-sex spouse as the sole representation of non-heterosexuality in the tv/movie franchise in this, the second decade of the 21st century is far too little, far too late to be anything more than embarrassing. It would have been trivially easy to toss in a few queer background characters on a regular basis back when it would have been genuinely daring and meaningful. Now? It’s insulting that they expect us to be grateful at this late date.
And you know? That bit about “meaningful to the plot”? It is meaningful to the plot to casually portray a dystopian universe in which not only the reality, but even the ability to imagine alternatives to heterosexuality has been erased. And if “genetically engineering the gay away” is offered as a hypothesis–leaving aside twin-studies that have demonstrated that sexual orientation is influenced but not determined by genetics–what does it say about the ST universe that a galactic culture that purports to respect diversity among the myriad of planetary species and cultures, uniformly, across all those planetary cultures, agreed to engineer out this one type of diversity? That’s what I call “meaningful to the plot”.
I have no idea whether the sexuality of my characters is “meaningful to the plot” of my novels. I suppose if one views them primarily as romance novels (which they aren’t), one might conclude so. But I could have written essentially the same plots with all the queerness stripped away. (Not the same stories, of course, but the same plots.) But neither is non-default sexuality a pasted on label. I started out by saying, “given these characters, what are their stories? what are their adventures?” And those stories are shaped by everything they are. That’s representation. Representation is not taking a long-established character, tossing in one bosom-of-the-family scene, and saying, “Surprise! Sulu’s gay!”
Book Report: “The Invisible Library” by Genevieve Cogman. In this variation on the Supernatural Librarians trope, the Library is connected to alternate worlds with varying degrees of “order” and “chaos”, magic and science. It’s an amusing romp with horror elements, and everyone in the Science household is looking forward to the next one — already published in the UK, it’s coming out in the US in September. I just hope the heroine doesn’t get Anita Blake Disease and spend more and more time see-sawing between Possible Romantic Interests #1 and #2. I have some hopes of a threesome in their future, however.
Obviously i prefer representation to non-representation, but if for some reason only one of the main cast can be queer, it really ought to be Kirk. Not bi, but pan. I mean, come on.
@Heather Rose Jones
Deep Space 9 S04E06 – Rejoined
“Dax is reunited with Lenara Kahn, the ex-wife of one of its former hosts. The two struggle with their feelings for one another because of the taboo in their species against reuniting with loved ones of former hosts.”
I remember quite liking the way that the sex of the characters was treated as a non-issue in the episode while still making clear through the allegory what they were talking about.
@Clack: if that kind of editing is possible, what would prevent hom- parents from editing their children’s genes to be hom-?
@5: Steve needs to read Hell’s Pavement (censored title: The Analog Men) if he thinks there are problems with the current system — and look at a televised movie on any ad-supported channel if he doesn’t think ads are/were intrusive. I go back far enough to remember 1200 baud being fast; I live in Boston, where Verizon finally figured out that the city proper (as opposed to the suburbs) pays enough to replace electronic cable with fiber. We’re seeing some movement toward free internet; the problem is that there’s a large capital expense between us and it, and very little public money to pay that expense.
::tickbox::
@Doctor Science
I’ve got that near the top of the tbr pile, it’ll be that or some Walter John Williams next. Good to hear positive reports.
@ IanP
Keeping in mind that we’re dealing with a deliberate conscious fictional creation, not a documentary of real life…
1. Someone made an authorial choice to create the cultural set-up that allowed them to avoid depicting a same-sex romantic couple.
2. My life is not an allegory. Allegory is not representation.
JJ thanks, but this time my comment was more for effect (and the silent audience that reads File 770 but doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude (out of respect for the audience here I won’t use the anatomical vernacular phrase that immediately springs to mind in reference to those silent ones) than out of any expectation that anything real might happen.
For my next act, I’m working on a new story called If You Were A Wannabe Writer My UnFan, I Wouldn’t Want to Read Anything You Wrote (especially when you think you are writing parody and it’s about as funny as a MERSA infection of the genitals)….
Cult Movie Bracket, Round one, Bracket one is on!
@Chip Hitchcock
It’s not as easy as that, though. My husband and I have talked about this theoretically. Imagine that there were a pill a woman could take during pregnancy that would guarantee (or at least strongly influence) the orientation and/or gender identity of the child (e.g. if both turn out to be epigenetic). If we then arranged for a surrogate to have a child for us (even a child with both our genes, assuming technology that could make ova from stem cells), what would we choose?
1) Produce gay, cis, males–just like us?
2) Let nature take its course?
3) Produce straight cis children (of either gender)
4) Something else?
Wouldn’t we opt for straight cis children solely on the grounds that it would make life easier for the child? We know what we went through, and we’ve seen what trans people go through. If we really loved the child, why would we do that to him/her? I can make a few arguments to the contrary, but they tend to sound rather selfish.
Perhaps the most selfish thing is that I hope I don’t live to see the invention of such a thing.
Chip, the only difference between the net and old network television these days is that some folks have decent ad blockers. I call those “snack and bathroom breaks” (far more effective btw as network commercial breaks could be counted on to occur at the same intervals and last for the same amount of time).
Infrastructure, bah! If the data miners and advertisers knew what they were doing, we’d already have what I’m calling for, as they’d recognize that hooking everyone up would increase the validity of their data and make them far more effective, for what would amount to a sunk cost of pennies per person.
But instead, right now, they’ve got us covering those costs, so they view such a thing as a net-net loss.
I’ll take my suggestion or the alternative: the individual gets paid a percentage on a quarterly basis for allowing their data to be gathered (and gathering any data, meta or otherwise, without a contract, would be severely illegal, with monitoring by Warren’s Consumer Protection bureau.)
@Hullender: I think the solution lies in humans finally realizing that we’re much more like Bonobos than any of the other great apes; sex, with whomever, is a form of communication that may, sometimes, result in perpetuating the species.
Although something tells me we’ll never quite get around to being comfortable with penis-sword fights in Times Square….
@Doctor Science: Genevieve is an old acquaintance, and I have memories of her and other folks I know trading gripes about the Anita Blake problem. Pretty sure she won’t go on to commit it herself. 🙂
Eventually, Anita Blake began to collect them all, like My Little Ponies …
One read of TV Tropes page on Anita Blake put the series straight on the nope, no way list.
@Clack
I envision a future in which the GOP platform will call for a constitutional amendment defining marriage as being between one man, one woman, and one ooloi.
Alas, the TV Tropes page came far too late for me, who enjoyed the first four Anita Blake books from reading on past the point that the sex was the sole point of the series.
Quel aggravation.
@IanP – The first two or three Anita Blake books were quite good–a nice balance of noir, horror, and sex. Then all of a sudden, the sex took over and it actually was quite boring because she just wasn’t that great at writing erotica! Twas a shame because I did like the original setup.
Star Trek has always struck me as treading very nervously around the issue of same-sex relationships: the overall attitude seems to be “yes, this is the future, and there is all sorts of diversity about, including same-sex relationships, but can we please be allowed not to talk about that one?” Much as I love the show… if someone wanted to call that cowardice, I couldn’t refute them.
Where the franchise has made a vague attempt at looking at this or related issues… hmm. I have a vague memory that a minor character in First Contact was supposed to be gay, but if that ever made it onto the screen, it was in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, and I must have blinked. Besides the “Rejoined” episode mentioned above… there was one Next Generation one, where they ran into some world where everyone was sort of epicene and bisexual, only one of the inhabitants decided she was definitely a woman and picked on Riker as the partner with whom to fulfil her womanhood. (Which proves it was science fiction, anyway.) She was eventually given forcible therapy by her planet’s authorities to turn her bisexual again… the overall impression was that the story disapproved of forcibly altering people’s sexual preferences, whatever they might be, but it all came across as rather half-hearted. (If I’m remembering right, and goodness knows I might not be. Can’t even recall the name of the episode offhand.)
Bottom line: Star Trek tries to be progressive (and, y’know, on balance I reckon that’s a good thing), but there are areas where it doesn’t try very hard, and this is one of them.
I quite enjoyed the Anita Blake series through Obsidian Butterfly, and was warned off the following book by a friend who told me “it’s basically porn”. Thank you, friend!
@Steve Wright:
Season 5, episode 17: “The Outcast”.
@Steve Wright
I think DS9 did the best of the series but were probably hampered by what the studio and networks would accept at the time. TNG had a couple of very bad attempts, while Voyager gave us newts.
The worst offender in my opinion is Enterprise, by its time they should not have had to fight too hard to incorporate more mixed sexual orientations and didn’t even try.
@Rob Thornton
I’ve stopped reading more than one book due to too much sex (hello Dresden Files) it’s just something I’d often rather not be reading while commuting.
> “I’ve stopped reading more than one book due to too much sex (hello Dresden Files) …”
Wait, huh? Three monogamous relationships with long pauses between them over the course of fifteen books didn’t really seem excessive to me …
@Kyra
White Court vampires making a porn film, Blood Rites? I did finish it eventually but stalled out again on the next book and haven’t gone back.
It’s not relationships though, strictly sex scenes. I sometimes skip them entirely, particularly on a 7am train.
Hey, I was wondering if anyone could help me out with something … I’d been using authoralerts.com to let me know when authors I like had new books coming out, but that service appears to be defunct now. Is there any other working service around that will do it, preferably all at once in a discrete e-mail for the day or something?
I know Amazon has a “follow” option for authors, but I want to keep track of quite a number of authors and worry about my inbox getting flooded with a zillion e-mails … And I’ve heard there’s a way to do it on Goodreads but that there’s no way to “turn it off” if there’s an author you *don’t* want to follow anymore?
Any suggestions?
@Heather Rose Jones in comment @Ian P:
1. Someone made an authorial choice to create the cultural set-up that allowed them to avoid depicting a same-sex romantic couple.
2. My life is not an allegory. Allegory is not representation.
Thank YOU! I have been snarling all over the place (to myself) since this whole thing hit the airwaves because of being so PISSED over DECADES of this crap, this absolute homophobic and heternormative bullshit promoted by the straight white men of Trek (Brannon Braga, on THE METAPHORS in Star Trek–not linking to it because finding it the other day when I was thinking about posting was so enraging). The one that made me maddest was the Planets That Had Given Up Gender Roles and/or Sex (it was always a bit unexplained which) (Next Gen) in which ALL the characters were played by women who were either deliberately cast or were made up to look a lot alike (weren’t they all brunette–memory a bit slippery these days) and the one who yearned for HETSEX with Ryker had to be punished. And they all fucking dressed alike because gee wow, people, if you don’t have the heterosexual binary, there are NO differences whatsoever between hooman beings that you might show. And Roddenberry had the nerve to announce it was all an allegory about homosexuality.
Or something.
*whew* well, that feels better.
But yes, the whole thing completely destroys any minimal cred Trek had for social progressive issues because so many of the straight white men running it were sooooo afraid of Teh Gay Cooties.
(And the fact that the DS:9 episode had two WOMEN in it–yeah, don’t tell me they weren’t playing with the fact that “porn lesbians” are just so amazing for straight men.)
@Dawn Incognito: that’s the one, thanks! (I see @robinareid remembers that episode every bit as fondly as I do.)
@IanP: Babylon 5 was about the same vintage as DS9, and it managed to work in a lesbian relationship for one main character (albeit one with a Tragic Ending), and, later on, had two male characters posing as a married couple – it’s not much, but it clearly implied that same-sex pairings were no big deal in the show’s universe. I reckon Star Trek could have done as well, if its creators had wanted to make the effort.
@Steve Wright
Ivanova and tragic endings seemed destined for each other alas.
7) The artist messed up on Lola Bunny, who could not be remotely as old as Bugs, even though they both appeared to be the same age in Space Jam. Lola had been created for the movie, which means she could be no older than 1996. Assume that she is at least 18 years old, and realistically she would be 38 today. But all the other characters are given ages determined by the date they first appeared in cartoons, so by that measure Lola is only 20 today.
Us cartoonophiles obsess over that sort of stuff…
@steve d: I don’t have an ad blocker, and I find ads on the sites I visit much less intrusive than the ads on TV (on the few occasions I watch). It’s true there are some sites that overload on ads; I skip them. And you still haven’t shown how the data miners (who IME are independents) are supposed to get the capital needed for semi-universal connection.
More Pokemon Go news, mostly focusing on people who’ve injured themselves playing it, but also this:
And then there are the robbers who figured out that setting up a beacon in the game was a surefire way to attract victims.
And another one: Pokemon Go while driving! That couldn’t possibly turn out to be a bad idea, could it?
Next Generation: The Host
The Enterprise is taking a Trill ambassador, Odan, to negotiate a dispute between the Alpha and Beta moons of Peliar Zel. Odan and Beverly Crusher start a romance. On arrival, Odan makes an unfortunate choice to take a shuttle down instead of using the transporter, and is mortally wounded by one of the more radical factions. With the host dead, the symbiont needs to be transferred to another host, and it will take time for a new Trill host to arrive. Odan is transferred temporarily to Riker. After some hiccups caused by having to learn to see the man she loved in the body of the man she’s known for years as a friend and colleague (and, really, Riker) the Crusher/Odan romance continues.
When the new host arrives, Odan is transferred to the new Trill host. Who is female.
Odan wants to continue the romance. Beverly Crusher is not up for lesbian romance.
On the one hand, yes, Crusher is entitled to her own sexual identity and orientation, just like anyone else.
On the other hand, ooh, please, no! This episode was not very subtly promoted as being, finally, the episode that would acknowledge homosexuality in a positive way. What they gave us was a hetero romance that Crusher cried off from when it became same-sex–and she gave Odan an explanation that indicated the non-acceptance of same-sex romance was general to the species rather than her personal orientation.
Another problematic aspect of this episode: It’s made 100% clear that the host bodies have their own fully developed personalities before symbiont implantation, and that that personality is 100% suppressed by the symbiont after implantation. Basically, that body’s original personality is being killed. Everyone accepts this and no one expresses the slightest ethical concern. When Dax arrived on Deep Space Nine, this icky aspect of the Trill was quietly retconned out of existence and memory, and the joined Trill personality and identity is a blend of the host and the symbiont.
Lis:
I’m gonna quote the relevant part from Dr. Crusher here:
“Perhaps it is a Human failing, but we are not accustomed to these kinds of changes. I can’t keep up. How long will you have this host? What would the next one be? I can’t live with that kind of uncertainty. Perhaps, someday, our ability to love won’t be so limited.”
Which I don’t read as a general human non-acceptance of same-sex romance, but it sure as hell erases bisexuals. Beverley seemed perfectly willing to continue the relationship if it had been another male host.
Damn, TNG, I loved you so much but you were so clunky and heavy-handed and just plain problematic a lot of the time. (The episode introducing the Ferengi was painful to rewatch. They’re not Space Jews at all! They’re…Yankee traders! Yeah, that’s the ticket!)
@robinareid
Oh yes, I hated that episode even before I knew it was supposed to be an allegory about homosexuality (which had me going “Huh”, because it was all about people wanting to be heterosexual). And yes, the androgynous bisexual aliens were all played by brunette women, the one who fell for Riker (Why? He was never remotely attractive) was played by Melinda Culea, who used to play Amy Allen in the early episodes of The A-Team.
Star Trek may have been progressive about a lot of things, but it was always bad about handling LGBT themes, even by the late 1980s/early 1990s, when people were allowed to be gay or (less frequently) lesbian on TV, as long as they remained celibate and/or locked into tragic relationships.
@Dawn Incognito
I find TNG more difficult to rewatch than the original Trek these day, because so many episodes are just so clunky and heavy-handed and problematic (and I loved it, too, back in the day). Not that the original wasn’t clunky and heavy-handed and problematic (“Let This Be Your Last Battlefield” anybody?) a lot of the time, but I find it much easier to make allowances for sixties television than for eighties/nineties television.
Besides, the original Trek profited a lot from the ironic 1960s/1970s style of German dubbing (and whenever I come across a random Trek episode of any generation on TV, it is dubbed in German), while TNG and subsequent series were dubbed more faithfully to the original, which makes the heavyhandedness more apparent.
This is from my faulty memory, but I recall hearing that on NextGen there was an episode that focussed heavily on relationships (sorry, faulty memory, I simply can’t recall which one) which had Guinan giving relationship advice in Ten Forward while the camera panned over couples sitting holding hands or otherwise looking romantic throughout the room. There was supposed to be a same-sex couple (no longer remember whether male or female) included in the panning shot and the studio execs cut them.
Anecdotal and my google-fu isn’t good enough to find documentation. I heard about it at an SF con at the time.
@Taral Wayne
So if the characters age is determined by the year they first appeared, Lola was technically 1 year old in Space Jam and Bugs would be around 58.
Interesting coincidence that the name Lola is so close to Lolita.
@Chip H.
I was largely just voicing the opinion that the economic relationship between those who data mine and those who are mined is out of balance and unfair.
The companies who do the analysis of the data are not poor in the least, but if they can’t reasonably support something like what I suggested, they have clients who would have an interest in seeing the data continuing to flow.
In general, it is my experience that when inevitable expenses for things a business considers to be vital to their operations, they find a way to absorb that expense and continue to make a profit.
If I had the time and the inclination to engage in anything other than drawing people’s awareness to the possibilities, I’d have dug a lot deeper.
Anita Blake: What I’ve heard (haven’t read any) is that the series starts well, turns to (near?) porn, then comes back and gets more entertaining again.
Trek and sexuality: David Gerrold has been claiming (and he’d probably know) that Gene really wanted to include at least one gay character, but the studios wouldn’t let him. Which seems all-too plausible.
That said, given the state of medical technology in that world, I’d think that Easy Sex Change would be a thing. (Warning: TV Tropes may eat your brain!) I bet that’s a topic the studios still don’t want to go anywhere near! 🙂