Pixel Scroll 9/9 The Scrolls Must Roll

(1) Blastr reports the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum needs photos or film of the original Enterprise model to assist them in replicating what the Enterprise looked like during and after the cult-classic episode “The Trouble With Tribbles.” That apparently was the last time the model was altered while the series was in production.

The National Air and Space Museum is opening its hailing frequencies and asking fans for help. They need original pics or footage of their original Enterprise model — which has already gone through eight different restorations ever since it was built in 1964, by the way — so that they can restore it to all its August 1967 glory. Yep, it’s that specific.

Star Trek fans made first contact with the ship in 1972, when a model was featured at Golden West College in Huntington Beach, Calif., during Space Week (a 10-day gathering of space-related activities). Then, in 1974 through 1975, the ship was put on display in the Smithsonian’s Arts & Industries Building in Washington, D.C., while the National Air and Space Museum’s new home base was being built on Independence Avenue.

(2) And while we’re discussing Classic Trek, should anyone ever ask you how Roddenberry came up with “Sulu” as the character’s name, George Takei explains:

In an interview with the website Big Think, he revealed that his character is based on the Philippine Sulu Sea. According to him, show creator Gene Roddenberry wanted a generic Asian name for the helmsman. He thought that most Asian last names were country-specific, like Tanaka, Wong, and Kim. In 1966, Asia was dealing with issues like warfare, colonization, and rebellion, and Roddenberry didn’t want to reference any of that.

(3) A few days ago I posted about the new BB-8 robot from Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Now someone has dissected a BB-8 with photos and commentary worthy of a medical examiner. You sicko!

(4) And on Force Friday, that glorious excuse to sell toys from the new Star Wars franchise, the rarest collectible was a mis-packaged Kylo Ren action figure – found on the shelves in Glendale, John King Tarpinian’s home town. And specialized collectors are always on the lookout for funny/funky slipups like this.

That’s when eagle-eyed shoppers might have spotted Kylo Ren—the helmeted, crossguard lightsaber-wielding new villain played by Adam Driver in The Force Awakens—being sold as lady storm trooper Captain Phasma after an apparent packaging error placed the new Star Wars villain in the wrong box that got shipped out for the massive retail push.

Misprinted, misshapen, and mis-packaged memorabilia occupy a niche spot in the world of collectibles, particularly in the long history of the Star Wars franchise. And while packaging errors are known to occur “more often than people think,” according to Toy & Comic Heaven’s James Gallo, it’s the production errors and discontinued design variants that yield more highly prized value to collectors….

There’s the infamously naughty 1977 Topps C-3PO #207 trading card, in which the Force appears to be very strong in C-3PO’s chrome junk, an aberration that Topps quickly corrected in subsequent printings. A bizarre yellow-hued discoloration on Kenner’s 1997-era Luke vs. Wampa set made the “incontinent” Hoth beast a curious find for Star Wars collectors. “Yak Face” (never distributed in the U.S.), “Vinyl Cape Jawa (later reconfigured with a cloth cape), “Rocket Firing Boba Fett” (cancelled on the eve of production for fear of a choking hazard) and versions of Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, and Obi-Wan Kenobi bearing telescoping lightsaber accessories have reportedly sold to hardcore collectors over the years for thousands of dollars.

(5) Amazon says The Man in the High Castle: Season 1 will be available November 20, 2015. The first episode was teased in January. This trailer debuted at the San Diego Comic-Con.

(6) For a limited Warner Bros. Studio Tour Hollywood is offering guests the rare opportunity to see the new Batmobile from Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice before the movie debuts in March. Here’s a video of Batman’s new set of wheels.

(7) “Alien Nuclear Wars Might Be Visible From Earth” writes Ross Andersen in The Atlantic.

A team of astronomers recently tried to determine whether Trinity’s light might be cosmic in a different sense. The Trinity test involved only one explosion. But if there were many more explosions, involving many more nuclear weapons, it might generate enough heat and light to be seen from nearby stars, or from the deeper reaches of our galaxy—so long as someone out there was looking….

I asked Jill Tarter what she thought of the paper. Tarter is the former director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute and the inspiration for Ellie Arroway, the heroine of Carl Sagan’s Contact, played by Jodie Foster in the film adaptation. Tarter told me the paper was “getting a bit of buzz” in the SETI community. But she also urged caution. “The problem is the signatures are detectable for cosmically insignificant amounts of time,” she said. Distant stars burn for billions of years, sending a constant stream of light toward Earth, but the flash from a nuclear war may last only a few days. To catch its light, you have to have impeccable timing.

(8) There’s a tad too much science fictional truth here for this cartoon to make a successful motivational poster. “Shoot for the Moon” on The Oatmeal.

(9) Let’s not forget one other award given last weekend at Dragon Con. Larry Correia and “Brando TorgersOn” were the first to win the “super prestigious LaMancha award.” Says Correia —

The fact that the gnome is tilting at that windmill with a nazi tank is just one of the added touches that make the LaMancha so prestigious.  It is crafted out of the finest southern bass wood and delicately hand carved with a poignant message.

La Mancha Award

La Mancha Award

(10) “We Watched That (So You Didn’t Have To): John Cusack and Jackie Chan’s VOD Historical Action Epic, ‘Dragon Blade’” by Shea Serrano on Grantland —

I sit here before you a man, a man who has watched Jackie Chan in any number of films — in a near countless number of films. There was one where he played a man who operated a fast food van and had to become a hero. There was one where he played a man in South Africa with amnesia who had to become a hero. There was one where he teamed up with a white man to become a hero and also one where he teamed up with a black man to become a hero, not once, not twice, but thrice. And now I have seen him wear a very thick wig and a poet’s goatee and a very generous amount of makeup and sing about racial harmony and total peace and then make a deathmobile out of shields and spears and then become a hero. I sit here before you a man, a man who has seen Dragon Blade.

(11) Your reality may vary!

(12) An especially good installment of SF Signal’s Mind Meld, curated by Paul Weimer, calls on participants to discuss the best deaths in science fiction and fantasyT. Frohock, Richard Shealy (sffcopyediting.com) , John Hornor Jacobs, Ramona Wheeler, Richard Parks, Alasdair Stuart, Martha Wells, Tina Connolly, Susan Jane Bigelow, Christian Klaver, Joe Sherry, and Gillian Polack.

(13) While researching today’s scroll I found a few more things I needed to report about Sasquan. Such as – the silly PA announcements.

And photos of the Other Awards winners including David Aronovitz.

Then, someone recorded Filthy Pierre playing the Superman theme on his Melodica.

And finally, whatever the opposite of comic relief is –

(14) Just how scientifically accurate is The Martian? This short video on Yahoo! lets Andy Weir, Matt Damon and others make their case.

(15) Sometimes a battle between a giant space jaybird and the Enterprise is just a battle between a giant space jaybird and the Enterprise.

[Thanks to Susan de Guardiola, Martin Morse Wooster, Mark, Will R., Colin Kuskie, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Soon Lee.]

357 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 9/9 The Scrolls Must Roll

  1. But Spock is a mature Vulcan, and surely must have experienced pon farr a few times before the incident chronicled in Star Trek.

    Surely I can’t be the only Original-Series K/Ser here …

    Very long-established fanon assumes that, in fact, Spock has *not* been a fully-mature Vulcan before “Amok Time”, and this is his first Pon Farr. There are two basic takes:

    – Vulcans live much longer than humans, therefore it’s only logical that their time to sexual maturity is longer, too.

    – Spock, as a hybrid, has had a delayed sexual maturation. It’s common to speculate that both he and T’Pring thought he would *never* experience PF — that he is a mule. Another take is that T’Pring didn’t realize that Spock’s PF would be so long delayed, and that’s part of why she’s so pissed at him.

  2. Jamoche–

    What if the destroyed planet in question turned green and radioactive? Did your friend tell you if we could observe that?

  3. Pogonip, I’ll have to go with different, and expand on the thought later. Unimagined opportunities for younger folks, and unimagined difficulties, both.

  4. Mike

    I’m sorry that it’s taken File770 this long to discover that Spock captured something which looks like a unicorn…

  5. A quick count shows that there are currently roughly twice as many 2015 SFF books that I would like to read as there are 2015 SFF books that I have already read. :/

  6. NelC on September 10, 2015 at 4:46 pm said:
    On the reduction of one’s TBR pile, I’ve found that one very effective way — which I recommend to absolutely no-one — is to be flat broke for an extended period of time.

    But my recycling center has an extensive Free Books area.
    It’s not much use for new books, but great for picking up 80s and 90s stuff I missed.
    Which is to say, that pile NEVER gets smaller.

  7. I can vouch for brokeness causing problems with the TBR pile, but local libraries can help with that if you have a decent one. Depends how well-funded it is, and whether it can order books from any other libraries.

    I’ve spent quite a lot of time supplementing my reading with fanfiction, which had the enormous benefit of being free.

  8. Surely I can’t be the only Original-Series K/Ser here …

    Very long-established fanon assumes that, in fact, Spock has *not* been a fully-mature Vulcan before “Amok Time”, and this is his first Pon Farr. There are two basic takes:

    – Vulcans live much longer than humans, therefore it’s only logical that their time to sexual maturity is longer, too.

    – Spock, as a hybrid, has had a delayed sexual maturation. It’s common to speculate that both he and T’Pring thought he would *never* experience PF — that he is a mule. Another take is that T’Pring didn’t realize that Spock’s PF would be so long delayed, and that’s part of why she’s so pissed at him.

    Except that a very YOUNG Spock going through rapid aging in Search for Spock starts freaking out and Saavik tells him it’s pon farr and mindmelds with him (plus whatever else happens off camera ahem.) So for those theories to work, Saavik has to be wrong. (I grant you, she’s half-Romulan, so it’s possible, since Romulans appear to have completely ditched pon farr somewhere along the evolutionary ladder.)

    I’m okay with “the first couple pon farrs, you just look at the Vulcan’s Illustrated Swimsuit Edition and spend a lot of time in your bunk.”

    I would also be okay with “it happened but the nice Deltan cadet down the hall took care of things before it got out of hand.”

  9. I never found being broke prevented me from reading over 200 books a year starting in my early teens. Until a couple years ago the concept of a TBR list was foreign/never heard the concept. My current TBR contains thousands of books and gets added to regularly.

    Growing up I read what I could get my hands on between libraries & friends & used bookstores and didn’t stick with a single genre although by mid-teens I tilted romance. Until ~10 years ago I always had groups of friends and we’d pass books around until someone sold to used bookstore and picked up more. Few books were kept by any of us longer than it took to read a batch and meet up with someone to pass a bag/box along. I still pass along books but now they are from Kickstarter as our house doesn’t have room for more physical books.

    Meeting my husband and seeing his ~5,000 book collection was a real shock. Getting an iPhone, an iPad, multiple ereader apps, knowing a few writers, having a decent social media following, and being bedridden made it easy to accumulate some 5,000 ebooks in under 5 years without spending all that much (thanks friends, authors, and Netgalley).

    I’ve found having a place to put books a much bigger problem than cost of books. Between libraries and friends I was usually able to get my hands on a specific book I wanted to read when I didn’t have money. It helps to be poor in rich areas, have well-off friends, or to know the right people.

  10. Very important for our interests: whisky sent into space has major differences:

    Nearly 4 years ago, a distillery sent unmatured malt whisky to the International Space Station to test how microgravity would alter the beverage’s flavors. That whisky returned to Earth a year ago, and now taste tests have revealed “major differences” in the aromas and tastes of the “space whisky” when compared with a vial of the same spirit kept at the Ardbeg Distillery on the Scottish island of Islay, BBC News reports. When the two were compared, the space whisky had “hints of antiseptic smoke, rubber, and smoked fish” among other flavors, whereas the Earth sample was noted for its “hints of cedar, sweet smoke, and aged balsamic vinegar,” according to the company. The near–zero gravity evidently affected the behavior of the whisky’s terpenes—the origin of most flavors and aromas found in plants—revealing a whole different side to the spirit, says Ardbeg’s director of distilling and whisky creation.

  11. going through rapid aging in Search for Spock
    It’s a good question whether that part of the storyline is canonical or not – ISTR that in TOS, it was canon that they mature more slowly than humans. But with that movie, they did a lot of things that were retconning TOS to make it not break the arc they were building.

  12. I’m totally okay with them aging more slowly than humans as canon, but that was a seriously young-ass Spock in SFS.

    I am also okay with that movie not being canon because frankly, after about Wrath of Khan all the movies went off the rails and should be shunned.

  13. RedWombat on September 10, 2015 at 7:05 pm said:

    I’m totally okay with them aging more slowly than humans as canon, but that was a seriously young-ass Spock in SFS.

    Yeah but not going through an exactly normal aging/development process for a Vulcan.

  14. So, unhappy with the Hugo results, right-wing Tron-guy has decided to make his own award to really represent fadom.

    https://www.blackgate.com/2015/09/10/a-proposal-an-award-for-sf-storytelling/#more-113946

    I’ve developed a proposal for just that: a series of awards to celebrate and commemorate the SF/F storyteller’s art. It’s modeled after the Hugos, with two major changes: a panel of judges evaluates the nominees to ensure that they are indeed good SF/F stories, and can reject a limited number of them; and the pool of eligible voters is based on a web of trust starting with the signers of the proposal. All voting and nominating is done automatically, on the Web.

    But a jury can reject nominees and only The Right People can vote.

    Proposal: call them the The Rococo Awards.

    Someone tell me again what the puppy complain about the Hugos was?

  15. Honestly, I think if they want to make their own awards, they should be encouraged, even if it’s a lawn gnome on a block. I will not mock them, I will not judge them, I hope they derive enormous pleasure from them and they are wildly successful.

  16. Thanks for the Blackgate link on the awards proposal. It’s a constructive response to criticisms of the Hugos so it gets my praise for that.

    I think allowing the voting body to no award would be better than having a panel of judges discard works. More democratic.

    ETA: I hope it’s successful and I can get good book recomendations from the winners and runners up.

  17. It’s modeled after the Hugos, with two major changes: a panel of judges evaluates the nominees to ensure that they are indeed good SF/F stories, and can reject a limited number of them; and the pool of eligible voters is based on a web of trust starting with the signers of the proposal.

    In short, it’s not actually based on the Hugos.

  18. Didn’t Spock have an actual line in “Amok Time” along the lines of “I had thought I would be spared” (pon farr, that is, because of his mixed background)? If so, that implies pretty strongly that it is indeed the first time, and that puberty in Vulcans occurs much later than in humans.

    OTOH, perhaps pon farr in the sense of “crazed, obsessive desire for the bonded partner and no other, RIGHT NOW” is a separate thing from “ability and desire to have sex,” and perhaps the latter starts at an earlier age.

    In either case, the most interesting question IMO is not what may or may not have happened before, but what will happen next time. Seven years later, who will Spock most naturally be drawn too? Seems to me the answer is pretty obvious…

    I wasn’t actually a TOS K/Ser, but only because I got out of the fandom just a little too soon. In the mid-70s I discovered Hong Kong movies, and so my kinky fantasies were not about K and S but about DC and TL in their many cinematic incarnations (rather like all those K/S AUs that I found out about later on).

  19. after about Wrath of Khan all the movies went off the rails

    The whale movie is in my headcanon. (It felt like TOS when watching. The third one comes closer than the first two. The rest – no. Some of them I’m looking at them and going ‘that isn’t even sci-fi’.)

  20. Stankrom: I was thinking about this when reading Seveneves. During the first portions I was like “okay this setting is similar to our world but there are privately owned space travel companies that are more advanced than we have today…” Then I hit the middle section and was like “WUT??”

    I’m in the middle of it right now. It’s an interesting novel — but yes, I’d agree that it pretty much jumps the shark, and I’d agree with the other person who earlier said they got the impression he’d slapped two books together without bothering to write the middle part of the trilogy. I don’t think it’s nearly up-to-snuff as the usual Stephenson book, and it won’t be on my Hugo nominating list.

  21. @RedWombat Oh I encourage him to go ahead with it, but I reserve the right to be amused when so little self-awareness is shown.

    From a puppy supporter, an award where unapproved works can be rejected and only the right people can vote. That’s worth a few chuckles.

  22. rcade: I’m ready to dive into a new novel that might be Hugo worthy. Looking around at what’s being widely read and seems promising, I’m down to either Seveneyes by Neil Stephenson or Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. But they’re such obvious choices I wouldn’t mind looking someplace less obvious. Any suggestions?

    As I said in a previous thread, I just finished Dark Orbit by Carolyn Ives Gilman: This novel is absolutely fantastic, and as of right now, it’s on my Hugo top 5 list. It’s imaginative and uses a well-researched basis on how eyesight and perception work, expanded into SFnal elements. CIG is like Bujold and Chiang: she’s not hugely prolific, but every published story is top-notch. If you’ve never read anything by her, Arkfall (Nebula nominee), Halfway Human (Tiptree nominee), and the novella “The Ice Owl” (Hugo and Nebula nominee) are excellent.

  23. I have, um, doubts about the voter trust system, but hey, more power to them if they want to make their own awards. I’ve been wondering (loudly) why they haven’t for some time. I hope it works out, and if they reliably choose good stuff I’m sure people will keep an eye on the winners.

    I hope the Sad Puppy leaders support the endeavour.

  24. Matt Y.: I like the La Mancha award… That’s building within your community positively instead of just whining.

    Do you think they understand that the “tilting at windmills” part refers to trying to fight imaginary “enemies”?

  25. More title suggestions:
    “Lord Scroll’s Bane”
    “Scrolling in the Deep”.

    As for the proposal for a new award over at BlackGate, good luck to them. I’ve said elsewhere that anyone who is unhappy with the Hugos doing it wrong and want to start their own award is most welcome. Awards are not a zero-sum game.

  26. Well, the Black Gate proposal is slightly more constructive than anything else I’ve heard for the Really Awards, but it appears to me that they have “[And then a miracle happens]” in their organizational plan.

  27. I’m all for the new Blackgate Awards, too, and simultaneously amused that it’s an award limited to rightfans nominating rightstuff.

    Maybe they should call it the Yeager.

    And the panel of judges could be the Black Gatekeepers.

    Beyond that, though, there are juried awards, there are awards that limit who can vote…nothing inherently wrong with any of that. And if it results in another award identifying stuff worth reading, bring it on. The more the merrier.

  28. RedWombat sez:

    Honestly, I think if they want to make their own awards, they should be encouraged, even if it’s a lawn gnome on a block. I will not mock them, I will not judge them, I hope they derive enormous pleasure from them and they are wildly successful.

    And I feel the same way. I even think his proposal works well for the purpose of making the awards part of a particular community within fandom. Webs of trust interest me, and I hope that something comes of it so that we can see how that particular one works out in practice. I want it to deliver results that will feel to the participants like good work getting reliably recognized and honored.

    On a personal level, I’m not happy seeing Jay Maynard having become a bitter grognard because I think of a bunch of his old net activity fondly, and I wish he were happier. If this could do that, it’d be well worth it in my eyes.

  29. The whale movie is in my headcanon

    The Voyage Home is one of my favorites, second only to Wrath of Kahn. In fact, I would recommend IV for anyone new to Trek. It’s the most accessible Star Trek movie mostly due to its sense of humor.

  30. I’m all for the La Mancha & Jay Maynard’s awards taking off. If you don’t like the way the Hugo’s work set up your own awards. Run with it. Make it fun and meaningful to you.

    On the reading side I’ve started the Confederation Series by Tanya Huff. My husband brought the series home from the library. Today I read Valor’s Choice, book 1, and really enjoyed it. MilSF with a female protagonist, great secondary characters, cool variety of species, great worldbuidling, fighting, humor, betrayal, morally difficult situations, all wrapped in well written prose. I’m looking forward to reading the next. Later this year she has a spinoff of the series coming out (Hugo eligible).

  31. @Iphinome:

    So, unhappy with the Hugo results, right-wing Tron-guy has decided to make his own award to really represent fadom.

    Heh! Good ol’ Jay M. This is the fellow who, back in April, when I was discussing the newly released nominations slate online, and I was still at the just-finished Eastercon’s venue, pronounced me one of the hated ‘SJWs’ because I had employed the word ‘nuanced’. Really. Apparently, that’s supposed to be one of the ideological dog-whistles by which current-issue USAian conservatives are to determine whom to reflexively dislike and block. And here I thought it just was a word meaning ‘characterised by subtle degrees of difference’.

    Well, it’s possible Jay will put together an awards system, if he sets aside the bitter and resentful act for a short while. So, I wish him every success at both things.

  32. NB: These aren’t the Black Gate Awards; Maynard contributes blog posts but is not technically part of the staff.

    Did anyone else notice that Maynard endorsed the E Pluribus Hugo methodology for his proposed award?

    Interestingly, he’s proposing an award that will represent “all of fandom” by allowing participation only by the people they decide to let into their club — and then giving 5 people the power to override “all of fandom”s choices.

    I also noticed the Big Glaring Omission: how is this awards program going to be funded? He says that voting will be free and the award will be funded by “donations”. No potential for impropriety there!

    But hey, I totally support this proposal, and I hope all the Puppies get behind it and support it, too.

  33. Re: the Blackgate awards. I wish them luck. Perhaps they should listen to the worldcon folks for advice on the difficulties of actually administrating such an award.

    But if they succeed, great. If they actually nominate great fiction that would have otherwise escaped my notice, awesome

    But color me skeptical.

  34. Joe H.: My one (scientific) issue with The Martian, which I enjoyed very much, was the initial incident that left Watney stranded there in the first place… I thought the Martian atmosphere was too relatively thin to allow it to generate that kind of force?

     
    Andy Weir posted on Facebook:

    Someday, Neil deGrasse Tyson is going to either read “The Martian” or see the film adaptation of it. When he does, he’s going to immediately know that the sandstorm part at the beginning isn’t accurate to physics. He’ll point out that the inertia of a Martian storm isn’t enough to do damage to anything.

    The knowledge that this is going to happen haunts me.

  35. @Tasha – Is that Huff series the one where a book is based on the Battle of Rourke’s Drift? That was a fun series.

    Weird that it’s by the same author as the ‘Blood Xxxxxxx’ series of vampire/detective books.

  36. Leslie C: at the risk of turning this into File 770 Science Fiction Fandom News and Cat Adoption Service

    I wish to file a complaint about the replacement SJW credential you sent me last Saturday to replace the one I farewelled last month. Not only is it an “all-body-points” Siamese, it does not meow. Instead, it coos and trills and purrs. The truth is now clear to me.

    You sent me a black Tribble with claws. If not for the fact that my remaining SJW Siamese is getting along with it splendidly, I would be demanding a full refund and replacement.

    As it is, I fear that my SJW badness has been greatly diminished by this reduction in credentials. I am expecting the Puppies to send me a membership invite any day now.

  37. @JJ –
    “Andy Weir posted on Facebook:

    Someday, Neil deGrasse Tyson…
    …The knowledge that this is going to happen haunts me.”

    Hah! Thanks, JJ.

  38. I have to stand up for Seveneves here. I actually think the narrative structure is brilliant: the dark ages have no records, and so you don’t get to know what happened there except via oral histories and seeing the outcomes. To me, it makes the narration much more historical rather than omnipotent.

    I also, having talked with colleagues over in Biochem, am less skeptical of the biodiversity problems than many here, nor the designer babies. Speciation, or at least separation into distinct breeds, over 5k years is hardly impossible either, as the dog and the cow show very clearly.

    The long infodumps, especially in Part III, were probably the author trying to get a lot of worldbuilding that he’s had done for a decade off his chest, and I can understand people that disliked them. I, on the other hand, love thinking about gadgetry like that, and it’s one of the fuller designs I’ve seen for an orbital civilisation.

    I also really hated a few characters, and really loved some others, and was moved to tears more than once. For me, it’s a winner.

    (Note that upthread someone explained the title. I feel this is a major spoiler, btb.)

  39. @Aaron “Yeah, I’m not sure if Maynard understands irony.”

    I remain convinced that first thing every morning, the major Puppies all cast Heightened Persistent Protection From Irony.

    My attempt to avert this is why I kept reading BrianZ long after other people gave up.

  40. But Spock is a mature Vulcan, and surely must have experienced pon farr a few times before the incident chronicled in Star Trek.

    Probably not, since he explicitly says to Kirk that he “had hoped to be spared this.” Which suggests that he hasn’t gone through it before.

    . . . and I am now rather appalled at myself at having remembered that.

  41. I still think a sort of weak pubescent pon farr and then the serious adult version would reconcile things. Like musth in elephants or something.

  42. RedWombat:

    Yes, have two kinds of PF would work. I don’t seem to recall a lot of fic using that particular bit of spackle, though — possibly because there was so much fanon in place before Search for Spock even came out, and for the movies we tended to pick & choose which bits we’d hold as canon.

  43. Maximillian on September 10, 2015 at 8:40 pm said:

    @Tasha – Is that Huff series the one where a book is based on the Battle of Rourke’s Drift? That was a fun series.

    That sounds intriguing. Did it have Afrikaaners in it? I only ask so I could ask:
    If it had a dying boer, my Huff?

  44. I still think a sort of weak pubescent pon farr and then the serious adult version would reconcile things. Like musth in elephants or something.

    You know, RedWombat, that would work very well as a retcon, and would solve some of the other inconsistencies about Spock’s sexual activities in TOS and later–sort of like a puberty-based sexual awakening contrasted to a mature adult “bonding compulsion.”

    I love this community. We all care about the weirdest things . . .

  45. When the two were compared, the space whisky had “hints of antiseptic smoke, rubber, and smoked fish” among other flavors, whereas the Earth sample was noted for its “hints of cedar, sweet smoke, and aged balsamic vinegar,” according to the company. The near–zero gravity evidently affected the behavior of the whisky’s terpenes—the origin of most flavors and aromas found in plants—revealing a whole different side to the spirit, says Ardbeg’s director of distilling and whisky creation.

    Ok, definitely not happy about THAT. I’m not a fan of my Islay having notes of burning rubber and smoked fish!

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