Castle Magus

Pick threefour characters to describe you.

( My choices, in tweet form, behind cut. )

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In non-tweet form:


Reginald Barclay


Sheldon Cooper


The Trio (Or, at least, Jonathan and Andrew anyway. Not so much Warren.)

Wil Wheaton on Star Trek Beyond: "Beyond was a Fast and Furious movie in space, and that’s not what I wanted to see. I give it 1 out of 5 motorcycles that are on the bridge of a starship for no logical reason, and still work after not being used for an incredibly long time for even less logical reasons."

Yeah, that's about what I expected it would be. My interest in seeing it is still near zero, especially in theaters.

You can get all four of the Star Trek games on GOG.com now, during the current sale, all for 80% off, or a total of $4.76 USD. I would have been on this like white on rice, if I didn't already have them. Just thought I'd pass the word along, in case anyone might be interested.

Oh and, for what it's worth, there's a separate sale on other Interplay stuff, but that one doesn't interest me as much, since I already have what little from that one that I'd have wanted, and none of what's left interests me that much.

"When the first trailer for Star Trek Beyond landed a few months back it had many fans of the classic franchise scratching their heads. For a series that often uses science fiction to ask deeper questions about humanity, there seemed to be an awful lot of things exploding. Simon Pegg even came out to relieve concerns and tell us that the trailer was not representative of the final film."

You know, when you have to come out and assure people that your movie isn't as bad as the trailer made it out to be... that's still not a very good sign. I mean, isn't that the whole point of a trailer in the first place, to be representative of the final film? You know, to get people interested in going to see it?

Also, it looks like they're apparently just going to completely ignore the whole Klingon War thing that they heavily foreshadowed in the previous movie.

Yeah, no... I might go see this movie, or at least watch it when it comes out on DVD or whatever... but as it stands now, I most likely won't. I think I'm pretty much done with nuTrek, unless I am given a compelling reason to feel otherwise.

Yeah yeah I know, everyone else is talking about the new Star Wars that just came out and all that good shit...

...but what I want to know is...

...what in the unholy fuck have they done to my beloved Star Trek? ;_;



They took the main thing that I hated about the previous two movies, i.e. all of that stupid, ridiculous, over-the-top, way-too-actiony horseshit, and then made the trailer for this new movie practically nothing but that. A trailer is supposed to get you hyped to see a movie, but judging by that trailer, I am firmly in the DO NOT WANT camp, at least for now. Ugh. Just... ugh. ಠ_ಠ

"Okay, let's never do that again." Indeed. I kind of almost wish that someone in a position of power at Paramount had said that after Into Darkness. ¬_¬

(Oh, and speaking of Star Trek: Into Darkness, I haven't seen Force Awakens yet myself so I don't know at all how accurate a description this is, but I'm hearing that the new Star Wars movie is essentially a sort of rehash of A New Hope in the same sort of way that Into Darkness was a rehash of "Space Seed"/Wrath of Khan. So, like, is that just a thing that J.J. Abrams does now? Taking earlier, better movies and rehashing them to troll nostalgiaphiles or something? Oh, wait, never mind, that's just what Hollywood as a whole has been doing for the past decade or two now.)

Maybe I'm just weird, but a Star Trek/Green Lantern crossover just doesn't interest me all that much. Maybe because it's the reboot Trek universe with Pine-Kirk rather than the Prime universe with Shatner-Kirk? I don't really have a problem with the reboot movies, aside from them being way too action-y for my tastes, but still... Or maybe it's the fact that out of all the big DC superheroes, the Green Lantern Corps are among the least interesting to me? I don't know. In any case, this just doesn't appeal to me all that much, despite the fact that I'm usually a huge sucker for crossover stuff like this.

Then again, I still haven't even gotten around to reading the Star Trek TNG/Doctor Who crossover comic yet either, which I have far more interest in (for some reason, despite having never seen even a single full episode of any season of Doctor Who as of yet... I really, really need to get my hands on that stuff and watch it someday).

Star Trek: 25th Anniversary, Star Trek: Judgment Rites, and Star Trek: Starfleet Academy are now available on GOG.com.

On the one hand, I think that's really cool, and I can't help but wonder what took them so damn long to get these games in the first place. On the other hand... I think I'll wait for a sale before rebuying these games, all the same, since I own physical copies of them all already. And I might also wait for them to get some of the other games, like A Final Unity, Borg, and Bridge Commander, before I really go in for it. Yeah, I know those are Next Gen games rather than TOS games, as well as made by different companies than Interplay, but I don't care. Really, there are a bunch of good old Star Trek games that could be on Good Old Games. (And some not-so-good old Star Trek games, true enough, but even so...)

Get on that, GOG.

(EDIT) And now these three games are on Steam as well, if that's more your cup of tea. (/EDIT)

I've been kind of sort of half-assedly following the brouhaha being talked about in this post, over on Twitter and Facebook (and even, occasionally, Tumblr, which is how I found, via a repost of that Tumblr page on FB, that post from Mr. Wheaton's website), so I thought I'd post a link to it here, because I found it interesting. From that, among other things, I learned two new phrases: The Dunning-Kruger effect and Epistemic closure. And I learned of the existence of something called DuckDuckGo, which is apparently a different (some claim better) alternative to Google and something I'll have to look more into at a later time. It also led to me reading this post, which in turn led to this post on his older site.

As for the political stuff, I'd never even heard of that whole "Obama turned NASA into a 'Muslim outreach program'" idiocy before this, which as Mr. Wheaton pointed out is just some typical Rush Limbaugh horseshit from a few years ago.

(EDIT)

Mr. Wheaton also says this: "And the whole thing actually makes me kind of sad. The Stupidsphere HQ and its leaders are all making money off of their gullible followers, and they’re all helping to prop up a political establishment that deliberately makes things worse for working class people. The Stupidsphere HQ and its leaders don’t give a shit about the people who follow them and leap into action when told to do so. All they care about are their clicks, and they’re laughing at them all the way to the bank."

However, that reminds me of something I said myself a few years ago. Since that particular post is friend-locked and not likely to ever be removed from that status, and thus is not visible to anyone not already on my LJ friend list, I'll copy/paste what I said there to here: "You know, to go off on a tangent, I rant about Faux Noise a lot and how it and guys like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh and the like are brainwashing and otherwise deluding and hoodwinking people like the above. I'm going to revise my opinion now. It's not that Faux Noise and such are controllers of these people, but more that they are simply facilitators and enablers of them. Faux Noise/Beck/Limbaugh/etc. are, just like any other work of fiction, merely a means of escape for these people from the rigors of reality. They allow these people to live in a make-believe fairyland reality for a little while, divorced from common sense and logic. And if that's what it takes to get them through their days, well... whatever floats their boats I guess. *shrug* The only annoying part is when that kind of crap intrudes upon others, such as me, who simply don't want anything at all to do with it."

(/EDIT)

In any case, I've always liked Wil Wheaton. He's good people, in my opinion, and for a great many reasons. Mind you, I don't know him personally at all outside of his Twitter and Facebook, and have never met him in person, but I still feel that way. As such, it annoys me that a bunch of asshats have been dogpiling him lately, though at the same time, it amuses me to watch him wreck their shit so effectively. (And, just for the record, I didn't even mind Wesley Crusher all that much either, both when I was originally watching TNG back during its original run, and when I was watching it again more recently, during that whole Star Trek marathon thing I did. Also, for the record, I have never seen Stand By Me, which is an oversight that I should probably correct someday [nor did I know before today that the film was based on a Stephen King novella, which I similarly have not read yet].)

I'm glad I don't have to put up with this sort of thing where I work. Then again, the full extent of how it went down where I work was that I happened to mention watching the show once in passing a few months ago during a discussion about television, my supervisor said faux-mockingly "So does that mean you are a brony?" and I said "Yeah, I guess so," we moved on to other topics, and then I never brought it up again. I just don't feel the need to advertise the fact that I watch the show in real life, outside of the occasional mention here (if you consider LJ to be "real life" at all). I'm not ashamed of it, it's just not something that needs to be shouted to the heavens. If I found someone in real life (i.e. outside of the Internet) willing to talk about it, that'd be cool, but it's not a big deal to me or anything. That said, I doubt I'd get fired even if I did wear a brony t-shirt* or bring a toy to work**. Certainly nobody has said anything about the five mostly Star Trek related images that I'm currently using as a revolving desktop background on my machine, aside from the occasional "Heh, that's pretty funny" or "I like your background." But, then, it's more "appropriate" for a guy to be into Star Trek/Star Wars/X-Men than it is for him to be into My Little Pony, so there is that to consider as well.

But, in any case, if what the guy in that article says is accurate, and he actually wasn't being a completely obnoxious douche about the whole thing, then I think he got treated wrongly here as I don't think what he (claims he) did was inappropriate at all, especially if other people were doing the same thing, but with more "manly" interests. That boss and his former co-workers sound kind of like giant asshats, at least judging from what the fired dude is saying about them. On the other hand, even if the guy was being an incredibly creepy weirdo about it, I still don't think that, in and of itself, should have been enough to get the guy fired, at least as long as he didn't do something completely over the top like, say, proposition the boss's 9 year old daughter or something. (Because, you know, all bronies everywhere are totally pedophiles, amirite u gais? But seriously, if he did actually do something like that, I would have hoped that they'd have called the cops rather then merely fire him.) Some people go on and on and on and on about sports or whatever that I would personally like to tell to STFU (but don't, because it would be impolite, so I just tune them out instead), but I don't think they should be fired over it (but again, sports is an appropriately "manly" subject). Actually, that's just a hypothetical, since while I do know some people who sleep, breathe, and eat sports, none of them exist where I work. Most of my co-workers actually tend to share my apathy about sports.

(And then I made the mistake of scrolling down to the comments under that article, which are filled with the typical "durr hurr bronies sure are creepy and weird amirite" bullshit that I should have expected would be there even before I scrolled down, given that it's gawker.)

(EDIT) With all of that said, I get that the guy may have been an at-will employee, meaning that they could fire him for whatever the hell they wanted to. Even so, it's still not cool, in my opinion. (/EDIT)

* - Which I don't own yet, but have vaguely considered buying some stuff while perusing welovefine, but then I don't buy t-shirts for any of my other fandoms so why would I for MLP?

** - Which, as I've said elsewhere, I have very little interest in, even if the toys do now look somewhat more show-accurate than they did back when I originally made that comment. (Though I'm still waiting for them to make a proper MLP:FiM video game most definitely. Come on, Hasbro, get it together. A actual, full-fledged, fully backed, official MLP:FiM video game that isn't a crappy iPhone thing would get you mad bank.)

As of a few seconds ago as I write this (though by the time I finish this it'll probably be more like an hour or three), with the viewing of the final episode of Enterprise, I can now say that I have finally seen all of Star Trek. It took me a while. (And, looking back through my LJ, I notice that I never made any posts about TAS, TNG, or DS9 for whatever reasons, even though I definitely watched those as well. Probably because I didn't have much to complain about with those, I guess. I'm pretty sure I probably made posts about them on Facebook or Twitter, but I'm not going to bother searching through all of that to link it here. Suffice it to say that The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were probably my favorite two series, and I can't really pick between them which is more my favorite, to be honest. The Animated Series was pretty good for what it was, I guess. Better than I expected it would be going into it, at least.)

So, now I'm going to talk about Enterprise. Here's my overall assessment of it: it's not nearly as bad as most people seem to say it is. I mean, sure, there were some stinkers in there definitely, but I'd say that what I'd consider to be the worst of Enterprise is nowhere near as bad as what I consider to be the worst of Voyager.

( Now, a bit more in depth )