On my 7th birthday, I was given 4 Star Trek novels. They were good. On my 34th (today/yesterday, the 9th) I saw the new Star Trek movie, whose name I didn't even catch. It was not. My impression: it was a sequence of dramatic scenes unconstrained by coherence. I liked the aesthetics (though some others didn't), especially of the future ships, one of which made me go "it's the Vorlons!" There were a couple of good Spock lines sending up time travel tropes. But there were a lot of egregious coincidences, and unnecessary tension (kind of like the crumbling-bridge-jumping scene in Moria in the LotR movie, though without the "no one throws a dwarf" extra; you're in fucking Moria, or (spoilered), you don't need to transport into a water tube accidentally for more action. Or you shouldn't.) There was bad physics. There was what I'd call bad biology, and bad planetary defense, and... Yes, it's Star Trek. I find that a poor excuse.

Was it a good Star Trek novel? Ignoring the science, you've still got the weird coincidences. I guess the characters were okay, though no one seemed deep. Some companions complained "it's Star Trek, now with sewers!" and about the clutter in Engineering; I didn't care. But then, I'm not that attached to Trek.

And then there was the characters kissing. They were unexpected.

'Maru' is not pronounced that way, though when I complained S. pointed out that "Hikaru Sulu" doesn't make sense as a Japanese name. The r/l phoneme can be transliterated as r or l but not both...

But hey, I had a good time hanging out, talking about the movie and Moby Dick and CS stuff. I got to natter on again about the infodumps and science-fiction nature in Moby Dick, and realized that my liking non-fiction might be why I often like fake non-fiction.

If life was the Illuminati or CryptNet, I would now be of the highest degree.

Got the usual call from John (he always remembers), and a surprise one from mrs_feltner. Didn't do much else yesterday, but had a small dinner tonight at Bombay House. Out of coffee and tandoori lamb, but the chai and tan. chicken was good, and afterwards people were in my place for the first time since July, perhaps. (Place is a lot more crowded after bringing boxes back from the house.) All the books lying around were good for starting little conversations, though, and lyceum borrowed Uncivil Liberties -- Calvin Trillin being a parental taste I haven't spread around my friends enough, along with Taste of America, and boco's got my Juuni Kokki.

I stayed up to 6am working on the wikip Transhumanism page,so today was pretty much dead between then and dinner time.

Unrelated: the state of the US electrical grid

Dubai construction craziness. I figure crappy outdoors + oil == build lots of indoors. An RPG.net thread discusses how much of that is underpaid near-slave labor.