that's just how I roll. I write entries with no real theme.

[seperis]

Porn is just bizarre from a Vulcan's pov. I just want to state for this for the record, because I want really low expectations. Okay? Okay. I'm saying, I will really spellcheck this time, and like, check my its/it's, and I want credit for that when anyone gets to like, page thirty, kay? Thank you.

In other news, there is no other news. I mean, winterlive is a filthy, filthy tease with fic (seriously, my inbox is such a porny, porny place) and transtempts is trying to drive me nuts with what appears to be OT3 foreplay that lasts forever, and svmadelyn is sending me links to fic where people use the word orbs for eyes without irony. I'm sorry, no.

Also, apparently, my playlist for Star Trek is dance-pop and techno. I wnat to say I do not associate Kirk with Britney Spears (damn you, butterfly, with your brilliance; when I get stuck, that's the vid I watch to get unstuck when writing), but it's a lie. I am so not kidding. I dragged out The Pussycat Dolls and I don't know what this means, but I know it's not an improvement on my emo-by-way-of-metal-guitar phase.

[And talitha78 for freaking Lady Gaga. I--can't even deal with this. I just pretend I am not me. I am saying, my musical tastes are pretty much "Did a vidder use this song? I like it!" Is that even healthy?]

No.

It's been a while, so I feel it's about time to list off my most recent fic peeves. In no particular order in two fandoms.



Stop using orbs for eyes. How can anyone write that and not think of Tolkien, I do not know.

You cannot use jade three times in a sentence, I do not fucking care how green Spock's cock is.

Lube. Lube. Lube. LUBE. LUBE. I am not asking much here. I am asking that I do not have an unmistakable physiological reaction known as SQUICK where there is twitching and so much mockery.

Weirdly, I am still okay with instant refraction period and marathon sex, but see, here's the thing. No one should be striving for realism, because realism is kind of disgusting, it's not like humans like sex because it is pretty and clean, we like it because it's filthy and its fun, but filthy can be really literal--they need to strive for hotness. Lubeless sex is not hot (there are exceptions, but I will state unequivocally that I will actually friend people on their ability to pull that off and not make me flinch. That's skillz.). Ten times in twelve hours is hot. What I'm saying is, I am really arbitrary in my enforcement of realism. I read astolat's Merlin tentacle fic and really hated myself for loving it as much as I did, alright? So there you go. Arbitrary.

Kirk is not dumb. Let me just state, in case Pike didn't convince you, Starfleet in three years and worked out that Nero was back due to a conversation while listening to two undressed girls talking and semi-conscious in sickbay with a snatch of an announcement. The novelization had him competitive for valedictorian of his class. Broke into Starfleet security to alter Spock's program. Spock's. Program. And heartily pissed off his Vulcanness pulling that shit. Not dumb. The Enterprise is chock full of geniuses. Crazy geniuses below the age of thirty-five who are going to either destroy teh galaxy or just set it on fire.

Smart is hot. Everyone can be smart! It's okay! You don't need a token dumb character to show how smart your favorite character is! Really! We're fangirls! I have at least ten MENSA on my flist and only hate them on alternate Sundays! Smart for everyone! Please. Stop that shit. It's not just irritating, it's cliched as hell. D/s all you like, but keep everyone's IQ intact.

Luckily, I read only by rec and very careful screening (ie, skim and run)--Uhura is not just awesome because she has lines and is a woman. She speaks eighty-three percent of Federation languages. Sit on that one for a bit for those of us who are monolingual with pretensions of understanding and reading a second language under stress. And all three dialects of Romulan. She owns herself, which is actually, oddly, why I like her. I liked her mocking Kirk while he flirted with her (the movie was a high improvement on the book on her character, btw, she shoots men down with style and with a smile; I love her for that).

Also, randomly, and I can't remmber if this was in the book or book and movie, but I was utterly thrilled when Spock gave her the conn. Small thing, but in TOS, I don't remember her being given command of the ship.



Okay, question for Uhura fans and the chain of command, please. This is jsut for my own curiosity for now, though I am using some of this for a fic.



Has anyone worked out the chain of command for the Enterprise yet? For my own purposes, considering her age and seniority, in the current Enterprise, I assumed Uhura was third in seniority after Kirk and Spock, but does it work like that or does the helm outrank communications? While the Captain can give command to anyone (see the novel Doctor's Orders I think for the hilarious results of Kirk making McCoy take it and then vanishing; that was great), I remember in TNG that Deanna outranked Ensign Ro despite being ship's counselor despite command experience, I'm not so sure here. I'm not even sure bridge crew no matter their rank are higher in the chain of command than someone of higher rank but not bridge crew; is it just me or is Starfleet just that confusing sometimes?

If it's not set, I'm just going with that interpretation due to her (probably?) being already graduated and the Starfleet equivalent of a grad student when the movie opens.

Okay, I cannot deal with her being junior to Sulu and Chekov. I just can't. It doesn't make sense. I keep clinging to Spock giving her the conn as proof currently she's third in the chain of command.



And because this came up on my flist.



Recently, several people on my flist were gathering information/recs/links about fic that highlighted POCs in fandoms and pairings. If you're into Trek, I submit Voyager as being the only fandom I know of that every major pairing het and slash involved a POC. The only ones I can think of that weren't and had a following were Paris/Seven and Janeway/Paris for het and Janeway/Seven in slash, and two of those didn't take off until season five. And Paris/Seven was not that popular; I know, it was my tertiary pairing. At one time in the fandom, I think I was responsible for like, half of all existing Paris/Seven stories and one novel. I--really need to find my list of fic. I never did finish a decent Voyager fic rec page.

Weirdly, it was not until the last year when someone mentioned it that I ever noted that of Voyager's major characters, there were only five that were white, and only two of those were bridge crew: Captain Janeway, female; Kes, female, alien, not bridge (season one through four); Seven of Nine, female, Borg, Astrometrics, not bridge (season five through seven); Lieutenant Paris, male; and The Doctor, hologram, doctor, not bridge. Not an ideal spread, but still kind of surprising to me, possibly because when the question went around where people were thinking what POC related stories they'd written, I completely forgot the majority of my Voyager fic was primary Tom/B'Elanna (and fine, one Chakotay/Paris, but that story had him sleeping with everyone. As I am one with cliches sometimes). Which is a reminder of my level of awareness is not exactly all tht great.

Even that mix isn't ideal or representative, but compared to TNG (and to a lesser extent DS9, though DS9 had a much higher proportion of alien, and I wasn't a regular watcher, they could have been much more diverse and I just don't remember; I watched for Sisko and Jadzia, basically) that's not--too terrible. Which isn't exactly a recommendation, but I can say my pairing has some seriously amazing writers, and was also not only my first experience with fandom, but with threesomes (Tuvok/Paris/Torres and Paris/Kim/Torres and Paris/Torres/Seven). I can hunt up recs if anyone is interested.



Finally, for anyone who is interested or who wasn't around circa 2006 when I did this, Trek Meet and Greet. I haven't updated comments since last year, nor is it terribly organized, but it has a pretty interesting cross-section of Trek writers on LJ, comms, etc. If it feels useful or there isn't a better reference out there, I'd be happy to start organizing and updating it again. There are some people I haven't added or removed either by request or because they really, really seemed to not want the connection.

Yes, this is what happens when I've been struggling with Vulcan porn. I can't even look at myself in the mirror right now. Kirk POV--next time, Kirk POV.

ETA: darkrosetiger asks for Tuvok recs here and now I'm kind of interested too. Bring your Tuvok recs!

Comments

[akacat]

You keep bringing up rewriting Spock's program....

Any program Spock wrote would be *cake* to alter. It would be wonderfully commented and completely logical. The variable names would all make sense. The subroutine names would be fantastically intuitive. There wouldn't be a single spot where you look at it and wonder wtf he was thinking when he wrote it. Getting to it to alter it would be trickier, but that's system security.

And Kirk's modification to it was kind of sad, really. The enemy's shields just suddenly shut down. Whoopee. I can honestly tell you that someone with a single semester of programming in a different language could make that change, armed with a reference sheet to the language the scenario was written in.

Which makes sense, given everything else Kirk knows -- he probably didn't have time to take more than the minimum required number of programming classes. I was just hoping for something a little more subtle. Like, if the ship is flown in a particular pattern, the enemy fire just happens to hit with only glancing blows that never quite take out the shield.

Of course, subtle doesn't play as well on the big screen, either. Unless it's Spock saying "Live long and diaf". :D

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I can honestly tell you that someone with a single semester of programming in a different language could make that change, armed with a reference sheet to the language the scenario was written in.

Without access to the uncompiled code?

[akacat]

Without access to the uncompiled code?

Ok, that I didn't know about.

Yeah, unless he had some really kick-ass tools, that would require genius-level smarts. And I can't see Kirk doing it with top-of-the-line hacker's tools. That would be cheating too much.

But he probably used *some* sort of hacking/debugging tool -- if he used the 23rd century equivalent of notepad on uncompiled code for a system that size, then he's somewhere way past 'genius'. He'd have to be the sort of person who can 'read' 2400baud line-noise.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking about this way more than healthy, because somehow, no one noticed he'd made a change to the base code. I mean, that really makes me wonder about Fleet security.

Likely, he did it virus-style; he knew the language, and possibly even had seen samples of Spock's code, so he wrote in a conditional, when x occurs, switch from current decision tables to his tables, and inserted that into the mainframe. He could probably even disguise the upload to look like a normal update/new build if Spock is the perfectionist I think he is and updates regularly. I mean--I am willing to buy many things, but even if he was sitting at the highest MENSA in the universe, I can't see how he would have had *time* to reverse engineer the whole program enough to make changes to the base code.

But getting through SF security. You know, I am going ot go out on a limb and think that maybe he's been hacking their security since he got there. *G*

[akacat]

I'm glad you're thinking about it, because I've had no-one else to talk to about it! Mostly.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Spock's program wasn't a program in the way we're thinking of. The simulator itself probably runs on a huge quasi-AI program -- Spock's programming was largely a case of working out every possible move in a game of chess, and making sure the AI always knew the best counter-move for anything the cadets did. Those reactions were probably all stored in something more like a database, than a program.

That would eliminate the need to reverse-engineer anything -- Kirk probably already slept with someone who knows how the core of the simulator works. :-P It would also greatly reduce the need to cover his tracks -- in a database, once you've cracked all the security, you can make a change without it updating any "last altered on" date. It would leave two challenges -- getting past security, and making an effective change in the least noticeable way possible.

Like you said, he probably had security hacked the first week he was there. Every layer of it, even though there were three dummy layers meant to leave the sneakier cadets thinking they'd hacked it.

I've been thinking he took a sledgehammer to the test, but now I realize he didn't. He didn't put in some huge glaring "shut off the enemy's shields at X time" -- because they didn't just drop their shields, they stopped responding completely. He put in some small, sneaky little "when the captain starts crunching an apple, that's a sign that the ship has been destroyed." Because they didn't just drop their shields, they stopped. Game (test) over. Federation ship destroyed, and all the little AI ships come to a stop and drop their shields. And don't do anything annoying, like react to being blown away one shot at a time.

He knew how they would react to game over, because he'd already lost the test.

[clancy-s.livejournal.com]

Kirk probably already slept with someone who knows how the core of the simulator works.

I gather* that was the way the screenplay was originally intended to work: Gaila (the green girl worked as some kind of TA in the computer / Kobayashi Maru section. Kirk was bonking her for fun, but also to get access to the codes, without her knowledge. He'd arranged for her to received an email (or equivalent) from him whilst he was running the test, when she opened it it released a virus that cause the shieds to drop.

They cut it all for brevity and because they thought how Kirk did it was irrelevant.

* I read every ST interview I could find the first week, I didn't bookmark any but I'm fairly sure I've got the gist of the explanation. All that remains of that subplot is the line at the end of the novelisation when Spock asks Kirk how he did it and Kirk says Orion girls talk in their sleep...

[akacat]

Kirk says Orion girls talk in their sleep...

lol.

Hmm. I guess I do need to read the novelization...

[seperis.livejournal.com]

Of course, subtle doesn't play as well on the big screen, either. Unless it's Spock saying "Live long and diaf". :D

Well, yeah. He wasn't trying to be subtle. He did performance art with an apple and set it up to be the most obvious possible cheat he could manage; TOS Kirk had them hail him by name. The point wasn't by then to win the Maru. It was to rub the fact that he knew the dice were loaded in Starfleet's face. Or a nice bit of parallelism, as he stated during the hearing; the test was a cheat, so he cheated it as well.

[akacat]

Yeah, I guess. It must be another change caused by the reboot, though. Because I know he told someone in one of the movies that he cheated on that test -- and in the reboot, everyone who knows about the test, is also going to know about his cheat.

[seperis.livejournal.com]

I-want to say that it was also general knowledge in TOS, or at least, not a secret. But I may have picked that up from Kobayashi Maru novel (which had how several of the bridge crew broke the no-win in creative ways). I think there was a commendation involved?