Star Trudge

[emo_snal]

The Original Series   Hark! Last night I achieved a cultural accomplishment 66 hours in the making! I have watched the entire Star Trek Original Series. As a fan of science fiction I'd felt for awhile like it was something I should do. I fondly remember watching The Next Generation in the 90s. Since that time I haven't been as fond of the later

Comments

[fauxklore]

Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? mostly made me even less likely to buy a Lonely Planet guide unless there is nothing else available. I already thought they were shallow (come on - suggesting eating at MacDonald’s in Rome to save money?) and have horrible maps, so the poor quality of research is no surprise.

If you haven’t read them, you might like Peter Biddlecombe’s books about business travel in Africa.

[emo_snal]

I'm almost ashamed to admit it as a regular traveler to obscure places but I almost never consult Lonely Planet. I've been gifted a copy before going a place before and glanced at hte page about the place I was going and was like "::shrug::, there's nothing in here I can't figure out on the fly"

The book is definitely inspiring me to want to write for them in a "I could do this so much better than him!" kind of way. He complains a lot about how there's just not enough time to do this assignment but then he spends every evening binge drinking and every morning hungover, with my thoroughly boring habits I'd have heaps more time than him to devote to doing the actual work ... though I might not have as much research on the nightlife...

Haven't heard of this Peter Biddlecombe I'll have to investigate!

[lookfar]

Oh, man, I have so many Old Lady Comments about your run through the original Star Trek. Yes indeedy, it is slow moving. But please picture me, age 10, throwing meself down on the living room carpet in my PJs, Thursday night at 7, saying "Shut up, shut up!" to my younger brothers, and watching the series as it came out. I'd never seen anything so...world building, on TV before. Probably the moral dilemmas and human chauvanism were about right for a kid that age - it certainly wasn't complex, in that sense - but mostly it was the sense of entering into a different place and time. Also, dude, that shaking-the-camera-and-throwing-styrofoam-boulders was state of the art storytelling at the time. It looked fine to us.

But you've got Spock all wrong! He was the desire of every neurotic middle school girl because he suffered with his half-human, half-Vulcan weirdness, his inability to fit in or to speak his feelings. I mean, basically, he WAS a middle schooler. Every time he was, you know, fighting his human side that wanted to show

[emo_snal]

Haha oh maybe I should have stated that I can appreciate compared to it's contemporary alternatives I'm sure it was great, I mean neither I nor anyone else is about to rewatch whatever it was competing against so there you go. I can't fault them for their styrofoam boulders and actually marveled at the effects sometimes knowing what they were working with (they did a surprisingly good ship flying through space for not having CGI and all that!)

Ahh yes Spock does have that going for him. But I still think it's a testament to his acting. Another actor could easily have made that character not even appeal to high school girls.

Interesting to know about Shatner being a jackass, the chest-puffingly way he comes across on screen makes that really not surprising!

[lookfar]

Also, your travel writer book - I once read the famous The Ginger Man by JP Donlevy, and although I understood that he was meant to be an unlikeable character, I found him so unlikeable that I couldn't stand the book. So, there's that.

[emo_snal]

Oh which reminds me another book I'd meant to write a review on, focusing on the theme of unlikeable characters is David Donachie's John Pearce series, which is another one of those series following characters in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars a la Master and Commander and Horatio Hornblower ... but what's interesting in this case is I found the protagonist very unlikable but I don't think they author actually intended that. After careful analysis and consideration of what made it clear the author didn't realize how unlikeable his character was I hit on the fact that in the series all the other characters who are good like his character and only bad evil characters dislike his character. I think if he had known his character was in fact bad and dislikable himself he wouldn't have it quite like that. Generlaly his protagonist is an argumentative asshole. He wrote him to be likably "rebellious" but he comes it too strong and just seems disagreeable

[adoptedwriter]

Spock will always be my all time fave character followed by Data.

[emo_snal]

I had forgotten how funny Data was! His serious delivery of lines showing a humorous naivety about figures of speech and quibbles of human behavior is spot on! I watched episode 2 last night, where the whole crew gets drunk by some strange phenomena, including Data, and he does this thing where he tries to lean on something that isn't there and falls down and it was just so funny! And usually I'm not amused by slapsticky physical humor but it was just perfectly timed and executed I laughed out loud.

[zhent]

I was a college freshman in the fall of 1987, and my roommate had the entire STOS on VHS tape. He had carefully recorded each episode then edited out the commercials and put them together in episode order. So of course when TNG debuted we had a little watch party.

[emo_snal]

Haha rad! Did you get through the whole thing over several evenings or just watch as much as you could in one? (because it's 66 hours of total airtime!)

[zhent]

It took me a while to get through them, a few months I think.

[nattalie_m]

the picture is great!

[emo_snal]

Haha yeah her poise is just perfect, like "voila, this parrot!" (: