Let's see how many times Kirk logicks a computer to death. To be updated as I go.
1-10, "Dagger of the Mind" - Kirk and Nurse Chapel are kidnapped by an android with some guy's consciousness copied into it. Kirk shames it into destroying itself. Not quite the logic-death, but close.
1-22, "The Return of the Archons" - Kirk convinces a computer who enforces "good" on its planet that it is "the evil". Computer asplode.
2-08, "The Changeling" - This was a remarkably shitty episode. It also seems to have had much of its plot filched for the first Star Trek movie. The ship meets a ridiculous powered-up probe who's been altered by some other being into going around and "sterilizing imperfections". Kirk convinces it that it is itself imperfect. Probe goes boom.
2-10, "Mirror, Mirror" - Not quite a computer, but Kirk does try to get alternate-Spock to admit that a barbaric empire is logically doomed to failure.
2-12, "I, Mudd" - The mother of all Kirk Conundrum episodes. It's funny how super-intelligent races of beings can't program their service-sector robot slaves to handle contradictions. Kirk and crew are cheerful goofballs and confuse the robots - who quite sincerely only wanted to help - into circuit meltdown. I left this episode feeling sorry for the androids, who were rather more intelligent than humans are. (And also rolling my eyes at the strong undercurrent of "women exist to be controlled by men" evidenced by the subservient female androids and Mudd's android replica of his wife to control. And why on Earth would an alien race from the Andromeda galaxy even make man-robots and woman-robots? The universally-assumed gender dichotomy in every blinking one of these episodes is really starting to get on my nerves. Pfaugh. The next episode, at least, is the tribble one, so I'll get to be refreshed by a race of critters with no sexual dichotomy at all. yay!)
Shatner is so ridiculous, it's hilarious. Let's see how many times he can manage to get out of his clothing. Also to be updated as I go:
1-02, "The Corbomite Maneuver" - First shot of Kirk is of him taking a medical exam shirtless. (However, at 0:8:27, you get a perfectly clear view of Scotty's right hand!)
1-06, "The Naked Time" (ha ha) - McCoy tears the shoulder of Kirk's shirt open to give him an injection. (Also, Sulu runs around shirtless and with a fencing foil in this one. George Takei rocks my socks.)
1-07, "Charlie X" - Kirk tries teaching the little punk Charlie how to fight, Charlie wears a red karate gi, and Kirk wears only pants.
1-09, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" - Kirk lays, ostensibly naked with the large restraint across his waist censoring everything we don't want to see, on a large turntable.
1-11, "Miri" - Kirk rips his sleeves open to show his funky blue lesions to the kids. His collar got torn a little too at some point I didn't catch.
1-14, "Court Martial" - In an episode whose story seems the most unexciting of all, Kirk manages to shred his clothing while fighting a disgruntled crew member in the engine room.
1-17, "Shore Leave" - Kirk tears most of his shirt off in a brawl that lasted way too long.
(1-19, "Arena" - Despite this being that hilarious episode where Kirk fights the lizard-man, and makes a primitive hand cannon out of bamboo and surface minerals, he doesn't even tear a seam. I am amazed.)
2-05, "Amok Time" - Spock slices Kirk's shirt open with a fun little weapon that I'd like to have my own self.
2-15, "Journey to Babel" - Kirk manages to get a shot of him in his quarters, shirtless, as well as a couple shots with just a chest bandage after being stabbed. Will it never end?
2-16, "A Private Little War" - While running around planetside in native garb, there is a disquieting discrepancy between McCoy's fully-laced jerkin, and Kirk's rather loose one.
2-17, "The Gamesters of Triskelion" - Kirk spends most of the episode in a slave harness. This was an episode whose plot read rather uncomfortably like somebody's rape fantasy. Ew. (Yet we do get to hear McCoy tell Spock he's out of his Vulcan mind, and Kirk gets an alien woman named Shahna to ask, "What is Love?", so it's all okay.) And also, this episode wins "best comment on Youtube": "i love whenever kirk gets in some sort of physical altercation his shirt always gets torn in the same place from the neck down to the chest so his so his man-breast is on display.....little somethin' for the ladies.....we get a myriad of nameless beautiful women in ass-cut miniskirts and dark stockings.....you get william shattner's right nipple....a fair exchange indeed!" -CatzGNA This episode fails, however, with the ridiculous concept of directed evolution that appears so often in these episodes. Come the fuck on, people, Lamarck was debunked last century.
So yeah, I'm going through and watching The Original Series. I was surprised to find that Kirk doesn't end up getting some in every episode - just most of them. And yeah, I knew how sexist this series can be, I just chose to forget it. Sigh. To be updated as I go:
1-04, "The Enemy Within" - Kirk's embodied evil half forces a kiss from Yeoman Rand. (And here we have a delightful little scene where Rand, tear-streaked, tells Spock and McCoy how she wouldn't have reported the incident on her own because 'she didn't want to make trouble for him'. Social justification of avoiding reporting rape and attempted rape to the authorities, how nice.)
1-06, "The Naked Time" - Overcome by the disease that's sweeping the ship, Kirk gets really emo about wanting to feel a girl right then and there. Oh, wretched duty that keeps him from jumping on his female crewmen !
1-09, "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" - Kirk kisses, and tries to seduce, an android named Andrea.
1-10, "Dagger of the Mind" - A hypnotized Kirk imagines kissing the most useless psychiatrist I've ever seen. And then he kisses her for real.
1-11, "Miri" - The guy shamelessly flirts with a 14-year-old girl named Miri for the whole episode. And fans everywhere grimace and try to forget about this one.
1-14, "Court Martial" - Kirk meets an old girlfriend, and yep, they kiss.
1-17, "Shore Leave" - Kirk gets an attractive yeoman to work a kink out of his spine.
1-28, "City On The Edge Of Forever" - It's hard to believe it's been this long since Kirk tried to get into someone's pants- I mean, into someone's skirt. Tragically, he "falls in love" with doomed Edith. Spit is duly swapped.
2-01, "Catspaw" - Kirk tries to seduce the funky alien sorceress, Sylvia.
2-10, "Mirror, Mirror" - In a parallel universe, Kirk sucks face with alternate-Kirk's ambitious concubine, Marlena. (Her official "title" appears to be "Captain's woman". Judging by the number of pretty cabin boys kept by seafaring captains throughout Earth's history, one has to wonder if there is also the "Captain's man". But oh wait, I forgot - homosexuals didn't exist until 1980 or so, of course. -_- ) Later, back in canon-universe, Kirk spies the recent transfer Lieutenant Moreau, and makes a really creepy statement to Spock about how he thinks he "could become... friends," with his crewmember. Ugh.
2-14, "Bread and Circuses" - Kirk reluctantly boinks a slave named Drusilla. When Spock later asks what the Captain has been up to while he was away from him and McCoy, Drusilla is dismissed with, "They threw me a few curves". (Also, in other kissing headlines, I would have sworn that Spock and McCoy were going to start tearing each others' clothes off in that prison cell shot, hahaha. Bonus points: unless I missed one, this is the first episode with, "Green-blooded hobgoblin!") And every time I think we might be past the worst of the ridiculously heavy-handed religious metaphors in this show, the damn thing has to go and prove me wrong.
2-17, "The Gamesters of Triskelion" - Kirk does his best to charm the alien woman Shahna. I think you can see where this is going.
Over at that thread on E's blog (we all know which one I'm talking about), there was a recurring claim: that one should not criticize religion because beliefs are very important to people, and criticism is hurtful.
I get that people hold beliefs dearly. I understand that. But that is insufficient reason to declare such a huge aspect of the human experience as out of bounds for criticism and debate. It is precisely because religious beliefs have such an impact on people's lives that we must submit them to criticism as often as possible.
Religious motivations, yes, have over the ages produced beautiful art, have inspired people, have given comfort and joy and peace.
Religious motivations have also destroyed art, have oppressed people, have given war and terror and pain. And this means that all the harmful aspects of faith - which are not a rarity - must be scrutinized, criticized, examined, discussed, and talked about endlessly so that the people who admire all the loving aspects of faith can be on guard against all the hateful aspects of it. Child molestation; exploitation of the elderly or poor; oppression of women; subjugation of other cultures; disregard for the physical, mental, and spiritual health of human beings - all of these are part of the religious experience in addition to the comfort and beauty, and all of them have their root in a structure of patriarchy and unbending authority that fears the consequences of flowing with an ever-changing world. All of these must be protested, because to remain silent is to condone the very worst aspects of humanity.
Yes, I'm speaking from a humanistic perspective that considers religious faith of all stripes to be myth. Research suggests that the human consciousness tends toward a desire to identify with the spiritual - whether in institutionalized religion, in personal faith, in nature worship, in artful pursuits or intellectual activities or physical performance. People can take comfort and joy in them, people can identify very strongly with the emotional benefits of their faith, and faith can say valuable things about the human experience. I don't think that that in itself is "dumb", and I respect my religious friends' intelligence enough to be reasonably certain they'll know not to take my perspective as me telling them I think they're "dumb".
What I do criticize is when people use any faith to oppress other human beings, physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. And when abuses by the faithful and of faith occur every single day, nobody has any business saying that it's "wrong", or "tactless", or "fucktarded", or "coarse", or "classless" to criticize faith, all words I saw thrown at E. If non-personal criticism of faith as an institution, or of harmful faith-related behaviors, is offensive, or if it's uncomfortable to hear a detached anthropological assessment of religious faith as human-created fantasy well, that's unfortunate. But it doesn't mean that people with valid critcism or observations should ever feel forced to censor their speech or thoughts simply to appease a reactionary audience when the topic is being discussed. "Time and place for everything," yeah, and the author of a blog gets to choose their time for discussing whatever they wish on their personal blog.
Comments by religious or non-religious friends or strangers who would like to engage my points in a substantive way are welcome. Comments by irate godbags with nothing more to contribute than character assassination, appeals to emotion, or baseless cries for self-censorship are not welcome, and will be deleted. I am not as patient as E.
Guys! We could totally make an online game work, I think.
We'd need something like OpenRPG for the game mat.
And we'd need Ventrillo (and microphones) for voice chat.
With the OpenRPG game mat, we wouldn't necessarily require webcams or anything, you should just be able to move "figures" around on the "board". And Vent means that the DM won't have to type up long descriptive passages ahead of time the way the DM of my one old game back in 2002 did. OpenRPG also has individual chat tabs so players or the DM can discuss things in secret, etc.
I really think we could do this, and have some fun with it. Who's with me? :D
I don't think my dad knows how to deal with someone who refuses to be either lower or higher then him in whatever hierarchy he overlays on the world around him. He clearly expects me to behave as if he were my "superior". That I do not is threatening and confusing to him.
I was looking for my Baldur's Gate 2 discs to send to my little brother, and couldn't find disc 1. So I figured it had to be somewhere in my desk, and started cleaning out one of my piles of paper. I found a stack of notes with phone numbers on them, and I decided to go through them and find out which ones were dead, disconnected, or worth keeping. Most were scribbled onto sticky notes or on the backs of homework papers. I called a half dozen dead phone numbers and threw them away, and then I found a number, in a wide, loose hand, that I didn't recognize. So I dialed it, not really paying attention, and when someone actually answered I was a little taken aback for a moment. I had this spiel prepared in case someone did answer, so I went, "Hi, this is weird I know, but I'm going through my old address book and trying to figure out who some of these phone numbers are. I'm Carmen, and who are you and how might I have your number?"
A slight pause.
And then gales of Elf laughter.
Yeah, I'm a nincompoop. At least Elf got a good hearty laugh out of it. I was soundly embarrassed. D: The area code really should have tipped me off, but I guess I thought it was one of my aunt's numbers or something. I hope you guys get a laugh out of it too.
I'm getting what appears to be restaurant email spam from your yahoo address. With your sig line and everything, very weird. I would think it was something wonky on my end, but I'm not receiving emails like that appearing to be from anyone else yet.
Or did you mean to send out ads for TGI Friday and Denny's?
So, Kathy gave me and Morocco a ride to one of the Catnip outreach vets to take a look at her. It turns out it isn't going to be an easy fix like I'd thought.
Basically, she did something, probably by running under something and catching her shoulder, that jerked her shoulder blade away from the body and damaged nerves and muscles. The muscles will heal with time and therapy, but the nerve damage is a real problem. She doesn't have much sensation in her paw and leg, and since her paw naturally curls inward without her able to tell it to straighten out, she "knuckles", gimping around on the back of her wrist when she walks.
If I were to put her back outside, she could get the damaged limb caught in something. She wouldn't feel the pain of being stuck, but she'd be able to tell that "something" had her, and in the effort to get away she could rip the arm completely off. Also, having the limb there, if she ever tries to jump off of things, her brain will tell the leg to be there to catch her, but the leg won't listen, and she could break her jaw or neck by landing on her head. Another possibility is that the nerve damage might start causing that constant "pins and needles" feeling like you get when your foot falls asleep. To an animal who can't get it to stop, it can be maddening enough that they self-mutilate by chewing the limb. They won't feel the pain, just the constant pricking, and they've been known to go all the way through the bone trying to stop it.
If she can't learn to throw that foreleg forward when she walks to flip the paw out (or if she doesn't regain any control over the paw), the constant use of the wrist to stand on will cause sores and skeletal damage.
So, now she's living in my bathroom. I go in there every hour or so when I'm at home to giver her attention and physical therapy. I move the leg back and forth and flex the paw and wrist to keep things from atrophying or tightening (the shoulder muscles are already atrophying from disuse), and I'm hopeful that she'll regain enough function to keep the leg. If it doesn't improve in about 8 months, it probably isn't going to, and at that point I would have to have her leg amputated to prevent the problems I listed above.
Either way, I can't in conscience let her back outside. Technically I'm classifying her as a "foster" now, but she's going to have to learn to accept being a housecat from now on. You guys will get to see her curl up in my arms when you come down here. :)
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