Ben X

Also about a minute too long.

Watched "REGENERATION" - ENTERPRISE 02.23 (SPOILERS). It was okay. It was kind of cool seeing less well-equipped people learn the rules of the Borg at the start of an outbreak, but that's pretty much the only fresh aspect to a story we've seen plenty of times already. Unless they fix it later in the series, it suddenly makes no sense that the Federation haven't heard of the Borg before. Considering every starship captain seems to know Federation (and indeed human) history inside out, it's strange that Picard doesn't go "oh, this must be that cyborg race that lives in Delta Quadrant that we know loads about from Admiral Archer's encounter and from them being only about the third or fourth alien race to be encountered on Earth itself." You'd think this would be at the forefront of the writers' minds; I was waiting for a Revenge Of The Sith style "wipe the protocol droid's memory" type move at the end of the episode. I noticed they avoided having the Borg name themselves, but that doesn't solve it. Assuming that the drones in the Arctic are from the events of First Contact, though, the fact that they alert their collective to the existence of Earth/Alpha Quadrant does have a nice time paradox/circularity flavour to it. Also, the people at the Arctic outpost were fucking idiots who deserved to be assimilated. And I'm going to keep mentioning this fucking theme tune. "I have faith to believe" DOESN'T MEAN ANYTHING.

Jeff Smith has a webcomic. I'm a few pages in and enjoying it.

You're right, that's a bad example; it hasn't been fully reclaimed, as the word hasn't been stripped of perjorativity in the way "gay" has. I was just interested in why Argobot doesn't think it's worth reclaiming, but having thought more about it, I see the point is that it's not a perjorative term for a section of society; the problem lies in its hypocritical application to women only, not in the term itself.

Do you think that reclaiming "nigger"/"nigga" had any value? If so, why not "slut" too?

I tried to funnel it over to the Feminism thread because there were at least two games with the same issue and I thought it made more sense than having the same discussion on two different threads.

Just watched Carbon Creek. It was a nice idea, but it doesn't manage to get around the dryness that comes with having three Vulcans as the lead characters.

Yes! They'd need a thin, hard flavourless coating, though.

Agreed on the Borg Queen, as above, but I'm willing to cut the movies a little slack on Picard - partly because the contrast to his usual character is intentional, I reckon, and partly because FC tackles it very directly and keeps it tied in with the Borg while the off-roading comes off more nerdy dad than Mad Max.

It's more inappropriate than calling her an arsehole, because it's a gendered insult and contributes to/normalises etc.

Maybe she stepped on all the thugs' favourite things previous to the events of the game and that's why they all call her bitch.

Ha ha, this is what Ron Gilbert means when he goes on at Tim about giving the player the key before showing them the lock. I think in this case, it probably would make more sense for the game to have

But Manny doesn't currently have a reason to print out any specific ticket, right? You're trying to figure out a puzzle that the game hasn't given you yet!

It doesn't have to make social commentary, but then if it doesn't want to do that maybe it shouldn't use such problematic language. If there's no reason for including something that has strong real-world connotations, if you're just making a "fun game", then make the deliberate choice not to put that stuff in. Just like, say, the Batman Adventures or Batman '66 comics do at the moment. II think the point is that it's lazy use of misogynistic language - ie, they haven't thought about their use of it and its connotations. Presumably, most of the stuff they say to Batman would work just as well with Catwoman...

YAYYYYYYYYYY, season 2 of Adventure Time is finally on Netflix!

Zeus, do you actually have an objective for working out what cat race ticket to print out? I'm pretty sure as of your last post you don't, so I wouldn't worry about that until you know what it is you're actually trying to achieve.

Although I covered this in the list I just posted, I just wanted to clarify that the argument isn't that they're actively endorsing the norm, more that they decided to be part of that norm with no good reason. (Disclaimer: as I said before, I have not played the game, so I'm just presenting arguments, not making them.)

I've paraphrased the more salient (imo) points from those Hulk articles (plus his collection of some of the problematic stuff from the first few hours), as I found them useful to summarise the main argument against AC's use of the word "bitch" and other tone control . I'll put it in spoiler tags just so it doesn't take up half a page (but also because it has spoilers: Obviously, you'll have to read the articles to get the fleshed-out arguments. Thrik - although I'm pretty sure you're being a little flippant, using a word some would interpret as problematic does not make you bastard. With regards "gash", if I used it, although I would not literally be saying "this thing is like a vagina and therefore terrible because women", I would be using it as a reappropriation of a slang term for vagina, not wound - if it were the latter, it wouldn't be a rude word. That's my thought process, anyway. So yeah, that's one of the words I wouldn't use. I would say that ideally stuff like "bollocks" should be avoided as well but as misandry isn't normalised in society and stopping men from getting equal rights, I don't see it as needing as much consideration.

I'm going to go with this list for Enterprise, plus I might fit in some of Mike's season 4 episodes. If nothing else, I should get some Borg/evil crew/generation-crossover antics.

I brought it up here, as a similar issue was mentioned in a Metal Gear thread: https://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/topic/7428-feminism/page-105#entry283770

Yeah, the melodramatic writing style of that indiestatik piece made me wonder if it was an April Fools too, but it seems not. Dan wrote another advisory piece for indie devs considering appearing on telly: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/04/01/down-the-tube-a-developers-guide-to-television

Hooray, thanks for the heads up!

Hm, can't be bothered to edit that post. I'm going to assume no one here minds VOYAGER SPOILERS. So, it turns out I missed a few Borg Queen episodes but they keep it quite vague anyway. They say she was assimilated at a young age but then her organic parts can be recreated. To my mind, that makes her introduction in First Contact, which was contradictory to the interesting idea of the Borg collective anyway, retroactively unnecessary as she's no longer an individual villain to be defeated but just another easily-replaceable Borg. I've started on the Enterprise pilot. I forgot how awful that theme tune is, and how photogenic the entire human crew are. When I said "If they really wanted to attract a new male audience they could have cast Yasmine Bleeth or something" in a previous post, I forgot that they pretty much did that for the next series! Good to see TIny Lister as a Klingon, though they haven't actually made use of his height yet by showing him standing next to anyone.

I read the spoiler as I don't feel like going back now I've finished the series. I had heard reference to Life Line in subsequent eps (including which I thought was a lovely idea). Man, that thing about EMHs is a real gut-punch, just from your description of it. The series finale was rather unsatisfying. It felt very similar to that one where on the ice planet, plus there never felt like any peril except from . It certainly had high production value, though, and I liked the stuff. I need to check Memory Alpha to find out how come the . (Phewf, these spoiler tags are exhausting, plus it really niggles my OCD that they force line-breaks. Perhaps we should just list any episodes spoilt at the top of posts. I'll come back and edit this post to that effect later. In a most non-stereotypical Trekkie move, I'm going to meet my girlfriend at the pub now instead of continuing to discuss Trek on the internet.)

How did this go, Jon? I'm on the antepenultimate episode of Voyager and have generally really enjoyed the (bolded episodes of the) series. I just finished Author, Author, which went back to the alt-crew holo-sim well, but was still entertaining. It also was indeed very reminiscent of the Data trial. The epilogue was surprising, though - the Federation is using EMHs to lug rocks?! A bizarre revelation to chuck in at the end of the episode, unless it's been mentioned previously and I missed it.