Captain's Log, Weekly Digest 7

A summary of the past week of posts to my in-character Star Trek Online Tumblr, chronicling the adventures of E.N. Morwen, a science-loving and thoughtful young woman trapped in a galaxy of warring space giants.

• Divide et Impera: In which Admiral Zelle is not what she seems.
• Saturday's Child: In which STO decides that uncritically repeating some of the most problematic and racist elements of TOS is a good idea.
• Preemptive Strike: In which the Watson slips in ahead of a Starfleet attack on the Rator System to rescue POWs.
• Hunting the Hunters: In which the Watson away team falls into a trap while searching for missing scientists.
• Project Nightingale: In which the Watson discovers a secret Romulan research project while attempting another rescue mission.
• By Any Means: In which the Watson must stop the Romulan research project before they unleash something terrible.

Captain's Log, Weekly Digest 6

A summary of the past week of posts to my in-character Star Trek Online Tumblr, chronicling the adventures of E.N. Morwen, a science-loving and thoughtful young woman trapped in a galaxy of warring space giants.

• The Lost City of Paradise:  The crew of the Kestrel meet their contact on Nimbus and get their first taste of the "delights" the planet has in store. Also there's a Borg tending bar, that's kind of interesting.
• Blind Men Tell All Tales:  Morwen and crew hunt for the Orion stronghold on Nimbus III.
• The Undying: The Kestrel crew confront the leader of the Orions on Nimbus III.
• A Fistful of Gorn: Morwen's team run a gauntlet of Gorn separatists en route to the Tal Shiar base.
• Installation 18: Inside the base, we finally learn the secrets of the Romulan presence on Nimbus III.
• [Promotion]: Captain: Morwen is promoted and transferred to a new ship, the Galaxy-class USS Starfire.
• Heading Out: The Starfire transports a Trill scientist to the Romulan border.
• Under the Cover of Night: A Starfleet intelligence analyst intends to defect to the Romulans.
• Minefield: Morwen works with an arrogant scientist on a plan to make the Federation's jump gates transwarp conduits more secure.
• Divide et Impera: The Starfire gets a massive overhaul and is rechristened the Watson, and assigned to serve as Admiral Zelle's flagship for a mission on the Romulan border.

Captain's Log, Weekly Digest 5

A summary of the past week of posts to my in-character Star Trek Online Tumblr, chronicling the adventures of E.N. Morwen, a science-loving and thoughtful young woman trapped in a galaxy of warring space giants.

• The Doomsday Device: Ambassador B'vat returns and awakens an ancient terror with the intent of turning it on the Federation.
• Arrested!: In a sequence of events that have basically nothing to do with the game except that I wanted to switch ships, Morwen gets caught in a Kafka-esque court martial over nothing.
• Koolhaas System Patrol: The new crew of the USS Ariel go on a fairly straightforward mission, while Morwen gathers her most trusted officers to found a conspiracy.
• Betreka Nebula Duty: The Ariel explores a nebula, Morwen sits in a hero's chair, and the plot thickens.
• Terran Empire Encounter: The Ariel has an extremely brief brush with the Mirror Universe.
• City on the Edge of Never: While Morwen's conspiracy closes in on their quarry, Ambassador B'vat switches tactics to kidnapping and time travel.
• Past Imperfect: The Ariel chases B'vat into the past, and the identity of the mole is revealed.
• Temporal Ambassador: The Ariel investigates strange temporal readings in the Azure Nebula, but they turn out to be nothing at all whatsoever. I mean, it's not like Morwen ended up on some kind of bizarre-yet-awesome adventure in an alternate timeline that ultimately became a paradoxical quest to erase itself from ever having happened, thus ensuring the log doesn't cover it. That'd be, frankly, far too Star Trek-y a thing for STO to do. (End of the Klingon War arc.)
• Secrets of Nimbus: Restored to her rightful place in command of the Kestrel, Morwen sets off for Nimbus III to investigate the possibility that thalaron weapons are being traded.
• The Lost City of Paradise: The crew of the Kestrel meet their contact on Nimbus and get their first taste of the "delights" the planet has in store. Also there's a Borg tending bar, that's kind of interesting.

Captain's Log, Weekly Digest 4

A summary of the past week of posts to my in-character Star Trek Online Tumblr, chronicling the adventures of E.N. Morwen, a science-loving and thoughtful young woman trapped in a galaxy of warring space giants.

• Spin the Wheel (cont. from last week): The crew of the Sakura goes on shore leave, but it's actually a cover for Morwen to go on a mission for Drake. (Interdimensional Vampire Ghost Giants From Space Saga, Part 2).
• What Lies Beneath: Armed with a prototype weapon, the crew of the Sakura return to the haunted depths of Drozana Station--but there is more than one way to be a ghost... (Interdimensional Vampire Ghost Giants From Space Saga, Part 3).
• Eihress System Patrol: The Sakura protects aid shipments from Reman raiding parties.
• Everything Old Is New: The Sakura away team returns to Drozana Station, and a gateway to the past... (Interdimensional Vampire Ghost Giants From Space Saga, Part 4).
• Night of the Comet: The Sakura goes back in time to foil the Devidians' plans. (Interdimensional Vampire Ghost Giants From Space Saga, Part 5).
• [Promotion]: Commander: Morwen is promoted and given command of a new ship, the Advanced Research Vessel Kestrel...
• Klingon Scout Force: ...and promptly sent on a pure combat mission involving no research.
• Traelus Satellite Repair: Morwen reluctantly goes on another mission for Drake.
• Kinjer System Patrol: The Kestrel is sent to study a rare form of radiation.
• The Ultimate Klingon: The Klingons and Gorn have been raiding Federation medical and biological research facilities, and the Kestrel assigned to find out where they're taking their plunder and why.
• The Doomsday Device: Ambassador B'vat returns and awakens an ancient terror with the intent of turning it on the Federation.

Captain's Log, Weekly Digest 3

A summary of the past week of posts to my in-character Star Trek Online Tumblr, chronicling the adventures of E.N. Morwen, a science-loving and thoughtful young woman trapped in a galaxy of warring space giants.

• [Promotion]: Lieutenant Commander: Morwen is promoted and given command of a new ship, the USS Sakura. She has mixed feelings about this.
• Halting the Gorn Advance: Morwen fights to protect miners in the Tostig System from lizard space giants, and she and T'Vrell take the first steps toward learning some important lessons.
• The Kuvah'Magh: Morwen tries to prevent a pro-war faction of Klingons from disrupting peace talks.
• Treasure Trading Station: A servant in one of the Klingon Great Houses wants to defect to the Federation.
• Secret Orders: The Sakura is sent to locate a Klingon base hidden in the dangerous Briar Patch Nebula, while the seeds of tension sprout among the crew.
• Task Force Hippocrates: A Starfleet task force tries to stop Klingon and Gorn raids on medical and research facilities near the border.
• Skirmish: The mysterious Drake sends the Sakura to investigate fighting between the Cardassians and Klingons. (Interdimensional Vampire Ghost Giants From Space Saga, Part 1).
• Outreach: Morwen helps negotiate a trade dispute.
• Spin the Wheel: The crew of the Sakura goes on shore leave, but it's actually a cover for Morwen to go on a mission for Drake. (Interdimensional Vampire Ghost Giants From Space Saga, Part 2).

Captain's Log, Weekly Digest 2

A summary of the past week of posts to my in-character Star Trek Online Tumblr, chronicling the adventures of E.N. Morwen, a science-loving and thoughtful young woman trapped in a galaxy of warring space giants.

• Personal log: Morwen's feelings on being put permanently in command of the Oracle.
• Stranded in Space: The Oracle is assigned to look for a lost freighter, and finds trouble.
• Diplomatic Orders: The Oracle is assigned to protect an ambassador who is not all that he seems.
• Oracle's Last Stand: When a Borg fleet enters the Sirius Sector, Morwen is determined to help stop them. In the aftermath, she struggles to deal with her sense of failure.
• Celes Patrol: Morwen and Kolez investigate possible sabotage on Starbase 114.
• Hide and Seek: The Nephilim explores the Paulson Nebula in an attempt to determine why the fake Ambassador Sokketh sent a signal there.
• Starbase 24 Defense: The Nephilim must help defend Starbase 24 from a massive Klingon fleet that has slipped behind Federation lines.
• Stop the Signal: The Nephilim searches for a hidden Klingon listening post in Federation space.
• Researcher Rescue: When contact is lost with an archeological research station in the Kassae system, the Nephilim is sent to investigate and provide assistance.
• [Promotion]: Lieutenant Commander: Morwen is promoted to Lieutenant Commander and given command of a new ship, the small but advanced science vessel USS Sakura. She has mixed feelings about this.

Captain's Log, Weekly Digest 1

So, those of you who follow me on Tumblr probably already know this, but I have created an in-character blog to record the log entries of my Star Trek Online character. It's sort of something between a Let's Play and a fanfic. I've decided to post weekly summaries, with links to the relevant posts, here.

• Out-of-Character Introduction
• About the main character, E. N. Morwen
• In which Morwen is hopeful
• In which Morwen's hopes are dashed by an unexpected promotion
• In which there may be reason for hope after all
• In which Morwen has a bad feeling
• In which it is worse than she feared
• In which damage is assessed
• In which there is a delay going home
• In which Morwen gets to scan something
• In which Morwen FINALLY gets to reconfigure a deflector dish
• In which Morwen's first day is confirmed as the worst ever
• In which the Oracle must convey a warning for some reason
• In which newbies fight Borg
• In which newbies fight more Borg
• In which colonists are rescued
• In which Morwen is confident she will finally get an assignment appropriate to her skills and experience

Blasphemy

Following Saturday's Kill la Kill and Sailor Moon Crystal chats, I utterly forgot to copy them over to the blog. I still have them... on a different computer I can't get to until tonight. So today you'll be getting two posts, this one now, and then the SMC chatlog tonight.

I watched all of Star Trek: The Animated Series on Netflix over the weekend. (I had previously read all the novelizations, and seen the first two episodes.)

You know how Futurama described Star Trek TOS as "79 episodes, maybe 20 of them good"? Yeah, with maybe one or two exceptions every episode of TAS is good enough to stand among those twenty.

What I'm saying is, once you get past the *extremely* cheap and limited animation? TAS is actually a better show than TOS.

Been reading Vaka Rangi...

Josh Marsfelder, like me, was inspired by Phil Sandifer's TARDIS Eruditorum to do something vaguely similar with a show he loved. He started about six months after me and has been doing something much more Eruditorum-esque with Star Trek. I'm actually only on early season 2 of TOS, his third month of blogging, but I can already tell he's way better at this than I am.

Anyway, if you like Star Trek and read this blog, you are virtually certain to get a lot out of Vaka Rangi. Go read!

I have a feeling this'll be one of the more controversial posts...

No Fiction Friday this week. Probably none next week. Book-related stuff is heating up.

So, before I start, let me be very clear: I am, generally and overall, a Star Trek fan. Further--and perhaps unusually, given some of the stances I've taken on other works of which I'm a fan--most of my views on Star Trek more or less coincide with the general consensus of the fandom or, in cases where there is no consensus, at least within the Overton window. For example, I like TOS, TNG, and DS9; I think VOY and ENT are crap and the Abrams reboot movies are Star Trek in name only. I think Picard is the best captain, DS9 the best series overall, TOS the strongest on humor and interplay between the characters.

But I have one opinion that I've only slowly become aware of, which assuredly places me on the lunatic fringe of Trek fans: the more I think about it, the more I realize I really dislike Spock.

First off, I'm just going to come out swinging at Vulcan culture in general: the whole "emotions are bad and need to be controlled" thing is a crock of shit. Why? Because that feeling that emotions are bad is itself an emotional response. The backstory for the Vulcans establishes that they established a philosophy of strict "logic"* because they disliked how violent their culture was and preferred a more peaceful one. Those are both emotional reactions too. There is no logical basis to prefer any situation over any other, because to have a preference is to be emotional. As such, it is impossible to make a decision without including some degree of emotional consideration.

Which, of course, the Vulcans do. Now, I'm not going to assume they have the same emotions as humans. In humans, a distaste for violence is generally some combination of fear of being hurt, emotional empathy for others getting hurt, and aesthetics. In Vulcans, it may very well be a combination of scvetznarg and b'foth. But the simple fact that they do prefer to avoid violence, that they try to minimize it, proves that they have preferences and are acting on them, which is to say that they are emotional beings.**

Yet Spock insists he is motivated by pure logic, in contrast to inferior human emotionality. Bullshit. Logic is not, on its own, a decision-making mechanism. Logic is a system for deriving justified conclusions from already-established premises, nothing more or less. Logic cannot tell you which of two courses of action is better unless the premises already contain some definition of "better"--a concept which is, in itself, inherently derived from emotion. We can tell some of what Spock considers "better": he wants to survive, and for others to survive, but in a pinch he values the survival of the Enterprise crew, and Kirk and Bones in particular, above the survival of all others. There is no logical reason to prefer living over dying unless you establish in the premises that some aspect of living is desirable or some aspect of dying is not. Spock is loyal; he has friends; he has a moral code. None of these are things which can exist without the inherently emotional preference of some state of being over some other state of being. Vulcans are not dedicated to logic; they are dedicated to rationality, which is to say to using a combination of evidence and logic to choose the best course of action, where "best" is defined as "likeliest to achieve my [emotionally] preferred outcomes."

Which wouldn't be so bad--it's not inherently bad writing to have a character who is self-contradictory or hypocritical--if not for the fact that Spock is frequently held up as an object of admiration. (Admittedly, more by fans than the show, which correctly depicts Spock as smug, self-satisfied, and almost always wrong about anything other than matters of pure fact.) Unfortunately, Spocks are quite common in real life, especially online where obscuring one's kneejerk emotional responses is easier. I cannot tell you how many discussions I have been in about ethics, politics, or aesthetics--all fields which are fundamentally about identifying and pursuing preferences, and therefore necessarily contain a strong element of emotion--where someone tries to pretend that a façade of apathy (or even the genuine thing) somehow makes their opinions more valid than the opinions of people who passionately care about the issue at hand.

Remember, a purely rational being is necessarily an amoral being. They might fake having a moral code in order to achieve their preferred outcomes, for example if they have to deal with gatekeepers who aren't amoral, but ultimately there is no principle that a fully rational being won't betray if it's the best way to achieve their preferred outcomes. A moral being will necessarily sometimes choose to forego a preferred outcome if it requires immoral behavior to achieve.

So basically, Spock is a hypocritical racist who espouses an amoral philosophy while holding himself up as superior, and reflects neatly one of the more obnoxious forms of GIFT. Which may even be partially inspired by him--I have definitely met people who reference childhood viewing of Star Trek as formative in their pursuit of and insistence on their own superior rationality.

To be honest, he's pretty much an asshole.***

*We'll get to why that's in scare quotes in a minute.
**But, you protest, plants and amoebae are able to exhibit behaviors without having emotions! Why can't Vulcans? Because unlike plants and amoebae, Vulcans are conscious. They are able to observe their own thought processes leading up to their behaviors (which we know, because a major part of their culture--and ours, for that matter--is deliberately monitoring and seeking to alter those processes). That's what emotion is--an awareness (in humans, possibly subconscious) of one's own motivations for behavior. And yes, this also means that Data had emotions from the start. He is, for starters, envious of humans.
***Until Wrath of Khan, when he all of a sudden embraces his emotional side and becomes awesome just in time to die. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" is not only an emotional statement, it's an irrational one. It would be one thing if he expressed it as preferring the rest of the crew survive more than his own survival, but the way he phrases it places something ahead of his own preferred outcomes, which for a purely rational being are the only things that better. What it actually is, is a moral judgment, and therefore fundamentally irrational. Positive character growth!

On the "Unity Saga" series

Few things ruin an otherwise actually kind-of-okay crossover fanfiction than suddenly bringing in more franchises outside the original premise of the crossover.

The Genesis Device

So, here's a nerdery of mine that's been surprisingly rarely referenced on this site: Star Trek.

So, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (the best Star Trek movie by a wide margin, and probably the most accessible to non-Trekkies, despite being the one with the most references to past events) established the creation of the Genesis Device, which can turn a lifeless planet into a complete, habitable ecosystem within a matter of days--but if used on a planet where life already exists, that life is erased in moments and replaced. Thus, depending on the target, it's either a device of mass creation or a weapon of mass destruction. Alas, Star Trek III reveals that the planet created at the end of Star Trek II is unstable, and it collapses; the Genesis Device is only useful as a weapon of mass destruction, precisely the opposite of its creators hopes.

But here's my question: 60 or 80 years later, in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, the Genesis Device ought to be fairly common knowledge, something any of the more advanced/powerful cultures can build easily and the less powerful ones build if they're determined enough, much like nukes on modern Earth. And, much like nukes, they are a doomsday weapon--any war fought with Genesis Devices would quickly annihilate both sides. So it's odd to me that there's little to no mention of the device in the later Star Trek series, as it could have served as a handy metaphor for nuclear tensions--all the major powers have Genesis Devices mounted on warp-capable missiles, but only as a deterrent to keep the other powers from using their Genesis Devices...

Also, did no one think to try using them as a weapon against the Borg? Could have been interesting...