Eruditorum Press

The struggle in terms of the strange

Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2 Errata

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You can’t have action figures without some place to put them. Even if you’re too embarrassed to move them around in a playset, you’ve got to admit having a lavish plastic display to pose them all in looks awesome on your shelf. It was Wave 2 that started giving us those playsets for our Star Trek: The Next Generation friends-I’ve already talked about the bridge playset in this book. Although it technically came out as part of this wave, I felt compelled to talk about it back in the first wave because I really just wanted to go all-out gonzo with the first Playmates essay. This leaves me with one extra essay to write about and not a whole lot to fill it with here, however. So, let’s see how long I can talk about what’s left of Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2.

The other playset released this year was a transporter room. Now this was really cool because it actually worked by way of an old theatrical trick called Pepper’s Ghost. In a Pepper’s Ghost illusion, a one-way reflective surface is placed between the audience and a hidden room on the other side. There’s also an overhead light source that, when raised or lowered, makes any objects in the room appear to appear and disappear out of thin air. This is how the Haunted Mansion in the Walt Disney resorts create the illusion of the dancing ghosts in the ballroom at the beginning of the ride, and it’s also how Tupac Shakur appeared onstage at Coachella in 2012 and Michael Jackson did the same at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards (not, as is often reported, through the use of holography. We don’t have holodecks yet).

A lot of times in a Pepper’s Ghost trick the hidden room is painted black so that the “ghost” seems to materialize right in front of the audience, when really they’re in another closed off area. The Playmates transporter conveys the illusion a little differently, with the mirror dividing the transporter pad in two. You put your prospective away team member in the area behind the mirror, close the door and manually raise the sliders (which wonderfully take the form of the LCARS finger panels from the TV show and make a satisfyingly accurate shimmering sound when activated either way) as the overhead light gradually shifts. Obviously to give the illusion your character is standing on the pad both sections have to look identical, and this also necessitates the transporter becoming more of a chamber than a pad. As a matter of fact, during the seven years I didn’t watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, but did have these toys, I completely forgot the transporter room was even a pad on the show at all-I completely mentally retconned it as being a chamber and always remembered it as such until I saw “Encounter at Farpoint” again for the first time.…

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Stray Kitties

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Weird Kitties fizzled out, but I had a few spare reviews lying around and Jane’s holiday is going to run one more week, so here they are.

Material, by Ales Kot, Will Tempest, Clayton Cowles, and Tom Muller

Reviewed by Sean Dillon, eligible in Best Graphic Story, available on Comixology.

What does 2015 look like? That is a question at the core of Material, an Image comic written by Ales Kot, drawn by Will Tempest, lettered by Clayton Cowles, and designed by Tom Muller. The comic follows four people, living in these turbulent and fragmented times1.

The first is a Philosophy professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the name of Julius Shore. Every issue, save the fourth one, opens with a lecture he is giving, ranging from the incompatibility of Art and Business to a nervous breakdown in the form of wearing Su-Real dynamite on his head while ranting about how he is a failure. His ongoing conversations with an emergent sentient AI, which he dubs as Alien Intelligence, make this comic eligible for a Hugo Award2.

The second is an actress in Los Angeles by the name of Nylon Dahlias. She is escaping from the failure of her film career and the death of her mother via Alzheimer’s by doing a lot of drugs. She has just been cast by an up and coming auteur in his new film that’s missing its first 10 pages. Nylon’s story culminates with her running into her producer in the middle of the street having a nervous breakdown, unable to deal with the fragments of the reality around him3.

The third is Franklin, a young man from Chicago who went to a “Black Live Matter” protest. As with many of those protests, the cops showed up and beat everyone to the ground. Franklin woke up hours later in Homan Square where an officer of the police confronted him. Said officer is now blackmailing him to act as a mole in his uncle’s New Black Panther Movement. It is implied, though never directly stated, that other things have been going on between the two of them4.

The fourth is Adib, a man who was wrongly put into Guantanamo Bay (for being the wrong person, the wrong skin color, and worshiping the wrong god instead of the humane reasons it is wrong to be locked up in Guantanamo5). Now that he’s out, he can’t talk about what had happened to him in his time, not even to his wife. The only person he can relate to about his experiences is his female BDSM partner6.

The narrative is an unflinching look at the modern day, covering subjects from the Black Lives Matter movement and how it relates to the progressive movements of the past to the complexity of wanting your life not to be dominated by the cruelties that have happened to the man you are married to. The four issues are told masterfully as Will Tempest conveys a sense of control with the 9 Panel Grid as well as a sense of chaos with sketchy art style used for the characters within it7.…

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones 3.03: Walk of Punishment

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Daniel Portman perfectly duplicates the reaction of George R.R. Martin’s editors to the Mereneese Knot

Please enjoy our new and improved captchas while commenting on this article.

State of Play

The choir goes off. The board is laid out thusly:

Lions of King’s Landing: Tyrion Lannister, Cersei Lannister, Tywin Lannister

The Lion, Jaime Lannister

Dragons of Astapor: Khaleesi Daenerys Targaryen

Direwolves of the Wall: Jon Snow

Direwolves of Riverrun: Robb Stark, Catelyn Stark,

Bears of Astapor: Jorah Mormont

Mockingbirds of King’s Landing: Petyr Baelish

Burning Hearts of Dragonstone: Stannis Baratheon, Mellisandre

The Kraken, Theon Greyjoy

Archers of the Wall: Samwell Tarly

The Direwolf, Arya Stark

Tigers of Riverrun: Talia Stark

The Stag, Gendry

Bows of the Wall: Ygritte

Bears of the Wall: Jeor Mormont

Spiders of King’s Landing: Varys

Chains of King’s Landing: Bronn

The Dogs, Sandor Clegane

Winterfell is abandoned and in ruins.

The episode is in ten parts. The first is five minutes long and is set in Riverrun. The opening image is of Hoster Tully’s funeral boat.

The second runs four minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by dialogue, from Robb talking about Tywin Lannister to Tywin.

The third runs eight minutes and is in sections; it is set in the Riverlands. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by family, from Cersei, Tyrion, and Tywin to Jaime Lannister. The second section is three minutes long; the transition is by hard cut, from Brienne realizing what she faces to Gendry working on armor. The third section is two minutes long and is set in Riverrun proper; the transition is by family, from Arya to Catelyn Stark. The fourth section is one minute long; the transition is by dialogue, from Catelyn and Brynden talking about Robb to Martin Lannister and Talia talking about him.

The fourth part runs seven minutes and is in sections; it is set north of the Wall. The first section is two minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Talia talking about Robb’s supposed powers to the precise butchery of the White Walkers. The second section is four minutes long; the transition is by dialogue, from Mance Rayder talking about the Night’s Watch to the survivors stumbling into Craster’s Keep.

The fifth part runs two minutes and is set in the Dreadfort, though this is not revealed. The transition is by theme, from the monstrosity of Craster to that of Ramsey Snow.

The sixth part runs two minutes and is set in Dragonstone. The transition is by hard cut, from Theon riding off to the shore.

The seventh runs seven minutes and is set in Astapor. The transition is by hard cut, from Melisandre walking away to the Walk of Punishment in Astapor.

The eighth runs seven minutes and is set in King’s Landing. The transition is by image, from Daenerys noting that she and Missandei are not men to a lascivious shot of Rosalyn.

The ninth runs four minutes and is set in the North. The transition is by hard cut, from Poderick to an establishing shot of hills.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2 Vehicles and Role Play

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The first wave of Playmates’ Star Trek: The Next Generation toys focused primarily on the Enterprise and its crew: For action figures we got (most of) the bridge crew, and for electronic light-up ships we got the Enterprise itself as well as a Shuttlecraft. Following along with the accompanying Wave 2 action figure releases, which both expanded upon the Starfleet crew and gave us a greater assortment of aliens, the Wave 2 vehicles included a Klingon Attack Cruiser and a Romulan Warbird.

Both of these ships are very nicely detailed. Actually, in hindsight, I have to say they’re a bit more impressive than the Playmates Enterprise itself: The colours and proportions of both are screen accurate, which is really important when dealing with starships this distinctive and memorable. The Attack Cruiser does fare a little better in this regard: All of the little details and elevations Rick Sterbach sculpted onto it to emphasize shadowplay with the studio lights have translated perfectly to consumer-grade plastic, and as such I’ve always considered it one of the most bang-on replicas of the Playmates line. The Romulan Warbird only suffers a bit due to limited lighting: Just like all the vehicles, only the Warbird’s nacelles light up, and while that’s nice, one of the best things about the Warbird studio model is all the beautiful windows on the…prow I suppose, or beak section. That gives the ship an incredible sense of scale and grandeur the toy just isn’t capable of recreating, and this hurts the Warbird more than probably any other ship in the fleet, save perhaps the Enterprise itself.

(One of my biggest disappointments is that Playmates never made a Ferengi Marauder. You’d think given Letek’s headlining role in the first wave this would be one of the light-up starships they’d release first, but it never happened. Maybe it was because the Ferengi didn’t play as prominent a role in the sixth season, although given all the callbacks to first that seems strange. Or maybe they were holding it back for a possible inclusion in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine line. Although perhaps its for the best, as a Ferengi Marauder without windows would have left me heartbroken.)

What the Warbird does have are some awesome sound effects. Both the Attack Cruiser and the Warbird have four sounds: Cloak, Disruptor blast, “shield hit” and impulse. Neither one has what I’d call especially accurate samples, but the Warbird’s at least were terribly cool sounding. I think I pounded that disruptor cannon button enough times to wear both it and the sound chip out. At least, that’s the excuse I’ll give for the electronics in mine no longer working. Also, my Attack Cruiser is missing its battery case cover for some reason, as well as one of the “prongs” at the front of the ship, which is really annoying. I seem to recall getting my Attack Cruiser (and maybe my Warbird too) one Christmas at my great-grandparents’ house on my maternal grandfather’s side.…

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An Open Letter to Sad Puppies IV

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As the science fiction community mutters “I thought MidAmericon said nominations would open in early January” with baited breath, I note that certain fascist pricks have begun to ramp up their performative chortling. So I figured “why not write a mildly trolling open letter to someone else entirely?”

Ms. Paulk et al:

I note with some bemusement your efforts to reform the Sad Puppies movement from its oft-criticized 2015 form, stripping away its overtly conservative trappings, widening it to a ten-item recommendation list, et cetera. By and large, I have to admit, these seem like, if not strictly speaking good things, at least less bad things. So thank you for your efforts to be less odious than your predecessors. It’s genuinely appreciated. That said, there’s one rather large issue that you don’t seem to have addressed, and that I’d like to raise.

Simply put, why are you doing this?

I mean, I see your nominal explanation on the site – to increase Hugo participation. And while I think your assessment of the field is rubbish (science fiction, at least as a literary genre, that being the primary focus of the Hugos, is in no way “a field loved by millions,” and five thousand voters is absolutely massive given the current state of the publishing industry – and not just SF/F publishing), sure, I guess that’s a reasonable motivation. What’s rather less clear to me is why on Earth you’re adopting a brand that’s primarily known for its previous decision to actively ally with a fascist bully to do so.

Yes, I’m talking about Vox Day, who you so eloquently dismiss as “not our circus, not our monkey” and suggest that people “talk to him about whatever problem you have with him.” But, well, I have talked to him about many of the problems I have with him, and anyway, my problem here isn’t with him, it’s with the Sad Puppies movement that you’re actively positioning yourself as the direct successor to and that movement’s past relationship with an abusive, bullying troll motivated primarily by his passionate vanity and even more passionate hatred for women, ethnic minorities, and LGBT people.

Because let’s be very clear here: in both 2014 and 2015, your predecessors in running Sad Puppies made an active and conscious decision to ally with Vox Day. Indeed, that’s pretty much what your movement is best known for at this point – getting spectacularly hijacked by him last year such that you didn’t actually have a meaningful impact on the vote because his sidecar movement outperformed yours such that anyone who hadn’t looked closely at the precise nature of the fan politics mistook your movement ofr his. That’s your best-known accomplishment: allying with a sadistic troll who proved better at your own game than you were.

Now, of course, you’re not wrong in your basic sense that the sadistic troll’s moment has passed. Vox’s main talent in life is that he can marshall around five hundred people. Of course, given that Vox is steeped in GamerGate tactics, this means five hundred accounts, not five hundred actual flesh and blood people who might plausibly show up at MidAmericon II and affect any business that actually takes place at the con.…

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Chibnall Announcement Open Thread

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The Radio Times is reporting the not particularly suprising news that Series 10 of Doctor Who will kick off with a 2016 Christmas special and then run in 2017 and be Steven Moffat’s final series, and that Chris Chibnall will be taking over for Series 11 in 2018.

My immediate reaction is roughly that Chibnall is neither my first nor last choice, and that whatever my reservations, it’s hard to seriously argue that he’s not earned his shot. I can’t honestly say he’s written a story I consider great, or even very good, but in every case the flaws are generally ones of slight sloppiness – the sort of thing that could be worked out over another draft or two. Which is to say that I think he can be good, even if I’m not sure he’s going to be. Certainly I can’t think of anyone who’s inherited as strong a stable of writers as he’s going to be getting. So while I can’t imagine the next era of Doctor Who will be one I love as much as I’ve loved the past six years, well, that’s how loving an era of Doctor Who works.

Anyway, here’s your open thread. May the Captchas be kind to you.…

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Not The Last War in Albion (Phonogram)

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When I cover it in Last War in Albion, I am inevitably going to have to suggest that Phonogram was a magical ritual to murder David Bowie. Part of this will be a straightforward and well-reasoned technical argument based on The Immaterial Girl’s meticulously rendered and devastatingly well-structured invocation of Michael Jackson’s death, and another part will be the fact that Bowie’s cancer diagnosis would have come right around when WicDiv #1 hit, with Lucifer’s death literally coming ten days after the debut of “Sue (Or in a Season of Crime)” (“Sue, the clinic called /The x-ray’s fine / I brought you home,” although for the purposes of Phonogram the lyric you’d want is “Sue, I found your note / That you wrote last night / It can’t be right / You went with him”), and of course a big part is just going to be a big influence-based dig through the primary source material in a slightly self-parodic attempt to factually evaluate Gillen’s claims about Kenickie.

But that’s the content, which is entirely different from the reason I’m going to do this ridiculous but necessary thing, which is simply that in issue #2 of The Immaterial Girl Gillen says, and I quote, that he was “never a fan” of Placebo and that he “trolled their fanbase outrageously back in my evil days” before demonstrating that he’s referring to the present day by calling their debut their best album. And, look, I’m sorry, but there’s a girl named Mink I was trying to impress one year in college who’d sold half her personality to the devil for power (or something like that), and who introduced me to both Placebo and Bowie, and there are loyalties that never die, so Kickstarter backer or no, this does not stand. (Mink went on to marry the lead singer of a goth band, of course.)

Anyway, Meds is their best album, but let’s talk about their cover of “Running Up That Hill,” because it’s brilliant and deserved its overexposure, and also will probably annoy him more. The trick, of course, is that it’s a stupidly audacious choice of songs. Of course you can’t fucking improve on “Running Up That Hill.” It’s “Running Up That Hill.” It is literally the most perfect thing ever recorded. That’s the point. Placebo’s version of it is a desecration. It’s a staggeringly reverential desecration – a point demonstrated by the nine minute live cut, which fades in the ethereal synth line for a decadent minute and four seconds of anticipation before finally dropping the hook before building to a screaming crescendo in which Molko is audibly hurling himself at the very limits of his gender and sexuality, smashing himself bloody upon a prison whose walls are horribly and awfully more than flesh. (Note the addition of “God” before “tell me we both matter,” which slides in almost inadvertently, as though Molko could not stop himself from praying.)

But it’s a desecration never the less. It has to be.…

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Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Wave 2

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As the Playmates line of Star Trek: The Next Generation action figures expanded, I have to confess I started to get less of them. I know it’s hard to believe and that I have to keep stressing this, but I was actually never a hardcore Star Trek fan, and thus didn’t possess an encyclopedic knowledge of every single character and every single episode. When it came to toys, I was primarily interested in the Enterprise crew and the most recognisable aliens: My fondest memories of Star Trek: The Next Generation are of images and scenes, not specific episodes or stories. So, as Playmates began to expand beyond the main cast of characters I wasn’t as feverish about keeping up with their releases.

It’s the second wave where this began to manifest. That’s not to dismiss the toys from this wave and beyond in the slightest: They’re all of the exact same peerless quality you’d expect from Playmates Star Trek, just to articulate and further highlight where my interest in this franchise really lies. This is the wave where variants, one-shots and reoccurring characters started to become more pronounced (for obvious reasons), and the simple fact is I just wasn’t as interested in that stuff. I still had a fair amount from this wave, but I didn’t have *all* of it. In fact, I still don’t, and I’m not likely to ever finally “complete” my collection as it were. I’m not the kind of collector who has to horde absolutely every release from every line imaginable: I like to have representations of my favourite characters, and I don’t really need more than that. So I’ll review the figures from this line that I have, and only give a passing mention to the ones I don’t.

A few of these ones I’ve already looked at as part of the bridge crew retrospective last season. Even though they weren’t part of the Wave 1 1992 releases, it would frankly have been ridiculous of me *not* to look at Doctor Crusher and Guinan,who in fact didn’t actually get plastic likenesses until 1993. It’s especially dumb that Doctor Crusher wasn’t among the early releases. Normally I would grumble about sexism in the toy industry leading manufacturers to believe that action figures based on girls don’t sell and aren’t popular (which is sadly based on real, material sales figures in spite of what certain activists would have you believe and how much we might want to think), except Deanna Troi was part of the initial wave, and she seems like far less of an action-oriented character, and thus a weaker candidate for an action figure, than Doctor Crusher. Maybe it’s because Deanna’s not a mom. The Bev released as part of Wave 2 is the rather boring, unplayable version with the lab coat moulded to her body and hands that can’t hold anything, but for quite some time she was the only Bev we got.

Speaking of Bev being a mom, Wesley Crusher is (regrettably) another new release from this wave.…

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Forward, to the Past! – Episode II: Cuckballs

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Yes, it’s the second part of the trilogy. This time, I just made some notes and gave them to Irvin Kershner to write-up for me. Of course, he’s dead… which might explain why is take is a little darker than mine.

In Star Wars, we don’t see anyone on Alderaan die. We hear Obi-Wan say that their voices cried out in terror, but we never hear those voices ourselves. The only other acknowledgement of them in the film is Leia’s remark that “we have no time for our sorrows”, but even this is in response to someone saying that they “feared the worst” when they heard about Alderaan… meaning, in effect, that the murder of billions of people made them worried in case a Princess had been killed too. Of course, the context is that they’re worried about Leia because they think she has the Death Star plans, but it’s still a startling formulation. I confess to liking Leia’s pragmatic refusal to prioritise her own feelings. She never does the ‘girly’ thing (which would of course be to break down in tears). Even so, it’s worrying that she is given the task of comforting Luke about Obi-Wan’s death so soon after her entire planet (and presumably most of her family, friends, and colleagues) are all destroyed. Nobody ever offers her any comfort. As noted in the previous episode of this series, Alderaan goes unmourned. It’s a detail, put in to establish the hugeness and devilishness of the threat the Death Star poses. It is fear of the Death Star that will “keep the local systems in line” as Tarkin says (though what ‘local systems’ might mean, I have no idea… ‘local’ to whom, or to what?). Essentially, the destruction of Alderaan is a dramatisation – for plot reasons – of a point of politics.

There is also the extreme nature of the overreaction. You destroy an entire planet – presumably one with industry and wealth of some kind – in order to punish one dissident and demonstrate your new capacity for technological destruction. It’s impossible for me to not think of two things: the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Nixon’s ‘madman theory’ (essentially, Nixon’s idea that he could scare communist leaders out of confronting US power by convincing them he was bonkers enough to use nukes). I don’t think there was enough awareness, in the seventies, of the case for the nukes being dropped at the end of WWII more as a salutary demonstration of American power. I’m sure the claims were about but I doubt they had sufficient currency to be part of popular consciousness. As for Nixon, I suspect he’s part of a political context which makes its way into the first film… though I plan to talk about the Empire, and what relation it has to US politics of the 60s and 70s, in the third part of this series.

The point I want to bring out here is one I alluded to last time: in The Force Awakens, we see people on the planets about to be destroyed.…

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Comics Reviews (January 20th, 2016)

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From worst to best of what I bought. Digital codes will work at this link, but only for the first person to use them.

Silver Surfer #1

It’s not that this is a bad comic by any means, and the Fourth Doctor cameo is a hoot, but I have to admit, it’s hard to find much exciting about this particular “pick up exactly where we left off with no real changes” post-Secret Wars relaunch, and I kind of wonder if the Slott/Allred era of this title has said all that it has to say. This one in particular suffers from a hyper-compressed storytelling style that dispatches interesting ideas almost as soon as it comes up with them, which is fine and in keeping with the mad excess here, but it’s crossing into overwhelming such that I think the book really needs to slow down and give some breathing room for characterization instead of high concept. Tellingly, even when it does a low-key domestic scene there’s not much in the way of character depth; just a different sort of high concept joking. 

Digital code: THM3VRHI09XR

New Avengers #5

Ewing manages to make what should by all rights be a completely overstuffed issue work, which is impressive, but it’s also covering for the fact that this is a pretty standard array of parts that, at the moment at least, aren’t being assembled with any particular creativity. Ewing’s sense of character and humor keep it from feeling as tired as it easily could, but they don’t elevate this into anything particularly inspiring either, and Sandoval’s art eschews subtlety at every turn. Very much a “keep on keeping on” sort of issue.

Digital code: THMUAXU8ZW94

Batgirl #47

Not bad. I quite like the Spoiler/Bluebird cameo (they should really get their own book, but of course that ain’t gonna happen under the DC of 2016). Eleonora Carlini and Moritat step in for Babs Tarr and acquit themselves well, even managing a smooth hand-off within the issue, But the story lets it down a bit, underselling the sense of Batgirl losing her mind such that her anxiety over it seems misplaced and unearned, leading into a final page that is either unsatisfyingly cryptic or unsatisfyingly confident about the reader’s ability to identify a given DC villain on sight. Decent, but unspectacular. 

Ms. Marvel #3

Top-notch stuff, resolving the first arc and finally giving Mike a moment in the sun. She is, as you’d hope, charming and fun and full of heart, at once a character who makes you fist-pump with joy when she gets it right and smile at her anxieties and foibles. “Look out evildoers. Time to science” is sheer delight. Basically, she’s the best thing since Etta Candy. I also love “the key to his heart” being an unexpected answer instead of the obvious. And it still has evil gentrification to boot. As ever, we’re lucky to have this book. 

Digital code: THMFWYD6NTK2

Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl #6

I’ll have more on this soon, as I owe Patreon backers a bonus post on it, and so I’m not going to say much more than that there really isn’t a year of comics where this wouldn’t be a contender for best issue of the year.…

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