I would much rather boast about the great accomplishment of completing a 15,000 word story than actually show you the story, at least right now, because this way you can say, “Hey, great job!” without any caveats. A few of my friends have seen bits of it, and one has given me incredibly useful criticism over the course of writing it–most of which happened in the last week. Yay for being unemployed. Aaron has expressed an interest in seeing it, and perhaps someday he will. After I revise the hell out of it, because even after working on it for at least two hours every day for the past five days, it is still very much a first draft, and that kind of weirds me out.

When I write, I edit at the same time. When I type those last words, I am done. That’s always how it went in college, and I BSed my way through plenty of English classes without changing my methods, so I figured it would serve me pretty well out in the real world. And I guess in a way it has, because I haven’t actually written anything since graduating. I’ve gotten one or two days into NaNoWriMo several times before remembering why I never finish NaNoWriMo, I’ve started an expansive back-story for my steampunk roleplaying character, I’ve scribbled a few ideas and lines of dialogue, and I have about a dozen stories in various stages of visualization locked up in my brain, but this is the first thing I’ve actually finished since college. And it feels amazing, and I’m going to bask in that feeling a while longer before I go showing it to the world.

I will, however, tell you my favorite bit of dialogue in the whole thing: “When you finish that, there are others on the bookshelf behind the painting of the tarantula lorry.” Yeah, I bet you really want to read it now. Well you can’t!

For a while I was in danger of spiraling into boredom and despair, but the last week has been pretty amazing and everything seems to be looking up. I’ve been organizing things around the house, cleaning, and really getting into cooking–I get excited about reduction sauces now. I’ve read from several different sources (including Keri Smith’s blog and issue #15 of the zine Doris) that the only way to really fight depression when you have no way to occupy yourself is to get outside and walk for hours at a time. It’s gotten warmer in the last few days so I could do that regularly, and it really works. I found a shortcut to the post office, and I’ve pretty much mastered the local attempt at public transit (short buses that stop running at 6 p.m. and don’t run at all on weekends). I have a million ideas for a million projects, and in general I feel more alive than I have in a really long time.

That’s all just to say that you probably won’t see me around here much, not that you have lately anyway. I should probably go see Avatar just so I can write another rant about a crap movie and get more attention, but I just feel too awesome right now to subject myself to that. Maybe I’ll post some of my adventures here in the not-too-distant future. Stay tuned, if you want.

In addition to getting sick, I spent Memorial Day weekend nerding out with the Terminator movies, a franchise I’d forgotten I loved so much. The new Terminator movie is awful, maybe a step or two above Star Trek on the suckometer, and yet I fully adored it. Aaron and I saw it on Saturday, and in preparation I watched the original on Friday (a good thing, too, or I might have missed a couple nice in-jokes in the new movie), and followed them up with T2 last night. Suddenly I was 14 again, back when I wanted to marry Michael Biehn and I thought the cocking-a-shotgun-by-rotating-it-in-one-hand trick was the awesomest thing ever. 

Just so you don’t think this blog is all about the cheesy science fiction movies I watch on a disturbingly frequent basis, here are some photos I’ve taken recently on the Minolta 35mm SLR that’s been in my family for several decades. This camera just inexplicably started working again a couple months ago after nearly a year of not being able to see anything through the lens. I should probably get it checked out and fix the broken light meter and make any number of improvements, but for now it is rendered more charming by its few minor faults and it takes really gorgeous photos, so I’m in no rush.

Dorks at the renaissance festival.

For some reason, when I look at this I feel like I’m watching Donnie Darko. 

Aaron attempts to win a chess game through the use of Jedi mind tricks.

From my East Coast tour back in March. Creepy creepy creepy.

Pretty pretty lights.

Point is, I was never emotionally invested in Star Trek as a whole, which ought to have made it easier to watch, and maybe even enjoy, the new movie. Not so much. Click through for spoilers and crumb-spewing.

The first question to be asked when one is presented with the idea of resurrecting Star Trek is, “Why?” Obviously the answer from those responsible for the movie is money, but I’d really like to know whether fans of the original series, spin-offs, and movies really believe it’s necessary to bring Trek to a new generation. If those hip young people with their iPhones and their rap music don’t appreciate Star Trek for the campy fun/philosophically challenging material/high drama/more campy fun it was in its various incarnations, is it really worth trying to breathe new life into the concept? Leave it for the people who enjoy it. Furthermore, if Ronald D. Moore (who later proved himself to be the patron saint of revitalizing cheesy decades-old science fiction shows into masterful works of art) couldn’t save Star Trek (and oh, he tried), where does J.J. Abrams get off thinking he can? 

This new Star Trek (which I will refer to as Star Trek for the remainder of this post, rather than “the one J.J. Abrams directed”) is a prequel, an origin story about the crew of the Enterprise fans know from the original series (TOS). It is possible to do origin stories right–Batman Begins, for instance. Too often though, origin stories go horribly wrong, as in the case of the Star Wars prequels, which introduced a few dozen elements to the Galaxy Far Far Away that obfuscated things unnecessarily, and in several cases blatantly contradicted portions of the original trilogy. The Star Wars prequels were not straightforward enough. While I haven’t seen it yet, I’ve heard Wolverine errs spectacularly on the opposite end of the spectrum: it is far too straightforward, telling us almost nothing we didn’t already know and doing it in the least elegant or interesting way possible.

Star Trek fails as an origin story for reason I can’t sum up quite as neatly as those above. For one thing, it’s not even technically an origin story–at least not for the TOS characters as we knew them. It turns out that young, chisel-jawed jock James Tiberius Kirk is not quite exactly the same Kirk that sucked so badly at fight scene choreography in TOS, and it’s all because TOS Mr. Spock (played by Leonard Nimoy in a largely nonsensical cameo) opened a singularity that led into an alternate reality. 

Yes, an alternate reality. This is how Star Trek can get away with so many horrible, unnecessary choices with regard to the plot and characters. This is how people can claim in their glowing reviews of the movie that it actually doesn’t invalidate anything that already happened in previous episodes and movies. Spock went into another dimension–and back in time, to boot!–and set the movie’s events in motion.

Right off the bat we have a giant copout. Think about it. What’s the point of a movie about the origins of characters who aren’t actually, really, the characters from TOS? Is that really Star Trek? Fundamentally, I say no, and as soon as I realized this was not a story about the Kirk and Spock from TOS, but rather about their alternate reality counterparts who have different histories and personality nuances thanks to this being an alternate reality, I lost absolutely all interest I may have had in the movie during its first few minutes. In fact, even TOS Spock is not really TOS Spock in that he is in this movie for no other reason than to break the Prime Directive. He does so repeatedly, by both direct and indirect action. That is not Spock. J.J. Abrams could have just changed some character names and started a new science fiction saga rather than slapping the Star Trek label on this. 

Beyond the vexation caused by its very existence, there was plenty more about Star Trek that irked me. Lens flare was the most omnipresent and glaring (har) annoyance. I thought lens flare was awesome when I first got Photoshop, but I grew out of it and I’m not even a visual effects artist. J.J. Abrams loves lens flare like the Wachowskis love bullet time, like Zack Snyder loves slow-mo, and Abrams now occupies the same space in my mind as those awful hacks thanks to his overuse of the technique. There was lens flare in nearly every scene. The vast majority of the movie’s shots, whether or not there was a direct light source in the frame, had a blob of light obscuring some portion of it. Good God, there was lens flare inside a cave. The bridge of the Enterprise seemed to be made entirely of lens flare and saturated pastel colors. Those shots all looked like somebody’s artsy-fartsy LiveJournal icons; I expected Edward Cullen to show up at some point, sparkling. With lens flare. That’s not good design, and it’s definitely not good storytelling. If you ever meet J.J. Abrams, dear reader,  please smack him upside the head for me and tell him to lay off the bloody lens flare.

The portions of the movie that weren’t covered in lens flare didn’t particularly thrill me either. I was initially pleased and surprised by the vintage, boxy look of the ships, but as soon as the Enterprise appeared onscreen, sleek and futuristic with transparent touchscreens on the bridge, a far cry from the spindly cardboard tube model of TOS, I lost all hope that the film’s style would make up for any of its faults. As one of the only negative reviews of Star Trek on RottenTomatoes points out, nearly every part of the movie that was meant to be cool ended up looking like it was taken from some other movie. They even used shaky handheld camera shots in many scenes, just like–ZOMG!–Battlestar Galactica. Handheld cameras? In space? How gritty and original! Except it wasn’t at all, and indeed there was nothing original about the rest of the movie either. 

The only good thing I can say about the movie’s cast is that Zachary Quinto’s Spock and Karl Urban’s McCoy were spot-on. Eric Bana was both unrecognizable and completely wasted in his role, a villain even less memorable than Shinzon. Chris Pine’s fratboyish approach to Kirk didn’t even make an attempt at the convulsive gaps in dialog. Simon Pegg as Scotty irritated me to no end, which is not usually a problem I have with Simon Pegg, but his main scene was what prompted Aaron and Alan to dub this version of the Enterprise the Willy Wonka ship. Everybody else was essentially a caricature, down to the way overdone (yet somehow still adorable) Chekov. 

The cartoonish feel of the movie started early on with some terribly unfunny Kirk/McCoy slapstick, and culminated with Scotty’s trip through the Enterprise chocolate factory’s plumbing. It all proved that Abrams can employ comedy with the same aplomb and subtlety as he does lens flare. I already know how the man writes his scripts, and when I got bored with the movie I started imagining what a given page of the Star Trek screenplay might look like. The mental image was way more amusing than anything that happened onscreen.

Much like the movie as a whole, the actions of most of the characters are completely pointless. In the big climactic battle scene, right after alternate reality Spock opens a singularity on Eric Bana’s ship, Kirk fires on said ship. Why the hell would you attack a ship that’s about to be swallowed by a black hole? A black hole that then devours Bana’s ship, grows larger, and threatens to swallow the Enterprise too. Why, why, why would you do that?

And that’s just the beginning (or rather the end) of a whole string of inexplicable actions leading all the way back to when someone in a studio somewhere said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great to pump some more cash out of Star Trek’s corpse without having to pay all those old actors who are practically corpses themselves?”  The result of that thinking led to a wholly inelegant attempt to fill in some gaps in TOS characters’ histories, which was at times as unnecessarily complicated as the Star Wars prequels. I really felt for Aaron, because I went through the same thing ten years ago that he went through while watching Star Trek. In fact, at many points in the movie I felt like I was watching a Star Wars prequel. I guess you could say that in the long-running battle between Star Wars and Star Trek, Wars finally won because in order to attract a new audience, they had to dumb down Star Trek as much as George Lucas dumbed down the prequels–and, indeed, borrow many stylistic choices and even a couple gags. 

But everyone realized the Star Wars prequels sucked, whereas Star Trek currently has a 96% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes. People everywhere are lapping this up, and it seems like Aaron and I are the only ones who found the whole thing absolutely intolerable. This is a movie that never should have been made, that can’t justify its existence by being any good at all. If I had a really fast future-ship full of red matter, I’d make a singularity and go back in time to kill J.J. Abrams so it never would have existed. (Don’t whine at me about Lost, either–I wouldn’t mourn the absence of that show from television history in the slightest.) You can call me an elitist or a crumb-spewing nerd for my intense and vehement reaction, but please take my word for it and don’t make another inexplicable and unwise choice by wasting your money on a ticket.

Today the joy of getting a full-time slot at work was mitigated by the news that my mom has osteoporosis. Moreover, my grandmother has it, and my other grandmother probably did too, which means the likelihood of me eventually having it go up to about a hundred percent as I understand it. Occasionally when I try to lift heavy objects, I get this strange and horrible brittle pain deep in the bones of my arms; I already know I don’t get nearly enough calcium, and I bought supplements a while back to help change that, but I don’t take them regularly.

Suddenly I actually feel compelled to take care of myself, and it sucks. I’m 25–I shouldn’t be worried about what life will be like when I’m 60. But despite my free-spirited attitude in most aspects of my life, deep down, I do care. In fact, I care about what life will be like when my kids are 60. I usually only think about stuff like that late at night when my emotions have no middle ground, and I can’t think about it for too long or it does my head in.

In fact, my internal egg-timer just chimed and now I have to stop thinking about it. Must distract myself! Look, it’s Thom Yorke!

Tonight my friend Mel came over to work on a new song. It’s been a while since we’ve written together; our last band broke up a couple months ago when our bassist passive-aggressively sold his mixing board right after our first show, thus rendering it nigh impossible for us to practice. Mel and I were back to being an acoustic duo, which is probably for the best, but we both took some time off afterward. Anyway, tonight we demoed this song in about two hours, and I’m terribly proud of it. When You’re Out of My Mind