Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Seema accidentally put me in mind of yet another possible answer to the question Why Khan? Perish the very thought, but Why Khan? might be suspected to have the same answer as Why Angel? or Why Scott? - that is, I might love him for his pecs alone, for his Latin and leather manliness. I might even like Magneto for the black cape, shiny helmet, and well-preserved good looks.

The truth is that I’m not attracted to the vapid type, to Volvo Boy or the One-Eyed Insomnia Cure, because I don’t see any character in their faces. I prefer a good genocidal maniac, or even a lovesick platinum-blonde vampire. The Keanu Reeves phenomenon, in which fangirls swoon over (allegedly) pretty faces who can’t act their way out of a paper bag, is a deep mystery to me.

So I don’t love Khan because he’s beautiful; he’s beautiful because he’s lovable.

The corollary of transhumanism might be misanthropy - or, in Magneto’s honor, misentomy, a word coined for the occasion of this blog entry to mean hatred of insects.

Khan is glorious in his superiority when he says, “Captain, although your abilities intrigue me, you are quite honestly inferior.” Khan is above hating the insects - even Magneto is, I suspect - but she who loves Khan might love him because she hates the average man.

This is, in fact, Rabble Rouser’s interpretation of Marla McGivers in Weeds - Marla doesn’t care much for her shipmates. That’s not how I see the cheerful Marla of the first half of “Space Seed” - she can love Khan without hating Kirk.

And so can I.

This is yet another attempt to answer the question, “Why Khan?” See the previous two entries in the Muses category for the whole story. Minor spoilers for X-Men United.

So far I’ve been knocking down evil straw men, but here’s a relatively good theory of the attractiveness of the bad guy: transhumanism. Transhumanism is the hope for a more-than-human future through genetic engineering, cybernetics, uploading human consciousness to computers, and other science-fictional fantasies. It has been said that those who believe uploading is in our future generally predict it will be here by their 70th birthday.

The theory is, if you want to be transhuman yourself you might begin to identify with the evil transhumans of fiction rather than the boring human characters. My favorite bad guys - Khan, the Borg, Magneto - are certainly transhuman, but that’s not my reason for liking them.

For one thing, I don’t believe in transhumanism that way. I like to write about transhuman characters, but I don’t want to be Borg. I don’t believe I’ll be uploaded on my 70th birthday. I don’t think genetic engineering is a good idea even though it’s all over my original fiction.

More importantly for the Why Khan? question, I don’t care for all the transhuman characters, just the cool evil ones. Scott bored me to tears in both X-Men movies, and Storm, Jean, and Xavier weren’t far behind on the snooze scale. I just saw the movie two hours ago, and I wouldn’t have remembered Xavier’s name if I hadn’t come across it just now in an online review. As we were walking out of the Fenway 13, I was calling him Picard so Veronica and company would know who I was talking about.

I had no difficulty remembering Magneto’s name. In fact, I scared Veronica with my thing for Magneto - she even forgot that I still owe her for the ticket. Ten dollars is a small price to pay for the line, You are a god among insects.

I don’t love Khan for his transhumanity per se.

Jerie was kind enough to send me a lovely educational video about a certain mythological Sikh warrior, and I was faced with the challenge of playing the .avi file in QuickTime.

On my first attempt at double-clicking on the file, I got neither audio nor video. I suspect that was a codec problem, but you never know when the traditional .avi advice of changing the file type and creator will clear up something like that. I didn’t follow it, but if you’d like to give it a try, see this MacOSXHints hint.

For my part, I dived immediately into .avi conversion using DivX Doctor II, and the Doctor kindly converted most of the file to .mov. However, DivX Doctor chokes on audio errors, so the soundtrack ended about two-thirds of the way through the .mov.

At this point Jerie showed up and we discussed the nature of the audio track. I’d figured since it was broken it must be wma, but she claimed it was mp3. Such philosophical questions are best answered with DivX Tool, which verified Jerie’s story and explained a bit about .avi audio problems. DivX Tool can extract mp3 audio for reinsertion, so I obtained a fine .mp3 soundtrack.

However, I would have needed to use QuickTime Pro to paste the soundtrack back in so it would play. That, my readers, would have involved money, and I was running a purely fair-use operation.

So I read through some of the articles at the 3ivx forums, and found some very helpful advice - namely, that to cure these pesky audio bugs it may suffice to run the .avi through the DivX Validator.

The DivX Validator is a secret ingredient of DivX. I downloaded the Pro trial version, but the free version may suffice for all I know. Once the original version of my educational video was validated, it could play in QuickTime right from the “converted” .avi file.

I just checked that the soundtrack had lasted all the way to the closing credits, because I didn’t want to play from the converted file. I still haven’t bought that new iMac, so my mac is a bit pokey for playing video. DivX Doctor seemed like a better bet for the pokey problem, so I converted my converted file to .mov with DivX Doctor, opened it up in QuickTime, and…voila! Education!

The one other program I downloaded in this process was a QuickTime full-screen viewer. Normally only QuickTime Pro will play in full-screen mode, but there are several free solutions to the problem available. I forget which one I downloaded.

[Addenda] It was PresentMovie from ThankYouWare. Now I’m downloading QiPo (QuickTime in, Preview out) to extract some screenshots.

Rob Morris issued the following challenge on ASC:

From: brightfame66@… (Rob Morris)
Newsgroups: alt.startrek.creative
Subject: TOS Challenge : The Empty Shell
Date: Fri, 9 May 2003 06:29:47 -0400 (EDT)

In this challenge, the writer will try and answer the question : Just
what did the Enterprise and/or Starfleet do with The Doomsday
Machine/Planet Killer after it was deactivated? Be serious, have fun, or
both, or neither. :)

I changed the conditions of the challenge a bit and responded with a series of drabbles from all five Trek series. They begin with The Full Shell, an ENT drabble. The others are linked from there.

Cool Boston site of the day: The Mapparium

Another possible explanation of fondness for the bad guy is…simple badness. Maybe the writer is evil and gets along best with evil characters. Alternately, maybe the topic is horror, so their works are populated with nasties who would give Stephen King nightmares.

This is not my attraction to Khan.

This one’s for Seema, to memorialize her fight with the ASC troll and other ASC Awards sockpuppets and cheaters.

Title:   Goodbye Internet Trolls
Author:  Jemima
Summary: A filk of Elton John's "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" for Seema.
The original lyrics were by Bernie Taupin, music by Elton John.

When are you gonna grow up?
When will you understand?
I should have stuck to P/T,
I should have studied for that exam.

You know you can't mock me forever -
You see I've misplaced the muse.
I can't remember when I last got feedback;
This fan's too young to be filking the blues...

So goodbye Internet trolls
And the dregs of the mailing-list crowd -
Don't look for me in your treehouse
I'm down here laughing out loud.

Laugh at the horny, bad smut on the lists
Weed out the scriptkidz and moles -
Now I'm pointing my browser at sunny skies,
Without the Internet trolls...

What will you do without me?
Who are you going to flame?
Keep your minions voting for godawful fanfics -
I'm not playing your contest game.

Surely you'll find a replacement,
There's plenty of newbies to use -
Fangirls who haven't seen through you
Looking for contests they're just gonna lose...

Khan showed up at the ASC Awards Dinner, collecting several of my awards for me (in VOY and Overall). He also made an appearance in TOS).

The title of this entry doesn’t refer to the lovely Seven story by nostalgia. Instead, it’s a possible answer to the question someone asked me, Why Khan? Why the bad guy? Why the Borg?

I’m not going to insult Marla McGivers with the suggestion that she suffered from Stockholm Syndrome, but a writer who is forced to spend endless hours inside the mind of a purported bad guy can come to feel sympathy for her personal devil, identify with him, and eventually give him all the good lines.

That’s not my excuse.

I took too long writing my ASC Awards acceptance speeches, so I don’t have time to blog about Khan. Soon, though, I will discuss the Superior Ficcability.

Cool site of the day: David Lanham

I’ve added I Will Revive to the TOS page. For those who claim not to know the song, the alien version should refresh your memory. (Speaking of Khan filk, I was surprised to learn that Temperature of Revenge is actually a filk of another filk, “Temper of Revenge.”)

While out filking, I downloaded a list of all the 1 to 1.5 syllable words in English. Apparently, linguists consider a terminal er, le and certain other word endings to be half a syllable. Linguists are clearly not filkers. So with the magic of Emacs, I cut out all the 1.5 syllable words to make a list of the true one-syllable words. If you want to print them out, take the paper-saving version instead.

I’ve also added the ASC Awards 2002 results to the other years listed on the links page. I won some of them: first place in VOY Featuring Seven of Nine and third in Best Story for “The Lamne’rau,” all three VOY filk awards (”Janeway: The Musical!” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to the Phage,” and “The Sound of Sickbay”), first in VOY Crew for “Beta Energy,” second in VOY Single Person for “What’s Left of Her,” third for VOY Author, and third for Best Author. It’s the third-place awards that surprised me the most - last year I wasn’t the multi-series author I am today (Khaaaaaannnnnnn!), so I didn’t expect any of the Overall awards. Also I didn’t write all that much besides filk, but it was a slow year in general, it seems.

Congratulations to everyone who won this year, especially Rabble Rouser (Best Story), Djinn (Best Author, TOS Author), Rocky (VOY Author), Seema (DS9 Author), Lori (TNG Author), nostalgia (ENT Author, New Author), and Ventura33 (MIS Author). Thanks to everyone who commented - every comment is appreciated.