Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Kate Mulgrew’s one-woman show “Tea at Five” will be playing at the Shubert Theatre from Tuesday through December 19th. Tickets range from expensive to twice as expensive.

Disease of the day: Bird flu in swine.

And you thought Scotty was making the whole thing up! Physics Web reports a glass breakthrough:

Scientists in the US have developed a novel technique to make bulk quantities of glass from alumina for the first time. Anatoly Rosenflanz and colleagues at 3M in Minnesota used a “flame-spray” technique to alloy alumina (aluminium oxide) with rare-earth metal oxides to produce strong glass with good optical properties.

Thanks to MarsNews.com for the link. Also via MarsNews: the ESA wants to build pretty Space houses on Earth.

Fic of the day: Rubber Sword, a Ninja!Daniel SG story by Milareppa. Just keep in mind that it’s humor. (Note: the NC-17 rating is completely undeserved. I didn’t even notice the PG-13 language on which it’s allegedly based.) Thanks to Jerie for the rec.

I laughed along with everyone else when I heard about the Borg episode of Enterprise. In my Empty Shell drabble The Full Shell, I snarked at the whole pattern of Archer meeting species that Captain Kirk met for the first time a hundred years later. But the lure of the Borg is stronger than the natural aversion to Enterprise, and so I finally got around to watching “Regeneration” tonight.

It wasn’t all that bad, really. After a long lag of no ENT, Scott Bakula’s acting was a fresh and painful shock, but fortunately there were two whole segments of arctic Borgcicles with no Enterprise crew at all before the inevitable whining started. Of course it’s completely unbelievable that these people with their sticks and stones (phase pistols and hull plating) could both defeat the nameless Borg and cure assimilation completely - but this is a matter of degree, not of kind. Janeway also walked a few miles in the Borg’s cybernetic moccasins and defeated them time and time again when she shouldn’t have been able to. At least she did it with style and a-dish-best-served-cold hatred - she never felt guilty about spacing drones.

As an early adopter of the just don’t call them Borg fanfix, I enjoyed seeing it on the little screen. (Like Gene Roddenberry, I get no compensation when TPTB rip off my ideas and make a hash of them. Maybe the Great Bird is being punished for what he did to Harlan Ellison, but what have I ever done?) I also found it ironic that Archer caused the Borg invasion of the Alpha Quadrant, including the massacre at Wolf 359, by his trademark indecisiveness. And you thought his acting was painful!

The thing is, at the end of the episode he knows the Borg will be back in the 24th century. He could have at least left somebody a note about it, just as long as he didn’t call them Borg…

Over the past year of heavy SG drabble activity, I did manage to write a handful of Trek filks and drabbles which were eligible in the 2003 ASC Awards. The results came out tonight.

I really ought to be embarrassed that I placed in ENT but not in VOY. Somehow retirement is making it all fuzzy now. Anyway, here’s my very short list of placements:

ENT General Drabbles
#2  The Full Shell by Jemima

TOS Filks/Poem
#1  I Will Revive by Jemima

MIS Crossover
#3  The Other Side of the Gate by Jemima Pereira

MIS Filk/Poem/Drabble
#1  I Fought the Borg by Jemima
#3  The Sound of Borgness by Jemima

Both the MIS filks are actually VOY filks, but because I was the entire VOY filk category I had to be combined with MIS so that someone else could get an award. The embarrassing ENT drabble is part of the Empty Shell series listed in full on the MIS page. “I Will Revive” is one of three Khan filks I wrote during my Khan phase, and “The Other Side of the Gate” is a humorous Stargate crossover.

Well, the ASC Awards are over and I voted all over the place - pretty much everywhere except DS9, most of ENT, and some of MIS. I still haven’t done my taxes, but the big post offices are open until 9pm tomorrow, and the one near South Station until midnight. I suppose it’s no rush.

Once the madness was over (I cast the last vote at 11:01pm), I came here to blog and noticed tons of comment spam had piled up. Nothing new, and the blacklist plugin can delete it en masse, but the trouble was I hadn’t gotten any notification of the spam, either. It turns out I haven’t gotten any comment notification at all since the beginning of March. I try to keep an eye on the comment list in the MT interface as well, but it looks like I missed a bunch of comments. So I haven’t been ignoring you - I just didn’t know you cared.

I’m trying to catch up on the lost comments, and then I really have to do those taxes.

ENT humor of the day: Enterprise Characters plus reviews
VOY humor of the day: Foyager Park - check out episode 3!

Let me say straight off that I don’t like animals. Other people’s animals are ok, but I don’t want any flea-ridden beasts in my home. Living with animals leads to SARS and cat scatch fever and the death of half the population of Europe. In other words, it’s not a good plan.

I was up late last night finishing voting in the VOY catergory of the ASC Awards. When I went to bed, I started hearing things. Scratching, chewing things. I triangulated the noise: it was coming from inside the wall near one of my bookcases, about two shelves up from the floor. I knocked on the wall to discourage the chewer, but it took him a while to settle down.

Today I called the landlord to tell him about my nibbling acquaintance. He couldn’t give me a positive answer but he thought that maybe, possibly there’s a mouse in there. Ya think? Here I was thinking Elvis had entered the building. Seriously, though, Rattus rattus is a bit chubby for getting in between the floors - in my experience, he prefers Red Line subway stops. And decimating Europe.

The landlord said he’d send the exterminator next week. I hope the mouse doesn’t chew through the antique wiring and burn the building down before then. It’s not half of Europe, but it’s home.

Writing metalink of the day: The Writer’s Desk writer’s on-line resources

And I’m only halfway through the ASC Awards. I voted in a couple of categories of interest in ENT, and did a more thorough job on TNG and TOS. So far I’m one drabble category into VOY, which has to be done by the 4th. MIS is a must-read, but I’m not voting for that many writers, so the overall author category shouldn’t be too much work.

I have 85 votes in the mailbox where I’m collecting my copies. Out of those, I messed up two and had to fix them. The on-line voting interface is much more convenient than last year’s. If you’re a fan who usually avoids ASC, I’d recommend going and reading a category or two according to your tastes and vote. It’s fun.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?
And days of auld lang syne, my dear,
And days of auld lang syne.
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And days of auld lang syne?

I’ve been voting a bit in the ASC Awards for auld lang syne. I don’t watch ENT or DS9, so I’ve mostly skipped those categories. There’s some TNG by Lori and Alara I missed this year, and the whole category is quite small so I’m going through it now. Things won’t really heat up until the weeks of TOS and VOY, which somehow got scheduled together.

Many of the old Trek people are nowhere to be found in this year’s awards, and so far nothing has gotten the dried-up Trek fic juices running again. Retirement suits me just fine, thanks.

I wasn’t planning to do the DVD commentary meme, because it seemed
like way too much work considering that nobody really cares
(Bitter!Jack the Muse is sitting on my shoulder, playing a tiny violin
for me right now). But href="http://www.livejournal.com/users/mandysbitch/100150.html">CGB’s
MiSTing highly amused me, and Seema requested a commentary on “The Lamne’rau” or “The Museum.” I went with the shorter story.

Whenever I get ftp access back, I’ll put this up on its own web page (and I’ll get the new SG drabble up), but for the moment, the body of the story is going in the extended entry field (the MT equivalent of a cut). First, my commentary on the ASC headers of the story:

Title: The Lamne’rau

Hold it right there! The majority of effort on this fic went into the title. I spent hours combing through on-line Romulan dictionaries, trying to come up with a good Romulan term for “Borg.” (The precise derivation comes up in the story.) It’s disturbing how much time I devote to tiny details nobody is ever going to notice.

Author: Jemima
Contact: jemimap@crosswinds.net

That email address is long dead, but nobody sends fb anyway. At least this way I can pretend that the reams of fanmail bounced.

Series: VOY
Rating: PG for assimilation
Codes: 7

Obviously, this story dates from my Borg period.

Summary: Seven’s brief childhood, as glimpsed in “Dark Frontier”,
“The Raven”, “Author, Author” and other episodes.
Preliminary to Tertiary, a life of Seven of Nine.

And I really meant to write it. I had
big plans, involving psychobabble and a cool AQ frame story. The best
laid plans of muse and man… I have other fragments of Tertiary
floating around in my UFO folder, but none are in any shape to post.

Archive: ASC only, but feel free to link to
http://jemimap.freeshell.org/voy/fic/tertiary/lamnerau.html

There isn’t room in this DVD to insert
my tirade against redundant archives and fic taxes.

Disclaimer: Paramount owns their bodies, but their souls are free.

This is a standard Jemima disclaimer in which I don’t disclaim anything because I haven’t done anything wrong. If you disagree, you’re welcome to sue me.

Date: January 2003

In the fine tradition of January fic-dumps to ASC, I dusted this baby off and posted it. It was written much earlier as part of Tertiary. I don’t know the exact dates, but I do know I started Tertiary in late June, 2001 and worked on it on and off through August of 2002. As far as I can tell from the changelog (I track my fic using RCS), a lot of The Lamne’rau was written in February and May of 2002.

Note: This story won first place in the Voyager Featuring Seven
of Nine category of the 2002 ASC Awards.

Something missing from this note is appropriate thanks to members of the C/7 list for help with a timeline of Seven’s childhood.

(more…)

In my day tirade of the day: a Slashdot thread on silver paste

The results are up for the JCFicHaven Decathlon, a new fanfic contest that’s not entirely unlike AAA. I rooted through all the award pages to find out what B’Elanna the Canon Correcting Muse (Retired) had won, and put her awards up on her award shelf. Jade’s awards are also up on her index page and relevant stories.

I can’t speak to the results, since I didn’t actually vote in the contest. B’Elanna the Muse won the silver medal overall, but every story of hers that placed was written at least three years ago, except for one drabble that’s only two years old. Apparently Lurking in particular was new to a lot of readers. I always liked that one myself.

I knew I hadn’t written much lately, but it was surprising nonetheless to look back on how much I wrote circa January 2001, and how little since Voyager jumped the big Borg shark in the sky. It makes me wonder how long this Stargate thing will last before I jump my own personal shark.

Well, back to the Ice Planet fic…