This week, almost everyone on the Enterprise and most of the population of Vulcan fall prey to energy-based brain parasites that take over their minds, and it looks like the only cure is fresh air and exorcise. Will Spock, Bones, and the New Girl of the Week tell the parasites “Get behind me, Satan”, or will they succumb to the temptation to let them take over the galaxy? It’s J.M. Dillard’s Demons, or, Possession Is Nine-Tenths of the Crew.
I’m aware this is supposed to be the space where I talk about non-Trek culture, but I don’t know where or when else it will be relevant to revel in my delight that a woman, S.J. Clarkson, will direct the fourth Kelvin-timeline Trek film. Television and film Trek‘s track record of hiring female directors is, not to put too fine a point on it, abysmal: only six women have directed 35 episodes across all six live-action series, and Clarkson is the first female Trek film director period. But in the novelverse, as we know, it’s a different story. So far, the overwhelming majority of the books I’ve covered on this site have been written by women, and of the handful written by men, only one wasn’t hot garbage. As a matter of fact, thanks to doing Deep Space Spines, the majority of the books I’ve read in the last six months were written by women, and the influence is affecting my non-Trek reading as well. We all know women can do just fine with big-budget tentpole genre films, so I’m looking forward to seeing what Clarkson does with the franchise with her turn in the chair. (Now to actually get around to watching Beyond…)
This week, we meet Lt. Piper, who knocks the socks off the Kobayashi Maru and proves that, while orange may indeed be the new black, black is the new (command) gold. Will Kirk’s confidence in her talents pay off? How many OCs paralleling the main cast is too many? By what percentage does an exclamation point in the title make the book more exciting? We’ll seek the answers to those questions and more as we review Dreadnought!, or, Two Warp Nacelles Is Company, Three’s a War.
This week, we tackle a book that promises a lot more Joanna McCoy than it delivers. Plus: malfunctioning computers, antimatter holocaust, Uhura at the conn, and enough product placement to make an Adam Sandler film look like a paragon of subtlety. It’s Crisis on Centaurus, or, Mission to the Planet That’s Basically Earth But the Title Crisis on Earth Isn’t As Catchy or Compelling or Alliterative.
I’ve wanted a Switch since they launched, and while I haven’t yet reached a place to where I can justify getting one for myself, I do get to take care of someone else’s for almost two months. My brother is moving, and since it’s going to be a protracted transition, he let me borrow it. Now I finally get to catch up on some of the great stuff everyone was hyped about six months to a year ago.
Things I’ve realized after playing for one day:
1) Hunting moons in Super Mario Odyssey is the craziest time sink I’ve let myself indulge in in a long time. I’d think to myself, Okay, that’s good for now, just another minute and I’ll turn it off and go do some other stuff, and then the next time I looked at the clock, thirty minutes had gone by. This happened four times. As of this writing, I have 51 moons, and I hope to have roughly half the moons in the game by the next Shore Leave.
2) I still don’t like Sonic Mania. I’m sorry, I don’t. There aren’t enough original zones, there are still too many cheap shots, I still feel like I’m missing 90 percent of any given level, and I HATE the Blue Sphere stages. I wasn’t good at them in 1994 and I’m no better at them now. It’s flippin’ gorgeous though, and the Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine boss battle is great.
I predict my brother’s Switch will have Stardew Valley and Golf Story on it by the time he gets it back.
When I’m in the mood to watch an anime, I’m typically very fussy about my choice, and it takes me a long time to make the leap on one even when I’m confident I want to watch it. That said, I’m tentatively checking out My Hero Academia. I don’t have much to say about it yet, as I’ve only seen the first episode, but I’ll get further into my feelings about it if I watch any more.
Also, I’m not sure how I’m going to fit this in between the aforementioned anime and of course brushing up on all the Star Treks, but NYPD Blue was recently added to Hulu. (NYPD Blulu? NYPD Hublue?) My interest in NYPD Blue began when I was a teenager for what I confess are prurient reasons—if you didn’t have cable or an internet connection in the late 90s, it was a reliable place to see an unscrambled butt—but I found myself frequently getting sucked into the non-naked bits too, and until now there haven’t been many easy ways to watch it (unless you want to hunt down the Audience channel on DirecTV). Time to see if it still holds up.
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