Star Trek

    NaNoWriMo pivot: Back to 50,000 words of literally anything at all

    Hello friends!

    It’s been slow-going working on my TNG fanfic. Early in October, I toyed with the idea of being a NaNo Rebel with the goal of writing 50,000 words of literally anything at all. At the time, I meant fanfic, original fic, and academic writing.

    But at 4 AM this morning, I decided to return to that, with a much more expansive definition of “literally anything at all.”

    Here are the things I’ve added to my word count so far:

    • Blog posts (including short notes)
    • Emails
    • Texts
    • Slack messages
    • Meeting agendas
    • Comments on other people’s documents
    • Forum posts

    And once I log back into social media tomorrow (I’m posting this via micropub), I’m going to add replies and quote tweets.

    Why am I being so generous to myself with this definition?

    A lot of the time, I use a goal like NaNoWriMo to prove to myself that I “can* write.

    But lately, I’ve felt not that I have writer’s block, exactly, but that I’m just at a moment in life when writing is beyond my current capacity, that I just don’t have the bandwidth to write at present.

    So I’m using this expansive definition to prove to myself that I do write, that I an writing, even when I feel like I can’t.

    How’s NaNo going for you? Can you find a way to be more generous with yourself this month?

    Me, watching the Lower Decks finale after finally finishing watching “Time’s Arrow, Part 2”: Is Buenamigo’s cigar hand-rolled or replicated? 🖖🏻

    Peace and long life, y’all. Happy Star Trek Day! 🖖🏻

    Y’all, check out this picture of Gene Roddenberry cosplaying as a Romulan commander from Balance of Terror from Cinefantastique #20 that I found on the fanlore.org cosplay page. 😍🖖🏻

    I found a picture of myself on Tumblr. Dropping all other descriptors of myself in favor of “Data in an oversized cardigan.” 🖖🏻

    Finished Strange New Worlds Season 1. A+. Somebody give Ethan Peck’s eyebrow an Emmy. 🖖🏻📺

    “There’s surviving, and then there’s living.” - Star Trek: Strange New Worlds 🖖🏻📺💬

    Thinking through disability on Star Trek 🖖🏻📺

    I wrote this a week ago to sort through my thoughts on disability on Star Trek. It is essentially a freewrite, not a carefully structured essay.

    Some context: I write this as my mom has recently changed from being a person with variable and invisible disabilities to someone with consistent and visible disabilities. She has lost the use of her legs and must ride a wheelchair if she wants to move around independently. But for years, she has had problems with sometimes falling down, for decades she has had chronic illness with debilitating fatigue as a symptom. Disability is not new to her but her recently developed disability is quite different from her disability in the past.

    I myself have lived with chronic illness as my primary disability for a long time, though I did not conceive of myself as disabled until the COVID-19 pandemic. My disabilities are variable and invisible, like my mom’s earlier ones. I sometimes have debilitating fatigue or brain fog. I struggle with activities of daily living due to challenges of executive function, rather than physical limitation.

    And on top of all of this is my experience as an autism sibling - while this hasn’t impacted me much because Micah’s diagnosis came when I was away at college, I’m still keenly aware of it. I also am perpetually working on foregrounding the voices of autistic people themselves rather than trumpeting my thoughts on it. But it is work, not something that comes to me naturally. I’m too keen on talking about my own thoughts and ideas for that to be my default state.

    With all of this in mind, I’m thinking lately about two depictions of disability on Star Trek: Christopher Pike’s experience as a quadriplegic who can communicate only using assistive technology and, for whatever reason, that assistive technology is limited. (Maybe in the 60s it was the best they could imagine? Maybe his cognitive damage is so strong that he can only formulate yes or no as thoughts?) And Geordi Laforge, whose disability is mitigated by assistive technology that not only gives him sight, but allows him to use his sight in ways that people who are born sighted cannot do.

    And then there are others as well who I would love more details about. On Discovery in particular, Airiam and Detmer. What about on Lower Decks? Is the character with an implant there using it as assistive technology? Or is it an augmentation? I should look at these characters more closely and look for others as well.

    What about Sarek as he nears the end of his life?

    There are plenty of possible examples for me to look at.

    Today, though, I’ll focus on Pike and Laforge.

    Pike’s plight is presented as a kind of death or “the death of the man I am now,” as Pike tells Spock in SNW 1x01. In TOS (I’ll admit I have yet to watch this episode and have only read about it on Wikipedia), Spock kidnaps Pike and takes him to Talos IV where he can live with the illusion of his body as it was before his disabling event. What does this mean about disability in Star Trek? How does the illusion on Talos IV work? Is he actually lying in a bed somewhere? Rolling around in his chair? He gets to live out his days with Veena and that’s nice but what is the nature of this “solution”? And what does it tell us about disability in the world of Star Trek? I need to watch “The Cage” before I can know at all. And also perhaps to revisit Pike’s experience of the future on Discovery and take notes on his mentions of it in SNW.

    (Also who else is writing about Star Trek and disability?)

    Now Laforge. This is someone whose assistive technology effectively eliminates his disability but who 1. is once again disabled if his VISOR falls off and 2. if I’m remembering correctly, is always in pain and that’s the tradeoff for using the visor.

    (I feel like there is somebody else on Trek who’s always in pain but I wonder if I’m actually thinking of Miriam from Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night.)

    Geordi Laforge’s disability isn’t a thing until it is. I’ve been falling asleep to the TNG episode, “The Masterpiece Society,” in which a colony has systematically bred its citizens for optimum living, including eliminating disability. Laforge reads this (and I do too) as a suggestion that as a disabled person, he has no contribution to make to a society. And then there’s delicious irony that the technology from his VISOR is just the technology they need to save the colony from being essentially doomed by tectonic activity responsive to a star core fragment. (Still not sure what that is, though I can guess from the words. Maybe I’ll look it up.)

    I talked to W about this last night, and he suggested that it’s not that Geordi wouldn’t have been born, but that he would have been born sighted. I think this is a set of hypotheticals that it’s hard to think through. To what extent do our disabilities make us who we are? Are we the same person if we’re born without them? This is something that we’ve thought about a lot in our family with my brother and whether being able to isolate an autism gene would change his life. We wouldn’t have wanted to terminate Mommy’s pregnancy with him but it might have allowed us to prepare better. But if it were possible to manipulate the autism out of him, would he then be himself? I know he doesn’t think so.

    Neurodivergence is a different sort of disability, I think, than physical limitation. (I’m keenly aware of this deficit-based language and know that I need to change it before I write anything for wider publication on it.) We want autism acceptance, neurodivergent acceptance.

    But there is a real tension between the social model of disability and the medical model of disability. Is the world what disables you, or your body? I think it’s both. Star Trek sort of shows us with Geordi that it can be both. The Enterprise is a pretty accessible place, as long as the turbolifts are working, and Geordi has technology he needs to live and work. By the social model of disability, as long as he’s wearing his VISOR, he’s not disabled.

    But he is sometimes in circumstances where he’s not wearing the VISOR, especially in environments that are NOT DESIGNED. And that limits his potential activity, and so in those cases, it is his body that disables him.

    I need to be careful not to feel like I have to do a complete literature review on critical disability studies before writing about this any further.

    In our work team meeting today we spent a significant chunk of time discussing the history of Star Trek fanfic and its trajectory from zines to web to fanbound books. And it ended up being relevant to work stuff. I love my job. 🖖🏻📚

    The TNG episode, “The Masterpiece Society,” is great. 🖖🏻📺💬

    “It was the wish of our founders that no one have to suffer a life of disabilities.” “Who gave them the right to decide whether or not I might have something to contribute?” - Hannah Bates and La Forge, on eugenics

    If you enjoyed the Chapel/Ortegas dynamic in this week’s SNW, there are [21 works tagged with their relationship] (https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Christine%20Chapel%2As%2AErica%20Ortegas/works) at AO3, mostly from a prolific author with the delightful username Lesbi_enterprise. 🖖🏻📺

    “It appears that hijinks are the most logical course of action.” Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, 1x05, “Spock Amok” 🖖🏻📺💬

    Just followed some Trek fan Micro.bloggers from yesterday’s roll call. I’m current on new shows & doing a rewatch of TNG. Happy to offer advice on getting back into Trek after a break.🖖🏻

    In Star Trek: TNG, S5E11, “Hero Worship,” a kid asks Data what he thinks of a model the kid built. When Data expresses his aesthetic assessment the kid says, “You hate it!” Data tells him, “You are making an unwarranted extrapolation.” I’m telling my anxiety that from now on. 🖖📺

    Your girl’s over here finding old Star Trek: The Next Generation fanfiction listed on Fanlore but not linked anywhere and digging it up in the Google Usenet archives, then adding the links to Fanlore. Peak Kimberly.

    How do none of the early results in a Google Images search for Star Trek Bingo have something like “mysterious pathogen takes down whole crew” on them? It happened twice in season 1 of TNG & we got it in episode 2 of SNW. (It’s one of my favorite Trek tropes.) 🖖🏻📺

    “As we honor the lives that have been given, let us also be grateful to be still on the journey.” “The enemy doesn’t care about my feelings, Captain, so I don’t waste my time having any.”

    Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Memento Mori” 🖖🏻💬

    I love a good slice-of-life story but the constant interruptions to Worf’s work once his son Alexander boards the Enterprise in the episode “New Ground” are far too real.🖖🏻📺

    Week 3 of #StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds and there are already 189 works on AO3. Looking forward to discovering new favorite creators. 🖖🏻

    🔖🖖📺 In reply to Star Trek: Discovery Has Problems (& How They Can Be Fixed)(Trek News) by Bill Smith

    In reply to Star Trek: Discovery Has Problems (& How They Can Be Fixed) (Trek News) by Bill Smith:

    I agree with Smith’s assessment of Discovery. Each season, the stakes are bigger. In Season 4, they were literally extragalactic. Once you’ve broken the galactic barrier and made first contact with a species living beyond it, where else is there to go?

    The race to solve the puzzle box is exhausting. The hyperfocus on serialization leads to a lot of intriguing threads being introduced and tied off more quickly than I would like. For example, in Seasons 3 and 4 we saw what looked like they were going to be mental health crises for Detmer (PTSD from the jump into the future), Tilly (depression related to existential crisis), and Culber (burnout). In Detmer’s case, I don’t recall being shown the road to recovery at all. Tilly seemed to have two episodes of feeling bad that were magically fixed by deciding to become an instructor. And Culber I guess just really needed a vacation?

    I really enjoy Discovery. In fact, I enjoy it so much that I wish there were more of it so we would have time to devote a whole episode to each of these characters.

    I love Michael Burnham. But I also love so much of the rest of her crew. TNG started with a focus on the bridge crew and especially Picard, but opened up to give us time to get to know O’Brien, Barclay, and more. I wish Discovery had the breathing room to do the same.

    I especially agree with Smith’s point here:

    One of the things that Star Trek: Discovery did exceedingly well in Season 4 was First Contact with Species 10-C, the originators of the Dark Matter Anomaly.

    It was its own challenge in unlocking the mystery of the DMA and I thought that aspect was something that the show did really well. It took this concept of seeking out new life and new civilizations and put a 32nd-century spin on it.

    Discovery really leaned into that first contact situation hard and it worked. For 56 years, Star Trek has taught us that the unknown isn’t always something to be feared, but we should always strive to understand. There isn’t always a “big bad villain” when the puzzle is assembled or, sometimes, we find out that we are the villain however unintentionally.

    These are the types of stories that have always found their way into Star Trek—from Gene Roddenberry’s first script right up to today’s iterations of the franchise. These are Trek’s roots and when Discovery revisits them, it works brilliantly.

    Watching everyone work together to make first contact with the 10-C was exhilarating. It had all the delight of Picard figuring out the speech patterns in “Darmok” with an added bonus of getting to see a bunch of different people work together, leveraging each of their specialties to shine. This is foundational Trek stuff and I love when Discovery puts a spin on it.

    I hope the writers will go a little softer in Discovery Season 5, giving it room to breathe. I look forward to seeing what they do.

    I love Discovery and I’ve enjoyed Picard and Prodigy, but Strange New Worlds feels like nostalgic Trek in a way that of the new shows, only Lower Decks does. I’m happy to have such an embarrassment of Star Trek riches. 🖖🏻📺

    “Other people are… challenging for me.” La’an is the new Data, pass it on. #StarTrek #StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds #StarTrekSNW 🖖🏻

    Screw General Order 1? SCREW GENERAL ORDER 1?! 😍 #StarTrek #StarTrekStrangeNewWorlds #StarTrekSNW 🖖🏻📺

    Now I’m only halfway through the Strange New Worlds pilot but the Kilean makeup looks to me nearly identical to vampires on BtVS. 🖖🏻📺

    Anybody else assume based on TNG that Picard & Guinan had a friends with benefits situation? 🖖🏻

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