3D Printing

As I've mentioned on my RPG blog, a couple of months ago I got a 3D printer.  While I've mostly been using it for D&D stuff, I thought I'd post some pictures here of some of the non-D&D things I've printed.

Build-A-Viper Kit

Build-an-Enterprise Kit

Pencil Holder

2 Sizes of Grogu

My Desk

Medusa Pendant

Samus Aran - Still needs some touch ups.

Life is Strange characters

Life is Strange pendants

Life is Strange fridge magnet - 3D printed the figures, cast in resin in a pickle jar lid.

Life is Strange fridge magnet

Ranking the Star Trek Films

I saw some people were ranking the Star Trek films, so I thought I'd join in the fun.  I have a hard time ranking anything that's covers such a long span of time, because I have to weigh sentimentality versus rewatchability.  Plus some of the movies are wildly different genres, so it's like comparing apples and oranges.  But this is as close as I can get:

1) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
2) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
3) Star Trek: First Contact
4) Galaxy Quest
5) Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
6) Star Trek (2009)
7) Star Trek: Generations
8) Star Trek Into Darkness
9) Star Trek III: The Search for Spock
10) Star Trek V: The Final Frontier
11) Star Trek: The Motion Picture
12) Star Trek Beyond
13) Star Trek: Nemesis
14) Star Trek: Insurrection

So, some specifics:

1) Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - This one gets the gold because it ranks high on both sentimentality and rewatchability.  It has good pacing, it's quotable, and it stands the test of time.  Khan is still one of the best villains of any franchise.

2) Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Star Trek struggles on the big screen, because the TV's tone and pace don't always translate into blockbuster films.  Some Star Trek films add more action, some add higher stakes drama, but Star Trek IV leaned heavy into comedy.  And somehow, it worked.

3) Star Trek: First Contact - This one might be personal bias.  I was a latecomer to Star Trek, so Next Generation is my favorite series.  This is the best of the NextGen films, and features the best of NextGen's villains, the Borg. 

4) Galaxy Quest - Yeah, the fourth best Star Trek film isn't a Star Trek film, bite me.  But it does a stellar job as both a parody and an homage, making fun of Trek and its fans without being cruel.

5) Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country - Just a good, solid movie.  This one is special to me because it's the first Star Trek film I saw in the theater after becoming a Trekkie.  (I had seen first two movies in the theater as a kid, but I didn't like Star Trek then.)

6) Star Trek (2009) - A few years ago I saw Marina Sirtis and Michael Dorn at a comic convention.  Somebody asked them how they felt about the reboot movies.  They weren't fans.  They said that the TV shows usually have some sort of message, but that the movies were just flashy action with no message.  I agree, but I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing.  The 2009 reboot is sleek and shiny, and not nearly as deep as the TV shows, but it does its job well.  It shows us that Star Trek movies can be summer blockbusters with broader appeal, as long as they abandon what Star Trek was all about in the first place.  I think there's a place in this world for both styles of Star Trek.

7) Star Trek: Generations - This one's just fanservice, but that's okay.  Star Trek fans are often the type of people who enjoy fanservice the most.  I'm pulling this statistic out of my ass, but there was a time when 90% of Star Trek fanfiction involved crossovers with other TV shows.  (I'm almost embarrassed to admit that I had a Star Trek / X-Men comic book.)  So having the generations meet was a no-brainer.  It's not a great movie, but it was a fun way to pass the theatrical torch.

8) Star Trek Into Darkness - A lot of people don't like this one, due to the clumsy handling of its fanservice.  They're not wrong.  It wasn't the best way to reintroduce Khan.  But if you get past that (and some other minor nitpicks), it's a fun movie.  Cumberbatch is a terrific villain no matter what you call him, and overall it's a decent film as long as you don't think about how it relates to the rest of the Star Trek franchise.

9) Star Trek III: The Search for Spock - First off, let me just say that there isn't a single Star Trek film I hate.  But around here is where my list goes from "fun to watch on a Friday night with a big tub of popcorn" to "I would leave it on as background noise while I play Sims 4 on my laptop."  Search for Spock is a utilitarian movie.  It does a serviceable job of tying up the loose ends from Star Trek II, but it doesn't do much else for me.  I do like Christopher Lloyd as a Klingon, though.

10) Star Trek V: The Final Frontier - I have to say, "What would God need with a starship?" is one of my favorite lines in a Star Trek movie.  Beyond that, there's just not much here to write home about.

11) Star Trek: The Motion Picture - I vaguely remember seeing this in the theater (I was six) and being bored.  I watched it again when I was seventeen, and it was still pretty boring, but I can imagine how cool it might have been to a Star Trek fan.  People who loved the original series, and were then starved for ten years, only to see it return on the big screen with more expensive special effects - it had to be an experience.  I like the twist - that V'ger is Voyager - but beyond that it's a slog.

12) Star Trek Beyond - I saw it once in the theater and forgot about it.  I remember some of the imagery, but I actually had to go to Wikipedia to be reminded of the plot.  And wow, it turns out I remember even less than I thought.  I do remember having fun, but it obviously isn't the most memorable movie.

13) Star Trek: Nemesis - Honestly I barely remember this movie at all.  I didn't hate it, but there just wasn't much to love.  I remember reading at the time that it was written by a Star Trek fan, who was trying to give Picard an arch enemy as compelling as Khan.  If they were going to emulate Khan, they should have used an enemy from the NextGen series, someone who has an established reason to hate Picard.  For example, Gul Madred from "Chain of Command". 

14) Star Trek: Insurrection - And finally, we have the reason you shouldn't use TV plots for movie scripts.  Insurrection is a perfectly fine story.  It feels like a dozen other episodes of the NextGen TV series.  But that's all.  I came out of it feeling like I'd just spent $20 to see something I could have seen on TV.  If it had actually been shown as an episode of the series, it would have been a decent episode.  But there was just nothing theatrical about it, nothing that warranted a big screen budget or leaving the house.  But it also proves that even the worst Star Trek movie is still a pretty good time.

Do Transporters Kill You And Copy You?

Every once in a while, I come across a website that talks about the way Star Trek (and some other misc sci-fi) transporters work. They often conclude that transporters actually work by disintegrating you, then making an exact copy at the destination. Which of course brings up a thousand other questions. If it were so easy to copy a person, why would people have to die at all? Why not just backup all your crew members every day like you do with any other data? Even disease, lost limbs, etc, could be cured through transporter use. Why kill the original crew member? Why not just send down a copy, have him complete the mission, then disintegrate him, without ever disintegrating the original on the ship?

Here's my opinion. Mind you, this explanation is silly and unscientific, but no more so than most Star Trek technology. Basically, in the Star Trek universe, they have discovered how to convert matter into energy and vice versa. The reason they aren't killing you is because it's the same energy particles being converted back into matter. So first the transporter changes you into energy particles, atom by atom. Then those particles are shot to another location (much like a phaser shoots a beam of energy), then those same particles are converted back into matter, atom by atom. If someone simply recorded your transporter pattern and made another you using any old energy, that would be a copy. But since it's the same particles being temporarily transformed from one state to another and back, it's still you.

This is supported a little bit by the fact that you can't beam through shields. You can still send data through shields; enemy ships often communicate with each other. If a transporter pattern were just normal data, you could send it to the other ship just like you send a communication signal. You can't shoot phasers through shields either. So, maybe transporters work more like phasers than communicators, in that they fire energy rather than just data.

In a few episodes, the crew members mention experiences they've had during transport. There was an early TNG episode where they did a "near-warp tranpsort", and a crew member mentioned feeling like they were in a nearby wall for a second. A much later episode had Barclay wrestling with monsters in the transporter stream. While these are some of the sillier examples of the way the writers have abused the technology, they do support the idea that the energy particles themselves are still alive and retain some aspect of the matter converted.

Also, they often beam straight to a remote location (rather than another transporter pad). To me, this means that when they start the conversion process, the conversion back is inevitable. Meaning, your body is turned into energy particles that are only meant to stay energy particles for a few seconds before they turn back. So it is your actual pattern being sent across space, not just data waiting to be reconverted from random energy particles at the destination.

Admittedly, one thing that doesn't fit is Thomas Riker. If they'd established that one was "real" and one was a copy, I'd be fine. But they seem to imply that both are 100% Riker. When they boosted the signal that split his pattern, they were adding non-Riker particles to the Riker particles, which means that either one is made from pure non-Riker energy, or each of them is now only x% Riker. Though perhaps, every time someone is transported, a few atoms are lost and replaced with those from random energy. But since your body replaces cells all the time anyway, it's no big loss. So right after the accident, both Rikers were only 50% Riker (more or less) for a while. But ever since then their bodies have been replacing their own skin cells, so the now each of them is closer to being 100% real.

Again, I admit this is all Insane Troll Logic. But to me it makes more sense than the Federation routinely using a system that involves killing people and copying them.

Star Trek Origins: Enterprise

(a.k.a. Lens Flare: The Motion Picture)

This weekend KJ and I saw Star Trek, and we both loved it.

As much as I love nearly all versions of Star Trek, I agree with J. J. Abrams that it was greatly in need of a reboot. But given the nature of Star Trek fans, I was afraid that such an endeavor would be doomed to failure. No, not because it was an odd-numbered Star Trek film (besides, this is zero, not eleven). It's just that sci-fi fanboys love to hate things... I've often said that the difference between a sci-fi fan and a regular person is that the regular person enjoys sci-fi.

The worst is that continuity-obsessed Trekkies insist on incorporating the silliness of the 60's series with the more modern productions. Look, nothing against the original series. It was ground-breaking and ahead of its time. But for me, Star Trek started with Next Gen. When the last TV series, "Enterprise" hit the air, gazillions of fans were livid, because they felt it screwed up the original series continuity. They were wrong, of course, for three reasons:

1. The show made great efforts to explain continuity. Especially in the final season, where they even explained the Klingon head-bumps thing.

2. The Original Series, revolutionary though it was, was full of continuity errors of its own. Not their fault, they just didn't know it was going to take off, so they didn't bother keeping track of everything. But in any event, I prefer to think of the OS as a retelling of events, like a holodeck recreation based on the captain's logs, rather than a perfect video of the story.

3. Enterprise takes place first, so anything it says takes precedence over the original series. It's also 1000 times better, so again it takes precedence over the original series. So if there's any continuity discrepencies between the two, Enterprise automatically wins, and the OS can suck it. My blog, my logic, so there.

I loved Enterprise (well, except for the Xindi season), so it pisses me off to no end that people who consider themselves Trekkies wouldn't even give it a chance. I feel a bit vindicated by the fact that there's an Enterprise reference in the new movie.

So some people will hate the new Star Trek movie no matter what, but I think it will please everyone who is actually capable of being pleased. I'll try to say this without spoilers, but they managed to both break continuity while maintaining continuity, in a way that should please both newcomers and life-long Trekkers. KJ, who knows the Original Series much better than I do, spent the first half of the movie counting the "mistakes" where it didn't agree with the 60's. But thanks to a bit of time-travel and its butterfly effect, every difference is explainable. At the end - okay, I can't avoid spoilers - it's a given that the entire TV series would have been affected in subtle ways... I can't wait to re-watch the DVDs and see if anything's changed. ;)

The casting is spot-on. My favorite was Simon Pegg as Scotty, though I wish he'd had more screen time.

Well, there was a bit of unevenness, IMO, in that some of the players seemed to be trying new takes on their characters, while others were trying to emulate the originals as much as possible, almost to the point of parody. For example, McCoy sometimes seemed like the actor was doing a comedic impression of the original character, while Sulu didn't even attempt to lower his voice. There were a few times when it felt like a bunch of fans playing dress-up for a convention, but most of the time I was able to lose myself in the movie.

I was afraid Kirk would be written as a total badass, someone who can accomplish anything just because he's the goddamn Kirk. But while he does have the "Never give up, never surrender" attitude parodied in Galaxy Quest, he actually gets his ass kicked in most of his fights.

This movie is a bit less family-friendly than previous Treks, but it was time. The squeaky-clean attitude was holding them back, and keeping them from being able to compete with stuff like Battlestar Galactica. To be honest, I've always preferred optimistic futures (like Star Trek) to pessimistic (post-apocalyptic, etc) sci-fi. Mainly because I like to believe that while humankind will always have conflict, overall things will get better and better. Otherwise, what's the point? Shows like the new Battlestar just depress me. But even so, Trek has usually been a little too clean. I think the new movie represents the best balance so far.

I really hope this takes off, and gets lots of sequels. I wish the movie was the pilot for a new TV series, which rewrites the original continuity. But I seriously doubt that's a possibility. Oh well, I'll take this new Trek however I can get it.

Abrams buffs: In addition to the standard Slusho reference, there's also a creature that, while not exactly like the Cloverfield monster, at least looks like it belongs in the same universe. And a question... I've never watched Lost. Is Abrams always so obsessed with lensflare? Every computer, every star, anything with light, makes bright streaks across most of the movie. It's pretty, but it gets a bit distracting after a while.