I found a copy at a yard sale and figured I might as well, since I've been doing Trek stuff for the past couple of days. I was surprised - this wasa a good movie. I wouldn't have felt like I got cheated out of twenty bucks to have bought a DVD new, or for a movie ticket and a "small" (read, 32oz.) soda. Why can't they make movies that make me feel like this anymore?
Why can't they put in a female character like Lily Sloane, Cochrane's chief assistant, materials scavenger, and intended copilot, who picks up a gun to defend their work from invaders, quietly and effectively gets free from the people who have (as she sees it) captured her, and after getting filled in on the actual situation walks into Picard's ready room and gives him a reaming for being a stubborn, obsessed jerk and pulls his head out of his ass, and yet is never "a strong woman defying the patriarchy" or whatever, just being a strong character who fills a critical role in the plot? Deanna Troi, having put up with Cochrane's off-camera but implied to be half-socialized-geek level attempts at flirting and gotten drunk enough that she passes out after tagging Riker in to try to get him to try to convince him to do his test flight as planned, doesn't come off as a "weak woman conforming to outdated role expectations" either, for that matter. And Bev Crusher is a consummate professional who shepherds her team to safety with the Borg overrunning the Enterprise having literally beaten down the door to Sickbay, and still worries about the somewhat hostile local they picked up earlier when she realizes she's gone missing, again with no gender politics involved. Truly, the future is a different time... except the movie is over twenty years old, so why does it come off with a better representation of female characters than the supposedly pro-feminist "triumphs" of the past two or three, that seem to only be able to make their ladies look good by turning the men into incompetent buffoons? Eh, but that's not what I wanted to talk about.
This is about First Contact! So-- the starship battle in the first act! That was great! It's only relevant to set up the rest of the movie and confirm that Picard does have a point when he says he has knowledge that makes him the best man to fight the Borg, while at the same time that he's really not in a very good place to do so from a personal standpoint as the film goes on to further explore. Heck, despite knowing Data is in the rest of the TNG movies and has some kind of major role in the upcoming Picard series, despite even having watched documentaries about making the effects for the movie's climax that mentioned the broad details of the ending, there was some real tension in the final act as he seemed to have been won over to the Borg's side.
I wasn't even annoyed by the rock-song insert of Magic Carpet Ride during the Phoenix's launch sequence, and was disappointed when Party Pooper Number One asked him to turn it down and Cochrane shut off his music player. I don't even resent the movie Jossing the old FASAtrek and novel assertion that Zeyafram Co'achran was actually an Alpha Centauran human, because this version was just so much fun, even if he is a drunken ass and had the odd idea that spending years of effort and all the resources he could convince an apparently rather large group to scrounge to build an FTL rocket would somehow let him retire to a life of wealth and leisure on a tropical island full of nubile women, instead of building a comfortable settlement and machines to make widgets even barely-above-post-apocalypse level WWIII survivors would want enough to trade goods and services for. He'd hardly be the first inventor to have an over-inflated idea of the results of demonstrating a successful prototype, I guess, but still.
Oddly enough, it didn't fuel my desire to get back to working on my own ship models again though, and I didn't even notice the Akira making her screen debut despite having thought to look for her in the battle sequence. Ah well, I don't mind the thought of watching it again, and that's something I haven't been able to say about a movie since Revenge of the Sith stole two precious hours I could have been reading fanfic or watching cat videos. I got Insurrection and the last two seasons of Depp Space 9 at the same place and have had the Star Trek Continues playlist open on YouTube for months, so there should be plenty of other inspiration to be found.
When I checked my email after getting home from work tonight I found a dozen messages sent to me by the board software at around 4 PM local time. I won't go into detail, but it looks like someone tried to use a buffer overrun exploit to crack into the board. I do not think they succeeded, although my downloaded backup of the board was unusually large, and when I'm done with other tasks I will be looking into its contents to see what made the size jump.
In any case, I was overdue on a MyBB software update, so I decided to do it right freaking now. That was the 15 minute timeout. I threw up a warning in a banner for 10 minutes and even locked the board before I started, but apparently someone still tried to use the forums as I upgraded; sorry about that.
I'm more than moderately peeved that I have to turn off my adblocker to log in to the forums.
I had a long-winded post here detailing the problems I've been having trying to log in and requesting help. As I was typing up the list of things I'd tried, it occurred to me that the one thing I hadn't was turning off adblocking.
"Surely that can't be it," I thought. And surely enough, I was wrong.
reCAPTCHA doesn't work if you're blocking ads. Frankly I'm not sure it works anyway -- I'm still unable to log in, but at least now I get the captcha popup and the message is that I need to wait since I've failed login too many times rather than that I need to solve the nonexistent captcha -- but, progress, I suppose.
Also: the board can't seem to email me, or at least, I haven't received any email (yes, I've checked, the address is correct; no, it's not going to spam). Which makes the "forgot password" link rather useless.
Unless THAT's blocked by adblockers too, which would be silly(-ier).
Edit to add: I'm logged-in right now because my old computer, which the IT dept wants to take away Real Soon Now, has my login cached. On my new computer I can't log in. I don't know how much longer I'll have this one, hence my original reason for posting.
Edit the second: it looks like the reCAPTCHA is just borked. I've waited for the timeout period and now it won't pop at all, and the forgot password bit *also* wants me to prove I'm not a robot (and won't pop the captcha either). I've turned off the adblocker, javascript is enabled, I don't know what else I can do on my end.
At a speech on Tuesday, one of the Presidential seals displayed behind Trump had been modified to have a two-headed Russian eagle holding golf clubs, with "45 is a puppet" in Spanish instead of "E pluribus unum" for the motto.
Level 50 Natural Brute Primary Power Set: Savage Melee Secondary Power Set: Willpower Power Pool: Speed Power Pool: Fighting Power Pool: Teleportation Ancillary Pool: Mu Mastery
Villain Profile: Level 1:Maiming Slash
(A) Superior Blistering Cold - Recharge/Chance for Hold
(3) Superior Blistering Cold - Damage/Endurance/Accuracy/RechargeTime
(7) Superior Blistering Cold - Accuracy/Damage/Recharge
(37) Superior Blistering Cold - Accuracy/Damage/Endurance
If any of you are curious about what the hell is happening in Puerto Rico, here is a quick synopsis of the serious injustice and corruption. A couple of weeks back, details of a group chat between the governor of Puerto Rico (Ricardo Roselló), some of his allies and members of his administration were leaked. Some embarrassing stuff was revealed. A day or so later, the FBI implicated his former Secretary of Education, members of his administration and private contractors in schemes to influence the allocation of federal contracts to politically connected consultants and money laundering among other charges. This is just the beginning, get your popcorn ready
At the end of the week nearly 900 pages of screenshots of the group chat were revealed by the Puerto Rico Center for Investigative Journalism. This chat includes all manner of misogyny, homophobia, jokes about killing political enemies, threatening journalists, sharing confidential state info with lobbyists who were in the chat and stood to possibly benefit. But the most disgusting part of these chats was when the CFO joked about allowing vultures to feed off dead bodies from Hurricane Maria as a way to help with cleanup.
As a point of reference, Maria was a Hurricane Katrina level event that took place on a 100 x 35 mile island so you can’t just get your shit and drive inland to escape the damage. Both were Category 5 storms for which government agencies were ill prepared and handled poorly in their aftermath. Bodies piled up in morgues across the island following Maria, bodies the administration refused to acknowledge. 4,600 people died as a result and alleged leaders were joking about the deaths of our fellow citizens.
Our people deserve better leadership than this.
Across the island, people are protesting and demanding the resignation of the governor. Puerto Ricans have gathered in NYC, DC, Miami, Chicago, Orlando, Madrid, even Austria (I know, right?!?!) insisting that he step down. He doesn’t even have the support of his party anymore. The people are fed up, the group chat was the final straw. It’s time to go, Ricky.
This photo was taken earlier today (day ten of the protests) at Las America’s Avenue which at this point is six lanes wide:
