Procrastination with Pointy Ears
Star Trek – the 2009 version – turned into a large image. I used this software that did the hard work.
Pete Hindle
Pictures and stuff from a guy who likes coffee.
Tag: star trek
May 13, 2009
Nerd Night: Reboot to Win, or how the Geek Genre took over the Blockbuster
This is a piece written for Kino Bambino, a local zine run by film fans in Newcastle. You’ll be able to pick up a copy from the Star and Shadow, amongst other places, from 14/05/2009 onwards.
Have you noticed a trend with summer blockbusters? I have. They like to take a well-known nerdy book, film, or TV show, and make a new, shiny version of it. Currently, we can see this happening to the Star Trek universe, which has been operating since the sixties as a sort of Rosetta Stone of sci-fi TV.
The earliest forms of Star Trek were glorious technicolor slices of cheese; later versions of the show have a sort of po-faced seriousness that scared off sane people from watching anything like it. In a sort of no-man’s land there were an increasingly cheap series of films that never got any better than Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn, despite going all the way up to Star Trek X. I’ve seen all of them, and I can hardly remember what happens in Star Trek X (‘Data dies’ is all I can remember from that 90 minutes of my life.)
And this summer, we get what they are calling a ‘reboot’ of the franchise. Why? Well, Star Trek is just too big a money-spinner for Hollywood to ignore. The last TV version of Star Trek was so dull that nobody watched it, so a big-screen re-imagining lets the suits play merry hell with the existing universe of Trek – which is no bad thing.
Star Trek’s universe was reliant upon the idea of evil aliens being bastards to us poor benighted citizens of the universe. This is dumb, and ignores practically 90% of plot-lines. Where are the evil humans trying to take things over? As a race, we practically live for taking things over, and we’ve thrown up some of the most evil bastards ever. When you combine the two (Jeffery Archer, I’m looking at you here) you get great plotlines, which make for great movies.
The new Star Trek is about making the original series sexy again, the same way that Planet of the Apes got made over, the same way that GI Joe is getting a tummy-tuck and boob job later this summer, and the same way that Star Wars got botoxed to within an inch of it’s life in 2004. But the sad part is, it doesn’t make any difference.
Star Trek doesn’t need any new fans; people dress up like Klingons at the weekend anyway, so it’s a fair bet that they’ll spend a fortune on anything with the prefix ‘Star Trek’. The reason that the franchise got rebooted is so that your mum knows what’s on at the cinema, and that’s because the economics of modern Hollywood means crushing as many people into the stalls as possible. And everybody has a slight fondness for Trek, somewhere, even if it’s just Spock and his neck pinching.
But it’s not your mum that’s going to watch the film four times and then go home and Facebook his mates about how great it was; it’s your average nerd who’ll be proletising this new Star Trek. Anything with an inbuilt fan-base that loves it already is going to get picked up by Hollywood over the next half-decade, and then flogged to within an inch of it’s life as the moguls seek to earn some money.
So stand by for a flood of films that have your less sociable friends grabbing their coats and heading out: later this year, Maurice Sendak’s ten-sentence children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” will make a splash. We’ll also see more Harry Potter and Transformers, and a sequel to horny-but-celibate vampire movie Twilight. As long as you’re not looking for something original, there’s plenty of geeking out that can be done at the cinema.
February 21, 2008
Internet Funnies: Or; Please Smile Through this Period of Change
I like the internet. Currently, it would be fair to say that I like the internet more than the work I’m supposed to be doing. Which, by the way, is an annoying piece of text to say that I’m the best person in the world to give AHRC funding to. I mentioned to my mother that I was writing the application, and that I wished they could just look me up in the big database of excellent people, and she emailed me back –
… there’s something wrong with the database. When asked to sort on the excellence indicator, the database somehow does not come up with H’s. It must be written in Microsoft Access.
That’s right; my mum makes database jokes. That makes her 100% cooler than your mum. However, she’s not as cool as Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, who taught himself to speak after a terrible illness. And he wrote this, after some poor schmuck got fired for posting up a Dilbert strip at his work. Which is a great way to reward his faithful readers, even if the guy in question might have preferred some cash.
Thank god the internet isn’t just a balls-to-the-wall whose-the-coolest competition. I’d lose. In these days of constant distraction it seems the internet is usually best at meme creation, which leads me Colin’s Bear:
Colin’s Bear is something that is so far from the norm that you have to laugh. And then click the button for ‘replay’. But wtf is going on? Waxy.org’s founder went and found out for us, so we didn’t have to. Phew. Other places to find internet memes are sites like ytmnd.com, which I’ve stopped looking at, Digg.com which I only look at when I’m trying to avoid doing work, and the amazing icanhascheezburger.com.
Strictly speaking, icanhascheezburger only documents the lolcat phenomenon of late 2007/early 2008. Lolcats are something you should get if I regard you as a friend, but I do know at least two extremely intelligent people who are not moved by them. I don’t hold it against them, it’s probably something like colourblindness. But with cats. Let’s test you, huh?
Did you laugh? If you find the use of incorrect spelling funny when juxtaposed with the unusual picture of a cat, then you might be interested in this picture, which is a more typical picture of a ‘lolcat’ -
The use of language to present itself as something a bit stupid, but actually using sophisticated humour, can be extended indefinitely. There exist a large number of lolcat spin-off’s, including lolpresident, the deeply nerdy lolthulhu, and loltrek. Loltrek is great, and it really tickles my funnybone to see original series Star Trek anyway, so this is a highlight of internet humour for me. Loltrek also links to Anil Dash’s scholarly interpretation of the lolcat meme, which brings us back to where we came in – academia.
So let’s talk Trek instead. Some people like to accuse me of being a ‘trekkie’, which is to say, a huge fan of Star Trek. Actually, I’m a huge sci-fi fan, and I don’t like reading books unless it has a spaceship on the front. Or nanotechnology. Or giant robots. Hell, I’d read a book which just had those things on the front, even if it was a romance. But I do know the plotlines to most of the Star Trek episodes from the 1990′s, as they were some of the only science fiction that was on during the daytime. And I do love science fiction.
I don’t, however, love Star Trek’s stupid ideas of peace and love in the future. I recently read that The Next Generation was pretty much California in space, as everybody got on really well and was totally fine with talking out any problems. Obviously a big fat load of hairy space bollocks dreamed up by Americans befuddled by enormous sections of food. Which is why I was so happy to find that somebody had dubbed over sections of Star Trek California really, really carefully with the effect of turning the crew into potty-mouthed, food-obsessed sex-fiends.
At the moment, I don’t have any TV. The flatmate who had the television addiction (Eastenders, Hollyoaks, and other mindless rot) moved out, taking her cable subscription with her. We then found out that the ariel socket in the living room is not connected to an ariel, it’s just a hole in the wall. So, as a household, we just stopped watching television, which is not a great loss as the BBC seems to be devoted to only making one good serial per year, which function at a level of lowest common denominator.
(Translation: the new Doctor Who show is facile crap. And Torchwood is utterly pointless – read the reviews.)
This has turned into a massive post, and I hope it’s managed to tickle your funnybone a bit. I didn’t have time to mention this picture, which I should have, or the song ‘Re: Your Brains“, but I’ll leave you with somebody who regularly posts up a computer game review. Check it out:
I’m off to watch his most recent effort at Escapist Magazine, even though I only play about four computer games a month. After that, I’m going to sneak back into bed and pretend that I just popped out to get another pillow, not write an enormous blogpost that rambled on for ages.
