This Super Bowl XL This House is a 'Hawks House

On the night of February 2 2014, Ocean the Wiggle Cat decided she'd had enough of watching the Seattle Seahawks blowing out the rancid Denver Broncos to the tune of 43-8, so she hurried into the cat cave to nest and give birth to six Seahawks kittehs.

Five of them moved on to other homes through adoption, and here's hoping they are still alive and still rooting for the team they first saw winning the Super Bowl.

As for Mal the Krazy Kat, who remains here waiting for this coming Sunday matchup between his beloved Seahawks and THE EVIL EMPIRE PATRIOTS?

This house is a 'Hawks House this weekend, kiddos. 12TH CAT UP.

Next week we're back to plotting out Tampa Bay Bucs draft options.

Update: YAS, Mal's team won!

...

Whadda ya mean, they don't make cat merch for Super Bowls???

Anniversary: Being Witty Librarian Online

So near around my birthday back in 2004, I spotted a PC game box on the shelf that had a bunch of superhero characters on it and asked the store clerk "What was this all about?"

That, said the clerk, was one of the newest Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) games called City of Heroes.

I knew what MMOs were. Up until then, they tended to be fantasy-based like Everquest or Runescape, and I wasn't too enthralled about them. I was more into science fiction than fantasy, and more into comic books than either at the time.

Having a superhero based online game was tempting to pass up, though. So I bought it.

And... got addicted to it.

Welcome, to Paragon City!
Don't mind the Level 1s...

Part of it was the gameplay: Relatively simple compared to other MMOs of the time, with different means of crafting boosts (enhancements) to give your character more power and durability in battle. Another part was the roleplay:  A healthy mix of different (Arche)Types to roll made mixing and matching powersets reasonably fun and gave you a chance to build different ATs to test which ones - Blaster (Ranged Damage), Controller (Holders), Defender (Healers), Scrapper (Melee Damage), or Tanker (Meat Shield) - worked best for you.

One of the things about being into superheroes was being into the set universe - DC, Marvel, other - that allowed for fans' imaginations about being a hero in that 'verse. While CoH was its own franchise - and indeed ran into issues stopping players from rolling trademarked builds - fans still have in their heads a stable - entire teams worth - of different types of heroes they'd like to be.

It was common for players to roll multiple alts. The game gave you 10 slots per page (and a ton of pages) to fill, and people would just get about 50 or 60 of them built before maxing any of their levels up (first to 40, then to 50). Altitis (altoholism) is a thing, and CoH contributed to it. New ATs like Brutes, Corruptors, Dominators, Masterminds, and Stalkers added even more addictive appeal.

Say hello to Witty Librarian, on the Homecoming's Excelsior server!

When I first got the game in 2004, it had just finished its Beta testing phase and was actually two-three weeks into gaming. I stumbled around on the various servers before settling on Champion server where I was able to meet people who were willing to team up. One of the things about leveling in-game is that you have to run missions, sometimes story arcs provided by NPC contacts, or Task Forces that doled out bigger item drops. So there's a lot of PvE (teaming) involved. Finding an active Supergroup - think Avengers/Justice League - was a must.

(In terms of PvP - player vs. player - City of Heroes attempted that by adding a new side City of Villains and then created Arenas and shared Hazard Zones where PvP would happen. Two things happened: 1) The developers brought it in too late and the PvP fans weren't interested in the game and 2) Too many people had gotten into the teaming part of CoH/V to where they didn't want to play against each other, so the PvP aspect remains minor)

Soling this mob at Level 8 in Perez Park would be a mess. Find a team first!

Thing about the game, certain ATs played better early on that others. Blasters (think Superman's heat vision or Iron Man's repulsors) were extremely popular early because they were easy to figure out and doled out the most damage. Later updates (Issues) began nerfing or boosting other ATs to where Tankers (think the Hulk) became the preferred type to roll. There was an epic nerfing of armors in Issues 5 and 6 that almost killed the whole game, but the players tolerated it as later Issues course-corrected those mistakes and allowed the game to be more fun.

As I said, Tanker became very popular, to the point where it's one of the often-seen builds in the game. A group in one of the servers began hosting Tanker Tuesdays on a weekly basis, which quickly built a following and a good way to find people to team with on other days of the week. Up above is one of my many Alts, Witty Tanker. Yes, there is a theme. Gamers will tend to name alts after a common nickname/identity. My in-game nickname is Witty, short for Witty Librarian, and so I've rolled numerous Alts with Witty in the name.

You'd be amazed how quickly names can go in-game. When murder hornets hit the newswire late April 2020, I immediately logged in and created a Murder Hornet alt. Within minutes of my doing that, I started receiving in-game text messages from angry players that I had gotten to it first.

Time to GO HUNT, KILL SKULS before there are any
DUPING RARES.

All those screenshots are from last night's Tuesday Tanker run (missions team running high-level door missions to help lower-level builds that are SideKicked can get better XP to level). You can see a lot of different uniforms and costume styles, part of the CoH allure. City of Heroes gained a reputation for one of the most diverse and colorful costuming among all the MMOs - better than Warcraft - and allowed for even more Alts to get built around themed costume designs.

And THAT is what it looks like when your Alt hits a new level up!

Oh no, the abandoned mine map! Veterans of the game
aren't a fan of these (too narrow, and one map has a nasty room
we called the Layer Cake).

While it was fun to play - and needed a few months here and there to step away to keep from getting too addictive - it all came to an end when the game's owner NCSoft decided to end it (in spite of its popularity in the US and Europe, the South Korean company never understood the appeal and wanted to expand newer franchises) by 2012. The outrage back then was intense, even from non-players. Attempts were made to buy up the rights, but they all fell through, and it all ended with fans standing in Atlas Park holding up torches in remembrance.

The Last Night in Paragon City 
November 30, 2012

Except...

A number of gamer fans had gained access to the base code, and had begun underground servers to maintain and keep a core set of players going. Due to the illegality of it - NCSoft still owned the rights - they kept it hush-hush as much as possible, inviting back players they knew would keep their damn mouths shut.

(Glances about) (whispers) I got invited to the secret server around 2018.

Until 2019, when someone finally blabbed on a public forum, due to concerns that the game code contained the personal information of those who had paid to play between 2004 through 2012 (some MMOs required full registration for full access, some offer limited access for free, and CoH had both). Immediately, hundreds of thousands clamored to get back on the game, even with the pending legal battle that NCSoft was sure to unleash.

Except...

NCSoft decided not to pursue the matter as long as none of the server providers required people to pay (they could donate monthly to help pay for server space/office bills instead). Someone must have explained to the bosses that this was an audience that could - and would - pay down the line if they ever brought it back as a fee-based MMO.

A number of alternative CoH sites sprang up, with Homecoming - formed by the people who ran the secret server - gaining a sizable advantage. Homecoming also made back-room discussions with NCSoft to be the official provider, with all of the talks wrapping up this past January to where the game is officially back.

Whether they will convert the current setup to a pay-to-play model - which could reduce the number of active Alts and the ability to build post-50 Veteran-level Alts - remains to be seen. In the meantime, there are nights when multiple servers on Homecoming are packed, there is ongoing interest in playing the game, and demand for new power sets for more Alts remains constant.

So I may have my Shardtobers back after all! If I can convince people that the gameplay's improved to where we can run those Task Forces in under two hours now.

Witty Librarian in figurine!

And don't even get me started on all the Badge Hunting that happens in-game...

Anniversary Again: My First Full-Time Job

It's now been thirty years since I started my first full-time job as a librarian.

I wrote this ten years ago for my twentieth anniversary: 

I had a part-time Library Adjunct position at the St. Pete Junior College Clearwater campus off Drew St. at the time.  It was nice, working the reference desk, helping students get on the CD-ROM databases and look for books in the two-story building.  I had just gotten my Masters degree in Library and Info Sciences at University of South Florida (GO BULLS) and was hoping to find a full-time spot at an academic-level library.

While it wasn't an academic library, I got a call from Broward County Libraries to interview.  The county system was this large, spread-out system that used regional libraries as nexus points for the smaller community libraries that dotted the packed urban/suburban landscape.  They were going with a novel idea at the time of sharing the large regional libraries with the Broward community college campuses.  They were building a brand new building for the BCC North Campus, and needed full-time staff to cover the expanding Reference desk (BCC provided two existing librarians to staff the desk as well)...

There was the rush of driving around the county with dad to find an apartment complex I could rent out within a month.  There was the hassle of figuring out what to pack and carry down.  There was the confusion of figuring out which roads to take and which led to nowhere (if Broward County had one thing going for it, it was that most of the roads were in a grid pattern: figuring out intersections became the easiest thing to do).

And then it was May.  My parents helped me move down from Pinellas County.  May 8th was my birthday (and also Mother's Day, which we celebrated at a nice restaurant, I forget where now) that Sunday.  I was twenty-four years old.  And then Monday May 9th I started my first full-time job at North Regional Library...

In those thirty years since, I'd learned a lot about being a reference librarian, and then the technology training aspects of it as our public services switched from finding things to helping patrons figure out their emails and smartphones.

When I wrote the 20-year remembrance, I had just been hired by Bartow Library after a four-year stint on unemployment. I had hoped then to make it a steady career when I got there, as the upheavals of going from Broward County to University of Florida to Pasco County didn't work out too well. 

I've been there now 11 years, the longest stint at one place I've done (North Regional was 6-plus years). Many of the staff who were there in 2013 when I joined have retired or moved on to other jobs. I'm the veteran of the place... which is still an unnerving sensation for me.

I still think of myself as starting out, still 24 years old, still learning the skill sets, still thinking I'm a rookie at all this librarianship when I'm really a 54-year-old survivor of the Midnight In the Garden of Good And Evil / Where The Crawdads Sing Shelf Wars.

My role as a reference librarian is coming to an end. There's little call for research assistance at the public library level when everyone can Google(tm) search it; and yet the need for experience research skills are greater because the information out there is no longer accurately vetted.

Where my expertise matter now is dealing with the adult patrons who still have tech issues and need training on the ever-changing personal devices we all have now (no jetpacks, but pocket phone cameras with computer processing power). We've gone from 3.5 inch floppies to CD-Recordable to USB flash to microSD card to straight-up wireless streaming.

We've even gone to where people would line up for hours to get on the public library computers - I can remember using clipboard sign-up sheets to manager 60-minute usage for patrons back in 1994, and people getting into fights over cutting in line - and then a ton of users getting online during the 2007-08 start of the Great Recession trying to get their unemployment benefits signed up. And then by 2015, the number of computer users just... dropping as the job market steadied, and the demand just... settled to normal.

We're still recovering from the COVID shutdown, it's been 4 years and only now have some of the Bartow regulars returned to check out books again. Sadly, some of the older ones - and our Friends volunteers - have passed on over the years. My awareness of my time as a librarian is drawing near to a close. I'm closer to my own retirement than to my own beginning...

Going Back to My Old School in 2023

I am in the midst of my National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) project. This year, instead of writing a work of fiction, I've decided to work on a nonfiction project focusing on the political ideologies - the Isms - that define the American worldview.

In order to do it, I need decent research, and the best place for nonfiction research is an academic library.

So, I took a vacation day from work to drive up to Gainesville FL and visit the University of Florida libraries - arguably atop the public university system in the state - to find what I could for references for my writing.

This was also a homecoming of sorts for me. Since this is where I went to college to study for my journalism degree from 1988 to 1992. And it was a special homecoming because the library was where I spent most of my college life.

When did they add palm trees to the Plaza of the Americas???

During my journalism classwork I worked part-time, getting employment at the library itself in their cataloging department handling the book spine labels getting printed and applied. I enjoyed working the library more than working towards that degree (it didn't help that my grades were middling, I had to take Basic Reporting twice which was not a good sign). So it shouldn't be too surprising I ended up a librarian instead of a reporter.

While I've spent most of my career as a public librarian - working at the county/city level - my dream had been to work as an academic librarian in a university system, where the research demands were more intense and challenging. And the library I wanted to work at was at UF.

And in 2003 - twenty years ago - I got my wish. I was hired on to work at Library West - the main business / humanities / political science / general academia branch - as their Evening (tech support) Librarian.

And... it didn't last. Part of it was because the building itself went into a massive expansion / renovation to improve the floor space, which sent the West staff to work in a wing of Library East where almost none of the students visited - other than to check out DVDs - and it quickly jaded my experience. Another part was that I just didn't fit in, and I ran into a personal conflict or two with fellow staffers that led the HR department to hint that I should go find work elsewhere. By the time Library West reopened, I was looking for employment back closer to my parents and friends in the Tampa area, and I left in 2006.

I'd been back up to Gainesville from time to time: Whenever brother Phil (a fellow alum) went up to see football games with his sons, I would tag along to some of them; I had visited pre-pandemic to a SwampCon and walked the campus from Reitz Union to the library and back; and had driven by on recent swing-bys when I went to Tallahassee to advocate with the Florida Library Association's lobbying every year for funds.

But this would be the first time to visit the library and campus during a school day, and it was going to be - unavoidable - a nostalgic trip back to when I was in my early 20s, and a reminder of half the regrets I carry with me.

This video was in the early Tuesday morning, which is not often the busiest class day - class cycles were Mondays-Wednesdays-maybe Fridays, or Tuesdays-Thursdays - and relatively early enough that not every student was heading to class ("Never before 11!"). This was in the Turlington Hall plaza, between the main campus buildings for Turlington (where most of the humanities/social sciences were taught) and Marston (where some sciences - especially computer tech). The Century Tower is across the street. This plaza at midday is one of the centers of student life, where odds favor you bumping into half of your friends between sessions (the Plaza of the Americas in front of the main library is next, and then Reitz Union).

You had two main methods of getting across campus back in my day: By foot or by bike. Maybe skateboarding if you were cool enough. This visit I spotted a reasonably high number of scooters, apparently the technology - and collapsible steering rods - has improved.

The library itself hadn't changed much since the 2005 renovations, although they've moved equipment rooms around, and instead of copier machines they now use scanner trays which can email PDF copies to you (no more cash or student debit cards!).

Never try to walk and use a smartphone camera while turning a corner...

The welcome desk for the staff floor. You'll still get students asking "where can I study?" while standing in front of that sign.

When they renovated, it was to install the closing - accordion-style - shelves
to expand shelving in a limited space. Even then, UF libraries has so many books
they had to split branches by subject - Arts, Music, Education, Science, Journalism - just to give the main library room for history/literature/humanities/business/social sciences.
Even with this, UF has to maintain an off-campus storage for all the other books they need to keep.

Ahh, there I am.

I had published my short story collection in 2005, and donated copies
to the library for inclusion. The natural lifespan of a book by an unknown author
in a public library could be 5-10 years. An academic library by its nature
has to hold onto books as long as possible for research needs. In 20 years, depending on the circulation, this will likely go to Off-Campus Storage... say, 2025... /sigh 

I ventured back over to Library East, which is the Special Collections building.

Used to be the Cataloging department I worked in was on the third floor. That's been taken over by the Latin American collection that used to be on fourth (it was pretty cramped up there when I left in 2006). There was an elevator for East I had to use getting work as a student labeler, but it was sooooo slow I would take that stairwell (of which I took that photo). When I was 20, I could run those stairs to third floor without a problem. At 53, old and fat, there is no fucking way
I can run those stairs again.

I wore a Nirvana shirt to signal my Gen Xness in case the graying beard and aged eyes didn't give me away.

There is a spot between Librarys West and East where a fellow could sit, either before the library opened for work, or during the day on a snack break, and it was at this spot I would rest.
If it was early enough in the morning, some of the squirrels would be brave enough to approach me and beg for the candy M&Ms I would eat. I did share, but I worry now that I gave those squirrels diabetes.

The walkway between the business classrooms that take up the original (northeast) corner of the university, going through the Plaza en route to Turlington. This was in the mid-afternoon between the final round of the day's classes. I didn't want to take pictures of it being too busy because I wanted to avoid close-ups of people who wouldn't want to get photographed by a stranger.
You might notice there's one older brick path in-between two newer paths. There were SO MANY people biking and walking this path between the major parts of campus that the grassy areas along that original path wore down into dirt. The campus HAD to expand the brick pathway to accommodate
that traffic. The benches are super-new, though (I noticed memorial nameplates on several, so it's apparently a new fund-raising gimmick for alumni).

The Plaza of the Americas is the "official" spot to hold protests and political gatherings, and they seem to have an ongoing protest by the local Jewish student groups about the kidnapped hostages in the current Hamas-Israel Gaza War. It was quiet for now, no counter-protests by the sizable Middle-Eastern / Muslim student groups that are also on-campus.
My previous experience as a student - and library staffer - was that the on-campus Jewish and Muslim groups behaved themselves (because they shared a common enemy with the frats). I dunno how they're both handling the nightmare of war in Gaza right now...

On my way back from Library West to the Visitor Garage at Reitz, back through Turlington, one last look at the infamous rock statue locally known as "The Potato" (no lie, the Pokemon Go gym spot labels itself that).
I know it looks lumpy like a potato, but c'mon people, do you notice that large bump on that one side of the rock formation? I swear that's a thumb, and the statue is really a lumpy glove. IT'S A GLOVE, PEOPLE. Why am I the only one who sees it...?

Going back to where I had been 30 - even 20 - years ago brought back a lot of quiet memories, and a lot of the regret I know I carry with me. Above all, the regret that I did myself poorly not being more social and active while a college student. I didn't do much other than be with a science fiction club that struggled to reach more students, I did nothing to find a dating life among the young women that populated half the campus, I made few friends from that time and haven't kept up much with the ones I did.

A lot of physical changes had happened to the UF Campus - and to the businesses and eateries across the street, ye Gods the Pita Pit was gone??? - but there was still a lot that reminded me of how it was when I was a young man with his whole life still ahead of him. It's just... I wish that young man enjoyed his time in that moment a lot more...

It's Been 10 Years With a Wiggle Cat

On Halloween Night in 2013, a brave little tuxedo kitten began meowing for food and love and I offered both to her.

This is Wiggle Cat. I named her Ocean because the vet nurses
felt Wiggles was too silly for her.

 

This was in 2021 when I ordered a couple of cat posts during
the pandemic. Ocean prefers napping in this one, but the tall one
at the window is great for morning suntans.

And today October 31 2023 is our tenth anniversary together, you wiggler.

Star Trek: Living In the Lower Decks

image from CBS Interactive

I once wrote about the Star Trek franchise being an optimistic, hopeful view of humanity's future (was that five years ago already? Happy 55th Anniversary then):

It spoke of the future: At a time humanity was threatened with nuclear war, environmental disaster, or worse, Trek suggested we would outgrow our worst demons and answer to the better angels of our nature, that we would achieve space flight and do so in ways that would let us explore the cosmos. That we would meet races like Vulcans and Klingons and myriad others, and that despite the differences we could blend, co-exist, share our wonder of the universe.

Star Trek is a reflection of the whole Earth: that we are a diverse species as humans, clinging to this small blue/green rock covered with air and water, facing daily challenges to survive but still looking upward and outward, dreaming up warp drives and seeking out exoplanets that might share other lifeforms. The drive to improve ourselves and improve our futures...

So that being said, another thing that science fiction geeks like to do with beloved franchises is to pull the thing apart, nitpick the errors and inaccuracies, what the literary academics like to call Deconstruction of an entire 'Verse of beliefs...

...and then put it all back together again with a sly awareness that we still enjoy the damn thing.

In the past five years or so, our entertainment media empires have exploded with content - movies, television shows, crossover materials - to fill the expansive and still-growing streaming capabilities that the Internet and high-quality video have reached this 21st Century (It's 2021, people!). Among them is/was/not sure of their current status Paramount Studios and/or the CBS network competing against the likes of Disney-Plus, which currently sits on so many franchises - Marvel, LucasFilm (Star Wars), Pixar, Disney's own empire - that Paramount/CBS had to hit back with one of the biggest franchises they own with Trek.

As a result, in the past three years they've come out with a new series ST: Discovery, followed up by a sequel/rebirth of Next Generation with the series Picard, and soon to include a reboot/prequel of the Original Series involving Captain Pike, Number One, and Spock called Strange New Worlds.

Into THAT mix of new content came an animated series fitting into the Original Timeline (yes, this is a problem with multiverses now) just after the Dominion War (ST:DS9 and ST:Voyager, also the movie ST: Nemesis) but before Picard's series. Thing is, this animated show was getting put together by people who worked Rick and Morty, a show that went out of its way to Deconstruct other shows and genres in a sometimes vicious (almost sadistic) fashion.

Star Trek: Lower Decks does indeed Deconstruct a lot of the known tropes for both science fiction and Star Trek itself... and yet for all of the gore, body horror, high-pitched screaming, and psychological trauma (not the audience, I'm talking about the in-show characters) the show is actually doing a good job of showing WHY the Trek Universe works the way it does... and why it's not a bad thing for humanity in the long run.

And it's actually a good show. Lemme get into that a little more.

The thing about space is that it's big, really big, and in that vastness of space there's millions of stars and hundreds of thousands of planets. A space that big requires a big Starfleet to explore and patrol it, meaning hundreds if not thousands of starships to trek it.

While the major shows of the Trek 'Verse either involved the crews that oversaw epic adventures (the Enterprise) or dealt with galactic crises (Deep Space Nine) or survived insane journeys (USS Voyager), there are still a lot of minor, almost common tasks that the rest of the Fleet works on. As the opening quote to Lower Decks notes:

First Contact is a delicate, high-stakes operation of diplomacy. One must be ready for anything when humanity is interacting with an alien race for the first time...

That is where the Enterprise gets involved. Alas...

But we don't do that. Our specialty is Second Contact. Still pretty important. We get all the paperwork signed, make sure we're spelling the name of the planet right, get to know all the good places to eat...

And the "we" in that opening narration is the crew of the USS Cerritos, a California-class starship that's not as glamorous as the Enterprise (the flagship of the entire Federation) or battle-tested as the Defiant, or even as quirky and durable as Voyager. Cerritos is part of one big happy Starfleet Bureaucracy, keeping up with the aftermaths of major battles and contacts and scientific findings that the major league starships resolve on a weekly basis.

The ship itself is part of a class that's easily interchangeable, one of a hundred named after small towns and cities in the state of California (a nod to the human-centric (actually American-centric) nature of Starfleet in spite of the hundreds of humanoids that make up the crews). The Cerritos is also not exactly in the best of shape, more like a 3-star hotel where the Enterprise would be a 5-star luxury resort.

And as the show highlights with most episodes, the Cerritos doesn't get any of the glamour gigs, dealing with supply runs, taxi services, minor planetary disputes, and finding out how bad the drinks are at the local Klingon coffee shop on Rigel VII. This ship is kind of like the lower deck of the Federation fleet itself.

What we get then is a show about the mundane, day-to-day activities of a large-scale employer that just happens to be a quasi-military exploration fleet that basically involves cleaning out holodecks of bio-refuse (oh yeah, the Internet of the Future is still for porn), daily maintenance checks of those sliding doors that don't magically open when they're supposed to open when you're ready to leave a room, and signing off on timesheets for the midnight shift in the astronavigation lab who really all goofed off in the bowling alley on Deck 10 instead.

You know, all the stuff that the important cast members don't have time to do because they're fighting the Borg or engaging in espionage against the Romulans or dating plasma ghosts from 19th Century Ireland. (Yes, that reference gets made in this show)

So we're stuck with the "lower deck" ensigns of Starfleet, such as Brad Boimler, an energetic newcomer out of Starfleet Academy who's a little too eager for promotion and too naïve to realize how dangerous the galaxy out there can get. Desperate for promotion, he's one of those extras you see on the bridge handing PADDs (the Tablets of the 24th Century) to another extra to make it seem like people are working.

He's been teamed up with Beckett Mariner, older and more experienced, who ought to be an officer by now except for her reckless disregard for regulations and diplomacy. Where Boimler wants to step up, Mariner wants to step out, and seems only to be in Starfleet because there's nothing else out there that gives her the opportunities to "explore new worlds" and "kick ass."

Filling in the Engineering side of things is Rutherford, a human who suffered an injury before all this and received cybernetic implants to help him function. He's the tech nerd of the group, more interested in making sure those sliding doors open properly rather than worry about a zombie infection or a bridge officer turning into a god.

Making this a four-team ensemble is Tendi, the token alien crewmember that provides the diversity of Trek philosophy (IDIC). She's actually from the "sexy alien" category: The green-skinned Orion women who add that allure of seduction and intrigue to the Trek 'Verse... Except Tendi is the sweetest, shyest, and least sex-obsessed crew member on the Cerritos (she was a little shocked to see Mariner's naked Olympic holodeck program).

It's through their viewpoint we witness the goings-on of a regular Starfleet cruise: The weekly crises resolved with the right application of technobabble; the quick fights over Prime Directive/Non-Interference quandaries that are resolved through insane troll logic; and the reality that Starfleet operates on a kind of repetitive ennui that requires a healthy balance of holodeck fantasizing and a lack of micromanaging in the workplace.

What makes Lower Decks work as a series is that its efforts at Deconstruction are not meant as dark or dispirited mocking, but a kind of deliberate examination of "what would it really be like for the day-to-day operations of Starfleet, away from the dashing heroics of the original show and its spiritual successors?"

One episode for example focused on "Scotty Time," a Trope about how Trek engineers would inflate their deadlines for repair jobs that would get finished earlier and make them look like miracle workers. In the Lower Decks, it's become a dirty little secret to have your projects use "Buffer Time" on the calendars so that you'd have time to juggle that project with other hobbies beneficial to the ship - or better still fix any emergencies that crop up while you're working on the main task. When the Cerritos' Captain Freeman finds out what "Buffer Time" means, she's enraged because she thinks the crew is deliberately slacking off work (and hurting her chances at promotion), and then sets immediate deadlines for projects to make her crew work faster. Instead, because the deadlines are too swift, too arbitrary, and too inflexible to allow responses to emergencies, the Cerritos turns into a chaotic mess. "Buffer Time" had been happening for so long, no one could remember how much time was needed to calibrate a sensor array.

By the show's own logic, Buffer Time was a necessity: it allowed the crew (employees) to work at a pace they inherently knew could let them function while allowing enough time to handle the crazy space stuff along with it.

Another episode delved into those nightmarish episodes that would happen where a crewmember or guest-star would suffer an accident that would cripple them... or infect them with an exotic incurable disease... or turn them into salamanders (oh, yeah, THAT was when I quit watching Voyager, ye Gods. Why can't we go to Warp 10?! It'll turn us into newts!!! (We got better. SHH!!))

When Boimler gets phased improperly during a transporter upgrade test, he's assigned to a transport ship under Division 14 to take him to a "retirement" spa called The Farm for treatment. These "accidents" to crew members have been so common that Starfleet did develop a protocol for handling it. While the episode careens into a crisis when the other passengers are convinced - because they've been en route for months - that there is no Farm, the matter is resolved when the transport finally arrives to an exotic, Risa-like planet that does take care of the injured personnel as they were promised.

Mixed into all of this is a critique of the serial storytelling of the early Trek series, how weekly escapades and epic movies would ignore the ramifications of those events down the line. As television narratives evolved in the past 20 years to allow for continuity - for novel-styled story arcs that ensured a coherent, developed history would emerge from what we watched - what were stand-alone episodes for TOS and TNG now seem antiquated, and leaving behind issues that the "lower deck" crews like the Cerritos would have to clean up after.

In this, the animated series' Deconstruction is more deliberate, and raises legitimate issues regarding the idealism of Star Trek's philosophy. The contradictions of "exploration and discovery" behind Starfleet curtailed by a Prime Directive that insists on non-interference with "lesser" yet sentient races. The sporadic threats of one-off villains like Pakleds coming back years later as serious threats. And the abuse of flare lighting in holodeck movies, okay, the emotional conflicts of allowing family members (Mariner is secretly Freeman's rebellious daughter for much of Season One) serve on the same ship.

But I come to praise Lower Decks, not to bury it. Underneath the snarky witticisms, gag replays of Trek's less-noble plot points, and obvious physical humor, there is some legitimate character development AND 'Verse development for a complex, overwhelming universe as Star Trek's entire franchise. For all the craziness the ensigns go through, you see how the excitement and challenges of space travel keep them going, even in the vastness of bureaucratic inertia where they work. That for all the eldritch horror (and repetitive cleaning chores), there is still Hope that humanity (that may seem a bit speciest, but it's the only way we can define the nature of Starfleet itself) will prevail.

It gives me hope that somewhere down the line they can plot out a decent crossover moment with Dr. Who and Star Wars and DC Comics and Marvel Comics and... and... YES, I KEEP HOPING FOR A MASSIVE CROSSOVER, DAMMIT. IT'S IN MY BLOOD!

In the meantime, Season Two is streaming... somewhere. CBS Access or some such. BINGE IT while you're buried alive. BIIIINNNNNGGGGEEEEE IIITTTT!!!!!!!

Five Year Anniversary with the Wiggle Cat

Five years ago tonight, waiting at an apartment in Bartow for trick-or-treaters that never showed, I instead heard the mewling of a hungry little tuxedo kitten.

So I figured what the heck, it's trick-or-treat, so I go get cat food from the store and come back and put it on a paper plate for the little kitteh to eat... whereupon three other cats jump out of the bushes and eat what's on the plate before she could. Still, I made sure to feed HER since she was the one brave enough to ask me.

And brave she was. And friendly. And wiggly. She'd flop down on the concrete and wiggle back and forth waiting for ear rubs.

I had just lost Tehya to cancer a week before Halloween, and here I was with a kitten just knocking on the door to come in. And she did come into the apartment, cautious but unafraid, and after a few visits I let her in and closed the door, and she had no problem with that.

That was how Ocean the Wiggle Cat came into my life. And then later her kittens.

BUT THAT IS ANOTHER ADVENTURE...

There Are Days I Still Miss Tehya

Tonight is a painful anniversary of letting go of my first kitteh, Tehya.

We want our pets to live full lives, at least live as long as we do, and yet theirs are so brief. What hurts about Tehya's passing was how she hurt, suffering from lung cancer, starving away, mewling in pain... :(

I can't remember how she sounded anymore. I've forgotten her meows for "feed me" or her murmurs for "rub my head." I can still recall how she would come up to me on the sofa, find that spot in my arm as I lay there watching the television, and flop down into that spot with her head arched back for ear rubs and content purring. I fear I may forget that someday...

I miss you, Pretty Kitty.

Bartow Public Library 1897 - 2017

It's our 120th Birthday here at Bartow!

Thank you all for your patronage of the library!

Notes For March 2017

On a professional note, Bartow Public Library is celebrating its' 120th Anniversary this month! We're going to host all-day events on March 29th complete with cake and activities. To the eight regular readers of this blog, please plan out a trip to our fair library and join in on the fun.

On a personal note, I really need to get back to writing my stories out. I am coping with the wrong levels of anxiety and stress and depression. /headdesk

On a cat note, Mal has learned how to jump up when I toss snacks at him to snag the bite-sized bits with his mouth. A few more weeks and we can go on Saturday Night Live to show off.

I should post later about more library stuff.

KEEP READING!

Anniversary with Ocean the Wiggle Cat

Today is the three-year anniversary for me when it comes to my tuxedo kitteh Ocean.

Back in 2013, on Halloween eve without any trick-or-treaters knocking at my apartment door, instead I had gotten a tiny mewling and hungry kitteh, who quickly bonded to me and pretty much wiggled her way into my heart.

My first pet cat Tehya had just passed away a few weeks before, leaving me heartbroken and not entirely sure I could care for another cat. But Wiggles insisted on being my kitteh, so by Thanksgiving time - which is another sad anniversary time because that's when Page's skin cancer got worse back in 2011 and... and... - I took the effort to bring this new tuxedo kitteh to a vet for a checkup and adoption as Ocean.

And of course that all led to baby kittehs, and keeping Mal the Crazy Cat, and dealing with hissing fights between Ocean and Mal the last few weeks, and...

Sigh.

But then Ocean hops up on my chest and purrs away and wriggles back and forth looking for rubs and I find myself content.

These Are the Voyages of the Starship Lollipop

It's a Good Ship...

Actually, this should be a moment of incredible geek-out, but also a signal of DAMN WE'RE GETTING OLD:

This is the 50th anniversary of the first broadcast of Star Trek (aka The Original Series).

TO BOLDLY SPLIT INFINITIVES THAT NO MAN HAS SPLIT BEFORE!

...no, no, that's sexist.

TO BOLDLY SPLIT INFINITIVES THAT NO ONE HAS SPLIT BEFORE!

Damn, that's discriminatory towards hive-mind races.

Anyway.

I think I've explained before how Trek has been not only a major force within the genre of Science Fiction - not just film and television but also literature, and some of the best writers have been part of it - but the series is one of the great American cultural milestones.

When most Americans think Sci-Fi they will think of Star Trek (or Star Wars, or hell mix up the two). Everyone knows who Vulcans are (SPACE ELVES). We just shifted from our phones looking like the Original Series comm units (flip phones) to our phones looking like Next Generation PADD tablets (there are apps to make your smartphones look at act like TNG screens!). When we joke about breaking speed limits on the highway, we measure it by Warp Speed ("Musta been doing Warp 90 back there on the goat road, Junior.")

Looking back 50 years ago, it seems quaint how a TV show that struggled in the ratings could turn into such a massive influence (WKRP, outside of references to turkey genocide, never did). But Trek was ground-breaking: It shook off the more hoary SciFi cliches and tried stories that delved into social and political debates.

It cast African-Americans in prominent starring and guest roles: Just having Uhura - despite the seeming meaningless task of "hailing" calls - on the bridge of a starship alongside White men (mostly) in a genuine attempt at ethnic and gender sharing was shocking for the 1960s television market. Would it stun you to find out that Southern television stations back in the day would insist on cutting out any black characters on shows as much as possible? Having Uhura in nearly every bridge shot made that impossible. No less a figure than Martin Luther King spoke to actress Nichelle Nichols to convince her to stay on after she wanted to move on: She was that important a role model.

The show routinely called into question the human condition: What is racism? Can Logic as a belief structure control the emotional impulses that divided our lives with conflict, passion, and despair? Are we superior beings, our bipedal humanoid selves, or can sentient rocks like the Horta be our equals (and share the universe with us)? The best episodes questioned the duality of human nature, that things did not divide "equally" between good and evil, that sometimes we humans (or sometimes we Americans/Starfleet) were in the wrong... but that we had chances to do better.

The Horta was the first non-humanoid creature on Trek that showed intelligence
and ability to adapt/learn/communicate with us. The fans still love them
as one of the best aliens the show ever created.

Religion and faith were part of the debate. What is spiritual purity? Gods would appear on the show only to be revealed as petulant children or uncaring beasts or soulless computers (and yet the show retained a vague Judeo-Christian value system that a benign distant Providence kept things ticking).

Trek would argue the virtues of Socialism one episode (the United Federation of Planets had replicators, advanced agricultural tech, a "wantless society" that couldn't comprehend gold or trinkets of value) and push the Libertarian virtues of self-reliance and need for deregulation the next, but somehow pulled off the trick of making BOTH -isms co-existing and balanced (it did so by arguing that in a socialist-wantless society the human drive to achieve will still seek challenges and life purpose).

The show also dropped a ton of Tribbles on William Shatner's head.

It downplayed the then Cold War between the Soviets and Americans, by providing alternate Earth scenarios of bad ends for those Earths that couldn't resolve the East-West conflicts. By Season Two they included a Russian character - partly for comic relief and mostly to answer the legitimate complaint from the Soviets that they too were space explorers. Thus Chekov (who spoke with a Polish accent than Russian, go figure)

Why did Star Trek influence us, influence not just American culture but the global community?

It spoke of the future: At a time humanity was threatened with nuclear war, environmental disaster, or worse, Trek suggested we would outgrow our worst demons and answer to the better angels of our nature, that we would achieve space flight and do so in ways that would let us explore the cosmos. That we would meet races like Vulcans and Klingons and myriad others, and that despite the differences we could blend, co-exist, share our wonder of the universe.

Star Trek is a reflection of the whole Earth: that we are a diverse species us humans, clinging to this small blue/green rock covered with air and water, facing daily challenges to survive but still looking upward and outward, dreaming up warp drives and seeking out exoplanets that might share other lifeforms. The drive to improve ourselves and improve our futures.

The Trek universe itself allowed for a range of literary themes to play out, and gave us heroic characters - Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, Scotty, Chekov as our original cast - that defined themselves as Archetype. Spock in particular would become a character that reached the level of legend, akin to Robin Hood or Sherlock Holmes or Superman (RIP Leonard Nimoy).

And someday, we'll get this:

"You'll Be Safe Here" by Dean Trippe

Granted there's a ton of comic book heroes here, and the setting is Doctor Who's TARDIS, but Trek is there with Picard and other characters standing just behind the Doctor. Someday, there'll be a story that encompasses all our modern heroes, a tale of epic scale where all the heroes are summoned, and you can be certain that the USS Enterprise - all of them - will answer that call.

Let's make sure history never forgets the name Enterprise.

We won't.