Star Wars vs Star Trek Essays: Star Wars vs Star Trek in Five Minutes
If you’re a huge nerd, like me, you’ve gone ahead and looked through it.
I think fans from both camps can agree that both mythologies are ridiculous and contradict themselves all the time (it’s just a lot easier to spot if it’s played across a few seasons instead of dozens of books). I remember, back when I used to take this sort of thing slightly more seriously, being a bit disappointed with the willingness of Trek writers to just make shit up as they went along. Then I caught a few TOS episodes, and I realized that Federation ships have always been super wimpy and spend most of their time disabled by mysterious alien forces until a last minute technobabble deus ex machina shows up. It’s like, the template around which Roddenberry decided to attach some Cold War commentary and interracial relationships.
My problem with Star Wars, however, is that they didn’t even try to make sense. You obviously have to suspend lots of disbelief to be a serious enough fan to have this conversation in the first place, but I think that no Star Wars writer every really thought it through just how massive a universe consisting of “millions of worlds” is for everything to still hinge directly on Skywalker or Han Solo, or their descendants, over and over and over again. Or Bobba Jett’s ship blowing up 5km asteroids, I mean, seriously, do you have no concept of scale?
The way I like to look at the universes the most is that in Star Wars, they’ve been at this interstellar community business for thousands and thousands of years, while in Star Trek they literally only figured out how to travel faster than light a couple of hundred years prior. They’re a bit hard to compare fairly.
(Can you tell I tend to prefer Star Trek?)
powerpoint testcard (via antimega)
Hah! I have to use that, now. It is pretty awesome.
On a related vein, check out that guy’s abstract pointillist powerpoint toolkit. The poor use of slide technology, whether they be PDFs or powerpoints, drives me crazy. I’m very much a fan of Pecha Kucha as well.
My favourite part are professors whose entire classes consist of reading slides full of text word for word, and then categorically refusing to post the slides online. It’s a brilliant position to take, and it’s got this perverse logic whose ballsy, uncompromising lack of concern regarding the quality of instruction they are regurgitating upon their audience you have to admire.
My favourite part is where he assumes everyone working in the industry has at least ten grand saved up, and scolds you if you don’t. What a wonderful, unconnected to reality, field.
I plan to do a version of this when I finish university.
A Reporter at Large: The Countertraffickers: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
Yana was taken to meet customers in apartments, saunas, hotels. Most of the johns were Moldovan; some were Turks or Romanians. She worked from 4 P.M. till 5 A.M., seven days a week, except when she had her period. Maxim took every cent she made. She and Galia were not allowed to go out alone. If they tried to escape, and went to the police, Maxim said, they would be returned to him—the police in Chisinau were all his friends—and punished. Yana never tried to escape; Galia did. And Maxim was right: Galia was returned to him, and beaten. Undaunted, Galia escaped again, and this time found her way to the Ukrainian Embassy. According to Yana, Maxim got a call, went to the Embassy, and retrieved her. She was severely beaten again.
Intense article in the New Yorker. I have to confess it didn’t remember Moldova existed, so a map may help.
