26 thoughts on “Obama And Star Wars Fans”

  2. The Star Wars reference was to “be hip with the young people”, or rather people like me who were young 35 years ago, and the melding of Star Trek was that if the President knew about “Jedi mind tricks” and “these are not the droids you are looking for,” he would be regarded as spending too much time on the popular culture and hence not a serious president.

    On the other hand, the President has such a reputation for misdirection, at least from his critics on the Right that “these are not the droids you are looking for” is a phrase he should know to keep up with what people might be saying about him.

  3. The petition ends with

    Also Dr. Spock does mindmelds, but Star Trek sucks

    I asked myself “What would Sheldon do?” So of course I posted the petition at a Star Trek message board. There will be blood, even if it is fake green convention blood.

    1. Too bad we can’t comment on the petition, because it’s “Mr. Spock”, not “Dr. Spock”. Of course the petitioner may be trying to be ironic…

  6. It’s a shame B5 snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by making the bridge non-rotating (and not zero-g). The writers were never even allowed to come up with a plausible explanation.

    Also, why does the blog keep giving me the mobile css. Annoying.

    1. Actually, I was always more interested in the writing and the acting than in the tech details. Way I look at it, if the scriptwriters suck (SWars, most especially the Last Three Movies- go watch the Red Letter Media reviews if you haven’t already; they’re well worth your time) and the acting sucks (Next Gen, but Voyager most especially) there’s no point caring about details. B5 had its share of clunkers (see the “Unions R Kool, M’kay?” segment in the first season and in fact most all of the last season) but it had one of the best overall casts and some of the best overall writing around, much less in SFTV.

      I get the mobile too, so it’s not just you.

    2. “Also, why does the blog keep giving me the mobile css. Annoying.”

      Trent,

      This is fixable at your end. Try using this URL:

      http://transterrestrial.com/?wpmp_switcher=desktop

      And it should always pop up as the desktop version. I was having a lot of trouble with this last week and Rand pointed me in the right direct after we noticed that the message at the extreme bottom of the mobile page – which took yo to the desktop – was also busted.

      So far I haven’t had a recurrence.

  7. Wrong, Trent. The B5 bridge was rotating. The problem was that they weren’t able to show rotating stars looking out through the window. Budget too low… Just lights outside the set, pasting in CG would’ve been prohibitive cost at the time.

    When Sheridan is first given a tour of a “White Star” ship by Delenn, he remarks that it has artificial (non-rotating) gravity. To which she coyly remarks that “we’ve [Minbari] had [it] for some time.” Actually at least for centuries.

    However a later continuity problem cropped up when they made the TV movie “In the Beginning” about the Earth-Minbari war, in which Sheridan is captured and taken onto a Minbari ship. But this is no worse, really, than the attempt made to make him look ‘younger’ by giving him dark hair at that time. So first he was dark haired, then he’s blond when he’s running B5 years later, then he’s grey haired when his “clock runs out” at the end of the series (20 yrs after his resurrection by Lorienn).

    Gee, I didn’t know I remembered all this. It’s been some time.

    1. De-rotating the view out the window will probably be the very first request whenever we build a rotating station, especially if Earth fills half the field of view. In low orbit the brightness contrast would probably cause people to start going insane after a few days of “lights on – light off – lights on – lights off” in a 30-second cycle. It would be worse than trying to sleep next to a lighthouse.

      2. You see the bias of the MSM.

        With Mr. Obama as President, he can meld Star Wars and Star Trek and the White House Press Pool still thinks he is cool as ever.

        Were Charles Lurio to be President, the press would be all over him for missing one minor detail of Babylon 5 . . .

  8. I can already tell you the response to this petition, assuming it gets 100,000 signatures:

    “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Mr. Sulu.”

    1. That’s “Darth Sulu.” He makes the Enterprise jump to lightspeed.

      Such mashups are to be expected from someone who can’t tell if their wife is a Wookie or a Klingon.

  10. The problem is SF itself. Most people think it stands for Science Fiction, but it also stands for Science Fantasy. The entertainment industry has little use for Science Fiction.

    1. Ken, you might prefer Harlan Ellison’s definition of SF: Speculative Fiction. Of course, Ellison traces the genre back to the Bible :-/

      Movie and TV SF has never gripped my imagination like written SF did, at least the written SF of the 40’s through the ’70s. A co-worker got me to read Cryptonomicon, which I enjoyed, but I’ve never been able to take Gibson et al.

      1. I’d forgotten that one. It is fun to see a movie adapted from a book written long before the movie and read when you were a kid. The books are almost always better. Forest Gump was an exception, being a ridiculously stupid book.

  11. Meanwhile it looks like scientists have quietly come a huge step closer to creating Borg, in this case it appears they have created Borg rats 🙂

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/28/mind-melds-brain-communication_n_2781609.html?utm_hp_ref=science

    Rat ‘Mind Melds’ May Point Way To Long-Distance Brain-To-Brain Communication

    Reuters
    By Sharon Begley
    Posted: 02/28/2013 9:49 am EST
    Updated: 02/28/2013 9:37 pm EST

    [[[The Duke team sees the study as a step toward what lead author Miguel Pais-Vieira calls “a workable network of animal brains.” They are currently trying to link four rats’ brains and (separately) two monkeys’ brains, each in what Nicolelis calls a “brain-net.”]]]

    [[[Asked how likely it is that one day human brains would be linked, Nicolelis said: “I wouldn’t mind if, 100 years from now, people say two rats started human brain nets.”]]]

    And you thought the Borg were from the Delta Quadrant 🙂

    1. I did read one where a planet of dogs formed human level intelligence as part of packs that communicated ultrasonically through an organ in their foreheads. When separated they became just stupid dogs. But when they got human technology, they remained intelligent by communication through a radio.

      1. That’s Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. He has a prequel called A Deepness In the Sky about a planet of spiders and a recent follow-on about the humans growing up on the doggie planet.

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