On the DEWLine 2.0: Dwight Williams

Okay...and now it looks like we're finally at the true Main Event...?

Yeah. Picard was fun.

I enjoyed "Disengage", and Amanda Plummer is a joy to watch as she tears stuff apart.

One word I was most pleased to hear this week:

arie'mnu

And there were other moments as well throughout the story. A story that's being given time to "breathe" properly, as far as I can see.

Spoilers in the comments...

...from Kevin Jardine at GalaxyMap.org via his Twitter feed!

https://twitter.com/galaxy_map/status/1334455740367560707

Maybe useful to some of you?

I found myself inspired to go digging for one book yesterday, and in the process of finding it, rediscovered another.

1. I was looking for A Stó:lō-Coast Salish Historical Atlas yesterday, inspired by the news that a guest starship on Star Trek: Lower Decks would be named USS Vancouver. I half-remembered that this book would have that Indigenous nation's name for the larger region including Vancouver, the one I was taught to call the "Fraser River Valley": S'ólh Téméxw.

(Which I dearly want to learn how to pronounce properly!)

It occurs to me that, before I die, I'd like to see that name, S'ólh Téméxw - accents and all - on the hull of a Starfleet ship, preferably one more prominent than a DS9-style runabout. They can name a runabout "Fraser" if need be. With the people running Star Trek as a while these days, I'm thinking that it might happen, provided the Trek people reach out properly to the Stó:lō. There seems to be at least one Trek fan amongst that nation living in the metro Vancouver region going by anecdotal evidence on Twitter.

(Note: Titmouse Animation, the company handling the actual animation work on Lower Decks, has a branch studio in Vancouver, BC. This might be at the heart of the shout-out to the city.)

2. In the process of trying to find the first book, I accidentally rediscovered my copy of the second one, Ikonica: A Field Guide to Canada's Brandscape by Jeannette Hanna and Alan Middleton. Which contains a number of historical overviews of some two dozen Canadian brands of note and longstanding in our memories. I don't know if it's still in print. My copy became mine thanks to an airplane ride out to PEI back in 2008. It was a family trip, and my mother and I were travelling together by plane for the occasion, everyone else taking their families' respective cars. I think I posted some of the pix from that trip on my Flickr account...?

Kevin Jardine's got another update...

https://twitter.com/galaxy_map/status/1277264515273560065

http://gruze.org/galaxymap/map_800pc/225dpi.png

From 2008.

I'm sure I'm not the first fan of "Second Galactica" to take a picture and make the Joke.

This was an unlocked article at the Scientific American website, excerpted from the April 2020 issue. As a fan of astronomy and of the space opera branch of science fiction and fantasy, there was no way I wasn't going to distract myself from my troubles for at least a few minutes to look this one over.

I keep saying: the Star Trek people are going to need to update their maps too. This is one more part of why.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-new-map-of-the-milky-way/

An intuition:

The Star Trek "Novel-'verse" many of us have been reading - and some of us, writing - this past decade or so has been travelling down the road where Picard took Kirk's advice in Generations to heart and kept it there.

What we're about to see on TV or streaming video - depending on where we live - is what happened on the road where he set Kirk's advice aside for reasons that seemed to make sense when he made the choice.

Now here's a blast from my childhood. In this case, the detonation of the atomic reactor and weapons-grade fissiles that were dumped in a couple of what were supposed to be graves on the Moon in an alternative future that could've been....provided certain smart choices and mistakes and maybe even a few crimes alike had been made instead of what did happen in the real worlds. And if physics, biology and chemistry were slightly other than we knew - and still know - them to be, too.

Some of you reading this will remember the TV series created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's team for ITC back in the mid-1970's. Martin Landau, Barbara Bain, Barry Morse, Catherine Schell and a bunch of other actors in front of the cameras. The first season was more a gauntlet of horrors for the surviving crew of Moonbase Alpha to either endure or die of. The second, closer to classic action-adventure tropes of past series.

Others of you watched it years or decades after the original broadcast fact via syndicated re-runs or the side roads of the Internet. There was going to be either a remake from scratch set further into the possible futures for TV, or a sprucing-up of the VFX and whatnot by a fan-run crew under the brand Space: 2099. But both of those came to grief in different ways.

So now we're going to have this audio-only revival and recasting from the same people who do the audio adventure stories licensed from the Doctor Who and Blake's 7 studios.

I am somewhat surprised, of course. Not sure how high my interest level is at this point. But we'll see.