#i would assume most watchers need to have a basic knowledge of how to note those things but he's like Insanely detailed about it

[mournmage]

I love this little comment you can get from Emmrich post becoming a lich, because I assume he's talking about knowing what a heart looks like and how big it is due to. Y'know. Seeing his own or something similar during the rites.

But in Amaris's canon, one of the things I decided on that he was like specifically talented in/had a knack for is anatomical diagramming, both skeletal and muscular (which is part of why he has the full body skeletal scarification - he drew the design himself.) So he'd hear Emmrich say this and immediately be like "Let me see that I need to critique it for myself" and they both proceed to hash out the details and corrections together like the huge freaks they are <3

[thebarefootking]

Eye Contact

Sometimes I look back on memories of what seemed at the time to be the happiest, most cherished times of my childhood, only to realise in retrospect that I was, in fact, miserable for nearly their entire duration. The starkest example of this phenomenon is that of the numerous trips I made with my Southern Baptist church youth group. Over the course of each year of my adolescence, we traveled to camps and conventions (and one time even to New Orleans, on a mission trip to 'convert the Catholics'). Each event was one I anticipated (and sometimes prepared for) for months.

The most frequent and reliable destination for our travels was a church camp a few hours away. Once in the summer and once in the winter, we made our way there for 4-7 days of sermons, prayer, and camp activities. Our group was assigned one cabin each for the girls and boys (or, occasionally, the girls got one of the 'new cabins', which were more like hotel rooms, with aircon but no bunk beds, and halfway across the campgrounds from pretty much everything of relevance. Bleh.), as well as a color and a meal hour. I'm not sure why, but we were almost always assigned yellow and green (with the accompanying later meal hour), as opposed to the much prettier and time-convenient colors of purple and blue, which I only recall getting once in around nine camp stays. 

And so we would go, walking around camp with our yellow arm bands (meant to deter non-campers from sneaking a quick meal, they said, failing to grasp any irony in denying meals to the stranger at a Christian institution), doing camp things and singing camp songs.

One of the songs that still gets stuck in my head to this day was part of a camp game the campers played called 'Big Booty'. Being rather shy (read: terminally embarrassed due to rejection sensitive dysphoria) and also dreadful at rhythm games (no doubt due to lack of practice in childhood, stemming from the same), I mostly watched rather than actually engage in the play. Still, the song was catchy as hell, and could be heard from up to hundreds of feet away at nearly any point when the campers had free time. To play, all players stood in a circle and were assigned a number, counting clockwise from the position of the game's leader, who was referred to as 'Big Booty'. The goal of the game was to move up the ranks and become Big Booty, or, in another variation, to be the last one eliminated by messing up the rhythm.

The game started with a rhythmic chant: "Big Booty! Big Booty, oh, yeah! Big Booty, Big Booty, Big Booty!" All players slapped their thighs in rhythm with the chant, and throughout the whole game, to keep time.

At this point, the game was on. Big Booty would begin play by stating their own designation (Big Booty), and the designation of any other player of their choice (for example, Number Four). The designated player would then state their own designation and then the designation of yet another player. Play would be passed around in this manner until someone failed to say their part in the correct rhythm, at which point the one who failed was moved to the place in the circle with the highest number designation (with all other numbers reassigned as needed), or, in the other version, eliminated from play. It sounded a lot like this:

"Big Booty! Big Booty, oh, yeah! Big Booty, Big Booty, Big Booty!"

"Big Booty, Number Four!"

"Number Four, Number Eight!"

"Number Eight, Number Two!"

"Number Two, Big Booty!"

"Big Booty, Number Six!"

And so on.

God, now it's stuck in my head. Dammit.

In retrospect, this was how I spent a good portion of my camping time regardless of the activity at hand; I was a watcher, not a doer. And when I did, I most often did alone.

Not that I necessarily wanted to be alone. Awkward, adolescent, and very, very autistic, I had no idea 'How to Win Friends and Influence People', as the book says. My thought, logical as it seemed at the time, was that if I told people what I was doing, and then went and did it, they might follow along out of interest. And it seemed to me afterwards quite strange that no one was as interested in these activities as I was.

Of course, I didn't know to take into account the eccentricity of activities such as off-road blackberry picking in the eyes of kids who had mostly grown up in the city, and who later would express doubt that such edible berries even existed. To them, I was a quirky loner; to me, I was desperate and lonely.

Well, no, that's not right. At the time, I didn't even acknowledge that I was lonely, though I spent most every moment at camp attempting to remedy that loneliness. I was just delightfully weird, that was all. That was all.

Even cabin time rarely made for good bonding moments, queer as I knew myself to be. The other girls could playfully flirt with one another, knowing they meant only jest. They could touch each other (they knew how to touch each other) in a friendly way, and not have it misconstrued. 

They could touch each other in weird ways. Some of the girls liked to exchange affection (and show off, I guess?) by licking one another's eyeballs in turn. I could only dream of aspiring to that kind of kinship.

No, I didn't touch the other girls. Not until the later years, when one of my close friends finally started coming to camp with me, and then we mostly hit one another, as was our wont. (Incidentally, this behavior never stopped everyone at school from assuming we were a couple. Go figure.)

The closest I ever got to making a friend at camp was making a friend that would later become an enemy. We'll call her Max.

Max was a later addition to the group, not a full time youth-grouper, but one who sometimes made it for trips. She had been brought into the fold by the most popular of popular boys in our group, who she attended school with (and who I had lusted after in my heart since before I even joined the church, possibly before I even knew what lust was).

Max was weird. She read The Lord of the Rings during sermons, instead of taking notes. She talked about Catholicism. She was goth.

She also, as I found out one Winter Retreat, wrote M-rated (and higher!) Rocky Horror Picture Show fanfic.

It would be a startling understatement to say that, at this point in my life, I was painfully naive. I had only recently discovered masturbation and the horrible spiritual agony it left in its wake. I was sure God was pissed because I was abusing the shower head every morning, and REALLY pissed that I sometimes thought of girls while I did. I didn't dare look at or read pornography. That stuff was addictive and homewrecking.

But... I did quite like Max.

We struck up a fledgling friendship as I tried to make her comfortable on one of her first trips with our group. It was the right thing to do. I certainly wasn't doing it because she was attractive and quirky.

And so, upon learning that I was a writer as well, she sought my opinions on some of her writing one evening, as we settled in our cabin. 

"It's the least explicit one I have right now that doesn't require knowledge of the canon," Max said, kindly taking my foibles into account. "No sex or anything. Although she is naked. And there's… some… other stuff? Referenced. But not, y'know, explicitly."

Well. As long as it isn't explicit, I figured.

And that, my friends, was my first encounter with the idea of BDSM.

I was fucking shook.

While I already had, and had had since early childhood, a predilection for and interest in sadomasochism and power play, only at that moment did the spark go off in my head that connected these things to sexual arousal. It was like lightning. Things finally made sense!

But they were bad things. I didn't know what to do with that! I sputtered a bit, pointed out a couple of grammatical and syntactic errors, and told her it was good. I don't think she ever found out how dramatically she affected my life with those few crumpled pages torn from a composition book.

Of course, only a day or two later, I couldn't stand the bitch. She told some of my secrets to the guy I had a crush on (basically immediately after I told her?), and the two came up with a plan to use them against me, for no reason I could see but to be mean. My fault for trusting someone I barely knew, but she just had that vibe around her, y'know? And, as I said, I didn't know what I was doing.

Sometimes, I'm pretty sure I still don't. But damn if I didn’t learn a thing or two from her, including that that guy was a dick.

[attract-mode-collective]

Review: Relaxer

Relaxer is the latest release from Oscilloscope, a film distributor that I've slowly but surely become a big fan of in recent years. Fave offerings include The Road Movie, which is a mixtape of Russian dash cam footage (those familiar with examples on YouTube may know already how insane such a thing can be; in the end, it absolutely is), and November, which is an Estonian folk tale about a love triangle, with one of the participants being werewolf (I think.... though the real stars of the movie are the random farm tools that are imbued with human souls... it's hard to explain).

So now we have an absurdist and surrealist black comedy from the director of Buzzard, which had a character that made a Freddy Krueger-esque weapon out of a Nintendo Power Glove (haven't seen that one, but I plan on to).

Perhaps you've seen others reviews of Relaxer thus far? It made a big splash at last year's SXSW, not this past one, and also nabbed an award at Fantasia Fest, which is how I first caught wind (and have been dying to see it ever since). Or maybe not, unless you're a devotee of off the beaten path cinema. And that's the thing... when it comes to motion pictures that concerns itself with video games, we're slowly but surely checking off those boxes. Years ago, in a review for The FP, I stated that gamers finally have own equivalent to Bull Durham, and now, they have its own... I dunno... Slacker? Gummo? Taxi Driver? The Shining?

The funny thing about Relaxer is how, despite being a fairly unconventional motion picture, at its core is something that’s become extremely popular and the norm among gamers, and that’s watching someone else just sit there and play games. The plot goes something like this: older brother Cam constantly gives younger brother Abbie challenges that the latter sibling fails at, mostly because he inevitably throws in the towel. But after declaring that he has quit quitting, Abbie decides to conquer Cam’s latest and greatest challenge… one that he came up with after seeing Billy Mitchell’s face on the cover of Nintendo Power, aka our first real sign that [semi-spoiler] the world in Relaxer may not necessarily be our own.

Abbie is tasked with reaching and surpassing the 256th board in the original arcade version of Pac-Man (for the N64; I'd have to assume it's the port found on Namco Museum 64) without getting off the couch. Period. An important detail: it's the middle of July 1999, and Abbie has until the end of the year, before the Y2K bug completely dismantles society, or so sez Cam. And... that's it; the entire movie is Abbie on the couch, playing Pac-Man, while also struggling to deal with basic human needs, cuz once more he can't leave his seat. This includes arguing with Chuck E Cheese on the phone, wondering why they don't deliver. Abbie also finds himself seeking intel on how to approach the challenge, and ultimately receives it from an unlikely source... or is it? Because in this world, knowledge of Billy Mitchell's accomplishment, and other contenders to the crown, is seemingly common.

As time passes, we see Abbie both physically and mentally break down; it's a fascinating character study, one that's quite funny, at times also sad, though overall disgusting. For the record: Relaxer is pretty gross. And to a certain portion of the audience, it'll seem less a movie and more a play; the entire film never leaves the living room where Abbie’s located. It's also the kind of stage production you'd find at a very Off-Broadway theater... yet this kind of stuff is par for the course among aficionados of avant garde cinema. Now's maybe a good time to mention that Luis Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel was a source of inspiration. Then again, as previously noted, given that just staring at someone playing games for hours on end via Twitch has become such a thing, Relaxer might be familiar territory, so gamers may end being more receptive than your average mainstream movie watcher.

But there's also the fact that Relaxer is about wish fulfillment (the antics of Abbie, while exaggerated, is honestly no different than what many live streamers engage in on Twitch in real life), one that’s taken to such an extreme that it could be perceived as being antagonistic (the depiction of Abbie might hit too close to home for some). And... I dunno, recent times has seen a desire to reexamine video game flicks that were previous maligned. While those reevaluating the live action Super Mario Bros flick are to be applauded, I also find the sudden appreciation for that Gerard Butler vehicle Gamer rather baffling.

Instead of Hollywood's take on the player, which made predictions that admittedly ended up being accurate (mind you, most if not all were super obvious), I would highly recommend instead a take from an independent filmmaker... one who makes some very uncomfortable (translation: genuinely insightful) commentary regarding those who choose to just sit there, determined to hold onto that controller, despite all hell breaking out around us. Relaxer arrives in theaters today; you can see where it’s playing here.

[megers67]

What is Wrong with Who Watches the Watchers?

I love Star Trek, I really do, but I think this episode really shows that the interpretation of the whole Prime Directive is off. Whether it’s by the characters or the writers, it just goes past the good intentions into offensive imperialistic ideas. The Next Generation’s season 3 episode Who Watches the Watchers is the best example of this. 

So let me break it down for you. Why is this episode so frustrating to me? Mostly it revolves around this right here.

This is the duck blind that the “anthropologists” use to study the Mintakans. Thing is, apparently, this is a common anthropological method in the Federation. This is implied from what Geordi says in like, the fourth line in the entire episode.

“A hologram generator. Oh, a duck blind. Right. They’re anthropologists.”

And that’s troubling. Why? Because most modern cultural anthropologists prefer other methods of data collection, particularly participant observation. Participant observation is when the anthropologist goes and lives with the group of people, noting their experiences with them. This is such an effective method because it allows for hands-on work with the people. You can talk to them, ask them questions, but also work, eat, and sleep like they do. The point is to understand their perspective of the world in order to get a sense of why they do the things they do. If you’re just watching from afar, you get none of that intimate experience. These anthropologists seem to want to avoid contact at all costs. It baffles me! There is so much information that you’re missing out on! Why are they hiding themselves away from the Mintakans? 

I would almost forgive them if their reason was to avoid the natural interviewee bias (not sure of the exact term at the moment if there even is one). Basically when you interview someone, you can’t actually be 100% confident that what they tell you is the exact truth. They could either be intentionally deceiving you and telling you what they think you want to hear, or be doing so subconsciously by giving you an idealized version of the truth. But as an anthropologist, you are supposed to take this into account. By spending time with the people, you minimize the first as you gain their trust. As for the second, it’s actually an interesting area of study in itself to compare what they say and what you see. It gives a good look into what their values as a society are.

But I know that’s not what these anthropologists are avoiding. They want to avoid violating the Prime Directive. What exactly is the Prime Directive?

You know? That’s a damn good question.

As Archer put it, there needed to be a directive to spell out how you can and can’t interact with alien species (clearly meaning the Prime Directive), but until that was made “I’m going to have to remind myself every day that we didn’t come out here to play God.“ 

For a directive that is so often used and referred to and held to so high a reverence, I haven’t actually seen much of actual text of it in canon. However, I was able to dig up something said in TAS episode The Magicks of Megas-Tu as far as official phrasing goes: “No starship may interfere with the normal development of any alien life or society.” Sounds simple, but apparently it’s actually pretty complicated as well because as of Voyager, it has at least 47 sub-orders. As far as I’m aware, these aren’t then listed, but they would assuredly follow the same philosophy, one that is derived from an anthropological perspective.

The anthropological perspective means that every culture, now matter how different it is from your own, is just as valid as your own. This means that other cultures may have different values and customs that are neither better nor worse than yours, just different. This is also the basis for the Prime Directive. As the Federation is its own collection of cultures, it has no right to just impose its set of values on new ones they encounter. It is for this reason it is often referred to as the Non-Interference Directive. 

But it is often misused. Not by the characters exactly, but by the writers. Moral dilemmas are often an intriguing and engrossing way of creating conflict in a story. However, it can be really hard to pull off because the writers know the solution already. It may not be the right or wrong choice, but for the character(s) to make it, it must be right for them to make it. Usually this also means we as the audience are supposed to believe they made the right choice because they writers want us to root for the character unless this is something the character(s) involved are going to learn a lesson on. That exception however, can’t happen every single time. It just isn’t sustainable in a long series or franchise like Star Trek is. But when you have a lot of potential moral dilemmas, how can you be sure to pick the “correct” choice as a writer that your audience will be on board with?

You instead create a false moral dilemma. This is when a situation is presented and treated as a moral dilemma, but really isn’t. That way you get all of the tension of the debate and discussion, but little risk of doing the wrong thing because there really wasn’t a big issue. This is how the Prime Directive is used most of the time. The formula is that something bad happens on a planet. Perhaps some crisis involving a natural disaster or something. Then Starfleet gets wind of it then goes through this whole debate of whether or not they should keep these people from dying because by interfering, they are violating the Prime Directive. Then they usually decide to help anyway.

As an anthropologist, you’re not supposed to interfere. But what it means in that context is that you’re not supposed to just go running around telling people of different cultures that they’re ass-backwards and are doing things wrong and while your way is best way. It doesn’t mean that you just sit there and watch people die because doing so will ruin some abstract sense of purity of culture. 

That’s playing God.

There’s a few reasons why:

1. It’s highly colonialist thinking. If you see a group of people and decide that you know what’s best for them because you are from a “more advanced” society, that’s colonialist. You are treating this other culture like children who can’t be trusted to make decisions for themselves and that it is up to you to be the adult in the situation and solve it for them without their input or consent. Why are you more qualified to make that choice for them? What gives you the right? That you’re from the Federation? That’s like the USA trying to “civilize” the Native Americans. It’s an extreme example and not like the situations we see in Star Trek, but it is the SAME LINE OF THINKING. 

2. It assumes that culture progresses linearly, a very outdated anthropological idea. You may have heard according to sociocultural evolution that cultures progress from band, tribe, chiefdom, state. These are now only the names of organization sizes/relationships, not stages that go one to another. Sociocultural evolution now refers to a broader sense of how cultures change over time, not necessarily in any particular direction. There are many different theories now on how or why cultures change, but they can all agree that they are always in a state of flux. They might also stay more or less the same for long periods of time, changing in ways we can’t quite recognize. Some might see these people as being “behind the times” or in need of help in some way because they are not “civilized” in the way that we are. No. Again, just because we are different, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with how or what or why they do things the way they do. To assume that they will follow the same path that Western civilizations took also assumes that we are a goal worth pursuing, that we are at the top right now. Can you see why that can be a major problem despite good intentions? Like, yeah. That alien species might never reach the point of space travel. They might be perfectly fine with that. Is there anything wrong with that? They might have been the way they are for thousands of years and advanced in other ways. Why is that arbitrary criteria something that makes them ineligible for being considered equal to you?

3. It assumes that any interaction will ruin the cultural purity or natural progression of their culture. Goes with the last one. It assumes that your culture is soooo awesome that they will abandon your own just to emulate yours. Thing is it assumes that these people would be willing to just abandon their own cultural norms because you (purposefully or accidentally) shown them the light and error of their ways. Which is really just silly and unrealistic. Yes, they might indeed change parts of their culture. That does happen when two cultures collide. It happens a lot. But is that a bad thing? Can you imagine how much technology and knowledge and other ideas the West has borrowed from other cultures? We literally wouldn’t be where we are today without that cultural diffusion. Yet each of the countries that make up The West are all culturally unique and complex not only between each other, but also the rest of the world. If everyone copied whole-cloth from a single culture that had any good ideas, then the entire Earth would be one damn culture. But it’s not. The reason is that we borrow what we want, and don’t borrow what we don’t like. It’s that goddamn easy. Other cultures made up of sentient beings can do just the same. The only reason they might borrow things they don’t want is if they are forced to. This also goes for things they want to borrow that you, for some reason, don’t want them to. That’s wrong for the reasons I have gone over already. Taking away people’s choice in their own lives for arbitrary reasons is wrong.

4. What do the people want? That’s the main issue. You can hee and haw back and forth all you want about whether it is ethical to intervene, but taking action (or specific inaction) without input at all from the people whose lives you’re affecting, is making a choice on their behalf. You are taking away their autonomy. Their ability to make choices about their own lives. When you do that, you are in fact playing God. If they ask for your help (even if it’s just spit out into the cosmos, distress signal style), that’s all the permission you need. They are explicitly asking for intervention. Plain and simple. If they don’t know if there’s a problem, the moment you notice, it’s your responsibility to figure out if they want your help. If there isn’t time to figure that out, you should assume that they want you to try. It’s a general assumption that might end up being problematic, but most things want to live. However, there is also a flip-side. If they don’t want your help, then you must honor that. Failing to honor that is then breaking the Prime Directive because you are overriding their wishes because you think you know better than they do. That’s hard, but you have to let it go.

So where does that put us in terms of how the Prime Directive is used in Star Trek? Well most of these moral dilemmas come when the main characters are forced to choose whether or not to save the aliens or follow the Prime Directive. In other words, the choice is to save the lives of a sentient race of creatures, or to preserve the purity of their culture, however short lived it now may be. Do you see what the easy choice is now? The writers present this as an extremely difficult debate. They save the aliens if they want their main characters to be shown as heroes, or let them die if they want to give their characters easy drama and sadness or mope about how hard the job is sometimes. 

Bringing it back to the main point, here’s how all of this applies to Who Watches the Watchers. The anthropologists are observing the Mintakans from a duck blind (wrong). The duck blind’s camouflage then fails, allowing for a pair of natives to see the high tech (nothing wrong with that). One of these Mintakans is then injured and has to be saved by the Enterprise which is a big problem (not it isn’t). He is healed, given a memory wipe, and returned to the village (okay but Crusher had to defend her decision to save him). The memory wipe isn’t 100% apparently because he remembers Picard and tells everyone about his experience (nice going). The village interprets Picard as a god (okay this is a problem because you never should want this power dynamic). Also one of the anthropologists is still down there (not a big deal like everyone is making it out to be). After great debate (where the actual phrase “cultural contamination” is used for fuck’s sake), he sends Riker and Troi in disguise to pretend to be from over the mountain to rescue the anthropologist. The villagers debate among themselves about what “The Picard” wants them to do with the anthropologist and now these newcomers (really Riker and Troi did not do a great job). Stuff happens and eventually, after refusing to send a sign to make his wishes known to the Mintakans, Picard beams one of them aboard to show her he isn’t a magical god figure (the one time the Prime Directive is used reasonably albeit in probably not the best way). After he shows her that he cannot prevent people from dying sometimes, she understands that he and his people are just that, people (because she is capable of basic understanding like an actual sentient being who is an adult and not just a large child). Meanwhile, the other Mintakans are about to sacrifice Troi (because sure why not) when he returns the one he beamed aboard AND IS THERE IN PERSON HIMSELF (?????). He convinces them to stop (only after proving he’s mortal by being hit with an arrow because ugh), collects Troi, and fucks off. With the anthropologists. Because apparently now that the Mintakans have been “culturally contaminated” there’s no reason to stay and research them any more despite it being the perfect opportunity to do good ethnographic research. 

Sorry that last paragraph turned into an unorganized rant. I might post that discussion of the Prime Directive in its own post though.