#unnatural selection

[agent-troi]

lolololololol jack wanted to name the ship enterprise and the president is number two on hammond’s speed dial after his grandchildren lmaoooo

[teamharpy]

I made another book! Tried out the Caterpillar Binding described in one of Keith Smith’s books. It seemed appropriate that a story about people forced to become bug hybrids to survive would have its cover held on by creepy blue centipede thingies.

Unnatural Selection by auburn, 164K words, 747 pages, an SGA/SGU fusion. Actually my second time binding this excellent horror story. The first try was pretty weird too, but this one is much more readable.

More pics and bookbinding talk behind the cut

Black bookcloth is just next level. Got some glue on it and it collects lint like woah. Also, because I read that the caterpillar bind is not the most stable and you can see this is a big mamajama, I actually stitched the text block in Coptic stitch in white, then used the caterpillar to attach the covers and decorate the spine.

Best thing about Coptic is how it lies flat when you open it. Gorgeous! Also bragging about keeping the covers lying almost entirely flat, a flaw of caterpillar is they like to pop up. This spent a lot of time under weight at almost every stage. That also helped with minimising swell.

Can’t wait to read it again!

[sshbpodcast]

Character Spotlight: Katherine Pulaski

By Ames

We may have only had Dr. Pulaski for one season of The Next Generation, but that didn’t stop her from leaving an impression. Your hosts here at A Star to Steer Her By are big fans of her character and also of Diana Muldaur’s performance of the cantankerous and brilliant doctor who graced the Enterprise-D’s sickbay during Dr. Crusher’s time away from the ship (more on her next week!). She even made a couple of our top characters lists from TNG!

There’s a lot of negative feelings about the McCoy knockoff in the Star Trek community, and we’ll cover some of those below, but overall we have to give credit to the good doctor for how much she grew in only the twenty episodes we had her. By the end of season two, she was viewing Data as a peer, saving lives left and right, and fighting for the rights of other species. There’s no telling how much better she’d get if she stuck around. So raise a cup of Klingon tea to the best CMO of the Enterprise (I said it!) with our highlights below and elaborated upon in this week’s podcast episode (timestamp for this one is 58:29). Fight us, haters.

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best moments

Crammed full of crumpets We’ve made a running gag on the podcast about how Professor Moriarty stuffed the doctor full of crumpets in “Elementary, Dear Data” but there’s more to this episode than crude jokes and blue humor. Pulaski ran with the Holmesian scenario in the holodeck, proved to be stalwart and brave in a hostage situation, and totally rocked the period attire!

At least someone still remembers quarantine procedures While the whole thing did backfire on her, Pulaski’s actions in “Unnatural Selection” kept the rest of the crew safe. She was willing to risk her own health on her hunch that the augmented children weren’t carrying any pathogens, but let’s give her credit for taking the child and Data out in a shuttle so that, if (and when) things went wrong, things were contained.

Knives and bearskins! When the biobeds are on the fritz due to the contagion in “Contagion” and her staff is whining that the bone knitter isn’t working, Pulaski pulls some tried and true methods out of her back pocket – make a splint! It may be archaic medical technology, but it’ll do in a pinch and having that kind of medical knowledge saves the day (or saves someone’s leg at least).

Generous doses of PCS I just really love the sweet little moment during “The Icarus Factor” when Dr. Pulaski is tending to some crewmember suffering from the flu and says part of her prescription is PCS – Pulaski’s Chicken Soup. It shows how much she cares about her patients and gives the audience that warm feeling of having someone care for you when you’re home sick from school.

Jettison the emotional baggage you’re still carrying around Also I have to give my girl some props later in “The Icarus Factor” when she’s flirting with Kyle Riker right in front of Will. We find it a nice character inclusion that she and Kyle used to be down to clown, and even that she would have married him in a heartbeat, and she tells his son off in the most “oh no she didn’t!” way and then proceeds to drop like fifty mics all over Ten Forward.

Take your Prime Directive and shove it up your hatch! We on this podcast (who am I kidding; it’s mostly Chris) have a certain skepticism about the Prime Directive sometimes, and it’s usually the CMOs of their respective shows that get to question it most blatantly. Pulaski sure does in “Pen Pals” because screw the prime directive in this case! When a whole planet is on the line, Pulaski is the conscience that we all need!

Forget me, forget me not This is one that could have gone in either the Top Moments or the Worst Moments list because, face it, mind wipes are horrifying. But I’m gonna give Pulaski the win for erasing Sarjenka’s memories in “Pen Pals” because it’s impressive as hell. And she uses it to kinda-sorta stay within the Prime Directive that we just shat on. Plus she let Sarjenka keep the singing rock!

You’re still the Captain. Invincible. I’m still not certain what Chris was getting at about Pulaski’s letting Picard avoid the heart treatment he’s been neglecting out of sheer vanity in “Samaritan Snare,” but I’ll do you one better: she winds up fixing his stupid ticker for him in the end anyway! And is the grouchy little man thankful afterwards? Not even a little bit! Pulaski gets no respect, I tells ya!

Quote me a little of that poetry While you’ll see in just a moment that Pulaski’s views on Klingons were initially unkind, by “Up the Long Ladder,” she’d bonded with Worf enough that she was willing to engage in some Klingon rituals. She goes out of her way to concoct an antidote so she can take part in a poisonous tea ceremony with him, which is above and beyond (and also fuels some shipping), and she also keeps Worf’s measles a secret!

Bust him up, Data! In “Peak Performance,” it’s Pulaski who sets up the Strategema match between Data and Sirna Kolrami, and she ends up feeling really bad for goading him when he loses to that smug Zakdorn prick. So it’s that much sweeter that she’s there cheering him on when Data thinks outside the box causes the stalemate, telling him that in that way, he did indeed beat him!

Feelings of warmth and friendship What a shame that the last episode we got with this amazing character was one of the most infamously bad. But none of that is on Pulaski because she’s actually on full display in “Shades of Grey,” partly because she’s one of few characters in the non-clipshow scenes. But she (and Troi, as I brought up last week) pulled out all the stops to save Riker’s brain from certain doom.

Pull your head out of your ass! Okay, this last one’s not canon, but I just couldn’t help including this plug to go read Caitlin’s fanfic “The Pulaski Maneuver”!!! Or listen to it on the podcast back when we wrapped TNG with our episode “Tales from the Holodeck.” Pulaski finally telling Geordi everything that he’s deserved to hear might be my favorite moment, and it’s so in her character that I say it counts!

—

Worst moments

The cold hand of technology Most of Pulaski’s negative personality traits are going to circle around her treatment of Data as a piece of equipment and not an individual. In her introduction episode, “The Child,” one of her early interactions with Data is to tell him he’s not wanted in the delivery room because he lacks the human touch. Lucky for us, Troi sticks up for him and he gets to watch her whelp an alien baby.

One is my name; the other is not Shortly afterwards, still in “The Child,” we get one of the fandom’s most hated moments from Pulaski when she not only mispronounces Data’s name, but doesn’t seem to understand that doing so is rude and problematic, instead deciding to put the onus on him for being capable of offense. It’s a tough moment for fans to accept, and if that were the level of bigotry her character stayed at, I’d understand why so many Trekkies dislike the character.

I’m not accustomed to working with non-living devices More growing pains come from Pulaski in “Where Silence Has Lease,” in which she refers to Data as “it” and Picard has to gently correct her. We’re two episodes into the season at this point, and Pulaski is still finding it difficult to accept the personhood of this fan-favorite character, something viewers pretty much got on board with in episode one. At least she apologized.

The mystery of the lack of any mystery Here we are, three episodes in when we reach “Elementary, Dear Data” and we see more of Pulaski judging Data for being incapable of thinking creatively when he solves Holmesian riddles. We may have blamed Geordi for accidentally creating Moriarty when we covered his character spotlight, but it was definitely Pulaski who goaded them on in the first place.

Medical research is sometimes a risky business While we may have praised her above for not putting everyone else at risk when she released the augmented child from his wrapper in “Unnatural Selection,” Pulaski was still dead wrong about the experiment being at all safe. She still got contaminated by the fast-aging disease and was resigned to her fate until Picard and O’Brien were able to transport her back. Speaking of which…

I’m a doctor, not an original character One rather understandable complaint we can see in the Pulaski character is that she’s just Dr. McCoy in a skirt. Which may not be a bad thing, per se, but when we see her racism against the outsider character, her Bones-like irascibility, and even her specific fear of transporters in “Unnatural Selection,” we start to wonder if the writers couldn’t have been a little more original.

I’m just glad that humans have progressed beyond the need for barbaric display We get a couple glimpses that Pulaski is a little repulsed by Klingon culture throughout the show. First, in “A Matter of Honor,” she’s grossed out by Klingon cuisine and calls Klingons barbaric, and not in the way Klingons would probably like. And she also gets a little smug after watching Worf’s Age of Ascension ceremony in “The Icarus Factor,” which she seemed pretty judgey about (but hey, at least she went!).

Quit cloning around! We gave Riker some guff for this as well in his character spotlight, and there’s enough guff to go around to give to Pulaski as well for their actions in “Up the Long Ladder.” Sure, the clones were made of them without their consent, but to take matters into their own hands and murder these people without discussion is not the Starfleet way.

Never to be heard from again… Obviously the worst character moment for us is Pulaski leaving the show after just one season. Notice how most of the bad moments come from earlier and the good moments are mostly from the latter half of the season. That shows how much the character was getting better, even in the rough first couple seasons of the show (you’ve heard our coverage of Chaos on the Bridge, right?). And while many celebrate the return of Crusher, we still have to wonder what the show would be like with more Dr. Pulaski.

—

And just like that, she’s gone and so is this blogpost. Keep following along because we’ve got another doctor of the Enterprise-D to discuss next week, and it’s not Selar! We also hope you’re making the schlep through Enterprise with us as we cover the whole thing over on SoundCloud or your podcast platform of choice. Wave your medical tricorders over our Facebook and Twitter pages, and get the pronunciation right: It’s Data, not Data!

[nade2308]

Part 1 || Part 2

@thethistlegirl

[supermassiveart]

[stylistic-nightmare]

Havok - Unnatural Selection

[continent-of-wild-endeavor]

I feel like I may be accidentally selecting for hulls on my field peas that are harder to see.

A lot of cultivars of Vigna unguiculata* have hulls that turn purple when they're mature, but before they start to dry out. Purple hull and pink eyed peas are two common varieties like that, and it makes them real easy to spot for harvesting. Other kinds stay green, or maybe just go a little paler/yellower when they're ready, and those you have to hunt for among the leaves.

I don't know what varieties I started out with, but there's at least two normal-sized kinds in the mix, and hull color varies among them both. I never get every pod picked at the optimal time, but the ones I miss dry well on the vine, so I just pick them when I do find them, and put those dried bean in a jar to plant next year. Which means, as far as my unnatural selection, that the ones that don't turn a convenient color when they're ready have an advantage. They're more likely to get 'selected' for propagation (i.e. forgotten & then found later), as long as they produce well enough to be statistically significant in the seed jar.

Beans are pretty stable over the planting generations, as they mostly pollinate themselves, but they do produce crop-outs from time to time (like my exciting new fat variety - I'll do a post about them soon), so the color may drift over time. I've been growing these from my own saved seeds for ~10 years, and at least some of them are still purple (maybe half? maybe less), but then I don't really know what I started with, so idk if they've changed. I could start taking more notes, I guess.

*This species includes all the field peas, cowpeas, black eyed, purple hull, lady peas, Sea Island red peas, and a hundred other cultivars of similar beans. I call all those field peas, as a general term. Yardlong beans are also in this species, and some other Asian varieties I'm not as familiar with. Crowder peas, too.

Now, some people (and google) seem to think that crowder peas and field peas are the same thing, and they're wrong. Similar, yes. Closely related, yes. Cooked about the same, also yes. A crowder pea might even be considered a type of field pea, but not every field pea is a crowder. They crowd together in the pod, see, and it changes the shape of the pea, leaving an indent where the next one pushed up against it.

Proper crowder peas:

vs. ordinary purple hulls:

[give-us-euphoria]

Unnatural Selection is a rainbow song to me I don't know why she's the representation of the 😊🤗🌈 emojis

[oveliagirlhaditright]

So, I think I mentioned this in another post… but curiously, a few times in the Buffy tie-in books, Buffy has definitely been being interested in having children with Angel (like in her ideal life/fantasies and stuff). Part of me wonders if maybe if this was foreshadowing the Twilight S8 stuff? (But maybe not, because I think at least some of these were written before that, of course. Though maybe Joss already had the idea at the time and could have told these writers about it? IDK.) Or it could have absolutely nothing to do with that, which I honestly hope it doesn’t, and it’s just Buffy voicing what she wants, as she definitely should be allowed to do, of course.

But anyway, I decided I’d go ahead and compile them all here (that I’ve found so far). And -sighs- the Twilight thing too, just on the off-chance it is connected to that. (Though I pray not.)

From “Unnatural Selection,” that takes place in Buffy season 3 (though this one’s actually a cover story on Buffy’s part.)

2. Book three of the Unseen Trilogy, entitled “Long Way Home” (this takes place in Buffy Season 4/Angel season 1 and is a Buffy/Angel crossover book. In this instance, Buffy is seeing a parallel universe and is somewhat being tempted by it).

3. This is from the book “Heat” (another Buffy/Angel crossover, that takes place in Buffy season 7/Angel season 4. Buffy is being shown her ideal fantasy by the enemy in a way to keep her down, but I don’t think this one’s real. Like, I don’t think it’s a parallel universe or anything like that.)

And then here’s a beat from “Heat,” where Buffy and Angel talk about Connor:

And here’s stuff from Buffy season 8, where Buffy and Angel are gods, have sex, and give birth to a sentient universe that then possesses Angel and is evil, because it’s not too happy its parents abandoned it right after creating it (this universe is called “Twilight”). Because why not do all of this nonsense? I mean… I guess it could happen, arguably, make some sort of sense because it sort of rings like Greek mythology or something, and they did all kinds of weird stuff like this. But this all thing is strange, and why did we need it? And it makes me sad that this is the only canon “child” of Buffy and Angel that we have.

But here it is:

Anyway...

[frog-and-rat]

Welcome

This is to be a starting point for me to blog about ttrpgs. It will hopefully be my game notes, or tables if i can think of them… or maybe art drawn by me. No one really knows.

The name “the Frog and the Toad” came from the tavern name tables in ShadowDark by Kelsey Dionne of the Arcane Library. The current header images shows the 1 and the 20 rolled in my emergency dice kit to get that result.

ShadowDark is currently my system of choice, though I just got a pretty good end of fiscal year bonus from work and I’ve backed/bought a few more games. Unnatural Selection is a supplement by the Dungeon Damsels. Knave 2e, by Questing Beast, Dolmenwood, by Exalted Funeral, I backed something by the Merry Mushmen, but i don’t remember what it was, then i bought A Folklore Bestiary by them. I should have tons to talk about.

I’m currently, slowly, playing a game with my kids using the mini-campaign setting The Gloaming found in Kelsey Dionne’s Cursed Scroll no. 1. It is written with one adventure fully written, but otherwise several places and NPC’s with a few sentences about them, the rest I get to come up with, or yoink something from other adventures to insert into the campaign. I hope to post these adventures here. Feel free to join me, or if you never even stumble upon this blog, that’s okay to. Who knows, maybe I’ll get good at this kind of thing and start a real blog, like a Xanga!

Who knows what is to come here? Probably not much, but I’ll try.

[sweetfirebird]

Just remembered one of my favorite vids of all time. For Battlestar Galactica/Terminator/the Sarah Connor Chronicles by Charmax

tw: violence, blood, gun violence, body horror, death, nuclear explosions

[nade2308]

Part 1 || Part 2

@thethistlegirl

[geethr75]

SPSFC First Chapter Reads Day 6

Accidental Intelligence by Bryan Chaffin Blurb TALES FROM THE QUANTUM VAULT In his debut novel, Bryan Chaffin transports us to the year 2139, where corporate combines have their own Senate seats, the surveillance-state is all-encompassing, humans live most of their lives in the Omninet, and sentient AIs are partners with the world government. It’s not all bad, though. There are docbots, you…

[elenath9]

Do NOT take Teal’c’s ice cream.

Stargate SG-1 “Unnatural Selection”

[mancano-le-parole]

Counter balance this commotion

we're not droplets in the ocean