The end of the U.S.S. Galois!!

I've just uploaded the last two episodes in our fabulous Star Trek-parody series!!

Here's the whole Start Trek Galois series as a YouTube playlist.

Babel, Babel, Bass, and Treble is a comedy-murder-mystery that takes place at a musicology contest. You may wonder how that can be the plot of a Star Trek episode, but anything can happen on the Galois! Basically the plot is a spoof on the original-series Journey to Babel episode crossed with the film What's Up Doc? (which was a family favorite when we were kids, as I mentioned earlier).

We wrote this episode for a big family reunion, so it is full of uncles and cousins, and such. For example, my cousin Aerin is in it.

Then, there's the last episode, Hansel and Galois. Captain Thelev's ambition finally gets the best of her, and the poor little USS Galois goes out with a bang!

I hope you'll like 'em!

Time Travel Time!!!

Here's our amazing time travel episode!! This is the one where we travel back in time to 1992 (which was the present when this was filmed), because the Romulans messed up the past and sent us into a weird parallel timeline where Dal Vortass (a.k.a. my brother John) is captain -- and has a beard! Plus all of Starfleet wears crazy hats. Gotta go back and fix that!

Speaking of divorce...

Following up on my post on Jane Eyre and divorce, by chance the next two episodes of my Star Trek parody series are the two where my ex-husband played a starring role (as the first officer of the USS Galois):

He did a good job, didn't he?

Nerd-hobby time again!!!

So, I've been busy with my nerd-hobbies again!!

My kids (especially Leo) and some of their friends from school love playing Minecraft together, so I thought it would be fun if they could play together online across the Internet. Plus, I thought it would be fun for them to play online with their cousins across the ocean. So I set up a Minecraft server for them on the Internet!!

I figured that I might as well make a second server (for my blog friends, see here) since setting up two minecraft servers is as easy as one...

The funny thing is that setting up the server was almost as much fun as playing!! (I wrote about it on my professional blog.) I signed up with linode, and (I'm not being paid to say this) I totally recommend them -- their service is great!

For my work, I have to maintain some server applications running on some Linux machines, and it's fun to have my own little (virtual) Linux machine out there in the cloud that I can run hobby stuff on! Soon I will figure out how to migrate the Main Street Plaza blog to it.

And -- in case that isn't nerdy enough -- here's another episode of my Star Trek parody series!! This is one of my very favorite episodes, even though I'm hardly in it. It's the one where my little sister plays a child-genius who invents a new life form, which, naturally, escapes and wreaks havoc...

The only thing worse than people talking about you is people not talking about you...

My mom used to say that anyway -- and that's the attitude I'm taking towards some news I discovered the other day. Apparently there's a new journal of Mormon Apologetics, and they devoted some space in their inaugural issue to calling my blogs "childish rubbish" and "bit raunchy and as lacking intellectual content."

Hard to believe they bother to publish claims like that about little ol' me? Well, you can read all about it on my latest Main Street Plaza post.

And -- for those of you who aren't interested in such frivolity -- I uploaded another episode of the Star Trek series I starred in!!! This is a funny one involving a Tholian plot to steal my pet hamster:

Back in Switzerland, and back to my usual fun!!

The fund-raiser for Camp Quest got off to a slow start, but seems to be picking up. Like last time, various bloggers are pledging to do silly stuff if our team wins. I agree with that on principle, but I'm not that good at it myself.

I should pledge that if we win, I'll dress up as a Vulcan/Romulan Federation Starship captain and battle my own Romulan evil twin!! And post it to YouTube!! But, of course, I already did that:

And, while I'm at it, I could also pledge to design the coolest Minecraft castle ever!!! And post to YouTube all about how I did it!! Of course, I already did that, too...

Anyway, Camp Quest is a good cause, regardless of whose team wins. :)

Whatever will I do with you, tube...?

I have got one-hundred-million-and-one things to do at once for my trip to the US in about a month!! And you can see it's had a bit of a negative impact on my blogging...

However, our family YouTube channel is going strong!! Nico keeps inventing new series to upload, plus here's another episode of the Lost Generation!!

This is the first one where my mom makes an appearance (playing my brother John's mom, surprisingly enough).

I also made a sequel to my best Minecraft video -- this time talking about how the X-ray TNT glitch affects castle-building strategy in intriguing new ways:

I have to confess that the strategy for building an audience on YouTube still kind of eludes me. This one has gotten exactly one view so far -- despite the fact that I posted is as a response to a much more popular video. My main experiences with YouTube is spending hours and hours making a video, and then finally feeling validated if I can get 100 views and a kid bothers to comment and tell me it's cool, lol. ;)

Me on Star Trek -- Again!!

I've mentioned this here before a few times: Throughout my graduate school years, I produced a community-cable Star Trek parody series with my brother John. I uploaded a few of them to the Main Street Plaza channel, but -- now that my kids and I have a channel where we're allowed to upload videos longer than 15 minutes -- I'd kind of like to upload the whole series to our channel. (The episodes are each about 20 minutes long.)

It's the adventures of the USS Galois. In a nutshell, real Star Trek recounts the galaxy-changing exploits of the "flagship of the Federation." But everyone knows that there are also a whole lot of dinky little starships flying around the Star Trek universe doing -- who knows what...? Well, with this series, now you know!

As I've said a couple of times, we learned quite a lot on the job. So the sound quality, the production quality, the acting, the special effects -- basically everything -- improved dramatically over the course of the show. I hesitate to start at the beginning because the early episodes are sometimes hard to understand, and they look like they were filmed in someone's garage (because they were). By the end, they were actually pretty professional. But they build on each other, so to make logical sense of the series, you have to start from the beginning.

Here are the first three:

Also, I hope you like some of our other videos that we've made for our YouTube channel. Nico is continuing his "BfIM" series -- which he's been making entirely on his own, with no help from me! He's always thrilled when people vote on which characters he should eliminate.

YouTubin' is hard, BTW. I've found that I can spend hours editing together a silly little video of playing Minecraft, and then feel disappointed that maybe a handful of people watch it. I should encourage my kids to hit "Like" on more of the Minecraft videos they like, and maybe more YouTubers would come visit our channel...

My continuing adventures as the Vulcan/Romulan Captain Thelev on TeeVee!!!

I hope you liked the earlier episode I posted (the one where I got to play my own evil twin, separated at birth -- one of my faves!). Well, that was episode #7, and here are episodes 8, 9, and 10:



In this one, my younger sister plays a child-genius who invents a computerized brain -- that escapes, naturally. The folks of the lower decks try to catch it without the Captain getting wind of the situation.



In this one, I watch in horror as my arch-rival gets the promotion I deserved! Also features sneaky Tholians and a hamster getting dropped into the soup.



In this one, Captain Kirk's illegitimate grandson (who replaced the horta as our first officer) gets a chance to prove himself -- by figuring out the mystery of the weird recurring dreams!

If you guys like these, I'll go back and post episodes 1-5, but I'd rather you start with these because the earlier ones have poor sound and production quality.

Me, on Star Trek!!!

I've mentioned a few times that my brother and I produced a 13-episode community-cable Star Trek parody series (way back when we had just graduated from college). Well, I finally found a friend who knew how to convert the DVDs to YouTube-friendly format (and another who knows his way around YouTube), so you can see the show for yourselves!



I'm starting with episode 6 because the the early episodes have really poor sound quality and other technical problems, and I'd rather introduce the series with one that we filmed after a few episodes worth of on-the-job training. ;)

Harry Potter vs. Jesus

I hate to feel I need to put a "spoiler warning" on this: Really, if you haven't read the last book by now and you're sensitive about having the ending spoiled, the Internet is not a safe place for you at the moment...

For a universe defined by magic, Harry Potter's is surprisingly unmagical. The magic in his world allows tons of fun, imaginative, and unexpected possibilities, yet it seems to behave like a force of nature that can be studied, understood, and even researched in a scientific way (with Dumbledore writing papers on his work on the uses of dragon blood and the like). Some wizards are more powerful and/or more skilled than others, but there's no hint of a higher power or purpose any more than electricity or gravity might point to an ultimate purpose. Rowling even raises amusing questions about whether some magic is pseudo-magic (divination, Lovegood's work) when the evidence of its effectiveness is less conclusive.

Then there's the question of death. One of the themes of the Harry Potter series seems to be the virtue of accepting the finality of death. Rowling uses a Biblical quote about death being the last enemy to conquer, but attempting to conquer death was clearly the problem. Nowhere does the story praise the quest for immortality: lingering and continuing in spirit form after your time is up is shown as inability to achieve closure and move on. That's why I knew Dumbledore wouldn't come back like Obi Wan Kenobi to guide Harry at a critical moment or to save him.

All of these themes make Harry Potter a remarkably skeptic-friendly fantasy. The series is far more atheistic than His Dark Materials, a critically-acclaimed fantasy trilogy written by a bona fide atheist (see my discussion of atheist themes in Pullman's work which includes some further comparison of Rowling's style and Pullman's).

However, J. K. Rowling self-identifies as Christian. She is rich, powerful, and popular enough that she can basically get away with saying anything she wants to at this point, thus it seems reasonable to take her at her word and not try to come up with proofs that she's a closet atheist or something like that, no matter how tempting it may be.

So, to double-overcompensate for my pro-atheist bias, today I will ask the obvious Christian book critic question: Is Harry Potter's death scene a re-telling of the Jesus story?



I'm not going to try to prove the case either way, just throw out some ideas and let you decide. As a control, I'll compare these two stories to two other famous self-sacrificing-nonpermanent-death scenes from popular culture: It's a Wonderful Life and Star Trek II. (If you haven't seen these, George Bailey tries to kill himself so that his family will have the money from his life insurance policy and Spock steps into an area of deadly radiation contamination to fix the warp drive so the ship can escape in time.)

1. It had to be the hero in person, not someone else:
JC: yes, for some reason theologians can explain better than I can...
HP: yes, because he had some part of Voldemort's soul.
IAWL: no, nobody really had to die at all -- all they needed was some money.
ST2: not really, somebody else with similar skills and abilities could have done the same thing.

2. The hero was betrayed by a friend:
JC: yes, however the story indicates that Jesus knew it was going to happen and allowed it, thus their relative power levels leaves the betrayal question rather ambiguous.
HP: yes, and it was a difficult blow for Harry when he realized that his trusted friend Dumbledore had been grooming him for the slaughter all along.
IAWL: sort of: the problem arose when Uncle Billy handed $8000 of the bank's money to the enemy (named Potter, coincidentally...), but it was an accident.
ST2: no, Spock acted alone. His longtime friend/rival Dr. McCoy attempted to stop him and failed.

3. The hero was perfect:
JC: yes
HP: no
IAWL: not entirely, but he was remarkably virtuous.
ST2: perfectly logical.

4. The hero is entirely dead before coming back:
JC: yes, and this is an important component of the story: Jesus had to actually die in order to conquer death, so it wouldn't have worked for him to be very, very close to death and pull through.
HP: no, Harry had a "near death experience" which the text jokingly indicates was all in his head.
IAWL: no, George had a NDE similar to Harry's where he got to analyze his situation.
ST2: yes, Spock had a funeral and his corpse was shot out into space before his spirit was reunited with his body. Another point of similarity with the Jesus story is that in both cases it's not entirely clear the resurrection was part of the original story as opposed to having been added later.

5. After his death experience, the hero continues his life as before:
JC: no, Jesus miraculously appeared to some followers a few times, but his death scene ended his everyday life.
HP: yes, he continued as before, grew up, raised a family, etc.
IAWL: yes, but maybe he appreciated his life a bit more.
ST2: yes, he even went on to appear in several more films. He may have made a joke line here and there about having been dead, but his experience doesn't even stand out as a turning point in the Star Trek universe.

6. The story describes the pain of the hero's decision:
JC: yes, Jesus was extensively tortured and asked God if he could get out of it.
HP: yes, Harry contemplated how much he will miss the joys of life.
IAWL: not really, George's choice comes off as a rash act of desperation and despair.
ST2: no, "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." The choice is the logical one, and that's good enough for Spock.

So what do you think? Is Harry Jesus? Is Spock?

Anyone have any further points of comparison or other stories that could be added to this list?

More Star Trek!!!

Unfortunately my brother hasn't posted any more episodes from our community-cable series since the last time I posted about Me, on Star Trek!!!. It's too bad because some of the later ones were really cool, especially the ones where we used cheesy split-screen and blue-screen effects so I could play my own evil twin who is a Romulan...

He seems to have redirected his Star-Trek-related energy into ClassicTrek.com where we have this cool story going here. I'm "Dr. Shareb" and I'm serving aboard the Starship Concordiat. It's great fun -- in our first adventure our Starship was vandalized by some peacenik space-hippies and we went and chased them through space...

That's actually the closest thing I'm doing to fiction writing exercises at the moment. I know I signed up for Scrambled Sage on Toast and I haven't been doing the homework (because I'm very, very naughty). (And my dog ate it?) It's not that I think I'm above workshop exercises -- quite the opposite -- it's just that I know I don't have time to put serious thought into fiction exercises right now, and I don't want to do a half-assed job of it.

Now you're probably thinking: "But Chanson, you seem to have an awful lot of time lately for writing a bunch of controversial-yet-boring political theory..."

I don't know what's up with that. I seem to be having some sort of brain-dump about politics lately. I think it's just because I see blogging as an extension of conversation -- and one where I'm surrounded by intelligent people -- so I like to spend some time chatting about life and light fun stuff and some time discussing and exchanging ideas.

Or more likely it's because I see blogging as this endlessly fascinating experiment, and I'm curious to see what kinds of reactions I'll get from writing different types of things.

Me, on Star Trek!!!

For all those of you who doubted my Trekkie credentials, doubt no more!!!



Here I am as the Vulcan captain of the U.S.S. Galois, the starship I commanded for the fifteen-episode community cable Star Trek parody that my brother and I wrote and produced.

The cool thing is that my brother has started posting the various episodes to his blog!!!

Here are the first few:

episode 1: Playing God
episode 3: The Rivalry
episode 4: Deus Ex Machina
episode 5: Holo Pursuit

Some fave photos, again lifted from his blog:


I'm in the red, my two brothers are the guys in the blue and the yellow.


Even my mom got in the act!!!


My little sister is the kid in the foreground -- she's a grown-up now!!! :D


This one's a little blurry, but it's my big fight scene!!! I think this is the one and only time I've ever done a theatrical/choreographed fight. Man was that fun!!! Fortunately my co-star seemed to know what he was doing... :D

For more photos and the episode descriptions, see the links above to my brother's blog!!!