Quote by Odioshi

It's 1.9 gigabyte download O_o, it should be neat

It's worth every GB. May I suggest the synthesis ending. I was impressed and now we all have closer.

So say we all

&hd=1

What no mouse? cheap buggers! :p

I haven't played yet, but I'm about to. With our new populated server, I can't wait to try out the group finder and see how they implemented the ranked warzones. The adaptive gear and augments should be cool, too, especially for the crafter in me. Maybe now my toons won't look like intergalactic hobos...or intergalactic homos for that matter :P.

It broke my heart watching that.

I read your mind. But don't worry, I won't tell anyone what you're thinking now. :P I just had a little time when I got home from work and wanted to at least get something up there. If you see anything that's not quite right (punctuation, grammar, content, flow, etc.), let me know. That was more of a quick and dirty, but figured the sooner the better with all the server swaps going on.

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Reddit where the map was posted.

I love me some map porn :silly:

:: sigh ::

Chance of winning vs creating a facebook account (that's right, I don't have facebook account :blush: ).

It's promotions like these that almost make me want to make one... almost

I'm home from work now, so I have some time to provide the analysis you've asked me for. This is not meant to be all-inclusive, but rather just the things that jump out at me right away.

First of all, the idea that this is a speech to be delivered is a problem. To whom is it to be delivered, and on what occasion? Without a setting in which the speech is necessary, it's really just a long exercise in self-justification. I get that trans people face the need to justify themselves on a regular basis (a woefully too-regular basis, really), but I'm not sure it's the best choice here. You see, this leads me to the main issue which is that in the Star Trek setting, it's probably unlikely that the self-justification speech would even have to be delivered in the first place.

For starters, the Star Trek setting in general is broadly a tolerant one, where people have set aside their petty differences and mostly work together, at least within the worlds of the Federation. Given the advances that trans people have made in just a handful of decades in the 20th Century and the first decade of the 21st, it seems silly to assume that trans people are a burning issue anywhere in the Federation by the time of the Star Trek setting. Gene Roddenberry deliberately made his bridge crew as multi-cultural as possible within the constraints of 1960's television production. He envisioned a world where all the little differences between people mattered not at all, but where the most important distinction was the content of their character.

On Betazed specifically, it seems that the issue of trans people should be especially a non-starter. They are a race of telepathic empaths. If anything, they would be showing the less-emotionally developed races of the Federation how it's done, not the other way around. An entire species of people who are constantly skimming the emotions of the people around them would certainly be far more understanding of trans people. For that matter, in a species of telepathic empaths, how could any minority group ever even be closeted in the first place?

This runs headlong against some of the autobiographical information contained in the story. For example, for an emotionally mature species of empathic telepaths, why would a trans person being a relative of a member of the ruling caste be an issue at all, let alone one that would "bring strife to an otherwise peaceful society?" The Betazed are supposed to be the mature empaths. There's no room for ignorant bigotry in such a society, and along the way to creating their peaceful society, such ignorance and bigotry would have been stamped out in the distant past.

Enough of that. I could write for days about the above alone, but there's a few other things I'd like to touch on as well.

The use of 20th Century science fiction as a symbol bothers me. However, I'll give you a pass on it because you're not doing anything that the entire rest of the collected body of authors of the entire Star Trek universe doesn't do too. To wit, why is the 20th Century so fascinating to the people in the Star Trek setting? With all of history to choose from, why does Star Trek lore always come back to the 20th Century when they want to show their future people being interested in their past? It's because that's when the people who are writing the stories are alive. We want to think that we're awesome, so much so that the people of the future will find us fascinating.

Also, there's the problem that the art, literature, cinema, and music of the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd Centuries have not been created yet! We'd have to use our puny turn-of-the-millennium brains to imagine the art of the near future so that the people of the distant future could be nostalgic for it. (And if there's one thing that we've found again and again, it is that any serious attempt to extrapolate the art of the future, even just the future a few decades away, is almost always hilariously wrong. In the 1930's they thought everything in the 1950's would be streamlined like the fastest trains, and driven by propellers and pneumatic tubes. In the 1950's they thought everything in the 1980's would have rockets and fins on it. In the 1980's they thought everything in the early 2000's would be day-glow colored and made of spandex and vinyl.* And so on.)

Speaking of the future, does anyone have surgery anymore? The impression I get from Star Trek is that almost every major health issue, particularly non-emergencies (like having a Nausican stick a knife through your heart) can be fixed with a wave of a magic medical tech device. I'm not sure this would be the pivotal event in the life of a Star Trek person's life the way it is in modern times.

And that leads me to this: I really think the whole story is a literal projection of a very specific modern cultural issue into a future setting where it simply doesn't fit. When Roddenberry wanted to talk about race in the Star Trek setting, he didn't emerge from the writer's room with a script about a planet where white people and black people still wanted to mess each other's shit up just for being white and black. He had a mixed-race bridge on the Enterprise, after all. So if a ship of the Federation was integrated and it was no big deal, why would it be a big deal on a member world of the Federation? Instead he made the famous people who are black on one side and white on the other, and their counterparts who are white on one side and black on the other. Surely there is some kind of allegory for being transsexual that could be projected into the Star Trek setting so that it fits better.

I've gone on overlong, so I just want to address one more thing. The author insertion character being a member of the ruling family of an entire planet, the same character being close enough to a canon character (Riker) to be a sort of protege', the bit about Ambassador Troi having a hand in the author character taking on the name of her very own daughter-- it's all very Mary Sue. That's all I want to say about that.


* I'm still sad that this didn't happen.

Episode 653 - Enterprise - "Acquisition" - 03/27/2002

http://www.allstepisodes.com/megvid.php? n=5119

A group of Ferengi hijack Enterprise, but Trip, Archer and T'Pol play mind games with the pirates in order to win back their ship.

Enjoy!

Thanks so much QiqJoe! :woohoo: Everything looks GREAT! This was my next project but you beat me to it and I am most grateful! :cheer:

Could be a lot of fun, only RP'd once in STO but was kind of disorganized. Was not with this fleet of creative people so I bet it'll be much more enjoyable. I'm all in!

Agreed. Never done any RP (outside of Legos and my imagination), but I'd like to give it a try.

This forum is awfully dusty! Does Stonewall do RP events anymore? I would be interested in giving it a try.

I think misogyny vs femmephobia is a useful distinction. I have known plenty of femme men who were awfully misogynist, and some people who are respectful of cis women remain uncomfortable with femme men or gender-queering in general. There's an awful lot of overlap in the Venn diagram, to be sure, but they aren't identical sentiments.

Granted, I don't have any experience with these updates to draw on. I do agree that they're probably not planning a graphical overhaul before launch. (I'm not sure I would want to wait for it in any case!) I was thinking more along the lines of post-launch improvements. That might take the form of full customization with a beefed-up foundry, or a set of optional reskins like those applied to ship interiors. I just find it very unlikely that a single unalterable interior that everybody has to use is a solution that anybody, dev team included, thinks is tenable for any length of time.

As for terminology, obviously I can't speak for every LGBT person, but I personally have never had any problem with "gays" or "queers" as catchall group terms, even though both would be misleading if I used them to refer to myself specifically. Maybe we should see if anyone has personal objections to that term being applied to them?

Quote by lilithvf1998

Thanks, SiranNataan!

Nova, care to describe what you think is unrealistic or hackneyed? I'm certainly up for specific constructive criticism.

I'll be glad to do so after work. It will be later tonight.

CLicKy.

I don't do the contest thing very often, but this thing is a beast. It'd be so cool to win. And I'm fairly certain that AMD black edition processor would run GW2 in circles even if they don't get around to optimizing the game to run from the graphics card!

Very good writing. There's an endless coolness about Betazoids. How does their telepathy/empathy work? Betazoids also have a public mind space and a separate walled mind space that they keep private from other Betazoids. While some other telepathic species share everything with each other and nothing is private or hidden.

Betazoids are also very emotional. It makes you wonder how a Betazoid would get along with a Vulcan, Vulcan's also being telepathic in a way but also very emotionally suppressed and controlled. So many questions. It's just a really interesting species. But.. /end geekgasm

My bet is that a number of us have Mary Sues (*cough* Ylis *cough*) running around our ships. :)