commotiocordis

From a comment thread on ontd_startrek wherein Star Trek/Firefly crossovers were discussed. Namely, how they'd work.

First, I NEED TO WATCH THIS SHOW AGAIN. It's been a year or so since I've seen any of it, I think, and I had a hankering to watch it again not long ago but had other stuff (prolly school) to do and didn't. Want.

Second, the question was posed: Putting both fandoms in the same area of space isn't too far of a stretch (hiding_places suggested they were in the Romulan Neutral Zone, thus preventing contact either direction), but how do you explain that Star Trek's got warp at 2053 and the Federation kicks in about one hundred years later, but Firefly's in the Unification war in 2506 without said warpy awesome?


To fix the tech discrepancy, I always sort of pictured it as a Battlestar Galactica-like situation. Colonists break off because of whatever, Earth-that-was (the one that joins up with the Federation and all manner of win like that) is essentially again the mythical 13th colony. And Earth's naturally technologically ahead because they don't have to waste their resources building up new colonies and terraforming and trying to survive, which I presume takes hundreds of years, and could pretty easily put the colonists back that far. Not to mention, it's not necessarily that Fireflyverse is totally behind--it's easy to assume because of the rim worlds' tech, but we hear of things like laser pistols and sonic guns and the whole hospital on Ariel is pretty kick ass if you move in towards the core--though I wouldn't argue that it is a little, we see more divergent tech evolution (that yes, happens to be slower for the above-named reason) than simply progressing like molasses along the same technological track as the Star Trek-verse.

So if St's first contact was 2053, considering that Earth just left a massive, massive war and had no resources and presumably the communications were also shit, I don't think it's too far out there to assume that it's some time before warp ships were available to the general populace (we know Travis Mayweather's folks had one sometime before the 2150s, but idk if they mention how far before). The leaving colonists would probably thus turn to one of those cryogenic ships that we see being used around the Eugenics wars as the most recent decently available technology, which also happens to be really suited to the running away they're trying to do. Maybe they're cryovac'd for 100 years, and then 300ish spent building the colonies and forming the fledgling Alliance to piss off the outer colonies before the Unification war starts.

The story that Earth was dead and dried up when the colonists left it is just the result of whatever division that led the colonists to leave in the first place spawning revisionist history that nobody now knows is incorrect. And then if you go with the RNZ explanation (like!), no communication. Other possibilities include the delta or gamma quadrants (the latter if you want the Fireflyverse to be easily play-withable, thanks to the handy dandy wormhole) since we still don't know heads nor tails of those guys. Also, possibly beyond the galactic barrier--Earth and Vulcan and Kronos and stuff are really pretty close to the edge of the galaxy if I'm recalling my Star Trek maps correctly, yet we rarely leave it in the later ST universes (I can recall one of the TOS-set video games doing so, but nothing else springs to mind).

The henna trufax worked like excellent. Except there's no chance of me getting pictures, because evidently mum and Kaci are staying in Vermont for three weeks. Erm, WTF? But yes. I've never actually splurged for the oil to add in, but Tthat totally did the trick. I fail at doing the designs, though. They turned out okay, anyway, which is good. Still, I just kept going with them until I had the back and palm of my left hand done, the instep/underside of both feet, and the palm of my right hand. By that time, though, I couldn't do anything because I couldn't move any of my appendages, so I took it all off shortly after the right palm. Which, as a result, is v. light, but still darker than when I've done it before.

So that's cool. The back of my left hand now says Serenity in Mandarin, because I was feeling Firefly-y, there's the Greek letter Psi on my right palm, a stylized Venus symbol on my left foot, a stylized triple luna on the right, and some random design goodness on the left palm (which is the one that turned out darkest; I washed it off about 40 minutes ago and it's already darkdark orange).

And then I dumped the rest of it (not a whole lot, so it didn't cover all of it; just at my face and along my usual part) on my roots. Which I'm sort of worried about, because as it's mixed in a completely different way, it might end up turning dark brown or something and look odd because it's not blended. If it does screw up, I can always just do it again normally anyway, but if it's too much darker, no matter what I do on top of it, it won't match up until the dark wears down. But I'm going to take it off earlier than usual, which should negate that a bit.

But since I didn't feel like using plastic wrap and because the foil was out, I've now got a sheet of foil on my head. Not wrapped around or anything, it's just about the size of half a piece of paper and stuck to the henna on top. We're talking about going to get ice cream later, and if we go soon, I'm going to still have it on. I've decided I'm going to tell people that I'm trying to stop the CIA from reading my mind to find out I'm a communist/stealing my precious bodily fluids. (w00t, Dr. Strangelove reference.)

My dad just brought up a coverall/jump suit type thing from the basement that he found from a long time ago that my uncle gave to him for some reason or another. It's perfect. It's got like 12 bazillion pockets, plus holes to put your hands in your pants pockets (as it's meant to go over clothes), and is gray and pretty darn comfortable, surprisingly. It's really big, but not so horridly that it doesn't fit at all. I'm so excited. This is going to be great. I've got to see if I can get the Shell (the oil company, I presume) patch off of the back.

So. (Though as far as I know, I won't be going anywhere that I need to wear one, it's nice to have one just the same in case.) Halloween costume? Done. I officially have got the Kaywinnit Lee Frye thing going on.

On a different note, I've recently realized how much better I've gotten in Spanish just this year. I used to be able to conjugate stuff written down pretty easily, but it took me some thinking to do it while speaking for any tense save present and past imperfect (because there are like 3 irregulars and that one's just easy). Noticed a few days ago that I've gotten to where I can do a whole bunch of tenses quickly in my head, fast enough to keep up a conversation more or less going without pauses whenever I get to a verb in preterite or something. That's pretty cool. I feel like I know stuff now.

R. Tam sessions? Never heard of them until now. Crazy cool. Though I'm surprised that I hadn't seen them around/mentioned or anything.
Though I cannot find a copy of it where there is sound past excerpt 2 (the first clip). Anybody seen/have one lying around that works?

Is it bad that I read this article and immediately thought about mpreg? Because this just proves what I've been saying all along. It is possible. Now I know it's not just theoretically possible.

All the teachers today were like "If we have a snow day tomorrow..." I'm like, yeah right. There's no way. You know why it's not going to snow? Because I'm not yet on spring break. If it snows, it will be all next week. It also isn't going to snow because I have two tests, one both of which I don't have the slightest idea what are about.

Honestly, I don't know what I've been doing in math for the past two weeks, because I have no idea how to do hyperbolas. Or circles, or elipses, or parabolas. You know what I was thinking about? Hyperbola goes with hyperbole, and parabola goes with parable. Math/English connections. Fun.

I. Need. The. Serenity. Soundtrack. End of story. I am planning on marrying the guy that wrote all that music. I am in love.

My computer has gotten better about downloads lately. All of a sudden, I don't know why. It used to be that when for some reason the download speed slowed down (like if I tried to download two things at once, or opened a page with a lot of images or something), even if I removed the slowerdowner, it would stay slow. Now it will speed back up. Not fast, but back to normal. (Which is about 3.5 KB/sec. Pretty slow.)

I found bits of the Serenity soundtrack for download on Can't Stop the Signal, but they won't download. Sadness.