Jeremiah Tolbert

We saw the new Star Trek movie. I liked it as a movie.  I enjoyed it about as much as the first one.  But it has prob­lems.  Big problems.

Here be spoilers.

Io9 has a really good FAQ that takes the movie to task for some of its more dense deci­sions.  It really focuses on that first open­ing away team mis­sion. The more I think about the start of that movie, the less I like it.

Here’s how it reads to me:

It’s like some­one watched an away team mis­sion from the orig­i­nal series, but dubbed in a lan­guage they don’t speak.  They kind of under­stood there was some­thing was bad about directly inter­act­ing with alien natives, but they weren’t sure why.  They saw the move­ment, the ten­sion of the sit­u­a­tion, and the char­ac­ters and the ship.  But they didn’t under­stand word one of dia­logue.  It was just peo­ple doing stuff in neat cos­tumes with some weird effects.  They didn’t under­stand the spirit of the idea.  And then they wrote their own ver­sion of that.

To put it another way, it’s like some­one try­ing to build a space shut­tle from a col­lec­tion of parts with only a photo of one in flight to go by as direction.

The new Star Trek, espe­cially in the open­ing scene, is a pithed frog. All twitch, no brain.

I’m not even going to get into the race-​​bending con­tro­versy. I agree with what oth­ers have said 100%.

And that’s what I have to say about a movie I actu­ally enjoyed.  Can you imag­ine what I say about movies I hate?

It’s been a stress­ful year so far.  I’ve accom­plished some things.  Some things I have not.  Some things are in the works.

• The SFWA redesign, the biggest project of the year so far, has launched.  It’s been gen­er­ally well received.  We have more work to done.  Websites are never done; they’re just abandoned.
• Despite the hard work above, I’ve man­aged to read fif­teen books so far this year.
• I’ve also caught three fish.  Tasty crappie.
• I’ve writ­ten three sto­ries, with more hope­fully to come.  I’m still strug­gling to find my cre­ative energy lately.  I’m hop­ing the sum­mer work­shop at KU really leads to me click­ing with the writ­ing again.
• I’m doing world build­ing and pre­lim­i­nary script­ing for a fan­tasy web comic that could be pretty excit­ing if it goes well.  I’ll be work­ing with the fine folks over at Outland Entertainment on that.
• Planning, research, and design work for Stranger Creek has been mov­ing along slowly.  Something’s not quick click­ing into place.  I’m not sure what it is yet.  Oh–maybe a plot?  Plots really are my weak­ness as a writer.  Good to know at least.
• Dieting has not gone well so far but I still have hope.  I’m start­ing back up again this week after aban­don­ing it a month or two back dur­ing a nasty cold.
• We’ve started look­ing for homes around Lawrence.  We even sub­mit­ted paper­work for a loan.  Who knows how that’s going to go — banks are often very con­fused by self-​​employed people.
• The trans­mis­sion went out on our Alero.  $1300 to fix, min­i­mum.  So that hurts.  We’ll live, but it means vaca­tion plans for the sec­ond half of June prob­a­bly need to be scaled down. Probably need to do a stay-​​cation (what a hor­ri­ble sound­ing word), espe­cially if we move for­ward with buy­ing a house.
• I’m still alive.  I’m still here, despite the best efforts of an opos­sum a cou­ple of days ago.   Here’s hop­ing the year keeps get­ting better.

Here & Now on NPR had an inter­view today with a researcher who has been look­ing into ways to fight heart dis­ease.  They’ve iden­ti­fied a very promis­ing pro­tein called GDF-​​11 that was able to take old hearts in mice and return them to a youth­ful state:

Dr. Richard Lee, direc­tor of regen­er­a­tive med­i­cine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Amy Wagers, of the Department of Regenerative Biology at Harvard, made the dis­cov­ery when they were work­ing with younger and older mice.

They took an older mouse with the most com­mon form of human heart fail­ure and merged the mouse’s blood stream with that of a healthy young mouse using a Siamese twin tech­nique known as para­bio­sis. They found that the older mouse’s dis­eased heart was able to reverse to a younger health­ier condition.

Six years out from human use is actu­ally quite fast, as I under­stand it.  The actual research paper can be found here. The results look pretty promis­ing from what I understand.

I don’t care about the eth­i­cal issues of liv­ing for­ever.  Get this in me as soon as possible.

Today I’ll talk more about the ancil­lary work I’m plan­ning around my per­sonal media empire called “Stranger Creek Stories.”

First of all, there will be the stories/​novellas/​novels, sold elec­tron­i­cally pri­mar­ily via Amazon to take advan­tage of their great deals, but prob­a­bly with some other etail­ers later on.  The debate about the appro­pri­ate­ness of giv­ing Amazon so much con­trol is for another time.

The next two aspects will be a hand­ful of social media pres­ences for a cou­ple of char­ac­ters you’ll see pop­ping up reg­u­larly.  I aim to build a city Facebook web­site, real web­site, and a news­pa­per web­site also.  These pages will all con­tain ancil­lary mate­r­ial to keep fans occu­pied and reminded while they’re wait­ing for the next piece to come out.

I’ll also be doing merch plans, just in case.  Because the sto­ries are grounded in a real fake city, I can sell city merch just like a real city does.  So soft­ball league t-​​shirts, t-​​shirts for the city, mouse pads, and so on.

I want Stranger Creek the kind of town you can crawl inside and look around at its weird­ness from dif­fer­ent angles. I want it to feel like it’s alive even when you’re not vis­it­ing it via your Kindle.  The ebooks will ref­er­ence and link to the exter­nal mate­ri­als as well, so the lines should blur nicely by the time it’s all up and running.

I don’t know if any of that will help me sell copies.  Probably not, ulti­mately.  But it’s the kind of fun stuff that I like to do, so I’m gonna do it.   Fun is the name of the game here, not profits.

I had some issues recently with a mul­ti­site install of WordPress fail­ing to load any images for a sec­ondary site.  The images would load broken.

If this hap­pens to you, check for the pres­ence of an .htac­cess file in the wp-​​includes/​ folder.  In my case, the Sucuri one-​​click secu­rity hard­en­ing tool had put a rule deny­ing PHP access, which pre­vents the redi­rect method that mul­ti­site uses for clean image urls from work­ing prop­erly.  Understandable for the most part, but annoy­ing until you really parse apart what’s going on. The 404 WordPress spits out is less than helpful.

Hopefully I can get this this to rank high in Google so oth­ers will avoid the same prob­lem, which inci­den­tally cost me approx­i­mately two hours of trou­bleshoot­ing today.

I have been think­ing a lot about belief lately.  In light of yesterday’s hor­ri­ble events, and sim­ply because my brain is wrapped around writ­ing lately, and I wish to be good at it.   I am cursed with a cer­tain ambiva­lence regard­ing belief.  Which is a prob­lem because from what I have read, deep belief in some­thing appears to be a cru­cial to the careers of writers.

I am eas­ily per­suaded by a well-​​formed argu­ment.  I might think I believe some­thing, but it doesn’t take much to dis­lodge me from my posi­tion.  The more I respect the per­son intel­lec­tu­ally, the more likely I am to let them sway my views.

There are a few core polit­i­cal things that I don’t seem to sway from (but believe I would if I heard the argu­ment that con­vinced me).  I think lib­er­als care about peo­ple in my sit­u­a­tion more than con­ser­v­a­tives.  I think unchecked cap­i­tal­ism is bad for the aver­age peo­ple.  I think that true democ­racy is a strong foun­da­tion for a gov­ern­ment, but it should be adapt­able and we shouldn’t wor­ship found­ing doc­u­ments.  I think that if it hap­pens between two con­sent­ing adults, it is not the busi­ness of any­one else.  I think that all peo­ple are equal in the eyes of law.

I don’t have reli­gious beliefs.  Nothing has per­suaded me in that regard, and I’ve read and searched far and wide for reli­gious beliefs that rang true to me.  The clos­est I have ever got­ten was Buddhism, but I don’t seem to be able to give up my attach­ments.  I like my attach­ments.  They bring me as much plea­sure as they do suffering.

Dig a lit­tle deeper, and yI find that I believe all life is beau­ti­ful. Even spi­ders and snakes (espe­cially them!).  That feel­ing you get when you go to church (if you are reli­gious)?  I feel that in the rain­for­est or on the prairie in spring.   Forests are my chapels.  To see a crea­ture liv­ing wild fills me with awe.    Whatever that thing is that causes peo­ple to recoil in hor­ror at a weird insect or poi­so­nous ani­mal, I lack that–in fact, I was born with­out it, I believe.  My mother can attest to my bio­philia even when I was an infant crawl­ing around, chas­ing wild rab­bits before I could even walk.

And yet I’m a meat eater.  Full of con­tra­dic­tions, I guess.

I used to con­sider myself an ardent envi­ron­men­tal­ist, but I saw that bat­tle was lost before I was even born.  Humans and their short term needs inher­ently out­weigh all else in our civ­i­liza­tion.  Logging, min­ing, frack­ing, whatever–if we need it, and it kills wildlife, destroys habi­tat, it’s going to be killed and destroyed in the end.   Environmentalism seems like wasted effort these days.  As does any kind of fight against global cli­mate change.

But really, polit­i­cal beliefs, beliefs in sci­en­tific the­o­ries such as evo­lu­tion or global cli­mate change–those are not the kinds of deep beliefs that a writer needs in order to have some­thing to express.

Are peo­ple fun­da­men­tally good or bad?  I don’t know.  Which day of the week is it?

Do you believe in con­cepts of good and evil? I don’t know.  Sometimes.

What is the mean­ing of life?  I don’t know.  I’m not sure there is one.

Before the Recession, I cared a lot more.  Maybe it was a mat­ter of youth, or maybe I expe­ri­enced a con­trac­tion of my sphere of care.  The strug­gle to sur­vive after every­thing that hap­pened reduced what mat­tered to me to my imme­di­ate fam­ily and friends.  Perhaps a win­now­ing away of friv­o­lous beliefs is a nat­ural con­se­quence of grow­ing older. It’s a cliche, but the older I get, the more I real­ize how lit­tle I know.

So I spend a lot of time think­ing lately: what do you believe, Jeremy?  What mat­ters to you?  Thinking that if I could just find some­thing that sparks my fires, that I’d find more mean­ing in my work.  I don’t have answers.  But I believe there’s value in seek­ing them–not sure for my writ­ing, but for being a well-​​lived human being.

I worked on some char­ac­ter devel­op­ment as I drove around doing a few errands this morn­ing.  Sometimes, the car is the best place to get pre-​​writing done.

I know that I need an ani­mal con­trol per­son in Stranger Creek for the story I’m plot­ting. And I had a vague idea of mak­ing him a were­wolf but that seemed too easy.  Then I thought… you know what would be funny? A guy in a place like this who works with wild ani­mals prob­a­bly gets bit­ten a lot. Which prob­a­bly means he gets all kinds of dis­eases, includ­ing all the lycan­thropic ones.

So at last count, Wilfred the Animal Control guy has 6 dif­fer­ent lycan­thropies, all of which keep to dif­fer­ent sched­ules (not every species has such a close rela­tion­ship with the moon). Wilfred keeps a very detailed calendar.

I pic­ture the poor man as lanky and awk­ward, and pos­sess­ing great fear of hav­ing any kind of con­tact at all with wild ani­mals. He loves his job because he loves serv­ing the com­mu­nity.  So rather than quit, he keeps try­ing out pro­gres­sively cra­zier pro­tec­tive gear (bear armor) to avoid being bit­ten (which of course rarely works).

I know I’m on to some­thing when I start laugh­ing sym­pa­thet­i­cally at my own char­ac­ter notions.

This place is going to be so much fun to write about.