Star Trek Captains have a heavy weight to burden; they not only have to carry the responsibility of the welfare of their entire crew, but depending on the week they could be making first contact with a new species, infiltrating secret Cardassian strongholds, or bolstering security back at home. And with all of this, they have the constant awareness that they are being compared against the greats of the past with every action and decision. Luckily, ever since Captain Kathryn Janeway came back from the Delta Quadrant, every Star Fleet Captain has one less burden. Because they’ll never be as bad as Janeway.

I know that sounds like a pithy remark with nothing behind it, but it really isn’t. Every other Star Trek captain in the canon of Star Trek (which excludes the novels thankfully) is better than her. Even that douche that got Kirk stuck in the Nexus in Generations. Even that shitty I’m-so-goddamned-evil captain in the episode of Voyager where the other Starfleet ship lost in the Delta Quadrant shows up and much more worse for the wear.

Now you might think that her ship is in such good condition because she’s managed to avoid conflict and stayed out of interplanetary politics in this backwater ditch of a quadrant. If you thought that, clearly you’ve never seen the show.

Janeway didn’t survive because of her natural leading ability, like Kirk; Janeway didn’t survive because of her subtle politics and ability to empathize with opposing views, like Picard (among other reasons); and Janeway certainly didn’t survive because she had a deep spiritual connection with the plight of those around her and was destined to play a part in shaping the worlds and future before her. Janeway survived because every week, there was a new particle discovered, or existing one exploited for purposes completely unrelated to all previous known usages, that was exactly what her ship needed to get out of the Tight Jam of the Week.

And her ship wasn’t pristine because of the military strategies she employed in her frequent needless battles, but because the budget required exterior shots of the ship to be repeated in new episodes to make the CGI department cost-effective. Every single battle that Voyager went through in those seven years in the Delta Quandrant — always 75 years away from the Alpha Quadrant even though every season they would find at least one shortcut that shaved five to ten years off their journey — was more destructive than anything the Enterprise D suffered but every week the ship was in tip-top shape once again. Even Enterprise made some lame attempts to show that not everything can be repaired without a starbase and some dry dock time with their body-snatching space station episode. But Voyager doesn’t need things like ship repair and shore leave.

Admittedly, some of these complaints are about the show in general, but the fact is the captain is the show. People will prefer The Next Generation if they prefer Picard. But even ignoring the completely unrealistic journey that Voyager took, there are plenty of things wrong with Janeway.

She was a hypocrite of the highest degree. The very first episode of the show, Janeway barters with a tribal species known as the Kazon for some information. What does she barter with? Water, something she can generate unlimited supplies of through Alpha Quadrant replicator technology, but is incredibly rare on the dying desert planet on which those Kazon reside. Eventually Neelix, her tentative ally up until now, destroys all the water they brought just to fuck with the Kazon. Any other captain would have kicked that rat-faced little shit off their ship then and there. But she keeps him around because he knows his way around the Delta Quadrant. If she had seen the rest of the first season already, she would know how little Neelix actually knew about the area, but even without that foresight, trusting someone who acts so duplicitously is an idiotic move.

That’s not completely hypocritical, although her over-the-top reactions to lesser crimes later on in the series show that she has absolutely no memory of past actions; what’s truly mind-bogglingly hypocritical is when she next runs into the Kazon, instead of offering replicator technology and a sincere apology for the actions of one fool under her stead, she claims moral and intellectual superiority by telling the Kazon that they shouldn’t have fucked with Voyager and that she couldn’t give them replicators, or even replicate supplies for them, because it would violate the Prime Directive: noninterference in undeveloped civilizations.

The closest the Prime Directive ever got to noninterference with already space-faring species was when Picard refused to repair the rickety shuttles used by the two planets to deliver the “medicine” for a long-lived plague from one planet to another. Not only was that an exceptional situation where Picard used the Prime Directive to stick it to the planet of smug drug dealers, but it was also exceptional because their ships were actually inferior. The Kazon had warp drives, a massive interstellar pseudo-empire, and could hold their own in battle against virtually every adversary in their midst, Voyager included. That’s hardly an inferior species. No-one would begrudge her for making peace with the Kazon through a cultural and technological exchange.

But that’s all semantics and law interpretation, right? We know now that Janeway has a very strict interpretation of the Prime Directive, so everything’s good. Right? Well, it is until the Hirogen show up and beat the living snot out of Voyager (another instance of the reset button enacting miraculous repairs) and after two episodes of pointless World War 2 holodeck simulations with the Hirogens as the Nazis (why they wouldn’t chose to be the allies is left unclear) Janeway gives them holodeck technology and databases of pre-existing holodeck programs to give them a head start! But at least she’s consistent. Within an episode. (And even that isn’t a guarantee, I just don’t have the time to do more than vaguely recall the idiocy of this show.)

I recall when a lot of people would get angry at disliking Janeway because she was a female captain, so she’d have to be a little tougher. First of all, Star Trek is supposed to be a colour-blind, gender-blind, species-blind co-operative of planets, so why exactly would the sexism of our society be relevant to her? Second of all, she wasn’t a little tougher, and she wasn’t just being an assertive woman. Her character changed depending on the episode, for the sake of a plot. One episode she’d be a tough-as-nails take-no-prisoners hardass, and the next episode she’d be a soft demure lady-in-waiting who had fallen for the Brave Man of the Week. It’s not that people can’t be both those things, or that people can’t change and grow over time, it’s that these disparate aspects of her personality don’t complement each other and they don’t mesh together naturally.

When we see Picard get stabbed by a Nausicaan as a rebellious youth, it’s not a sudden jarring discontinuity in the character, it informs the character we’ve come to know and love. Picard was a complete character, as was Sisko, but Janeway is woefully outgunned here, both by the calibre of the acting but also by the writing and characterizations. Again it’s not that her characteristics couldn’t work together, or couldn’t work together in a female character; Voyager could have been the best Trek up until that time if done properly, but it wasn’t so we’re left with the piece of shit that unfortunately stinks up the rest of Star Trek canon.

I could go on for much longer (I really really could) ranting and foaming at the mouth about all the things that Voyager did wrong and why Janeway is at the heart of most of these problems, but I don’t think it’s necessary. I don’t know of anyone who genuinely enjoys all or most of Star Trek — that is, not just Voyager — and doesn’t dislike Voyager, and Janeway herself, to a certain degree. And it’s not hard to see why. She was an egocentric and fickle, yet stubborn, captain who, despite years of efforts on the writers’ parts, never became a sympathetic or respected character.

It was Voyager and Janeway (and we’ll never forget the horror that was Seven of Nine) that degraded the image of Star Trek to the world. Deep Space Nine was never as popular as The Next Generation or Voyager, but it was consistently better than the latter and was at least as good as the former. With each new year Voyager got worse, and DS9 got better. But when Deep Space Nine left the airwaves, Voyager had to stand for all of Star Trek on its own. It took only a year, but without the credibility of Deep Space Nine to bolster the weaker Voyager, Star Trek was soon tarnished and that scar remained for Enterprise’s entire run. Enterprise didn’t do much to repair Trek’s image until its later years but it was still better than Voyager on its worst days.

I sometimes wonder what the landscape of Star Trek would be like right now if Voyager and to a lesser degree Enterprise hadn’t failed their progenitors so horribly. Would we still have a relaunch movie coming out next year? Or would Enterprise be closing off its seven year run with a Deep Space Nine movie coming out and a new series exploring the troubled lives of intergalactic starfleet explorers as they journey to our nearest neighbour galaxy. Who knows what wonders they would have found in that deep void. And what terrors.

I learned a few things the hard way on my first comic-con pilgrimage. In this ongoing series I’ll be documenting the things I did wrong and how you can avoid them should you ever go to comic-con. (Or maybe I’ll never write one of these again; I’m fickle that way.)

One of the first mistakes I made was over-scheduling the various panels of interest without taking into account the other events that go on at comic-con: most especially the exhibit hall. The exhibit hall is where you go to see all the booths set up by various exhibitors. If you want to see the latest collectible busts of Hellboy, you can head over to the Sideshow Collectibles booth; if you want to buy 30 Rock t-shirts and Dwight Schrute bobble heads, you head over to the NBC booth; and a quick stroll through Artists’ Alley gives you a broad look at a large range of artistic abilities and sensibilities. I went to the exhibit hall every day of comic-con for at least an hour, usually more, and even though I’d walked the length of it numerous times I saw something new every time I walked the aisles. You could quite easily go to comic-con and simply explore all the exhibit halls have to offer for the duration.

But even exploring briefly in between panels results in a multitude of choices, and all of them tantalizing. Here’s the problem. I went to comic-con vaguely aware of the exhibit hall, but I had my mind set on seeing the panels. That said, I went there with 500 USD in my wallet planning to spend every penny and maybe more, but as I strolled the exhibit hall aisles I realized that didn’t have any room to bring this stuff back with me.

In my zeal to bring every awesome shirt I had to prove my geekiness to other geeks, I packed a duffel bag packed nearly to the brim for a four day trip. I could probably shove it full of any trade paperbacks I purchased on the floor, but comics are much more fragile and would likely get crumpled along the way. No bag and board would solve this problem.

Then let’s factor in other purchases like posters, and movie props, and statues, and even original artwork. They’re all too big or to fragile to withstand being shoved in with my clothes for a plane flight, especially when your bag gets remanded to airline security for a random security check where the word “gentle” is not in their vocabulary (but that’s a story for another time).

So I ended up not buying all that much. Oh I still spent hundreds of dollars buying trade paperbacks, but I couldn’t pick up any of the comic-con exclusive versions of comics I like or posters or prints. That said, I did pick up a great print of art by Mike Sosnowski called The Culprit for my niece because I thought she’d like it, but by the time I got my bag back from airport security, the print was horribly crumpled and I would have been better off ordering it from his website.

So if there’s anything you do in preparation for comic-con, you should plan for the swag. Bring an extra piece of luggage for your gifts that you can bring as carry-on to ensure its safety on the flight, or be willing to swallow the costs and ship your purchases to yourself in well packed boxes. Whatever option you choose, one proferred here or one of your own devising, just be aware of the problem before you go or it could put an unnecessary restraint on the reckless spending inherent in an event such as this.

Well, the final schedule for the San Diego Comic-Con (or “Comic-Con” as it is known among certain circles) has finally been published. I haven’t written about it here, since my dedicated readership is ostensibly me, but I’m going to Comic-Con so this is a pretty big deal for me. Comic-Con is an epic event in the world of comics, film, television, sci-fi, fantasy, and it’s branching into mainstream entertainment as its fame grows. It’s a Mecca for geeks.

I’ve only given the two big days, Friday and Saturday, a cursory glance, but from what I’ve seen I’ve got a huge challenge prioritizing the various panels and events that I’ll be going to. Already I’ve run into a few painful decisions because of the sheer quantity of events. It’s rare that I run into situations such as these with a multitude of temptations. With the advent of PVR and bittorent, my TV watching habits have become much more open. Where I once stopped watching one show because a better one was on at the same time, now I simply watch the lesser of the two later on. I’ve gotten so used to the asynchronous nature of my media consumption that this schedule was quite a blow to me.

Now I need to go figure out what makes the cut. Wish me luck.

IPv6 is the next step in the Internet. At least that’s what was promised over a decade ago when IPv6 was first announced. The problem was the the four billion or so addresses allowed in IPv4 (that’s what you’re using right now) weren’t enough to accommodate everybody. The world was going to run out of IP addresses. And soon. That’s why most home networks use routers; routers allow multiple computers to use a single IP address with the added benefit of making the computers behind the router inaccessible from the public internet. But even with routers and NAT and all the kludges designed to extend IPv4, that’s all they do: extend. We’re slowly and surely running out of IP addresses and that’s why IPv6 was designed.

Now there are lots of valid reasons why IPv6 should be adopted and many other reasons why it hasn’t yet been adopted. There are more knowledgeable people to explain all the intricate awesomeness in IPv6. What I really care about is a quote I read in an ars technica article on the subject regarding the sheer size of the IPv6 address space:

The total number of possible addresses that this gives us [is] 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456. To put this into perspective: there are currently 130 million people born each year. If this number of births remains the same until the sun goes dark in 5 billion years, and all of these people live to be 72 years old, they can all have 53 times the address space of the IPv4 Internet [4,294,967,296 addresses] for every second of their lives.

If that doesn’t get you excited about IPv6… well you’re not a geek like me.