Rule 34 2013

Hello, Internet. I am one of your many Kings, and I greet you both as Ruler and Servant. For today's lesson, let's consider Rule 34, which states: If it exists, there is porn of it.

Above is Admiral Janeway from Star Trek: Voyager. A Simpson's joke, but it's no joke. Of course there is Janeway porn.

Click below for a wicked tease of Rule 34!

Satellite Photographers

Earth and the Moon as pictured by Voyager 1 back in the 70's. Beautiful, haunting, evoking a wonder and loneliness that is life. And the artist is a historical explorer. Yay culture!

Earth and Moon as seen by the Mars Global Surveyor, a craft currently snapping lovely pics on assignment at Mars. MGS is the foremost auteur in Red Planet Studios.

Earth and Moon as seen by the Juno space probe, launched last Summer for a mission to Jupiter. Currently, Juno is getting ready to swing by Earth for the last time, obtaining a huge sling shot of gravity assisted speed which will scoot it on the way to Jupiter in 2016. Prospects there are rated "ridiculously good". The moons of Jupiter in all their glories!

Speaking of Moons - Saturn's got a lot of them. But, see that bright dot in the upper right, between the rings? That's no Moon. Magnified in the inset, hey, it's Earth! As snapped by a contender for greatest space artist of all time, Cassini, currently orbiting around Saturn making fantastic discoveries.

All thematic riffs on the PBD, of course, but why wouldn't you love this shot? Only a handful of photographers ever get the opportunity, and it certainly is a lesson in perspective.

The Horrors of Specialization

For example: If you are a Graphic Artist, this poster might cause you night sweats. If you aren't, you might not care. The minutiae of the specialist is often of no concern to the non-specialist.  But you should care, dang it! Bad design leads to more bad design, and who wants that?

Speaking of...

Anyone can get a cooking show these days.

Requiem for Voyager

It wasn't the best Trek, I think we can all agree, but it was Trek, and somewhat true to the ideals as set forth in TOS and TNG. Peace. Exploration. Weird ass "what if" sci-fi episodes. I quibble with many of the details, but what do quibbles matter? In the end. So let's say goodbye to Voyager with a photo series.


Also, did people really look like this in the 90's? My color pattern was much more flannel.

O, Ensign Kim. 7 years serving as Operations officer in one deadly mission after another, and never a promotion. What were you doing wrong on Janeway's ship, man? Did Chakotay hate you? Crikey! Pretty boy Paris was a convicted criminal and he got a promotion. Shit ain't fair.

Janeway was a good captain. Not great. Better than Archer - but then, so was the EMH. This, however, violates many rules of fictional time travel. But violating rules is what you gotta do on the other side of the Galaxy, amirite?

Such as - you can't go faster than Warp 10! This is what happens! You get turned into a giant space salamander - true fact. You don't want that, do you? Obey the Warp limit then.

I think the joke here is that no one had a end of Voyager party, right? Or, perhaps, that the Doctor would hang out with these lower class degenerates - Barney's just above grade level "Street Bum". Either way, I can't blame you, Voyager, for contributing to the near destruction of the Trek franchise. You were just a fictional tv show! The real villains - like, worse than many of the Huns (not Attila though, dude was a badass) - were the Producers, Berman and Braga. I think they've since been shunned to remote Arctic islands, never to Produce (or Executive Produce) again. Hurrah!

But the damage has already been done....

?

Champagne Toasts

Here's to you, Captain Kirk. Or Evil Kirk, more likely - hey: Who's evil doppelganger wouldn't be cooler than the original? By definition, methinks. So don't take it personally.

Seriously, if anyone you know or meet says they love Voyager, run. Do it fast, do it subtly, do it somewhere inbetween, but just do it. It's an awful show, and highlights the Fall of Trek in obvious fashion - concurrently with the decline of American culture. Co-incidence? Probably not.

Poconos resort premier room. Now defunct and derelict, of course. Another concurrent process with the demise of America.

Also, have I ever told you how much I LOVE hyperbole?

Voyager Forever

Quite literally, this artifact will last forever, far longer than anything on Earth. What it says, I have no idea, so I'm not sure how the space aliens will figure it out. But it looks cool, and ultimately, that's good enough.

Voyager Rules!

Not that Voyager, actually. That Voyager had tons of potential and I will admit the first few seasons had their charms. But by the end it was a Space train wreck ending in a Space ditch.
















This Voyager, however, is totally awesome and rules by any measure you'd like to use to measure awesomeness.

I have a huge weakness for pictures like this, pictures of perspective. Like Carl Sagan's "Little Blue Dot", these types of pictures almost force you to consider the reality of your existence. The scale of it all, so vast, so incredibly vast and so incredibly small that our lives are what, in comparison? In the scheme of it all.

I mean, look into this picture. See the little solar system spinning around the bright nucleus of the Sun? Our planet is nothing but a single proton in orbit.

Wiki says:
"For the first ten billion kilometres of its radius, the solar wind travels at over a million kilometres per hour.^[1][2] As it begins to collide with the interstellar medium, it slows to subsonic speeds before finally ceasing altogether. The point where the solar wind becomes subsonic is the termination shock; the point where the interstellar medium and solar wind pressures balance is called the heliopause; the point where the interstellar medium, travelling in the opposite direction, becomes subsonic as it collides with the heliosphere is the bow shock."

This is our cellular membrane, shielding us from the worst of the vast expanse between us and the next cell.

Far out, right?

This makes us what, exactly? Quarks?