Current Post On Trae’s Blog:
So I'm just going to come out and say it: My favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is "Conundrum." It's episode fourteen of season five, and I just deeply love it.
I don't know if it's because I literally just assumed Erich Anderson's Commander McDuff was a random Enterprise officer of the week (which we saw quite often during the show) when I watched it as a kid during the original run, so the twist actually worked on eleven year old me. I don't know if it's because I just like a good "everyone has amnesia" story. I don't even know if it's just because it's a good Ro Laren episode. I don't know if it's just because we learn that Starfleet doesn't give a crap about lasers.
I just like it. It's neat.
And I rewatched it last night, and feel that it holds up -- which is why I found it deeply weird that the folks who wrote the episode actually think it's not that good. My favorite episode of the entire seven season run of the show was a failure according to the folks who wrote it.
And maybe, as a writer and creator, I should remember that.
Like the hardest part of releasing creative works to the public is that often, after a while, I'll start to judge those things far more harshly than when I first made them. Or I'll compare it to the potential I thought an idea had in my head. And if I don't reach that potential, I'll think of it as "bad" -- when it might just be slightly different than that idea. I have one hundred percent published stories that I thought were just sort of okay and later had someone tell me how much it meant to them to read it.
*cough*I Hate November*cough*
So I should make sure I remember Conundrum. That one of my favorite things to rewatch is considered one of those failures by its creators. That the things I make might have value, just not in the way I originally thought they should.
It's just sort of how things work out.
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Well it appears the war has just begun. Time to knock Jim down peg.
Nah, nobody could have seen this coming. Hope one of them screenshotted the Facebook group Jim was running before he takes it down.
This is kind of odd, really. If Jim’s this incompetent at game-playing, he wouldn’t have been in the position he was. Something’s not right here. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not hardly rooting for Jim in this thing – but I’d expect a more insidious and harder to counter effort. This is like Superman showing up to fight Lex Luthor, and finding out all he’s got no plan, a BB pistol, and 2 guys with blackjacks or something. You’d have to wonder what he was setting you up for, given his part history. I’d be wondering here too.
Gah. Past history, not part. Reminder to me – no typing when your hands (and apparently brain) are freezing.
It could be a matter of Jim just underestimating the Internet. When he talks about keeping Garner in check when he was getting on Lynn’s case (after she first joined), he talked about distracting Garner with other tasks and breaking up any cliches. That’s all real-world, in-person matters. And all Unagi-con meetings and primary communication seems to be occurring in-person too.
It makes sense to me that you could be a master manipulator in-person, but not so much in online if you underestimate the masses and how easy it is to document/screenshot things. There’s a reason the phrase “the Internet never forgets” is around. Jim might not be taking into account simple things like this. I think this might be especially so since he didn’t know how to disguise himself as an admin on the Bork Con Sucks Facebook page.
*matter of Jim not understanding the Internet.
Oh my goodness, I am not awake. I had it right the first time. @___@
Jim is good at manipulating but he’s not thinking at the moment. He’s completely over-the-top livid and his anger is clouding his judgement. He’s grabbing at anything that looks like a weapon to use against Lynn.
Next play will be for Bork Con to mention the Bork Con Sucks FB group, which Jim will have to delete. he should have already done so before releasing the e-mail.
As an aside, it is poor form at best for Jim to have NOT redacted the contact e-mails for the Bork con staffers. That info should be considered private.
No, he’d be able to claim the un-redacted stuff is fabrication by Lynn after the fact: time-stamps can be altered.
You’d be scandalized to know just how much the average low level staffer does not know and does not want to know the dirty laundry; many have a keeping my head down and doing my job approach to getting the job done.
Now in all truth the story is going whatever way Trae wants it to go and has story-boarded it out already
I think at this point, since Jim’s the one who made it public, the unreacted version of the letter needs to go up on Bork Con’s social media and they need to screen cap the “Bork Con Sucks” Facebook page before it is deleted.
I think there’s something else that’s being overlooked. Overconfidence. Jim’s not used to ‘playing the game’ with capable people. He’s surrounded himself with people he knows and can manipulate on staff. And he’s used to being successful at it. He’s also used to playing from a position of strength, as Con chair. Now he’s playing against a team of people who are better at the game than he is (individually, and as a group).
Just because Jim managed to play the game for a long time against a group of people doesn’t mean that he’s skilled at the game, it just means that he’s better than those he’s playing against.