Sarcasm is an adjusted stress reaction.

1. Your main fandom of the year?

Still Star Trek, my friends. It doesn't deserve my love, but it has it.

2. Your favorite film watched this year?

Dune Part Two. I really appreciated how it delved deep into the stuff that Lynch's film had to skip: Paul's rise as a terrorist freedom fighter, the Bene Gesserit's plans, Jessica's manipulations. It wasn't a perfect film, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

3. Your favorite book read this year?

I'll get to my annual book post in a few days, but roughly by category:

Contemporary mystery: Listen for the Lie by Amy Tintera. The murder of the heroine's best friend is the subject of a true crime podcast, and after all these years, she is still the number one suspect in the eyes of the world.

YA: The Fire Keeper's Daughter by Angeline Boulley. A thriller set in the Indigenous community of Michigan.

Non-Fiction: Flying Blind: The 737-Max Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison, Challenger: A true story of heroism and disaster on the edge of space by Adam Higginbotham, and Character Limit: How Elon Musk destroyed Twitter by Kate Conger and Ryan Mac. These books have a lot in common, starting with "actually, this is sort of Ronald Reagan's fault".

4. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?

The Great Impersonator by Halsey. I was only peripherally aware of Halsey as a performer, but I heard she had an album coming out where she paid tribute to a lot of iconic acts, including PJ Harvey, Tori Amos and Bjork. As someone who was a teenager in the '90s, I was intrigued. I expected a cover album, but instead it's a series of pastiches as Halsey draws on her inspirations as she writes about being treated for leukemia and the possibility of dying young.

Not every homage is effective, but it's overall a really strong album, and it really spoke to me as I dealt with my own health issues.

5. Your favorite TV show of the year?

Star Trek: Prodigy, my beloved. After season 1, I was going around saying it's the objectively best Star Trek since DS9; after season 2, other people were saying it as well. And they were correct. I know it's heavily pushed in fandom as "Star Trek: Janeway" or a sequel to Voyager, and it is that, but I think that does a disservice to a series which very much stands on its own, and understands that obscure references and fan service are meaningless unless you're also telling a good story that's about the new characters.

6. Your favorite online community of the year?

I'm in a Discord community that started as a space for fans of Admiral Cornwell, and now we just mostly hang out and chill.

7. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

I belatedly learned there's a new TV adaptation of PD James's Adam Dalgliesh mysteries, with three seasons of six episodes each, and I love the choices it makes. The books spanned the 1960s to the early 2000s, but Dalgliesh concentrates the stories in the 1970s, with the crumbling of the social contract and Thatcher slouching towards Downing Street.

I think it's fair -- if not overly generous -- to say that James was a reactionary and rather conservative author, and the TV series makes a lot of choices she would have utterly hated: lots of characters of colour, overt queerness where she used subtext (and a strong air of distaste), emphasis on Dalgliesh as a man who is accepted by establishment figures because he is white and educated, but who holds himself at a distance.

The best choice it makes is casting a mixed race actress as Kate Miskin. Kate is introduced in the later books as a working class cop with a chip on her shoulder about her education, because she feels her schools spent too much time teaching that racism is bad, rather than actually educating her. Obviously this is James's bugbear. When I last reread the books, in the mid-2000s, I was like, "Either Kate is incredibly racist, or she is Black and didn't need to be told that racism is bad." And so I headcanoned her as Black. Clearly the people behind the TV series felt the same way, and the writing is nuanced enough that this doesn't feel like simple colourblind casting with no eye to subtext.

The downside is that now I ship Kate/Dalgliesh, even though the series has made it clear it's not going there in any meaningful way. Such is life.

Bonus entry: Dune: Prophecy. I do not know if it is actually good -- the first act of the first episode is actively bad -- but it spoke to me on a profound level even before a stout, middle-aged woman was Touched By Destiny.

8. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?

The fifth and final season of Star Trek: Lower Decks. I very quickly went from "it's a shame Lower Decks was cancelled, but five seasons is a good run" to "Lower Decks should have been cancelled sooner, actually." Season five felt formless and half-baked. Mariner barely had an arc; Tendi was out of character; Rutherford was hardly in it at all. Only Boimler got coherent and consistent character development, and it was predictable at every turn. It was giving burnout in a really sad way. Fortunately the coda to the final episode was so delightful that it almost made up for everything which had gone before, so Lower Decks didn't go out on a wholly sour note for me.

9. Your fandom boyfriend of the year?

I keep seeing people declaring that "no one" wants this series. Which is a lie, because I want it very much and deeply resent the pandemic for delaying filming.

(I realise this is the very least of the problems with the pandemic, but it's one of them.)

Anyway, literally all we know about the series is that Michelle Yeoh is led, Erika Lippolt and Bo-Yeon Kim are showrunners, and Alex Kurtzman said in an interview that it's about women, and particularly young women.

We especially don't know when in canon it will be set, but I have some ideas...

This is an impossible question. It's like asking me to choose my favourite friend.

TNG was my first Trek. It's comfortable and familiar, and yet sometimes still surprises me.

Voyager took me from adolescence to adulthood, and formed a lot of my tastes and preferences.

Discovery gave me inspiration when my well was dry, and I fell in love with a degree of enthusiasm I really didn't think I was capable of anymore. I'd be less disappointed by season 2 if I didn't love the series and characters -- yes, even the ones who aren't Kat -- so much.

TOS is fun and funny and occasionally brilliant. DS9 is more than occasionally brilliant, and clever, and important. (I suppose, if we were going with the friendship analogy, DS9 is the acquaintance I admire very much, but am too intimidated by to seek a closer relationship.) ENT sets out the groundwork and worldbuilding for the series that came before and after. TAS is ... there.

I have no doubt I'll love Picard, and find joy in Lower Decks, and there's about a 95% chance that I will take the first older women in a position of authority to appear in the untitled Nickelodeon animated YA series and attach myself to her like a limpet clinging to a rock.

One of the things I realised, coming back to Star Trek fandom in 2017, is that it's okay to walk away for a decade. The franchise, and the fandom, will still go on, and if you choose to return, that's not a step backwards, it's just a reunion with an old friend.

When I started writing Trek fic again in 2017, I made a conscious decision to name starships after women of STEM, space exploration and science fiction. And while I'm on hiatus from fic writing on account of trying really, really hard to get my novel drafted, I still haven't gotten around to creating a USS Northcutt -- named for Poppy Northcutt, the only woman in mission control for many of the Apollo missions.

(She is still alive, now working as a feminist advocate, and she's still pretty salty about being left out of Apollo 13, if you were wondering.)

Two days left!

Day 29 - Favorite Trek Quote
Day 30 - Favorite Trek Series

I don't have any firm answers for this, save Not Earth, because Trek always makes Earth look so hideously sterile. (My headcanon is that, between the loss of life in world war three and the development of warp drive and interstellar colonialism a few generations later, Earth is relatively underpopulated by the 23rd and 24th centuries. But that's no excuse for how bland it appears!)

(Yes, I realise this is a result of limited budget, time, etc. Still.)

Anyway, I'm nicking selenak's answer: Bajor. After it has rebuilt following the Occupation, of course. A variety of ecosystems means they probably have some nice beaches somewhere; there'll be museums and historical sites to visit; your chances of being blown up by isolationists or possessed by ancient evil are only marginally higher than on Vulcan. And, as she says, Bajoran food always looks good.

(Quark says they make terrible beer, but luckily I don't drink beer, and also I don't trust the palate of a man who eats tube grubs.)

( Four days left! )

"Favourite Starship", "Best Overall Space Vessel", whoever came up with this meme was determined that no one would be able to give a smartass answer to "favourite ship".

I was going to make a crack about how this is basically the same question as the earlier starship one, but then I realised I had a different answer.

The best overall space vessel is ... the USS Defiant.

Mostly for external reasons: its overall aesthetic is similar to Voyager -- grey and silver, v stylish -- but it doesn't have any of the comforts we're used to seeing on a 24th century starship. No seat for the first officer, tiny shared quarters with bunks, a cramped little mess hall. It looks like what it's meant to be: a tough little warship.

Which makes it particularly galling that it's disabled within a few minutes of its fight with the Borg. IT WAS DESIGNED TO FIGHT THE BORG. COMMANDER SHELBY KNOWS HER SHIT, DAMMIT.

(Is it book canon or my own headcanon that Shelby was behind the design of the Defiant? I know Sisko also worked on it, but he doesn't join the project until after Wolf 356, whereas she was designing anti-Borg weapons a year in advance. Either way.)

( The final five days. )

Yesterday was A DAY. I got to work forty minutes early, thinking to have a nice, leisurely cup of coffee, update my blogs and read the internet before I had to begin. Instead, it was all hands on deck, and I worked through my lunch break as well.

ANYWAY.

Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country was the first Trek film I saw, and it's still my favourite. It's probably the source of my love for awkward dinner parties as a trope; I adore the show trial and nearly everything else in it, with the exception of the Spock-Valeris forced mind meld. Or, rather, the choice to make it a sexy forced mind meld. Oh, and the bit where Uhura can't speak Klingon, because what? But everything else: wonderful.

It's aged really well as a story -- not so much as a piece of film, I definitely don't recommend watching the Blu-Ray on a HD
TV, the results will not be pretty -- and pays off a lot of things from the earlier films, from Kirk's anger after the death of his son to the presence of Starfleet officers we know in the conspiracy.

If CBS/its licensees ever want to do a tie-in comic or novel about Valeris's rehabilitation, pixiedane and I are ready and willing to write it.

ALSO, Azetbur calls out racism in Federation language ("Human rights. The very term is racist.") because she is magnificent. Ask me about my headcanon that L'Rell mentored Li'l Azetbur.

(I used to think it was ridiculous that the Klingon Empire could have female chancellors in the 23rd century, but not allow women to serve on the High Council in the 24th. Now, in 2019, I get it.)

( The final week. )

I'm not answering this one -- I don't really seek out media with characters who are like me. I live in my head already; I consume fiction to get out of it.

(I also actively avoid fiction whose main characters share my health issues. Representation matters for some people; for me, it just makes me cranky and anxious. I wouldn't have read Mary Robinette Kowal's Lady Astronaut books if I'd known the heroine suffered from anxiety; I liked the books okay in the end, but had to skip big chunks.)

( The rest of the days. )

I don't really have strong feelings about this, but I do wish we could see more of the Orions, and in spheres beyond sex work. Disco has done that to an extent, but ... we could have more! More green people! Who aren't almost naked! Who have agendas and politics and ambitions!

(I have to congratulate DS9 for giving us Orion Crime Syndicate stories without actual Orions. Is it a franchise now?)

I think Tendi, the green woman in Lower Decks, is meant to be an Orion, although the green hair is unusual. So we're on track!

( More days! )

Easy: "Counterpoint". In which Janeway plays mind games with a space fascist and wins in the sense that she saves her people, but loses in the sense that she hoped she was wrong about his sudden and inevitable betrayal.

It's not just a great script, and one of Voyager's perfect little standalone episodes, but it spawned a lot of good fic and a whole mailing list, which is where I first encountered some people who are still friends to this day.

(The script was by Michael Taylor, who also wrote DS9's "In the Pale Moonlight", and went on to work on BSG. The man likes his morally ambiguous space dramas, and I respect that.)

( The rest of the days. )