Planet Dilbia is in a crucial location for both humans and their adversaries, the Hemnoids. Therefore making friends with the Dilbians and establishing a human presence there is of the utmost importance, which may be a problem, since the bearlike Dilbians stand some nine feet tall, and have a high regard for physical prowess. They're not impressed by human technology, either. A real man, er, bear doesn't need machines to do his work for him.

But Dilbians are impressed by sharp thinking, and some have expressed a grudging admiration for the logical (and usually sneaky) mental maneuvers that the human "shorties" have used to get themselves out of desperate jams. Just maybe that old human craftiness will win over the Dilbians to the human side. If not, we lose a nexus, and the Dilbians will learn just how unbearable Hemnoids can be....

* A "technobabble generator" created as a joke by a friend of Shankar became a frequently utilized not-joke writers' room tool.

* Moore and Braga lament that "Star Trek: Generations," which they labored on for a year, didn't turn out as well as "All Good Things," which took two weeks to write.

* Piller argued against the other writers who wanted Wesley to stay true to his fellow cadets in the season-five episode "The First Duty." Piller prevailed and Wesley did end up throwing his friends under the bus to put Starfleet Academy honor first. The episode, relates Shankar, is now used at the U.S. Air Force Academy to teach cadets about the honor code.

* The writers reveal Brent Spiner grew weary of stories involving Data's cat Spot. As a practical joke, they inserted into one script a scene in which Data invents a collar that translates Spot's meows into English.

* One storyline that was much fought for before Piller shot it down was to kill Will Riker and replace him permanently with his transporter-mishap doppleganger Tom Riker. "It was a chance to reinvent the character," explains Moore.

* Patrick Stewart, perhaps envious of William Shatner, apparently told every TNG writer he met that Picard wasn't "shooting and screwing" enough.

* Behr had a great episode idea about Picard getting promoted to admiral and Riker given the captaincy of the Enterprise -- and how Picard dealt with the promotions. But Roddenberry insisted Picard's insecurities regarding his new life were out of character, and the script was scrapped. That concept evolved into the episode in which Picard gets boned on the pleasure planet.

* Frakes was always annoyed when the writers made Riker turn down offers of commanding his own ship. He (and many fans) felt his willingness to decline a captaincy was out of character.

* Ironically given the subject matter of his first script, Moore was not a fan of children living aboard the Enterprise. He also never understood why a psychotherapist was always sitting on the bridge next to the captain. Moore was also no fan of the replicator, which he believed an enemy of drama.

* Rick Berman, Brannon Braga and Moore all once lamented that they should have saved "Yesterday's Enterprise" for the plot of the "Generations" movie, with the Kirk-Spock Enterprise swapped for the Garrett-Castillo one.

* The staff, which at the time included future "Battlestar Galactica" mastermind Ronald D. Moore, would often refer to Data as "a toaster."

The Time To Read feature uses your reading speed to let you know how much time is left before you finish your chapter or before you finish your book. Your specific reading speed is stored only on your Kindle Touch; it is not stored on Amazon servers.

Will finish this book in about 4 hours!

The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail… Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers. So, as players spend a few hours playing and growing their own game dev company, they will start to see the following message, styled like any other in-game message:

Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.

Slowly their in-game funds dwindle, and new games they create have a high chance to be pirated until their virtual game development company goes bankrupt.

"I can't progress furher... HELP!" one user wrote. "Guys I reached some point where if I make a decent game with score 9-10 it gets pirated and I can't make any profit.

"It says blah blah our game got pirated stuff like that. Is there some way to avoid that? I mean can I research a DRM or something?"

Said another user: "Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me! Not fair."

As we continue to focus on exclusive and curated content, our willingness to pay for non-exclusive, bulk content deals declines.

As we've gained experience, we've realized that the 20th documentary about the financial crisis will mostly just take away viewing from the other 19 such docs, and instead of trying to have everything, we should strive to have the best in each category. As such, we are actively curating our service rather than carrying as many titles as we can.

We don't and can't compete on breadth with Comcast, Sky, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, or Google. For us to be hugely successful we have to be a focused passion brand. Starbucks, not 7-Eleven. Southwest, not United. HBO, not Dish.

After meeting a mysterious yet very beautiful girl, a wannabe action star discovers that she's, in fact, a gumiho -- a legendary fox with nine tails -- who longs to transform herself into a true human.

Prosecutor Min Tae Yeon transforms into a vampire, but he survives by drinking blood sold on the black market rather than by preying on the living. His special powers also give him an edge in solving murder cases.

• BioShock - Note, I'm not talking about BioShock Infinite. That would be timely, and we don't do things like that here at Kaedrin. I actually picked up the BioShock 1 and 2 collection a little while ago and have slowly been making my way through it. Great atmosphere, some harrowing choices, and a combat system that's not all that fun. It's a first person shooter, but something about it just strikes the wrong chord with me. Part of it is the way enemies move, and another part is that ammo is scarce (there seems to be some sort of scaling system that allows you to find more stuff when you're running low, which is nice I guess, but also just annoying). I suppose expectations play a role here too, as this is a game that gets praised to high heaven by everyone, and it's been around for so long that at this point I'm bound to be disappointed. That's the drawback of the Kaedrin system, I guess. Still, I'm interested enough that I will most likely finish.
• Soul Calibur V - I've never been that into fighting games, so I figured I'd give one a shot a while ago. Let's just say that I'm not very good at this game and that I'm not really willing to put in the practice time to figure it all out. I'd rather just create dumb custom characters, and even that gets dull pretty quickly. So this is perhaps not the game's fault, but I'm not doing so well with this one.
• FTL: Faster Than Light - Now this is a little more my speed. It's a pretty straightforward looking strategy game that nevertheless has a deceptively deep gameplay. The game basically amounts to micromanaging a spaceship as you try to guide it across several sectors, all whilst being pursued by an enemy fleet. Simple setup, and basic gameplay, but it's fun, and it's something that's pretty easy to pickup and play, no huge investment of time needed. A single game can last an hour or so, but it has a high replay value. I'm no expert or anything, but I'm enjoying it and will continue to play.
• Hitman: Absolution - The only game in this post that I haven't started yet. Hitman: Blood Money was a game that really grew on me. I still think it's absurd to win the games exactly how you're supposed to without consulting outside guides or anything like that, but the value is that it's fun to come up with alternate strategies or just go completely rogue and kill everyone. Anyway, this is the first entry in the series since Blood Money, so I figure I should try it out.

• Roger Ebert's Letter to a Young Film Critic - Whether you're a big fan of Roger Ebert or not, you have to admit that he had a huge impact on the appreciation of film in this country. He passed away this past week, so lots of things like this have been popping up. In this case, he went out of his way to give some encouragement to a 14 year old kid who was handing out movie review newsletters at his school (in 1987). Just more evidence of a decent, hard-working, generous guy.
• Siskel & Ebert Outtakes - Perhaps a bit less polished, but this video of outtakes captures that lightning in the bottle chemistry of Siskel and Ebert. For reference, you can also head over to siskelandebert.org to check out archives of old shows. Big timesink, but the shows are a lot of fun!
• That Time Tom Hardy Took a Photo With a Boy Dressed As Bane and We All Died - Tom Hardy is a good sport.
• US 'hair archaeologist' recreates coiffures of antiquity - The headline pretty much says it all, but for good measure:

  By day, Janet Stephens cuts and colors at a hair salon. By night, she is an amateur archaeologist, meticulously recreating hairstyles dating back to the times of Roman antiquity.

  The Indy Jones of hair? [via MidniteTease]
• Japanese Schoolgirls Perform Superhuman Energy Attacks - A gem from the i'mnotscaredenoughofthejapanese tag I have on Delicious, this is sorta like Planking, but instead of being stupid, it's girls taking pictures of themselves as if they are actually performing superhuman energy attacks, a la Dragonball Z. Brilliant.

...the Hugo voter has a certain style it looks for in its fiction. Hugo-style, if you will, is like Gangnam-style only without the distracting Korean guy riding a horse, replaced with Charles Stross and Connie Willis on a podium holding a... rocket ship. I admit Gangnam-style doesn't have nearly as much sex appeal. In other words, Hugo nominated books tend to be recognizable. On the one hand because they are mostly written by Stross, Willis, John Scalzi, China Mieville, Robert Charles Wilson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ian MacDonald, and active members of the Live Journal community, but also because they fit a certain motif that's difficult to pin down. I'll fall back on the old pornography argument, "I know it when I see it."

None of this accusation of style is a criticism of the award, quite the contrary. I believe the populist nature of an award like the Hugo is vitally important. It captures the kinds of novels that more elitist awards fail to - books people love to read. I've tried several times to read John Crowley's Little, Big (which was, ironically enough, nominated for a Hugo in 1982) and it just isn't any fun. Like Little, Big though, the best novel category almost always has a wild card - something that doesn't quite fit in to the Hugo mold - and sometimes they win. These winning standouts usually represent something that can't be ignored for societal (Windup Girl), cultural (Among Others), or inferiority inferiority complexacle (The Yiddish Policeman's Union) reasons.

Books like Bear's and Jemisin's are missing not because they aren't good enough or even because they aren't the kinds of books Hugo voters support, but because of an impenetrable culture of voting habits that precludes them from being part of the discussion. Those habits involve Lois McMaster Bujold, John Scalzi, and (of late) Seanan McGuire who are as likely to be nominated for a Hugo as Barrack Obama is to be heckled at the San Antonio Stock Show & Rodeo.

....best dramatic short form can be summarized in one sentence: why does an award exist when 60% of the nominees year in and year out are from one creative enterprise?

• There is a lot of angst around the dearth of short story nominees (two of which are available online for free), due to a Hugo rule that in order to be nominated, an entry must receive at least 5% of the vote (and there's a minimum of 3 nominees, so it's possible, though probably unlikely, that no short story received 5% of the vote this year). This is apparently not unheard of, especially in the short story category, which is more varied and less talked about than other categories. Cheryl Morgan has the details on the 5% rule and a cautionary tale too.
• Morgan also notes that this year's Hugo ballot "has been submerged in a terrifying flood of girl cooties." Women took 11 of 18 nominations in the fiction categories, with the aforementioned Seanan McGuire nominated for 4 fiction awards (she's also nominated for the podcast award).
• In other awards news, the 2012 BSFA Award Winners were recently announced, including Jack Glass for Best Novel (been in the queue a while, but only because it wasn't available in the states!) and the self-published Adrift on the Sea of Rains, by Ian Sales (which I did not particularly love, but which was well done for sure).