Them: If you’re familiar with the meanings of wanton and dissipation, could you please describe them in a way that will help me never confuse them with other words or forget their meaning?

Me: Oh, there is no way the comments to this post are going to be helpful.

And I was half right! I was just about the only person to give the asked-for definition of "dissipation". As predicted, everybody else used the science sense rather than the moral decay sense. What surprised me is that they also all defined the word "wanton" in terms of violence rather than sexual promiscuity.

Anyway, I said myself that dissipation (meaning debauchery) is an old-fashioned term and that I'm not quite sure how I even know that one off the top of my head, but then the next day I was re-reading Ancillary Justice and there it is, right in the first few chapters. Seivarden is in a bad state due to her dissipated lifestyle, and that's the word used to describe it. Huh. (But I think I already knew that word before I read the book for the first time.)

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How does one compose an email to say "I got a job offer that seems just on the cusp of too good to be true, but as you and your company appear to actually exist I thought I should contact you and see if it *is* legit before I delete it"?

Which I guess I can sum up as "trenchant criticism of capitalism, maybe a little preachy, not subtle at all". This might not sound like a big endorsement, but then again, I'm pretty sure most of you are Star Trek and even Babylon 5 fans, so actually it is!

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Anyway, E was looking at Halloween costume patterns and obviously your opinion doesn't really matter at all, only the parents' does, but I thought I'd put up a poll anyway. Which costume is best for a six or seven month old?



* Former stepmother, but the relationship is still there even if she's not with their dad anymore

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So, we watched that one with the telepathic pitcher plant. Seven and Naomi bond - the writers really worked to make Naomi useful to the plot rather than just being kinda there, and it mostly works - but honestly, our space Ahab has chosen the least-efficient manner possible to destroy his whale.

Then we watch the two parter with the Borg Queen, in which we establish that the Hansens (whom Seven actually refers to as the Hansens) were absolutely terrible parents. I mean, even beyond the way they brought their child on a platter to be assimilated, growing up on a tiny spaceship with only two other people is just no life for a child. They should have left her at home. (And all the flashbacks establish that she spent a lot of her brief childhood scared. Poor baby!) At one point in this episode, Seven helps rescue a group of astonishingly passive refugees who are about to be assimilated. There's a lot of off-screen screaming, but I guess these refugees weren't paid enough to talk, because they're both passive and totally silent. Also, nobody at any points suggests trying to de-assimilate any drones, even the one who is probably Seven's father, if we can believe the Borg Queen. Seems a bit uncaring, but as I said, he wasn't a good father so fuck him, I guess.

This is followed by a kinda sad and pointless episode in which Harry Kim contracts love from having surprisingly racy (for 90s Trek) sex with a dissident from a xenophobic society. She achieves her primary objective, forcing the people in charge to allow those who want to leave their society to do so, but they still break up. He's sad about it. (E and I decided that the only other Varro with a speaking role has gotta be her dad. He sure acts like he knows her pretty well, and that ship has a lot more people than Voyager does!)

And then one of my absolute favorite episodes, the one where Tom and B'Elanna get married and there's apparently a new baby on the ship we haven't heard of before and, by the way, the ship is disintegrating. Lots of people hate this episode because it's sad and bleak and pointless, but I absolutely fucking love it.

We skipped the Chakotay episode because ugh, fake Native American fake spirituality, something something "vision quest", and then it was Think Tank, which is a very watchable episode. It's not great, it's terrible - it's watchable. Also, nobody really says it, but the spokesperson of the eponymous Think Tank is himself a victim of it. He was taken from them in childhood, which wasn't all that long ago. Possibly they all are victims except the founder. It sounds like being part of a particularly reclusive cult.

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