Given the option between hanging out with 3,000 Trekkies who are willing to plunge headfirst into a strange new ecosystem and 600,000 Trekkies who find making an account to be an onerous process, I'll take the former, thanks
My gut feeling is that with a couple changes this episode would have hung together better-
Have them take a shuttle instead of the Enterprise. This lowers the stakes for our command crew and simply makes more sense than half the crew (that wasn't on leave) agreeing to steal a ship. It also means they need to figure out a different way to deal with the fake Federation ship at the end of the episode is some way other than 'shoot it with bigger guns'
Have Chapel and M'Benga do something within their character strengths to escape instead of magic drug that lets them hand-to-hand fight their way through a dozen or more Klingons.
That said, there were a lot of things I DID like about the episode, including the Klingon Captain at the end and the new Chief Engineer.
Given that one of the reasons for migrating here was Reddit’s disregard of an disrespect towards persons with disabilities, perhaps it would be important to offer some (more than one) Star Trek custom theme that meets the needs of people with different accessibility issues.
While I know many Berman-era fans love LCARS, and it was innovative for its time, it’s really not at all accessibility informed.
Not to mention, that options for the board should be welcoming of fans of all eras, not just the 90s.
Let me be clear, I am a dog, I have paws and no thumbs, accessibility is super important to me!
jokes aside
click your profile name in the top right corner
click settings
scroll down to the themes option
You will find that you can change the theme startrek.website appears to you in. By default lemmy already has a couple loaded. We could easily add a special theme to this website that was fun and star trek themed that was opt-in for users, or at least easily opt-outable by going into the settings and changing the theme.
We have a fantastic freedom here to indulge in a very treky themed startrek.website while still making sure to value accessibility and flexibility for those that need it. Lemmy gives control to the user over which theme to choose to display startrek.website in (from the list of installed themes on the startrek.website server). That is one of the fun, but underappreciated aspects of fediverse software. You get to choose how everything looks!
On the note of making a lemmy theme focused on accessibility, I think the lemmy community would be more than thrilled if people created accessibility focused themes for startrek.website , other lemmy instances would surely benefit from that work too!
Again, this is just a fun idea that could only add to the community here, there is no danger in making it unaccessible.
Splinter the community, I’m going to stay with the people who went through the mess of setting up a new place that isn’t beholden to Reddit. It may be forever smaller, but of the 600,000 subscribers, how many of them contribute?
eh, it is what it is, and i’d say not really either. For now, probably nearly everyone that’s staying here is probably a contributing member, but if we continue building and promoting this community, then it will get to a sizeable number of lurkers. As long as we don’t attract bad actors, or bad actors are dealt with swiftly, it’s all good.
The “sacking” of the current moderator volunteers that I’ve seen in some news articles this morning leads me to the next step, which is if a moderator can be tossed, that’s a chilling effect for the next moderator and then, all the people who remain subscribed to that subreddit. I don’t know if that will actually happen this way, it will at least be a fascinating exploration to see how this all unfolds. Someone on Mastodon mentioned that Reddit makes no content of their own, it’s all volunteers, the public, and their 3rd-party toolset. That they are burning all of it and maintaining that everything will be fine in the end. Smells a lot like bravado and big-talk.
I think this is a important take - as far as users are concerned Reddit merely hosts the content and the community, but as far as Reddit is concerned it owns the content and wants to monetise the community.
The problem for Reddit is the moderation is done by users who do it for free, mostly because they love their communities and want to keep them going. Those people are not easy to replace - plenty of communities shut because no one wanted to moderate them, and plenty of users just aren’t interested. So if they lose the moderators, there is a small pool of people to replace them and many of those may not be motivated in the same way. There will also be bad actors amongst those untested moderators.
Lose the moderators, and the communities fall apart as bad content, rule breaking and negative behaviour takes hold. The “content” becomes lost and the value of what reddit things it owns falls massively. An archive of old reddit comments is actually not worth much - sure people google things and find answers on Reddit - but it’s the current active users and daily content that draws people in.
I think Reddit is doomed as it is failing to understand it’s own business and what made the site successful.
Yup. An opinion writer in the Washington Post had a weird analogy yesterday, but it works — Reddit’s business model is almost the same as a thrift store’s. People donate stuff (clothes and furniture to Goodwill, analysis and humor to Reddit). Volunteers sort through it and throw out the bad stuff (volunteers at Goodwill, moderators at Reddit). And the business sells it (Reddit has one extra step here in that it sells ads, so it uses the donated-and-sorted stuff to build an audience to sell).
If the donators and the sorters walk, what do they have to sell?
My biggest (only real) gripe with it is the “sit by and watch a civilisation die from something we could prevent inside five minutes without ever being noticed” shtick.
Thoughts and observations written as I watch- I’ll be putting this on both Reddit and Lemmy, since infinity diversity/infinity combinations:
Wheeee, NCC-1701 in the Star Trek tag!
Previously: Last season happened.
Little ships flying!
Wonder who the lawyer that Una and Pike have tried to reach is.
Oh, hey, the Vulcan musical instrument whose name I can’t remember!
“Fascinating.” “Isn’t that usually his line?”
The fellowship on archeological medicine? Is that a reference to Dr. Korby?
“We must steal the Enterprise.” Buddy, if I had a nickel every time someone had to steal the Enterprise, I’d have several nickels.
Lt. Mitchell gunning for series regular next year with how much screen time she’s had early on this episode.
Okay, having Carol Kane is already paying dividends.
And, yeah, Carol Kane doesn’t need alien makeup to be an alien. She’s already an alien.
I’m still not sure if the emphasis one the warp catch phrase is amazing or annoying, but this scene was funny.
KLINGON UPDATE: RIDGES!
So clearly La’An’s augmented ancestors were genetically engineered to drink a lot. Which, y’know what? Fair.
Ah, the borderlands, where utopian rules go away and everyone becomes a Ferengi.
Congratulations to Uhura on graduating from the Academy.
Ah, the old “I have technology that I’m totally not making up that will blow you up” bluff!
New transporter chief?
Okay, so the angry borderlands people are trying to do some sort of false flag thing.
Redundant Klingon organs, the old standby.
Roided-up doctors can tell you what bones they broke as they break them.
These are obviously Discovery sets.
This action scene, while well-done, is way too long.
A D7!
“We’ve gotten out of worse.” “No, not really!”
“This I’ve got to see!”
I wonder if “Lanthanite” is a synonym for “El-Aurian”
Pelia knowing that being on the Enterprise means adventure is further proof that those ships are goddamn weirdness magnets.
Gorn. Yes, it stretches canon but fuck it the Gorn are awesome we’ll come up with an explanation later.
“For Nichelle”
Overall, while not one of the better episodes, it still was a good start to the season. It wrapped up one of the hanging threads of last year (La’An), we continued to see some of Young Spock’s struggles with his emotions before he became the more-Vulcan Spock that Nimoy was in the main TOS series, and we got our first look at Carol Kane as the nutty new engineer. Overall, I’ll call that a win!
Regarding Nurse Chapel almost dying - this is one of the TV/movie tropes that I think is such a cheap and terrible device and I am tired of it. Discovery was full of these scenes where they make you believe a main character really almost died, only to survive after all, and having their crew mates weep for them (I am looking at you Burnham). There are much better ways to create good drama.
I am 100% here for the chaotic energy that Carol Kane is going to bring to this show.
The Klingon captain had exactly the right amount of swagger and sassiness that a TOS-era Klingon captain is supposed to have. I’m glad that they’re moving on from some of the Discovery Klingon characterization while also resisting the urge to jump right to them behaving like TNG Klingons.
Hemmer was my favorite character from season one, and is very difficult to replace in my heart. But Carol Kane is one of those actors you just can’t help but love to see on screen (in any capacity). It’s going to be very hard to be upset knowing she’ll be around.
Personally I think if you can customize the visuals, you guys should totally go for an LCARS style theme as that would be amazing. Maybe even get the exact typeface for it too.
Enjoyed pretty much everything in this episode except the magic super steroids. The sequence went on for so long… I assumed that I had forgotten something from last series because there’s no way they would have had this to hand the whole time and never thought to use it during any one of the many life and death emergencies?
That aside. Loved the rest of the episode and looking forward to where things go from here (plus really really happy to have weekly Trek again!)
there’s no way they would have had this to hand the whole time and never thought to use it during any one of the many life and death emergencies?
Ah, yes, the star trek classic!
I do agree, though. It was too long and too effective. A quick burst to make their way past the medical guards and into a turbolift would have been more believable and better paced.
Reminds me of a character in The Expanse who gets illegal hormone gland implants that can be activated for a burst of heightened awareness. The drawback is twofold. When the activation wears off the user experiences debilitating nausea for several minutes. Over the long term the illegal part comes into play because you know those things aren’t rated for health and safety. This character requires regular blood transfusions/dialysis due to toxin buildup from shoddy workmanship.
Anyway, that’s an entire tangent. I’m excited to see if there are interesting complications from a doctor who’s strapped with combat drugs of questionable ethics.
I used to have an antenna hooked up just to watch Svengoolie on MeTV and live tweet along (then they changed the schedule.)
Being able to switch to Star Trek and just zone out was nice too. Sure I can pick and choose specific ones on streaming, but there’s episodes I’d otherwise not think to revisit which pop up on broadcast.
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