AnarchistArtificer

AnarchistArtificer , 6 months ago

I love the word “Epochalypse”, from the wiki page you linked

AnarchistArtificer , 6 months ago

I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything. Lower Decks is probably my favourite Star Trek series by a decent margin, but I think that people’s varying tastes is part of the Trek experience.

Like the first Star Trek I ever watched was TNG, with a partner who hated DS9 because of how far it was from the much more utopian tone of TNG. My best friend, however, loved DS9 most of all for that exact same reason. I can’t tolerate The Original Series because of how campy and cringe it is, but I have friends who love it for that.

If you hate Lower Decks, then your perspective is one I can’t really relate to, but that just feels like regular old Trekkie solidarity to me - with a show so varied, inevitably there’s going to be diverse viewpoints. That in mind, I’m not going to try and change mind, I’m just going to highlight why I love Lower Decks.

My favourite bit about Lower Decks is that it feels like a love letter to Trek, in all its forms. There’s a lot of references I don’t get, but I don’t need to get them to feel the warm fuzzies of knowing this show was made by people who are, first and foremost, fans of Star Trek. I like utopian sci fi because the state of the real world means that I can find real hope in the fantasy because in my heart, I believe in humanity.

Alongside all of that idealistic space exploration though, Lower Decks doesn’t shy away from the more pernicious aspects of Star Trek, and Starfleet/the Federation. The humour isn’t always my taste, but I think they use it well to poke fun at Star Trek, the show, but also the world within. The sometimes critical lens that is taken is part of why it feels so much like a love letter to Trek - if you truly love something, you’ve got to take the bad with the good and not pretend that everything is perfect.

AnarchistArtificer , 8 months ago

“I’d kill to get a cut of the pie that every AI server I bring back up generates, on top of my raises.”

The equivalent situation is more like if you had salary + residuals, and the residuals were a significant enough part of your compensation package that your salary was a relatively small impact factor. You take the residuals into account when budgeting household finances.

Then over the course of years, you get less and less income from residuals, which shrink way faster than regular salary bumps can account for - everywhere has new servers you’ve been working on that technically lie outside your existing contract. The new servers are hugely profitable for the companies you work for, but your real world compensation shrinks, despite the new servers requiring just as much work on your part. It’s less about the residuals, more about the fact that you took a lower base salary on the understanding that you’d be getting a certain level of residual payments, and that’s undermined by the continually shrinking pay on technicalities.

But on top of all this, imagine that the total compensation levels were never great, even before residuals shrink. Most people doing work like yours barely make ends meet, and it becomes harder and harder to afford basic living costs.

Basically, there’s two points of contention when it comes to overall pay levels: the base level pay increase, which is a regular, time based bump; and the significant losses in net pay because streaming has led to increasingly unfavourable outcomes for actors and writers. Both of these problems could be solved without residuals, but it would require a base pay way higher than it is now. This would make the upfront costs of movies and TV shows insanely more expensive, and finding funding for projects would get much harder.