HobbitFoot

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HobbitFoot ,

Yeah. They were supposed to have a year of hell. The best they could do was a two parter where everything went back to normal in the end.

HobbitFoot ,

Enterprise was great when it was allowed to be the prequel it was meant to be. The actors were great. Set and prop design was on point. There were interesting ideas to explore during that time like the Vulcan-Andorian Cold War and the increasing destabilization cause by Romulus.

Cut the Temporal Cold War and the Xindi and Enterprise could have gone on for seven seasons and we might have seen the Earth-Romulus War.

HobbitFoot ,

Voyager was probably the most high concept of the era's Trek and didn't really fulfill that promise. It is funny that DS9 kept better track of its roundabouts over Voyager's shuttles.

They really didn't nail down the writing of the crew. The Doctor and Seven are the best written. However, out of the rest of the crew, only Tom Paris seems somewhat consistent.

You get some good episodes out of it, but I don't think it plays with the parts of Trek they were given to its fullest extent. I also feel like, while some of the shows are pure Trek, they aren't Voyager.

HobbitFoot ,

I feel like it wasn't just Kes who had this problem.

The Doctor and Seven were probably the best written characters. Tom and B'Lenna were probably the next two after that. Janeway only got better because she could act as a bad parent to Seven, which vastly improved her character and gave her focus. Neelix and Tuvok kind of drifted off to the background. Kim and Chakotay were blander than that, although Kim got a few decent character beats.

I'm not going to fault the actors on this, since this was the writing.

Study finds 1/4 of bosses hoped Return to Office would make staff quit ( www.theregister.com )

HR software biz BambooHR surveyed more than 1,500 employees, a third of whom work in HR. The findings suggest the return to office movement has been a poorly-executed failure, but one particular figure stands out - a quarter of executives and a fifth of HR professionals hoped RTO mandates would result in staff leaving....

HobbitFoot ,

That's why you don't fire the whole department, just implement a hiring freeze while your US staff train the Indian and Filipino staff.

Bernie Sanders blasts lawmakers' decision of both political parties to invite "war criminal" Benjamin Netanyahu to speak before Congress ( www.sanders.senate.gov )

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) today released the following statement on the decision of Senate and House leaders of both political parties to extend an invitation to Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, to address a joint meeting of Congress:...

HobbitFoot ,

Would you rather Biden be happy about this visit?

HobbitFoot ,

Would you rather Biden be happy about this visit?

HobbitFoot ,

That seems to be happening with a lot of online journalism. The money for the content was never there on a corporate scale.

billmason , to Star Trek
@billmason@mastodon.social avatar

‘Star Trek: Picard’ Wins 4 Saturn Awards, ‘Strange New Worlds’ Wins 1

https://trekmovie.com/2024/02/04/star-trek-picard-wins-4-saturn-awards-strange-new-worlds-wins-1/

@startrek

HobbitFoot ,

That’s a half season longer than I gave it.

HobbitFoot ,

I think it goes deeper.

Overall wage growth has remained stagnant for a while, but we are seeing greater wage equality and an increase in education requirements for jobs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the economic conditions for high-school educated men dropped significantly and the economic conditions for college educated men remained stagnant.

So if you are a working class white male angry at the system, you may end up angry that all these women came in to change the system for them instead of at the economic elites not paying their fair share.

And they may hear stories about how men a few generations ago were still “kings of their homes”, where women were unable to leave bad situations. The power sounds a lot nicer than today.

So you’ve got a lot of young guys looking at the old system and wanting that.

HobbitFoot ,

You’re aware of the systemic inequality and want to address that first, which is admirable.

The best you can do for now is to prep for the next fight by getting your colleagues on the same page that they are being just as exploited by the system.

HobbitFoot ,

You also have items in the article noting that managers who saw drops in performance during the pandemic were the ones most likely to pull people into the office. So it seems like some managers saw issues with group performance and going back to the office was seen as a way to resolve the issue.

HobbitFoot ,

I can see why Koenig wasn’t really happy about his role. I can see why a lot of them weren’t.

For Chekov, this isn’t a good posting for him. He is still a commander, and worse is that he is only second officer. It makes sense why Kirk is on the Enterprise still, but not Chekov. Worse, Chekov doesn’t really do that much. Functionally, Valeris seems to fill more of the role of second officer than Chekov does. Chekov’s most remembered line was only said by him because Nichols refused to say it.

Both McCoy and Uhura display gross incompetence at their posts. McCoy has served as a doctor on the front line with Klingons around for decades; he should have been educated about their physiology. Uhura is even worse in not being able to speak Klingon; it is good that later versions of her character highlight her linguistic skills.

Unless Starfleet is testing out new technology, it really doesn’t make sense that Scotty is the chief engineer of the Enterprise unless Starfleet is still pissed off about the Excelsior.

Even though the movie was partially written by Nimoy, it really doesn’t make sense why Spock is still in Starfleet at this point at the rank of Captain. Either Spock should outrank Kirk since he is making Admiralty level decisions or already be in the diplomatic service as he is by the time of TNG.

Only Kirk makes sense. He is a washed up Captain; never able to make it to bad admiral status. He gets to keep his ship, but Starfleet seems to use him as a pawn in diplomatic missions due to his noteriety with other powers.

HobbitFoot ,

Given that WB Discovery is being sold, I doubt Zazlav will join Paramount.

HobbitFoot ,

I think Sisko threatened to charge Quark for rent and utilities in one episode as a way to get Quark to do something Sisko wanted.

Quark may be billing Starfleet for his services, but I’m sure he understands how to be in the good graces of his cop landlord.

Not a classic lunatic, but this person seems to be doomposting on linkedin ( sopuli.xyz )

Alt text: two posts from the same person on LinkedIn. First post is someone dressed as spiderman lying on the ground in a park while it rains. Second post is an apparently naked person floating in a water body in a boat with their limbs hanging out.

HobbitFoot ,

So a good thing?

It was apparent at the time that Steve Jobs was not a good executive nor understood the computer market at the time. Jobs’s vision ended up aligning better with the market when he went back, but it didn’t fit during the 80’s.

HobbitFoot ,

Eh, you can put Doom on anything now.

HobbitFoot ,

“What does God need with a starship?”

HobbitFoot ,

I only wanted a picture of Levar Burton! You can’t disappoint a picture!

HobbitFoot ,

Unless they are filled with trilithium resin, because you have to be really bad at your job to miss a planet.

HobbitFoot ,

Sisko might have killed Worf.

HobbitFoot ,

With a replicator, you can turn matter into energy, which you can turn into other matter.

Gov. Abbott is now putting barriers along Texas border with New Mexico ( news.yahoo.com )

Isn’t this against the US constitution? Razor wire along the state border and checkpoints on roads that cross the state border are kind of nuts. I read a comment joking that the wire and road checkpoints were to keep Texan women from escaping to New Mexico, which got a bitter laugh out of me.

HobbitFoot ,

It depends on what the checkpoints are and if they are a drag on interstate commerce. For a while, California had staffed border checkpoints to look for produce that could bring pathogens to the state.

The Commerce Clause isn’t absolute.

HobbitFoot ,

The funny thing about the Troi episodes are that the best ones with her in them are when she isn’t being a counselor.

HobbitFoot ,

A lot of companies will take liberties with this if it means generating content.

Also, as others said, the TOS version usually sized more like a small laptop instead of a phone.

HobbitFoot ,

I always took it as Benny being a dream, someone informed by Sisko, the Prophets, and the Pah-Wraiths.

I think it is important that the Prophets picked someone who was very aware of humanity’s issues with discrimination and could rely on knowing the lessons learned from humanity to help Bajor transition.

HobbitFoot ,

At minimum, they should be paid for their before and after takeoff as well as all time caused by delays.

HobbitFoot ,

But it didn’t feel really earned. I feel like a Reman enemy or a Romulan captain that Picard faced in TNG would have been better. Hell, bring back Denise Crosby as Sela; her plotting to take over the Romulan Star Empire would have made sense.

HobbitFoot ,

But part of the problem with Insurrection was that it wasn’t ambitious enough compared to the “bad” TOS movies.

TMP is spacious and filled with great visuals; it isn’t a plot that would work as an episode.

The Search for Spock is the middle of a great trilogy and sets up a personal grudge for Kirk that pays off in Undiscovered Country. The movie pushed characters along; the closest in Insurrection is the eventual marriage of Riker and Troi but it doesn’t play out in the movies.

The Final Frontier has Kirk yell “What does God need with a starship”.

Insurrection feels lacking in ambition.

HobbitFoot ,

Plot wise, maybe. However, TMP looks and feels like a movie.

In contrast, there really isn’t that much jumping out of Insurrection that feels cinematic.

HobbitFoot ,

Yeah, both sides aren’t the same. How do you deal with the 20% of the country that want a fascist government and the 30% who are ok with it as long as it keeps taxes low and punish the “right people”?

I’m just venting in my reply to your comment; this isn’t a criticism of what you said.

HobbitFoot ,

The only decent tactic I found is to focus on having the government being the arbitor of who is a good person.

You also have to argue against the programming that relying on any unearned government assistance is bad. So, the best way to respond is asking if there should be a qualification that anyone working shouldn’t get the same benefits of someone who is broke.

It isn’t perfect, though. There is also a lot of tribalism.

HobbitFoot ,

If the CEO of Zoom is asking for staff to go back to the office, it may not just be a desire to control.

I find that a lot of people who defend full remote tend to speak past issues like coordination and mentoring. You may have some CEO’s seeing that people are doing individually productive work, but the organization as a whole isn’t productive.

HobbitFoot ,

I’ve posted in other comments that a lot of the initial studies were based on self reporting surveys, not actual measurements of productivity. One study that used actual measurements from a call center later revised their report as there were issues found like increased call backs.

And as for in-person versus virtual, I’ve seen a lot of staff don’t ask as many questions online as they do in person, even with video conferencing and chat being widely available. You also have some cases where senior staff used to do mentoring and providing some technical direction on projects they aren’t working on no longer doing so either because full remote tends to push everything up to the lead, which ends up getting drowned in more communication than hybrid. Sure, the senior staff may be more productive by some metrics, but the department isn’t and senior management is going to to try to fix issues on the department level. And as others have noted, there is a shortage of qualified staff, so you can’t have everyone be senior staff.

HobbitFoot ,

Except that work is more than just tech companies and there are other industries with retention issues and they are still trying to get people back into the office because of coordination and training issues. In some cases, they have been far more aggressive than tech companies in this regard.

HobbitFoot ,

Coordination, mentoring, and culture are intentional.

They are, but you may have issues with keeping up these with full remote, where people don’t get all the social cues that they would get in an office.

Hell, listen to a lot of the criticism here. Executives and management are trying to “control” workers instead of blindly following individual productivity measurements, even if those individual productivity metrics may not be good for the company.

You may also have cases where the culture role was given to a senior member that no one longer listens to because there isn’t a direct chain of command and the duties aren’t made explicit to everyone.

Full remote can work, but I feel like a lot of companies are finding that it isn’t working as advertised compared to being in office and there isn’t a known way to do so that they can implement. So, they are going back.

HobbitFoot ,

The issue may not be “just fine”, but which one is showing better results.

And some of the CEO’s are communicating why they think that full remote is failing. The Zoom CEO cited that Zoom meetings aren’t creating the environment for collaboration that in person meetings are. You can call him a liar, but he is giving a reason why he wants people back in the office.

And I think that this is happening across a lot of companies. It isn’t that working in the office is “good”, but it is apparently giving better results than the other option within their organization.

HobbitFoot ,

That’s fine that people have lives outside of work, but employers aren’t paying people to have good lives. An employer isn’t going to self advocate for less productivity.

Braga: ‘I still cringe when I hear it.’ Apparently, it was a long road to the franchise’s most despised title music ( www.slashfilm.com )

Working from the oral history in The Five Year Mission: The next 25 years, this is a fascinating deep dive that answers the question “How did a recycled cover of a 1998 song written for Rod Stewart, ‘Where My Heart Will Take Me’ aka ‘Faith of the Heart’ become the title music for Enterprise?”...

HobbitFoot ,

DS9 was arguably anti-Trek, or at least seriously questioned the idea of the Federation as a force for only good in the realpolitik of the Alpha Quadrant.

I feel like the problem with Voyager and Enterprise was more that the writing wasn’t as good.

HobbitFoot ,

Enterprise would have been a lot better if they introduced the Romulans as the big bad in the pilot instead of the temporal cold war bullshit.

HobbitFoot ,

I feel like the writers never figured out Neelix.

How Many Star Trek Episodes Pass the Bechdel Test? (TOS to ENT) | The Mary Sue ( www.themarysue.com )

I found this after reading and responding to this post here about early Trek fans’ prejudicial negative reaction to TNG. One of my responses (see here) was to point out that any fans of the progressiveness of Trek ought to have been mindful of the room for improvement over TOS, with female representation being an obvious...

HobbitFoot ,

I feel like DS9’s problem was that Kira and Dax never really had too many situations they would interact with each other. A science officer wouldn’t need to report a lot to the first officer. Hell, they even had entire seasons in which they were never together on camera.

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