Prouvaire

@[email protected]

Addicted to love. Flower cultivator, flute player, verse maker. Usually delicate, but at times masculine. Well read, even to erudition. Almost an orientalist.

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Prouvaire , (edited ) to Star Trek in Manny Coto Dies: Emmy-Winning ’24’ EP Who Created AI Drama ‘Next’ & Worked On ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’, ‘American Horror Story’ & ‘Dexter’ Was 62

As someone who used to hang around TrekBBS back in the day, there are actually many conservative and libertarian Star Trek fans.

It always baffled me also, but I think many of them were/are TOS fans. Kirk's swashbuckling, individualistic, break-the-rules, throw-a-roundhouse-when-you-need-to style disguised Roddenberry's socialist utopia that existed in the more civilised parts of the Federation. Certainly more so than adventures of the tea-sipping, conference-chairing, "I think I'll surrender in my very first appearance" Frenchman who followed him.

Prouvaire , to Star Trek in Manny Coto Dies: Emmy-Winning ’24’ EP Who Created AI Drama ‘Next’ & Worked On ‘Star Trek: Enterprise’, ‘American Horror Story’ & ‘Dexter’ Was 62

ENT was basically watered down TNG for its first two seasons. Some of the time it was good (eg "Carbon Creek"), some of the time it was bad (eg "Precious Cargo"), but most of the time it was stultifyingly mediocre. Season 3 tried something different, but it was only in season 4 that ENT found its true voice.

And it was Manny Coto who was responsible for the upswing in quality. I'm generally skeptical of prequels, but at least Coto fully bought into the premise of ENT being a prequel show, and showed us how various aspects of Trek lore came to be. I think his stint running that final season may have been his best work.

Prouvaire , to Star Trek in Is the next episode a comedy? S204 "Charades"

I was not a fan of introducing legacy characters like Spock, Kirk - and even lesser-explored characters like Pike, Chapel, Number One and M'Benga to an extent - in DIS/SNW. Introduce new characters I say, that aren't hamstrung by what's already been established - something that I think is even more important in a show that's set in the "past".

That said, if we were to have a pre-TOS Spock, I wanted to see a Spock who would credibly grin at a plant or exclaim "The women!". I think SNW has given us that.

However, you're absolutely right. The destination for the character in SNW is for him to choose his Vulcan half over his human half. Hopefully the writers have planned this out. There's potential for a poignant story arc here, not just for Spock but also Chapel and T'Pring.

Prouvaire , to Star Trek in Paramount+ Comic-Con 2023 Star Trek Panel To Focus On ‘Discovery,’ ‘Lower Decks’, And ‘Strange New Worlds’

It's possible that said showrunners are giving interviews in their capacity as producers, not writers.

This is a point of contention between the WGA and studios. See for instance:
https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/showrunners-writers-strike-producing-writing-1235626881/
https://deadline.com/2023/05/writers-strike-disney-hbo-showrunners-letter-other-studios-wga-1235357794/

Prouvaire , to Fediverse in Why some community's appear empty in kbin while if you go to their instance they have posts?

@Fgbd009 There could be different reasons for this. One is that federation with the home instance might be broken or slow.

Another reason has to do with the way the activitypub protocol that the Fediverse is designed around, basically assumes you're only interested in new content when you subscribe to a magazine/community.

For what it's worth, I've discussed why this causes problems for new users in more detail here:
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/131225/Making-threadiverse-communities-more-discoverable-some-suggestions

Prouvaire , (edited ) to Star Trek in Canon Connections: Strange New Worlds 2x03 - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

@USSBurritoTruck

Too bad “The Omega Glory” didn’t also get in on the game.

That would have been funny.

The difference is that "James T" is actually spoken in "Mudd's Women" (also "The Conscience of the King", "Court Martial", "Tomorrow is Yesterday", "A Taste of Armageddon" and "Errand of Mercy" in the first season) , whereas "James R" only appears visually on the tombstone in "Where No Man..."

I'd guess the real world reason for the discrepancy is that the tombstone was a mistake by the props people that slipped past Justman or Roddenberry. But fan theories that used to go around included that the "R" referred to a private joke or nickname between Mitchell and Kirk, or that the events of "Where No Man..." took place in an alternate reality. (IIRC one of the novels ran with this one.)

Interestingly the "T" middle initial goes back all the way back to Roddenberry's original outline in the early 60s, when the name of the captain was "Robert T. April". Other notable Captains with "T" middle initials include "William T. Riker", "Captain J. T. Esteban" and.... err... I thought there was at least one more, but am drawing a blank.

edit: The other person I was thinking of was "Leland T. Lynch", but he wasn't a captain.

Prouvaire , to Star Trek in Canon Connections: Strange New Worlds 2x03 - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

@USSBurritoTruck

Kirk’s middle name, Tiberius, was established in the TAS episode, “Bem”. Prior to that, the only indication of what his middle name might be was in the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before” when Gary Mitchell created a tombstone reading ”James R. Kirk”.

While David Gerrold canonised the "T" as standing for "Tiberius" in "Bem", we did know that his middle name started with the letter "T" as far back as "Mudd's Women" IIRC. You undoubtedly already knew this, but the way this particular connection was worded suggested that the "T" also first appeared in "Bem", when it had been established early in TOS.

Incidentally, but non-canonically, in Gene Roddenberry's novelisation of The Motion Picture, he has Kirk write, in "Admiral Kirk's preface" to the novel, that:

Tiberius, as I am forever tired of explaining, was the Roman emperor whose life for some unfathomable reason fascinated my grandfather Samuel.

And quoting from that same preface just for shits and giggles and to proffer today's insight into the mind of Eugene Wesley Roddenberry:

I received James because it was both the name of my father's beloved brother as well as that of my mother's first love instructor.

Prouvaire , to Star Trek in The fifth TNG movie that never was

@devnull

Waited four seasons for them to do this throwaway gag on

And they had the perfect episode to do it in too.

Prouvaire OP , to Fediverse in Making threadiverse communities more discoverable - some suggestions

3. BRING OVER SOME CONTENT WHEN FIRST FEDERATING COMMUNITIES

When an instance first federates a community, it should bring across at very least the last (let's say) 100 threads or the last (let's say) 7 day's worth of threads from that community (plus associated comments), whichever is greater.

This will prevent the following scenario: A user finds a community that's hosted on another instance, joins the community, but then finds no evidence of activity on their instance, because when an instance federates a community, it only starts pulling across posts from that moment in time. It makes it look like the community is dead, even if it isn't. While there may be a "Browse this community on the original instance" message, but that may well confuse people, and it doesn't mitigate the initial impression that the community has not posts.

Related to this - any pinned posts from a community should also be brought across by default, as these posts often contain information that a new user will find useful or that the moderators want all users to be aware of.

4. IDEALLY BRING OVER (OR ALLOW TO BE SEARCHED/SORTED) ALL CONTENT WHEN FEDERATING COMMUNITIES

The shelf life of posts in most communities is pretty short. If you subscribe to /news it probably doesn't matter if you can't see the top-ranked post from three years ago. But other communities curate content that has a much longer shelf life. A community like /askhistorians for instance, or /buyitforlife, where a user might want to search the archives for a great overview on the events leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall, or recommendations for the best compression socks. Allowing new users to search the complete history of a community, or sort posts by something like "most upvoted by all time", makes the community more useful.

So ideally if you subscribe to a community hosted on another instance on your home instance you should be able to browse/search/sort that community's entire archive.

I know you can click a link to browse a community on the original instance, but that can be confusing because suddenly you are now browsing on a site where you do not have an account.

Copying over the entire database for a community has storage/bandwidth implications (although I would argue data consumption issues are inherent to the fediverse model, which could lead to another discussion around the fediverse's scalability limitations). But perhaps there is a way for searches and sorts to interrogate the host instance of a community (which presumably has the most complete database) rather than the local instance.

Prouvaire OP , to Fediverse in Making threadiverse communities more discoverable - some suggestions

2. ALLOW COMMUNITIES TO BE DISCOVERED MORE EASILY ON UNFEDERATED INSTANCES

Communities should automatically (unless the community owner deliberately prevents this) be registered with one or more community directory services. The lemmy/kbin community search facility should use these services by default so that a new user's search results are not limited to communities that have already been pulled into that user's instance.

Multiple directory services should be available for the search service (similar to how you can switch between DNS servers) in order to eliminate single point sensitivity, which is part of the fediverse ethos.

The current method of finding new communities not already federated ("enter the exact, direct address of the community, and/or search and wait for a day before any results show up for anything not already on this instance") should be deprecated and only be used in the event these community directory services are down.

This will prevent the following scenario: A new user chooses an instance, creates an account, and searches for a community related to their interest on that instance. They may find a popular community (eg /gaming), because other users on that instances have already joined it (or because someone has created this community on their instance). But even moderately obscure communities will likely not appear in the search results because they're hosted on another instance, and nobody on this instance has subscribed to them yet. This makes it look like the fediverse is a lot emptier than it actually is, because niche communities (the long tail of communities that are the secret sauce of reddit's success) are difficult to discover.

Basically, every community should easily be discoverable from any instance on first search (unless the community owner deliberately chooses to hide their community from the directory services).

I know there are already some websites that act as a directory of communities, but you have to be aware of these in order to use them. They are not built into the native community search functionality of lemmy or kbin, so 99% of users (especially new users) will not be aware of them.

Prouvaire OP , to Fediverse in Making threadiverse communities more discoverable - some suggestions

1. MAKE FEDIVERSE-WIDE SEARCH MORE FRIENDLY

Search should, by default (ie unless constrained by the user), search communities and posts and users, and present the results grouped into these categories, with communities displayed first or at least prominently.

The current default fediverse search screens - especially on lemmy - are intimidating and require the user to know how the fediverse works before searching, eg knowing the difference between "local" and "all" or the difference between a "community" and a "creator".

Rather than putting the onus on the user to narrow search parameters before searching, have a general search bar that group the results after searching into easily distinguishable groupings, ie communities, posts and users.

Reddit search does this very well, and offers additional quality-of-life features like suggesting communities related to your search term even as you type.

Advanced users should still be able to specify search parameters in more detail up front of course, but it's important to hide any complexity from new users.

Prouvaire , to Star Trek in What does Prodigy’s cancelation imply about Paramount’s respect for Janeway?

@StillPaisleyCat I appreciate the long, well-thought out reply. But I'm not convinced. Lower Decks has a black woman, Tawny Newsome, first on the call sheet and Mike McMahan has said (IIRC) that by default all of the characters in the show are bisexual (something that's been shown in various ways on-screen), so I don't think you can point to Prodigy's cancellation due to some bias against LGBTQIA+, women or people of colour when you have a counterfactual right there in its sister show. In fact, every modern Trek show has its diversity boxes well and truly checked, but nobody is accusing Paramount of cancelling Picard because of some network executive's bias against an interacial lesbian relationship in Raffi/Seven.

I haven't watched any of the Yellowstone shows (they're on my list) but I understand that franchise has Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford and Helen Mirren in its stable. A show starring these actors is just going to do better than a show starring Kate Mulgrew (who's last-billed, albeit with the "and" credit), just as a show starring Patrick Stewart as the lead is inherently going to do better numbers than a show where Kate Mulgrew is a supporting character. Bring in, oh say Beyonce, as a lead on a Trek and I'm pretty sure the ratings will spike through the roof. It's not because they're white or male, it's because they're more famous.

They wouldn’t have done this with Picard or Kirk.

Maybe, maybe not. But if not, it's because Picard and Kirk are more iconic, more well recognised characters than Janeway. Star Trek was never more popular in the mainstream than in the mid 80s-early 90s, with the TOS movies and TNG TV series both in full flight. VOY ran during the Berman era's middle-age as Trek's star (nyuk nyuk) was beginning to fade. Fans know who Janeway is, but most people on the street wouldn't, whereas most people on the street would recognise Captain Kirk and the bald English guy from that space show.

By the way, I say all this as someone who thinks that Prodigy is a far more worthy addition to the franchise than the fan-lauded season 3 of Picard.

Prouvaire , to RedditMigration in Fuck Reddit u̶p̶v̶o̶t̶e̶ boost party!

@AnonTwo @ernest is aware of the issue: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/80

Hopefully this will be changed soon, as the current system is confusing can be off-putting.

Prouvaire , to Star Trek in What does Prodigy’s cancelation imply about Paramount’s respect for Janeway?

Just as Roddenberry's utopian future transcends sexism, racism, ableism and other isms, so too does the cold-blooded calculation of the corporate accountant. Networks will cancel shows that lose money and renew shows that make money over whatever timeframe their cost/benefit ratio is run on. Personally, I think Prodigy is a breath of fresh air for the franchise, and cancelling it/removing it the network is a mistake from a brand/franchise/portfolio management perspective. But spinning its cancellation as an example of misogyny is silly. You might as well argue that Paramount hates kids cause there are many more children as main characters in the show and only one adult woman.

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