theinspectorst

theinspectorst , 2 months ago

But ... I thought the 2009 film was an origin story?

It was literally the story of how the Kelvinverse came to exist and it followed Kirk, Spock, McCoy and co from their Academy days.

theinspectorst , 2 months ago

That was my thought, I'm quite up for this. I enjoyed The Voyage Home, I enjoyed The Trouble with Tribbles - I wouldn't want all Trek to be like that but there is absolutely a place in the franchise for light-hearted takes on Trek.

theinspectorst , 3 months ago

last couple of Picard seasons

I mean, that's a pretty astonishing statement to throw out there, grouping together probably the worst single season of Star Trek with one of the best...

theinspectorst , 3 months ago

I put in a request to take over a magazine last year when its previous moderator disappeared, and ernest actioned it pretty quickly. It looks like he hasn't posted for a month or so now though - hope he's doing okay. Running this thing must be a hell of a weight to carry.

theinspectorst , 5 months ago

The movie wasn't that well-liked and wasn't the perfect send-off for the original crew of Star Trek.

What a weird thing to say. I've always heard it described as one of the best TOS films and I always found the ending quite an emotional and fitting send-off to the TOS crew.

theinspectorst , 6 months ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:25th_Anniversary(computer_game)

theinspectorst , 7 months ago

Okay, but that's not really what they did with Sela.

Sela wasn't 'Tasha returned' - she had nothing in common with Tasha (in terms of personality or her role in the show) except for being played by the same actress. She clearly wasn't just a backdoor soap opera route for Tasha to return.

Also she was only actually in four episodes (on the first of which the character wasn't identified and Denise Crosby was an uncredited voice only). Sela's brief appearances were so memorable that we tend to forget how minor her role actually was across the span of TNG - Tomalak had a bigger role, for example.

theinspectorst , 7 months ago

The Host - the one where Riker ends up hosting the symbiont.

theinspectorst , 8 months ago

Yes! Have you met humans?

theinspectorst , 9 months ago

I had the same panic. That's not even the title of the article ('Voyager's Roxann Dawson Had A Chance To Direct Star Trek But Dropped It For Another Show') so, unless the website changed it, you have to wonder what OP was doing writing it that way.

theinspectorst , 9 months ago

Small sample sizes and idiosyncratic factors.

I agree that the 6 TOS movies on average are better than the 4 TNG movies on average. But if you remove Insurrection (which was fine) and Nemesis (which had a lot of flaws) from the mix, then that is no longer the case - so the question really becomes a narrower 'why is Instruction only okay and what went wrong with Nemesis?', rather than the broader 'TOS vs TNG' way you put it. If they stopped after First Contact, people would rave about the quality of the TNG movies.

Another way of looking at it is that if you alternatively removed TWOK (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer), TVH (written by Nicholas Meyer) and TUC (written and directed by Nicholas Meyer) from the TOS list then the comparison would also no longer be clear cut. In which case you could also phrase your question as 'why was Nicholas Meyer so good at making Star Trek movies?'

theinspectorst , 9 months ago

TMP and TSFS certainly aren't bad, they're just not at the extremely high standard of TWOK, TVH and TUC.

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

It's interesting to me that Voyager does that much better than TNG. Both shows had the same number of women in the main cast (Crusher, Troi, Yar/Guinan vs Janeway, B'Elanna, Kes/Seven) so other things being equal there should be similar number of opportunities for conversations that meet the test.

Obviously Janeway being the captain (and therefore a more prominent character, even within an ensemble cast) should give Voyager a boost, but I hadn't anticipated the difference would be so extreme!

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

Great point. I did think that Seven and Janeway (who I agree were a very prominent pairing - akin to the attention given to Data and Picard in TNG) would help Voyager, but then discounted it a bit by that pairing only even existing from season 4 onwards. I don't think that's enough alone to explain Voyager doing 42 percentage points better than TNG (44.9% vs 86.9%), but it would certainly have helped a lot!

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

Wow - I hadn't realised Guinan was in that few!

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

That's a fair point. On reflection, I also seem to recall that some of the Crusher and Troi convos were also literally about their personal relationships.

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

I went to Destination Star Trek in London in 2021. Overall it was a fun enough experience - saw a few interesting talks, met a few of the cast. Even though I ended up spending money I probably wouldn't have spent in a cooler-headed moment, my memories of the day itself were fairly positive as a one-off experience.

But it ended up leaving a nasty aftertaste for me. Most of the Discovery cast were there and they were promoting season 4 pretty hard (which was due to premiere the following week), but then a couple of days later CBS pulled Discovery from Netflix and announced it would now solely air on Paramount+, a service which was yet to launch in the UK at that time... I don't blame the Disco cast (whose social media reaction suggests they were as surprised as the rest of us) but it did make me feel like the franchise collectively had cashed in on UK fans' enthusiasm and then told us to fuck off.

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

It's been available to install as a progressive web app for some time. Other apps are coming.

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

Enjoy - The Awesome Ship That Everyone Hates.

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

There are some scale issues with it being a 'slap a bunch of stuff together' ship in canon. Namely the fact that the Intrepid-class that supplies the saucer is quite a lot bigger than the Maquis raider that supplies the hull and nacelles.

If done to scale, this ship ought to look more like a bobblehead.

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

I similarly do the Spock eyebrow a lot without realising it.

I also used to do the Data head tilt, again without realising I was copying Data, until someone pointed it out to me. They didn't actually know it was a Star Trek thing but as soon as they pointed it out I realised I was subconsciously copying one of my favourite characters.

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

Don't go around being a dick to people who have different tastes to yourself.

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_I_Was_Only_Joking_Bro_Fallacy

theinspectorst , 10 months ago

Mate, you're literally the one who showed up here saying that if you don't like this particular episode then you're not a fun person.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

Disagree, although I do think they've overused him. His appearance in an alternate timeline future at the end of season 1 was a nice idea to nod to Kirk's role in the prime timeline version of those events. But bringing him back again twice more in the first six episodes of season 2 has made him feel less like a cameo and more like he's becoming part of the main cast.

Lost in Translation - where he interacted with many members of the Enterprise crew (as opposed to just Pike or just La'an, and both times via timeline shenanigans) - felt particularly egregious. Although I did enjoy the episode.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

I'm seeing lots of positivity here, so I'll be the boring one. I enjoyed it but they didn't quite land it for me. Things that would have been funny in an out-and-out sitcom felt wrong in the context of a 'serious' Trek show. For example, Mariner and Boimler having a really inappropriate discussion about how hot Spock was, while Spock was right there, during a senior staff meeting - it was a bit too jarring for me. You kind of got the feeling the 23rd century officers were all left wondering why 24th century Starfleet is so unprofessional. I think they got this the wrong way round by making it a SNW episode instead of a Lower Decks episode.

Separately though, given that we know Spock and Chapel don't make it, I like that in the two episodes since they got together they have hinted at two separate reasons why they might split up: first the possiblity it's triggered by them having different attitudes to reporting the relationship to Starfleet, and now Chapel's Boimler-induced insecurities about whether she might hold Spock back from doing something great with his life.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

Frakes’ wife

For a moment in my head, I was wondering why you didn't just say Deanna.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

Why do worthless internet points need to be made more secure anyway?

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

My personal highlight was the scene were Spock and Chapel play chess, and he passive-aggressively pushes her to play faster. Very Vulcan.

My favourite scene too. I am glad they only got one scene together this episode to avoid it veering too hard into the soapy relationshipy aspects after last week. But damn those are two well-written, well-acted characters with insane chemistry - they gave them one scene together, playing chess no less, and it stole the whole episode.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

People talk about duplicate communities in the Fediverse as if it's a new problem. Reddit has loads of these though - it's not unique to the Fediverse. What happened on Reddit is that the communities in question eventually settled on one subreddit being the 'main' one for their community and then most of the traffic ended up with those ones.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

I found it weird when it aired. My recollection of watching it on TV as a teenager was that Vic became a big presence in the show very suddenly (I may be misremembering and it's been a while since I rewatched DS9) and the amount of screen time they devoted to him in late s6 and s7 felt odd.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

I really enjoyed this episode. The whole cast of SNW are really strong but Jess Bush has been a particular highlight - I'll admit I was cautious when I first heard they'd cast some Australian model as Chapel, but that caution was gone by the end of episode one and she's become easily one of my favourite characters. Ordinarily I don't tend to find that Star Trek romances do much for me but they've now got me invested in Chapel and Spock.

With hindsight my only mild criticism of the episode is the premise that a human Spock would be more emotional than the Spock we know. We constantly hear that Vulcans feel emotions more strongly than humans, but have learnt to embrace logic to control them - i.e. their nature is more emotional than humans but their nurture counterbalances this. So wouldn't a human Spock (with biologically human nature, but the nurture that Spock carries from his life experience being raised as a Vulcan) actually be super rational and logical?

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

That's a good explanation of it.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

The Measure of a Man is my all-time favourite Star Trek episode.

More then that, I think watching this and a few other key episodes at a formative young age might be a big part of why I'm a political liberal and why I put so much value on individual dignity, civil liberties, due process - a massive episode that means so much to me personally well beyond the boundaries of Trek fandom.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

Season 2 is where the show proverbially 'grows the beard' - Riker's literal beard being the trope-namer. But agree that a lot of that is just in comparison to the general level of Season 1 being weak. There are some other very good and important episodes in Season 2 though, like Q Who.

Season 3 is then where TNG really takes off and becomes quite consistent.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

A lot of people (myself included) would argue this is the best DS9 episode.

I think the Sisko/Jake father-son relationship is a key part of what makes DS9 different to other Trek - DS9 was about putting down roots in a place with everything that entails, in contrast to TOS and TNG being about a ship going from place-to-place each week, and multiple senior crew members having their families prominent in the show was a part of how they emphasised that theme. The Visitor is the key episode of the Sisko/Jake relationship and hence a key episode in what makes DS9 different.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

I can definitely see how a genuine libertarian could be a Trek fan.

The politics of Star Trek is all about individual dignity and fulfillment in a post-scarcity society. A lot of people try to call it socialist (as Pelia mockingly did in the most recent SNW episode) but the circumstances mean it's not any form of socialism anyone's encountered in real life on Earth, such as in the 20th century. After unfathomable levels of technological advancement eradicates the problem of scarcity, there's neither the need for a big state nor a market to allocate scarce resources - what we know as socialism and capitalism wouldn't be meaningful concepts. What we see instead is people doing what they do (joining Starfleet, undertaking research, conducting journalism, opening restaurants) out of a sense of personal fulfillment, and with neither a state nor a society nor a need to pay the bills particularly forcing them to do anything. They're free to live their lives as they see fit - infinite diversity in infinite combinations. I can see how a libertarian could look at that and call it their personal utopia.

I struggle much more with how a conservative could embrace Star Trek. So much of conservative politics is about the primacy of the norms of the collective over the rights and dignity of the individual - whether that's in moderate forms (e.g. wanting to manage the pace of social progress so as not to offend the sensibilities of the majority, wanting immigrants to integrate into host societies) or more aggressive forms (outright hostility to immigrants, denying the rights of women and minorities, denying the existence of LGBTQ people).

I guess what I'm saying is that once you remove economics from the problem of politics (as Star Trek has hand waved away via technology) then what's left of libertarianism looks a lot like Star Trek, whereas what's left of conservativism looks very different.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

It's great. Apart from Picard S3, this is the best Star Trek we've had since the 90s.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

The last time I paid money to go to a Star Trek fan event was Destination Star Trek in London in 2021. Most of the Discovery cast were there promoting season 4. The big screens in the halls for talks even had the season 4 trailer airing, prominently announcing the airing date. The first episode was due less than a week after DST and they were really building up the hype.

Two days after the convention, they announced they were pulling Discovery from Netflix and solely airing season 4 on their shitty in-house streaming service, whose launch date in the UK was still 'tbc'.

Then the mods on r/startrek decided not to enforce spoiler protections for season 4 after it aired in the US, so I got spoiled for the general plot over the course of the next few months. My enthusiasm to watch it dwindled to the extent that, even now that Paramount+ is available here, I still haven't made it more than a few episodes in.

The moral of the story is: fuck Paramount+.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

If you subbed Darmok for Yesterday's Enterprise then this would probably be my top 5.

Darmok would probably then be in my honourable mentions list, along with Redemption, Unification, Chain of Command, I Borg and All Good Things. The TNG two-parters were almost always gold.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

Lemmy seems to have gotten the lions share of reddit migrants

According to fedidb.org, Lemmy (all instances) has 70,412 active users while kbin (all instances) has 61,811. That's a 53%-47% split - technically a narrow majority, but the reality is that both services have picked up 'about half' of the new users. (I focused here on active users, as the total users stats are badly skewed by the problem a few weeks ago where several Lemmy instances that don't validate accounts were overrun by bots.)

It's not obviously enough to justify Lemmy getting special attention or Lemmy users not being aware the Threadiverse is bigger than just Lemmy.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

This is exactly what's wrong with the Paramount+ model. The best it can do is produce Star Trek for people who already like Star Trek - there's not enough other content on P+ otherwise for anyone to pay for a subscription. Without Star Trek available on mainstream TV or major streamers like Netflix or Prime, so that people can stumble across it or dip their toes in without needing to sign up to a whole other streaming service, it's hard to see how the franchise wins over new generations of fans.

So best case, if P+ is the future of Star Trek, then the future of Star Trek has an expiry date.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

At the start of the episode, when Ortegas was getting ready for the away mission, I thought this episode would have the scene from the start of the season 2 trailer where she (gleefully) pilots a shuttle down to a planet.

At least we know she will eventually get to go on an away mission!

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

But the same communities can exist on multiple sites, and it's confusing to navigate all of that.

I mean, on Reddit the same communities can exist on the same site. I'm a member of r/europe and r/europes, and of r/introvert and r/introverts...

Federation isn't the cause of competing communities. What happens on Reddit is that eventually enough of a mass of people congregate around one sub for a topic, and that becomes the de facto main one. The same thing will happen here.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago (edited 11 months ago)

AOC as the Democrat's candidate seems like a path to another Trump-type Republican in the White House. There must be few Democrats the Republicans would prefer to face in a national election.

It might not be inspiring, but for now I just want the Democrats to nominate moderate presidential candidates who will win. Even the worst Democrat is light years ahead of the best post-Trump Republican. There's too much at stake and the world literally might not survive the consequences of the next Trump or Trump-like presidency.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

Did you not read what I wrote? I said that AOC as the Democratic candidate means the Republican candidate has a much clearer route to win - she's a candidate to appeal to the Democratic faithful, not one for the swing voters.

theinspectorst , 11 months ago

I'm looking forward to a proper app with more functionality, but for now the progressive web app does work fine and I have it on my home screen on my phone in the place where Baconreader used to sit (and open it multiple times each day).