>from now on the appearance of angels in the finale and imaginary spirit advisors are to be the hallmarks of good writing.
So... DS9 and B5 had it right? Maybe also ST:Voy if you count Chakotay getting high to converse with his spirit totem or whatever. Oh, and the Ascended of SG1.
I think DS9 really fell off the wagon in the last season, unfortunately with the whole Pah Wraith/Gul Dukat/Kai Winn thing. Meh.
Yep. It's bad enough they've more or less gone full-blow with the PC route.
So, just what is the problem with casting an African-American woman as the captain? Have you SEEN -any- version of Star Trek before? Did you happen to notice how much importance was placed on diversity, especially at a time (say the 1960s) where you had to fight tooth and nail to get non-whites on the TV? Did you not notice that the franchise has tried to push the envelope as much as possible against network expectations?
It's hardly like this was the first time there was a black female captain, Star Trek IV had one thirty-one years ago. 31! But a second black woman, that's just fucking 'PC', clearly it should be a white guy, because I'm a white guy, and "white male" should be the default, and in our utopian future where racism doesn't exist anymore, clearly it would still always be white guys in charge all the time.
3-4 episodes a month for $6 comes down to a buck or two an episode. That seems worthwhile, right?
To watch? Or to buy? Because that's the purchase price, full, permanent purchase forever, for TV series' episodes. If that requires maintaining the subscription to watch them later, or you have to repurchase them in the future (say, DVD), then that $6/month is a serious, serious rip-off.
The abrams movies weren't star trek, they were just shitty action movies with star trek character names and branding. they litterally through all of star trek in the garbage to create that steaming pile.
Hey, they were a big step up in quality from Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Nemesis. Star Trek was old and TIRED at that point, and it needed a shot of energy if the franchise was ever going to survive.
That's one of the worst parts of Enterprise. That bad Rod Stewart-imitation theme song was just terrible, and the "remix" somehow found a way to make it worse. They could have taken any of the action incidental music and patched together a better theme song.
Orchestral themes rarely feel dated. You can bring something from a few hundred years ago and maybe with a small reworking, it can feel 'timeless.' Same thing for just about any Jerry Goldsmith composition. The last thing you want from your sci-fi series theme is to make it instantly dated. To give it whatever tune your producer was into that day. Especially if it's a bland "oldy" that already sounds like something most of society left behind. The only time I can recall this working was with Firefly, and that's because they were going specifically for a western feel, not a science fiction atmosphere.
I really don't want the balkanization of online content to occur.
It's already occurred, you just mentioned "Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu." You can add HBO to that list too. I don't want to dish out that much money for all that. That's nuts.
I wish CBS would get on the ball and put their channel On Demand stuff like the rest of the networks like ABC, NBC have, on the existing streaming services like Playstation VUE...Sling, DirectTVNOW...etc
The networks are fighting to stay networks. They want one series to drive traffic for other series like NBC used to with their Must-See-Thursday lineup with three top-10 hit series: Friends at 8pm, a new show at 8:30pm, Seinfeld at 9pm, a new show at 9:30pm, and ER at 10pm. Networks desperately want that formula back, or at least be able to do something similar. They want one show's popularity to prop up their network and gain viewers for other shows they might not have considered.
Viewers care about this less and less now. They've always hated cable package bundling, where to subscribe to network A, they have to subscribe to X, Y, and Z as well, which they don't want. The networks grudging gave in to the 'a la carte' model, but now viewers want even more freedom, they want to subscribe to -shows-, not networks, and networks fight that a lot harder. The marginal benefit to ME for subscribing to a network rather than a single show is zero. The marginal benefit to the network for me subscribing to a whole network is much, much more. Different networks fight this to a certain degree. AMC seems pretty good; I can stream Breaking Bad and the Walking Dead on Netflix. On the other extreme, HBO wants to stay HBO, and they don't allow their shows to be seen without an HBO subscription. That's why Game of Thrones was so heavily pirated.
I anticipate that Star Trek: Discovery will overtake Game of Thrones as the most pirated TV show. No one will like paying $6/month for this one damned show.
The cheaper stuff is often made with inferior quality ingredients and then loaded with more salt, sugar and fat to "improve" the taste
And that only tastes better when you eat a lot of stuff with added sugar and salt all the time, because if you don't, many of those crappy products taste pretty disgusting to those with taste buds not conditioned to that.
I mean, does Target exist for any reason other than for a few pennies more you can shop at a store that is like Walmart except clean, organized, and with actual open lanes at checkout?
Well, in my area, due to their predatory practices, the locals voted against allowing a Wall-Mart within the city, so they're a bit out in the boonies. There is a Target though, and it seems like a decent enough place. I wouldn't go there for actual groceries, but there sell quite a few things that a grocery store isn't going to have, since they really only have a little overlap.
1) You get the same brands as you do at other stores, but you pay a lot more for them. 2) An ok but not great selection of produce. 3) There's a lot of woo here, like organic free-range flaxseed oil and "all-natural" dietary supplements of dubious quality that sound like snake oil for the gullible.
I always assumed the high prices were to support #3 (other stores can even do "organic" at a much lower price) but maybe Amazon can find real spots in the company where inefficiencies can be identified and waste eliminated.
Why would we even bring that up? When then teacher tells little Johnny and Sally that when a guy and a girl love each other very much and get married, that sometimes the girl enjoys it when the guy performs cunnilingus on her? Or sometimes she likes it when he does it in the butt instead of the vagina? Is this what you think talking to kids about marriage involves?
I've noticed a trend among anti-gay marriage advocates. They present heterosexual marriage as being about love, family, and tradition. But if it's gay marriage, then it's clearly about disgusting gay sex. If you're talking about hetero marriage, well that's fine and appropriate, but if you ever talk about gay marriage, then why are you talking about sex to our children??
It should come as no surprise that gay guys haven't exactly had problems having sex with each other without marriage. Why would they want to get anything near marriage if it's it's a sex thing? To bring up these explicitly sexual themes when trying to drum up a moral panic is.. it's dishonest.
Of course it's a weak reason. The whole issue is based on weak reasoning. It's social preference stuff. Care to share some of the strong reasoning on the pro-gay marriage side? I've never heard any.
It's basically the same arguments that one can use for hetero marriage. Relationship stability, love, rearing children, etcetc. Just about any net positive one applies to heterosexual marriage being good apply to gay marriage. Why wouldn't they?
What movies from the 2010s will stand the test of time? Can you name even one? I can't.
I would say Up (cheating, that was 2009), Inception (I think Blade Runner is a little better, but they're both extremely good), the Artist, Lincoln, maybe (maybe!) Skyfall (I think it's at least as good as any of the Bond classics), 12 Years a Slave, Hacksaw Ridge, Logan, those all have the capability of being seen decades from now. Though really, who knows what tastes will be like decades from now? Star Wars Episode 7 will certainly be watched and rewatched decades from now, whether it really deserves that honor or not, since it's Star Wars, and Star Wars will be forever, like James Bond. That's all just the list of Oscar nominees since 2010 that I could think of off the top of my head.
But what are we really thinking of when it comes to movies that stand the test of time? Do you think most people today think Laurence of Arabia is a great movie? Not that they've been told it's a great movie, not because some film critic told them it's one of the best movies ever made, but that they saw Laurence of Arabia and thought "wow, that's one of the best movies ever made." That group of people is vanishingly small. I don't know that Laurence will eventually survive the test of time, other than there's something of an unstoppable juggernaut of film buffs who will keep it alive.
Every "colonizing Mars" plan has these holes. People say "create an atmosphere" or "dig caves" to live in. With what? There is no Home Depot on Mars. How do you create an atmosphere? How do you keep it when there is no magnetosphere? It is a mystery! But who cares - we are going to MARS!
Man, you're thinking way too limited! You identified the problem but thought small with the solutions. The first thing to do is to bury a lot of metal at the martian core so that it creates a magnetosphere, then you create an atmosphere (with compression?) that won't just get blown away.
solar panels on Mars get about a third the energy they do on earth. so one just needs 3X the solar panels to get a job done, eh? your first claim is meaningless.
Yeah, but in that case you'd need a company with solar technology and battery technology for this to be feasible, and also has the motivation to take on a task like this... oh wait. Hmm.
I didn't think it was supposed to be a "fun way to unwind outside." If that's the sort of person who thinks that's what Mars will be like, then it doesn't sound like the sort of person who would be much use on a Mars trip.
So you are supporting the scrubbing of history by removing those statues.
That's not scrubbing history, they're usually going into museums. I have no interest in whitewashing. The northerners sure as hell didn't fight the Civil War to free the slaves, but most of the Southern states seceded to protect slavery. What this is doing is removing them from a place of honor. Our places of honor should be reserved for people who, you know, actually deserve honor.
You should really dust off a history book, because slavery was actually a very small part of it. There was far more to the issue then just that. If you don't want to look like a book burner, perhaps you'd be better off wanting to show the entire history of it?
Over half of the Confederate states put, in their article of succession, the preservation of the Southern way of life through the institution of slavery as a primary motivation, or even the sole motivation for succession. Sure, it was all states rights, but funny that the "states' right" that they talked the most about was slavery.
England, while strictly true, is the wrong sub-division to use in this context. It would be as silly as refering "Atlanta, Georgia" as "Atlanta, Fulton County" without specifying the state, nor the top level country.
Plenty of folks in the UK would actually disagree with you. There are quite a few who want to be "English, not the UK" or "Scotland, not GB" or "Northern Ireland, not the UK." The UK is a hell of a lot less unified than even the USA is.
The movies are absolutely not canon, and don't use the names of real-world cities, but Christopher Nolan's batman trilogy was filmed in Chicago and used a number of Chicago landmarks. It wasn't the first time I'd heard of Chicago as Gotham, but when Batman was first written, everyone lived in/thought about/was based in New York. Marvel was more explicit that its superheroes were in New York city, and it took decades for them to show characters living in and operating out of other cities.
Before the San Francisco Giants moved out west, they were the New York Giants, but that was a name change as well, as they were founded in 1883 as the New York Gothams. Though that sounds a bit like the "New York New Yorkers."
So you support the removal of historical statues and scrubbing of history?
Scrubbing of history? I support the removal of statues of people who fought a war to preserve the institution of slavery. I know it's very chic now to try to whitewash the history of the Civil War and pretend it's just local state control over the big bad feds, but at least in the 1860s the Southerners were a bit more honest about what they were actually fighting for.
The Confederacy is one of the greatest symbols of our shameful past, where we thought it was fine for a man to keep another man like property. It neither needs to or deserves to be honored, and those statues were a casual, everyday "fuck you" to non-whites, a constant reminder that for many, they are not welcome even after 150 years.
and the US arrogantly thought that they were better hackers.
The US probably thought that Russia had absolutely no intention of stopping hacking. All this was was a ploy to try to bind the US in some agreement while Russia lies about how they couldn't possibly be behind the hacking! What, the hacking, did you think Russians were behind it? Oh, are you bringing up the hacking charges again? Russians were not nearly as involved as you think they were. Talking about the hacking during the election again? Ok, we Russians were behind it, but that was a long time ago, and it was totally justified.
Just see the timeline for the Ukraine invasion denials to see where on that historical pattern of denials/admissions we're at. I thought Trump could boldly lie, but he's got nothing on the Russian government.
Slashdot Mirror
>from now on the appearance of angels in the finale and imaginary spirit advisors are to be the hallmarks of good writing.
So... DS9 and B5 had it right? Maybe also ST:Voy if you count Chakotay getting high to converse with his spirit totem or whatever. Oh, and the Ascended of SG1.
I think DS9 really fell off the wagon in the last season, unfortunately with the whole Pah Wraith/Gul Dukat/Kai Winn thing. Meh.
Yep. It's bad enough they've more or less gone full-blow with the PC route.
So, just what is the problem with casting an African-American woman as the captain? Have you SEEN -any- version of Star Trek before? Did you happen to notice how much importance was placed on diversity, especially at a time (say the 1960s) where you had to fight tooth and nail to get non-whites on the TV? Did you not notice that the franchise has tried to push the envelope as much as possible against network expectations?
It's hardly like this was the first time there was a black female captain, Star Trek IV had one thirty-one years ago. 31! But a second black woman, that's just fucking 'PC', clearly it should be a white guy, because I'm a white guy, and "white male" should be the default, and in our utopian future where racism doesn't exist anymore, clearly it would still always be white guys in charge all the time.
3-4 episodes a month for $6 comes down to a buck or two an episode. That seems worthwhile, right?
To watch? Or to buy? Because that's the purchase price, full, permanent purchase forever, for TV series' episodes. If that requires maintaining the subscription to watch them later, or you have to repurchase them in the future (say, DVD), then that $6/month is a serious, serious rip-off.
The abrams movies weren't star trek, they were just shitty action movies with star trek character names and branding. they litterally through all of star trek in the garbage to create that steaming pile.
Hey, they were a big step up in quality from Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Nemesis. Star Trek was old and TIRED at that point, and it needed a shot of energy if the franchise was ever going to survive.
That's one of the worst parts of Enterprise. That bad Rod Stewart-imitation theme song was just terrible, and the "remix" somehow found a way to make it worse. They could have taken any of the action incidental music and patched together a better theme song.
Orchestral themes rarely feel dated. You can bring something from a few hundred years ago and maybe with a small reworking, it can feel 'timeless.' Same thing for just about any Jerry Goldsmith composition. The last thing you want from your sci-fi series theme is to make it instantly dated. To give it whatever tune your producer was into that day. Especially if it's a bland "oldy" that already sounds like something most of society left behind. The only time I can recall this working was with Firefly, and that's because they were going specifically for a western feel, not a science fiction atmosphere.
I really don't want the balkanization of online content to occur.
It's already occurred, you just mentioned "Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Hulu." You can add HBO to that list too. I don't want to dish out that much money for all that. That's nuts.
Interesting. Star Trek pilot episodes have tended not to be representative of the quality of the series.
Yeah...
I wish CBS would get on the ball and put their channel On Demand stuff like the rest of the networks like ABC, NBC have, on the existing streaming services like Playstation VUE...Sling, DirectTVNOW...etc
The networks are fighting to stay networks. They want one series to drive traffic for other series like NBC used to with their Must-See-Thursday lineup with three top-10 hit series: Friends at 8pm, a new show at 8:30pm, Seinfeld at 9pm, a new show at 9:30pm, and ER at 10pm. Networks desperately want that formula back, or at least be able to do something similar. They want one show's popularity to prop up their network and gain viewers for other shows they might not have considered.
Viewers care about this less and less now. They've always hated cable package bundling, where to subscribe to network A, they have to subscribe to X, Y, and Z as well, which they don't want. The networks grudging gave in to the 'a la carte' model, but now viewers want even more freedom, they want to subscribe to -shows-, not networks, and networks fight that a lot harder. The marginal benefit to ME for subscribing to a network rather than a single show is zero. The marginal benefit to the network for me subscribing to a whole network is much, much more. Different networks fight this to a certain degree. AMC seems pretty good; I can stream Breaking Bad and the Walking Dead on Netflix. On the other extreme, HBO wants to stay HBO, and they don't allow their shows to be seen without an HBO subscription. That's why Game of Thrones was so heavily pirated.
I anticipate that Star Trek: Discovery will overtake Game of Thrones as the most pirated TV show. No one will like paying $6/month for this one damned show.
The cheaper stuff is often made with inferior quality ingredients and then loaded with more salt, sugar and fat to "improve" the taste
And that only tastes better when you eat a lot of stuff with added sugar and salt all the time, because if you don't, many of those crappy products taste pretty disgusting to those with taste buds not conditioned to that.
I mean, does Target exist for any reason other than for a few pennies more you can shop at a store that is like Walmart except clean, organized, and with actual open lanes at checkout?
Well, in my area, due to their predatory practices, the locals voted against allowing a Wall-Mart within the city, so they're a bit out in the boonies. There is a Target though, and it seems like a decent enough place. I wouldn't go there for actual groceries, but there sell quite a few things that a grocery store isn't going to have, since they really only have a little overlap.
Whole Foods was known for three things:
1) You get the same brands as you do at other stores, but you pay a lot more for them.
2) An ok but not great selection of produce.
3) There's a lot of woo here, like organic free-range flaxseed oil and "all-natural" dietary supplements of dubious quality that sound like snake oil for the gullible.
I always assumed the high prices were to support #3 (other stores can even do "organic" at a much lower price) but maybe Amazon can find real spots in the company where inefficiencies can be identified and waste eliminated.
What sex acts you find gross?
Why would we even bring that up? When then teacher tells little Johnny and Sally that when a guy and a girl love each other very much and get married, that sometimes the girl enjoys it when the guy performs cunnilingus on her? Or sometimes she likes it when he does it in the butt instead of the vagina? Is this what you think talking to kids about marriage involves?
I've noticed a trend among anti-gay marriage advocates. They present heterosexual marriage as being about love, family, and tradition. But if it's gay marriage, then it's clearly about disgusting gay sex. If you're talking about hetero marriage, well that's fine and appropriate, but if you ever talk about gay marriage, then why are you talking about sex to our children??
It should come as no surprise that gay guys haven't exactly had problems having sex with each other without marriage. Why would they want to get anything near marriage if it's it's a sex thing? To bring up these explicitly sexual themes when trying to drum up a moral panic is.. it's dishonest.
Of course it's a weak reason. The whole issue is based on weak reasoning. It's social preference stuff. Care to share some of the strong reasoning on the pro-gay marriage side? I've never heard any.
It's basically the same arguments that one can use for hetero marriage. Relationship stability, love, rearing children, etcetc. Just about any net positive one applies to heterosexual marriage being good apply to gay marriage. Why wouldn't they?
What movies from the 2010s will stand the test of time? Can you name even one? I can't.
I would say Up (cheating, that was 2009), Inception (I think Blade Runner is a little better, but they're both extremely good), the Artist, Lincoln, maybe (maybe!) Skyfall (I think it's at least as good as any of the Bond classics), 12 Years a Slave, Hacksaw Ridge, Logan, those all have the capability of being seen decades from now. Though really, who knows what tastes will be like decades from now? Star Wars Episode 7 will certainly be watched and rewatched decades from now, whether it really deserves that honor or not, since it's Star Wars, and Star Wars will be forever, like James Bond. That's all just the list of Oscar nominees since 2010 that I could think of off the top of my head.
But what are we really thinking of when it comes to movies that stand the test of time? Do you think most people today think Laurence of Arabia is a great movie? Not that they've been told it's a great movie, not because some film critic told them it's one of the best movies ever made, but that they saw Laurence of Arabia and thought "wow, that's one of the best movies ever made." That group of people is vanishingly small. I don't know that Laurence will eventually survive the test of time, other than there's something of an unstoppable juggernaut of film buffs who will keep it alive.
Every "colonizing Mars" plan has these holes. People say "create an atmosphere" or "dig caves" to live in. With what? There is no Home Depot on Mars. How do you create an atmosphere? How do you keep it when there is no magnetosphere? It is a mystery! But who cares - we are going to MARS!
Man, you're thinking way too limited! You identified the problem but thought small with the solutions. The first thing to do is to bury a lot of metal at the martian core so that it creates a magnetosphere, then you create an atmosphere (with compression?) that won't just get blown away.
Yeah man, MARS!!!!
solar panels on Mars get about a third the energy they do on earth. so one just needs 3X the solar panels to get a job done, eh? your first claim is meaningless.
Yeah, but in that case you'd need a company with solar technology and battery technology for this to be feasible, and also has the motivation to take on a task like this... oh wait. Hmm.
I didn't think it was supposed to be a "fun way to unwind outside." If that's the sort of person who thinks that's what Mars will be like, then it doesn't sound like the sort of person who would be much use on a Mars trip.
So you are supporting the scrubbing of history by removing those statues.
That's not scrubbing history, they're usually going into museums. I have no interest in whitewashing. The northerners sure as hell didn't fight the Civil War to free the slaves, but most of the Southern states seceded to protect slavery.
What this is doing is removing them from a place of honor. Our places of honor should be reserved for people who, you know, actually deserve honor.
You should really dust off a history book, because slavery was actually a very small part of it. There was far more to the issue then just that. If you don't want to look like a book burner, perhaps you'd be better off wanting to show the entire history of it?
Over half of the Confederate states put, in their article of succession, the preservation of the Southern way of life through the institution of slavery as a primary motivation, or even the sole motivation for succession. Sure, it was all states rights, but funny that the "states' right" that they talked the most about was slavery.
>> Coventry, England
No. You mean "Coventry, UK".
Only Americans seem to get this so wrong.
England, while strictly true, is the wrong sub-division to use in this context.
It would be as silly as refering "Atlanta, Georgia" as "Atlanta, Fulton County" without specifying the state, nor the top level country.
Plenty of folks in the UK would actually disagree with you. There are quite a few who want to be "English, not the UK" or "Scotland, not GB" or "Northern Ireland, not the UK." The UK is a hell of a lot less unified than even the USA is.
I really enjoyed Michelle Pfeiffer as catwoman!
The movies are absolutely not canon, and don't use the names of real-world cities, but Christopher Nolan's batman trilogy was filmed in Chicago and used a number of Chicago landmarks. It wasn't the first time I'd heard of Chicago as Gotham, but when Batman was first written, everyone lived in/thought about/was based in New York. Marvel was more explicit that its superheroes were in New York city, and it took decades for them to show characters living in and operating out of other cities.
Before the San Francisco Giants moved out west, they were the New York Giants, but that was a name change as well, as they were founded in 1883 as the New York Gothams. Though that sounds a bit like the "New York New Yorkers."
I'm not left wing, but if guns and big black cock are involved, maybe I should give it a try!
So you support the removal of historical statues and scrubbing of history?
Scrubbing of history? I support the removal of statues of people who fought a war to preserve the institution of slavery. I know it's very chic now to try to whitewash the history of the Civil War and pretend it's just local state control over the big bad feds, but at least in the 1860s the Southerners were a bit more honest about what they were actually fighting for.
The Confederacy is one of the greatest symbols of our shameful past, where we thought it was fine for a man to keep another man like property. It neither needs to or deserves to be honored, and those statues were a casual, everyday "fuck you" to non-whites, a constant reminder that for many, they are not welcome even after 150 years.
and the US arrogantly thought that they were better hackers.
The US probably thought that Russia had absolutely no intention of stopping hacking. All this was was a ploy to try to bind the US in some agreement while Russia lies about how they couldn't possibly be behind the hacking!
What, the hacking, did you think Russians were behind it?
Oh, are you bringing up the hacking charges again? Russians were not nearly as involved as you think they were.
Talking about the hacking during the election again? Ok, we Russians were behind it, but that was a long time ago, and it was totally justified.
Just see the timeline for the Ukraine invasion denials to see where on that historical pattern of denials/admissions we're at.
I thought Trump could boldly lie, but he's got nothing on the Russian government.