StillPaisleyCat

joined 1 year ago

We’ve tried most of them over time.

Star Trek Resurgence has consistently excellent reviews. It’s about a 25 hour role play where the player makes choices for two different crew - a senior bridge officer and an NCO in engineering. It’s well done and one of our teens and I are enjoying it a lot. Great value for the sale price. My patience on this one was reinforced by its initial release being exclusive to Epic - but on Steam and on sale it’s worth it.

Bridge Crew is an older game. I have had it for a couple of years, and took advantage of the sale to pick up copies for each of our kids Steam accounts. One of them got really into it right away.

Timelines is also older. It held their interest for a bit in middle school but doesn’t seem to be one of the better tie-ins.

Star Trek Online is a long running massively multiplayer game that starts out free but then can cost a lot for in-game purchases. One of our teens is into it, and got fairly far without purchasing much, but the Steam sale is a good opportunity for them to buy things they’ve had on their wish list.

As a parent, I find these better than the endless number of Star Wars mods on Roblox that one of ours got into for a while.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 5 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The colours are unrepentantly psychedelic 70s fashionable and so are a few of the plots.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 6 points 2 months ago (4 children)

It’s always a good time to do a watch through of TAS.

The thing is that while the technobabble is just that, the process represents how engineering gets done better than most other ‘serious’ SF, albeit at compressed speed.

Voyager did a better job than any at showing how the thinking and problem-solving work gets done - which to me is more the point.

All this criticism seems to come from folks who’ve never seen nerds working in teams being nerds. They seem to want science FICTION to be locked down to concepts that someone with a mid 20th bachelor’s degree in science would know.

Whereas the real life scientists and engineers in my circle react more like Erin Macdonald did when she was working on her physics PhD and saw Voyager. She recognized the process and thought it was cool that some of the newer concepts in gravimetrics were referenced but didn’t sweat the small stuff.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Glad to have you mention that here.

So many fans of the older shows assume that Lower Decks isn’t accessible to new viewers who don’t get the references, but it’s quite the opposite. Gen Z and younger viewers are into animated comedies and it’s a successful entry point. And with the number of middle schoolers who got into manga and anime during the pandemic, the portion of the audience that prefers animation as a medium is only going to grow.

Our teens were fans of the Voyager when they were in middle school, and sampled the rest of the classic shows. Despite that they seem to be split on the animated vs live action new shows, and none of them would watch Picard.

It’s a real shame that there won’t be any new animated Star Trek after this season of Lower Decks.

Star Trek Prodigy is the true sequel to Voyager. It’s all ages / family rather than the ‘kids show’ many fans take it for. I would watch that with your GF next.

Because Prodigy is designed to be an entry point for new viewers, it introduces many of the key legacy characters and much of the lore. It has a Star Wars vibe in the pilot, mainly to draw in viewers from other franchises, but it settles into being some of the Trekiest content ever by the 6th short episode of season one.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Dave Blass said much of it was packed up in crates and shipped.

To where is the question.

Tawny is already in the writers room for Starfleet Academy as well as working as a cocreator of a new live action Star Trek comedy series in development.

It seems that she’s another alum who will be mostly behind the camera but will show up as a legacy character in other shows.

TOS ‘The Devil in the Dark’ in first run.

I was barely in school, but my slightly older neighbour who’d hooked me on Time Tunnel and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, convinced me that Star Trek must be seen.

I quickly caught up during the hiatus reruns, and have seen absolutely all of it in first run since.

[–] StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

As someone who sees MS Word forms regularly force Canadians to use Month/Day/Year formats which were never native to Canada and don’t meet the ISO standard either, I am inferring the impetus transition.

But truly, I old enough to recall many standards being harmonized in the early 90s in the wake of the North American free trade agreement.

Whether or not a digital archive document demonstrates that Canada Post intentionally harmonized to match the US is TBC.

But it is a verifiable fact that the two-letter standard for provinces and territories has not been commonly established in all federal regulations or data standards or in provincial and territorial data systems standards.

That is to say, it has not been formally adopted as by Canada or as the ‘Canadian data standard.’

I hadn’t been aware that he’d also been a director for television. Truly a wide-ranging career.

 

Because we can’t ever get enough Bruce Horak content.

This brief piece is from Canada’s National Arts Centre (in Ottawa).

 

This is a major revelation from the trial.

The writer is a principal from Duck Duck Go.

Thought folks here might be interested.

 

This one is well done, and seems worthy of capturing as documentation in the Daystrom Institute.

Those charming two forward-facing eyes were instant indicators that Moopsy is a predator…but how dangerous?

It’s a tubby jumping spider without all those extra eyes and legs.

 

This NPR coverage is interesting.

"A lot of people don't understand how different our demands are from the WGA's demands," Bond said.

Bond said unlike the WGA, the actors union represents many types of performers — actors, dancers, stunt people — each with specific needs that need to be addressed.

Artificial intelligence, for example, is an especially existential threat for background actors, some of whom say they've already had their bodies scanned for reuse.

So Bond said negotiations with the studios' trade association, the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) could take a while.

"The AMPTP is just going to use every union busting trick that they have," Bond said.

 

Many fediverse fans are exasperated that Paramount has (once again) missed the opportunity to take our money with official tie-in merchandise and left us to our own creations, or non-licensed creators.

While it says a lot that fans on a nonmonetizing platform are literally demanding that Paramount get its profit-taking act together, all this Moopsy fan-entitlement is currently being redirected into crafting energy.

So MakeYourOwnMoopsyMonth it is.

First out of the gate is a charming ceramic Moopsy demonstrating appropriate predatory behaviour on a blue crochet duck. Enjoy.

 

Simon & Schuster had a larger than usual array of ebook deals for September 2023.

October 1st is the last day for this group, a new set (likely fewer books) will come on line Sunday the 2nd.

If you haven’t given Treklit a try, these ebook deals are a great low cost way to get into it.

 

A solid round up of some of the broader industry issues as the WGA contract moves towards potential endorsement by WGA East and West leadership Tuesday in preparation for a vote by the members.

 

Amid some speculation about the questionable neutrality of major Hollywood media sources, owned by AMPTP members, CNN reports from “a source familiar” that WGA has been sent a ‘best & final’ offer.

So, stay tuned for the WGA leadership’s assessment.

 

Missed this report from earlier in the week…Paramount+ will be joining major streamer J:COM with a launch date for Japan of December 1, 2023.

For the many fans who’ve been waiting for a legal way to get new Trek in Japan, this is hopefully great news.

 

Many WGA veterans urged caution at getting hopes too high for what may come out of the AMPTP negotiating room later today, after a third day of talks between labor and management that involved four CEOs.

Notably, Paramount Global’s Bob Baklish is not among the CEO’s sitting in.

 

This ScienceOf.org interview with Professor of Genetics/Evolution (& Star Trek biological science advisor) Mohammed Noor on the biology, especially the r-selection reproduction, of the Gorn in SNW is marvellous.

Just the kind of uncomfortable but great biological thinking I was hoping we’d get into here at Daystrom Institute.

e.g. Can we think of the Gorn in viral terms?

Treating Gorn like this, each infected person could infect four more people, so the R0 for Gorn would be 4. Not wildly big, but large enough to do the job. Of course, the hatchlings would also be going after one another, so the analogy’s not perfect.

But if you want to think of the Gorn as intelligent, viral space dinosaurs, that does get the idea across.

 

It seems that with long hiatuses in new onscreen Trek ahead, genre coverage is starting to profile Trek novels again.

This set of ten weird but readable books isn’t necessarily the trippiest, but it does put the first of the Shatnerverse books at the top.

(Perhaps @ValueSubtracted@startrek.website there’s yet hope for Shatner’s wild imaginings to make it into S&S monthly Star Trek ebook deals promotional rotation.)

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