|
Khanstant posted:I completely understand why it has that rear end in a top hat bent to the humor, like, look at the world for half a second and it becomes clear. I think to write like old-Trek you'd have to be hopelessly oblivious to reality to maintain that optimism. The world today, as opposed to the paradise of the late 1960s...
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 18:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 07:46 |
|
|
If you want the can-do attitude of the Great Society’s space propaganda back, you have to actually get the Great Society back first
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 18:25
|
|
|
To whoever recommended A Stitch in Time, thank you. It was a great read and does a great job filling out Garak. And of course left me wanting more, so I guess it’s time for a ds9 rewatch.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 18:56
|
|
|
Son of Sam-I-Am posted:The world today, as opposed to the paradise of the late 1960s... I think it was easier to be ignorant and maintain a privileged optimism back then (at least for the people who decided what ends up on TV), it's easy to see why the past was complete garbage now, but back then they were pattin' themselves on the back for including a woman of colour like they just solved all racism, we did it _boys_, future is looking bright! More peoples have voices you can hear now and you don't get to sweep it under the rug as hard as you could in the past. Even then, re-watching old Trek you constantly run into regressive attitudes and thoughts from the past that were relatively progressive back then. I think people are more acutely aware that this is as utopic as poo poo is going to get and it's a straight up milquetoast dystopia in many ways. You're expecting people knee-deep in the days leading up to the bell riots to think like they're Picard on his luxury space embassy hotel. I get what you want, why you want it, I want it too but the writers are also literally writing and working under the same systems they have to discard to get at the old time fantasy attitude.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 19:21
|
|
|
can you rephrase your point or points because I'm having a hard time parsing what you're saying
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 19:24
|
|
|
The 60s, noted utopia replete with race riots, the Vietnam War, and a looming existential threat of nuclear obliteration. e: somehow I missed Son of Sam-I-Am's post at the top of this very page. Admiralty Flag fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Oct 30, 2019 |
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 19:28
|
|
|
reminder that even Star Trek (and TNG!) explicitly assumed the question of nuclear war was not if but when
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 19:34
|
|
|
The tribble short reminds me of those British comedies where everyone is miserable (and anyone who isn't clearly has something very wrong with them).
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 19:35
|
|
|
Farmer Crack-rear end posted:reminder that even Star Trek (and TNG!) explicitly assumed the question of nuclear war was not if but when Not necessarily that, but that we needed to be brought low and then have some unifying event to reach our potential, as did the Vulcans
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 19:37
|
|
|
GenSpecific posted:To whoever recommended A Stitch in Time, thank you. It was a great read and does a great job filling out Garak. And of course left me wanting more, so I guess it’s time for a ds9 rewatch. Zesty fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Oct 30, 2019 |
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 19:40
|
|
|
The Bloop posted:Not necessarily that, but that we needed to be brought low and then have some unifying event to reach our potential, as did the Vulcans So, accelerationism.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 20:09
|
|
|
I'm in the middle of a re-watch of DS9, showing it to my fiance for the first time. I remember the broad strokes of the story but there are definitely details I'm blanking on. So in DS9 2x12 "The Alternate", they bring some sort of Founder relic onboard the station after an expedition to the Gamma Quadrant. This was from a mission that included Odo, Dr. Mora, Jadzia Dax, and some extra. On the planet they got the relic from, they had all been hit with some gas that knocked everyone but Odo out. On the station, Dax was the least affected of the three. Julian speculates that her Trill physiology may have mitigated some of the affect. Later in the episode, she's shown being somewhat cagey. When she's alone with the Founder relic, she regards it oddly, and later makes a point of moving it. Her reasons for moving it are cagey (some vague allusion to aesthetic preference). The whole thing scans as there being something meaningful going on with Jadzia after her experience in the Gamma Quadrant, but nothing really comes of it in the whole episode. My assumption was that she might have been replaced by a Changeling in that episode, but I've seen episodes since where it definitely had to be her, such as the one where she discovers she had a secret 8th host. Does anyone remember what I'm talking about? Was I imagining the weirdness in "The Alternate"?
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 21:18
|
|
|
PerniciousKnid posted:So, accelerationism. Sort of, at least as the path that led us to the Trek future. Of course, accelerationism doesn't propose a meaningful event to bring us together and hopes that hitting rock bottom will do it, which is quite a gamble, so lets avoid the "billions of people have to suffer" path if at all possible
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 21:31
|
|
|
100 degrees Calcium posted:I'm in the middle of a re-watch of DS9, showing it to my fiance for the first time. I remember the broad strokes of the story but there are definitely details I'm blanking on. Nah, she was never replaced with a Changeling. Dr. Bashir was during a later season. I don't remember any Dax oddness in that episode galenanorth fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Oct 30, 2019 |
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 22:28
|
|
|
100 degrees Calcium posted:Does anyone remember what I'm talking about? Was I imagining the weirdness in "The Alternate"? They wrote and shot the episode almost like a mini horror movie, and included some eerie moments. Also some red herrings so people wouldn't guess the twist ending.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 22:33
|
|
|
Tighclops posted:can you rephrase your point or points because I'm having a hard time parsing what you're saying people in the 60s and 90s lived in lovely times but if you were white middle class and up in developed nation it was pretty easy to act like everything was great, ignore the intense bigotry, and pretend like the future was going to be great
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 22:46
|
|
|
Khanstant posted:people in the 60s and 90s lived in lovely times but if you were white middle class and up in developed nation it was pretty easy to act like everything was great, ignore the intense bigotry, and pretend like the future was going to be great If there is a major difference I would say it is that if you want to absorb the miseries of the world, you can now do so essentially every waking moment, if you want. In the 60s or even the 90s there was a practical limit because eventually TV would go off the air, or no news programs would be on, or you'd run out of newspapers to read, or something. You'd have to go do something else.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 23:02
|
|
|
Khanstant posted:people in the 60s and 90s lived in lovely times but if you were white middle class and up in developed nation it was pretty easy to act like everything was great, ignore the intense bigotry, and pretend like the future was going to be great Even people on the low end of things had it measurably better than the people on the short end of the stick in the past. I'd rather be a dirt poor mud farmer in 1995 than a dirt poor mud farmer in 1895, 1595, or 995. His 2095 version is going to have it better than the 1995 one.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 23:12
|
|
|
Nessus posted:If there is a major difference I would say it is that if you want to absorb the miseries of the world, you can now do so essentially every waking moment, if you want. In the 60s or even the 90s there was a practical limit because eventually TV would go off the air, or no news programs would be on, or you'd run out of newspapers to read, or something. You'd have to go do something else. That's a stronger point. The world has always been awful but now you can drink it in 24/7 from every suffering perspective plus people who helpfully point out other ways that thing is worse from other angles. Though to be fair I do think some of our era's crisis do really stand to be quite insurmountable, even if many of those crisis aren't new, just old problems we've been building up to for ages and are finally starting to come to a head.
|
|
#
?
Oct 30, 2019 23:42
|
|
|
Some bad things get better and some not so bad things get worse. It's never certain that the future will be net better than the present, but it's always worth hoping and trying. I think it's worth trying to put positive hopes out there even if it ends up being a bit dorkier, and while it can be fun playing around with bleak hopeless settings, it gets exhausting and frustrating sometimes when writers refuse to allow for any hope. People across the span of history have been constantly expecting things like the apocalypse, end of life as we know it, and destruction of most of humanity, and they're only sometimes right.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 01:26
|
|
|
Khanstant posted:That's a stronger point. The world has always been awful but now you can drink it in 24/7 from every suffering perspective plus people who helpfully point out other ways that thing is worse from other angles. Though to be fair I do think some of our era's crisis do really stand to be quite insurmountable, even if many of those crisis aren't new, just old problems we've been building up to for ages and are finally starting to come to a head. Have you ever heard the term "self-fulfilling prophecy"? If enough people believe this and lose hope then it's practically guaranteed to happen.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 02:20
|
|
|
Son of Sam-I-Am posted:Have you ever heard the term "self-fulfilling prophecy"? If enough people believe this and lose hope then it's practically guaranteed to happen. There are also some people who seem to glory in the assertion that the past was 100% evil and suffering, and that if you think things are getting better a-HA! you are wrong, things are actually getting worse and will never be better. It's like misery porn, and this fact Nessus posted:if you want to absorb the miseries of the world, you can now do so essentially every waking moment, if you want. In the 60s or even the 90s there was a practical limit because eventually TV would go off the air, or no news programs would be on, or you'd run out of newspapers to read, or something. You'd have to go do something else. This makes them feel the positives of a TNG style show and future pollyannaish and quaint at best, and unrealistic and harmful at worst. Bonus points if you go a full 180 from "death of the author" to drat TOS and TNG's positive futures as being tainted by Roddenberry, who some seem to feel is between Hitler and Trump for being a sexist, racist, regressive shitlord.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 03:47
|
|
|
Discovery is about finding our way to a better future. It's just bad at it sometimes. The whole point of the first season was, "how do we make peace with Islamic fundamentalists?" For all the reveling in the violence and hard choices, the goal was peace. The idea that we had to just defeat them really hard was explicitly condemned. In the end our hero did her best to bring peace by understanding the Other. All our liberalism will fall on deaf ears so long as the Other sees us as an imperialistic threat. We need to leave them alone and let them make their own progress. When they are secure in their own situation, peace and an honest exchange of ideas will be possible. In practice a lot of other stuff happened, with a lot more problematic implications, but Discovery was always obviously about a better future. I'm tired of people accusing Discovery of trying to tell some sort of nihilistic grimdark story, thereby making GBS threads on Star Trek's idealism. They're trying to tell an optimistic story using nihilistic grimdark trappings. Any making GBS threads on Star Trek's idealism is an act of incontinence, not malice. Except the Tribble short. God drat that was hateful for no reason.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 03:54
|
|
|
I'm willing to give you Discovery being distantly well-intended and being the victim of production juggling and poo poo writing. It started out with warcrimes and didn't really improve (yum yum) - there was a great speech about what starfleet means, maybe part of what Archer should have said about the Federation, but it was just words that felt almost entirely disconnected from everything they actually showed us. And I am not a hater, just a disappointed fan.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 04:18
|
|
|
The Bloop posted:I'm willing to give you Discovery being distantly well-intended and being the victim of production juggling and poo poo writing. This is basically it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 05:38
|
|
|
The Bloop posted:I'm willing to give you Discovery being distantly well-intended and being the victim of production juggling and poo poo writing. The impression I'm left with is that it's a show about a better future by and for people who don't really believe that's possible. I don't think there's any malice there either, it's just how it turned out.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 06:43
|
|
|
This is what happens when you put centrists in charge of Star Trek.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 06:47
|
|
|
MikeJF posted:I found a link to Stage9 and downloaded it and now I'm angry all over again because this is the coolest thing I've ever seen. Reason number 9 billion and 1 for swinging the pendulum back the other way and scaling back IP law significantly.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 16:10
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:This is what happens when you put centrists in charge of Star Trek. Yeah, it's this. The people currently running the franchise are not the daring optimists of Trek's past. They have this idea that making the show more "gritty" and the characters "more human" means loading the show with incredibly pessimistic garbage that should be mostly anachronistic in federation society. They saw the complex flawed characters, section 31, and ethical shades of gray of D9 but totally missed the point and dialed it all up to 11 while tossing the optimism and ideology of the show.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 16:45
|
|
|
S2 barely ended up being about S31 anyway. It was more about the future AI using them to try and kill Burnham’s mom
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 17:14
|
|
|
I'm watching infinity train and kate mulgrew plays an evil cat and she's knocking it out of the park but it's very weird.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 17:26
|
|
|
Senor Tron posted:If you can build a rigid Dyson Sphere then equipping it with grav plating is probably so trivial that it doesn't even occur to consider not doing so.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 17:40
|
|
|
Baronjutter posted:Yeah, it's this. The people currently running the franchise are not the daring optimists of Trek's past. They have this idea that making the show more "gritty" and the characters "more human" means loading the show with incredibly pessimistic garbage that should be mostly anachronistic in federation society. They saw the complex flawed characters, section 31, and ethical shades of gray of D9 but totally missed the point and dialed it all up to 11 while tossing the optimism and ideology of the show. I haven't watched Discovery, but I think they may have taken the wrong lessons from DS9. They probably looked at that show and thought "Huh. Dark and gritty works" without realizing that in its way, DS9 is as optimistic as its predecessors (just not ridiculously utopian like TOS and especially TNG could be). That series was less about "dark for dark's sake" than interrogating Starfleet values by showing how hard it can be to live up to them when a) you live close to aliens who don't share those values, and b) you're in gray area situations like the Dominion War.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 17:46
|
|
|
The thing is that rule #1 of conventional screenwriting is that conflict = drama, so it really takes an outside-the-box writer to go "Hey, what if something else." Most writers seem to view the TNG flavor of the principal characters getting along as some sort of weakness to the show.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 17:55
|
|
|
Eiba posted:
I appreciated this sentence. 
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 18:38
|
|
|
IShallRiseAgain posted:I like how it describes O'Brien being stuck somewhere for millennia as being briefly trapped. at this point the dude is subjectively older than the universe
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 18:59
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:This is what happens when you put centrists in charge of ANYTHING. Son of Sam-I-Am posted:at this point the dude is subjectively older than the universe Doctor Crusher was objectively older than the (her) universe for a while there
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 19:03
|
|
|
Happy Halloween, here's our mayor dressed up as a star trek: https://twitter.com/JohnTory/status/1189926137956360193?s=19
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 19:37
|
|
|
There's a Rob Ford/eating space mushrooms joke in there somewhere I think
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 19:40
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 14, 2024 07:46 |
|
|
piratepilates posted:Happy Halloween, here's our mayor dressed up as a star trek: Of. loving. Course.
|
|
#
?
Oct 31, 2019 20:13
|
|