StillPaisleyCat @ StillPaisleyCat @startrek.website

Posts

175

Comments

1,326

Joined

2 yr. ago

We’re deep in the summer NBA doldrums but !torontoraptors@lemmy.ca is trying to get traction.

Knowing what we were told of Seven’s experiences in Picard, and Mack’s track record in writing about trauma, I expect this to be a fairly sad book.

For those that aren’t aware, Mack has co-credit for the script of DS9 Only a Paper Moon which dealt with Nog’s PTSD.

Novelverse author Greg Cox’s attempt, to ‘dance between the raindrops’ to explain away a major 1990s war in Trek canon that no one could see in real life, was quite inspired.

There were however still numerous unexplained inconsistencies.

Beyond the ‘how is it really a war if no one knows it’s happening?’ aspect, there has been an inconsistency ever since TNG’s premiere Encounter at Farpoint pushed the timing of World War III back to the latter half of the 21st century.

Given this shift was based in Roddenberry’s own direction, Akiva Goldsman has a strong point that the Great Bird wanted the Trek universe to always stay a possible one for current viewers. As it happens, we can attribute the biggest shift in the Prime timeline to Roddenberry. There seem to have been further tweaks, but moving Khan’s birth to a later time seems a direct corollary of Roddenberry’s fiat in 1987.

TOS is fairly clear that the Eugenics War was the precursor of WW3, but TNG implied they occurred more than a half apart unless the timing of Khan’s rule and the Eugenics War is pushed back. Not to mention the hand waving to explain how none of us noticed Khan ruling a large portion of the global population.

While many don’t remember, this apparent discontinuity was a reason some TOS fans argued in the late 1980s TNG wasn’t in the same continuity as TOS.

Then there are other discrepancies such the later development of the Warp Drive and all the other Berman-era episodes that implied a shifted timeline. Voyager’s findings of temporal interference in 1990s California and the development of computer technology seem to imply that the writers were working off a bible with a revised timeline all along.

Greg Cox himself finds the explanation of accumulating effects of intertemporal interference to be a better solution. You can find his view on this in the comment section under Di Candido’s review of the episode Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

Another Trek author, Christopher L Bennett who wrote the Department of Temporal Investigations books, also weighed in positively on the episode. He attempted to figure out when the major perturbations in the Prime Universe’s river of time took place, with Encounter at Farpoint being the first major one.

I’m a Relaunch novelverse fan myself so I understand where you’re coming from.

I grieve the end of the novelverse, especially when I feel it often outshone the serialized writing that the new live action Trek shows have been struggling with. (I do note that some of the shows have been incorporating parallel plot and character evolutions and events to both the novelverse and STO.)

All of the new books, with the exception of the ones continuing to build on Vanguard/Seeker suffer from the requirement that the writers must “put all the toys back where they found them.” That is, they have to slide within canon and, by form, not have any lasting impact on the characters or universe. I think that’s why Mack’s latest Vanguard-related offering ‘Harm’s Way’ was considered by many to be the best new novel of last year.

That said, with Mack, McCormack, Swallow, and Miller writing the Picard-related books, they’ve all been better than I had ever expected them to be. Working off the bible for the show, they have dove deeper and often made what came on screen much more coherent.

All to say, I expect this one to be very strong.

That makes sense.

What doesn’t is losing Prodigy’s effective gap filling between Lower Decks and Discovery season 5.

And that’s not even taking into consideration that anyone at Baklish’ level in Hollywood should have been planning for and scheduling in anticipation of a long set of strikes.

They seem to think that they have enough other content to keep Star Trek viewers subscribed even if they reduce the Trek coverage in their schedule.

I can’t say we are tempted at all to trade Paramount+ Canada for CTV sci-fi channel, but we have an option most others do not.

‘Not too much’ is a risky strategy when the other major players like Max are doing their best to lower the churn rates on subscriptions.

One of our older teens likes it and Lower Decks best of the new shows.

Yes the original film exists, but you can also see the edges of the prostheses, the wear on the sets, and the ripples in the seams of costumes (as regrettably you can see in most seasons of Picard). People watch remasterd TNG anyway, but the rough edges show.

Red and Panavision capture everything all the time now.

Yes, people have worked to that production norm in cinema for nearly a century now, but very few cinematic features are filmed in a week.

Hey, I get that you’re angry, and I totally agree that not enough of the return is going to the creators and crews, but those same folks involved in production are talking about an unrealistic norm of gruelling long hours in production. They need both decent pay and residuals and humane production schedules.

I usually find AO3 best for fanfic these days.

Can’t say I’ve checked out too much Startrek there. There’s so much great Treklit in books and comics that it’s more than even an avid reader like me can keep up with. Long gone are the early days of avidly waiting for a mimoeod or emailed set of splinter stories and chapters from a fic group.

Recommend being aggressive on AO3 with your filters however. I find filtering out crossovers helps a great deal. While I love a good crossover, most seem to be attempts to hit as many possible tags as they can and end up spamming your feed.

For anyone interested, there is a video of the evolution of the canvas posted. StarTrek is middlish vertically on the left hand side.

The creator and moderator of the activity is accepting input for future ones in a post on !canvas@toast.ooo.

This would be ideal.

It doesn’t really help to enable factions if they don’t have a mechanism to chat internally. More there’s a need to be able to reach out to ask unknown someone what they’re up to without escalating.

Given that it’s not always easy to search up and private message someone new on another instance, and some don’t want to use Lemmy’s insecure messaging, a direct link to a secure chat would be a huge help.

xuv and others working on the StarTrek space were able to connect and collaborate using a thread I set up on the StarTrek dedicated instance. I saw that working for c/Canada on Lemmy.ca and emulated. That doesn’t work for all however. (And as it wasn’t stickied in the main StarTrek community, not everyone saw it in a timely way.)

It’s really an interesting set of offerings now.

I wonder how widely they are distributed to space/science/tech museums, hobby shops and toy vendors. Lego seems to have a lock on that distribution chain.

We don’t get to those places as much as we did as when our kids were tweens, but those are the places that we picked up some of the less widely available models and Lego kits. Somehow being in the shops and seeing the offerings was more motivating than looking at online catalogues for them.

Anyway, I really wish these had been available 5 years or so ago when our kids were at their peak Lego building stage. My spouse and I would have loved to build these with them. It’s good to see other families will have something to offer their kids other than SW or the very few NASA Lego sets. (The Lego techno construction machine sets just didn’t hold their attention, and only one was up for the birds and flower advanced sets.)

Now, we need to see the Protostar and the new Voyager-A kits soon please!

A full commander an XO five or so years after Voyager’s return seems quick, but not impossible.

I’m unexpectedly enjoying Christina Chong’s own music as well.

I posted the official music video for her release of two weeks ago ‘No Blame’ to our Quark’s community (which seems the better fit for following for non-Trek credits).

She has another song being released later today. I’ll post that there as well.

Uhura’s humming seems to intentionally lead into the instrumental medley during the end credits.

Christina Chong reportedly switched to auditioning for television roles after an injury sidelined her musical theatre career for a time. It doesn’t sound as though she ever expected the kind of role she has with La’an.

She’s currently releasing a series of music videos for an album. The next one will come out at 4:00 pm EDT today August 7th. You can check out her other offerings on her YouTube channel. I’ve posted her release of two weeks ago to the Quark’s community here on this instance as it seems the better place to follow her singing career outside of the franchise.

I really appreciate this deep dive that integrates the as yet unseen clips from the season trailers with the sneak peek for this episode. Well done Trek Central.

I was interested to see that this is a Maja Vrvilo directed episode. I have really liked her work on the Secret Hideout Trek shows. The article mentions SNW Children of the Comet, but she’s also directed some of the more tense Discovery and Picard episodes as well as the Short Trek Runaway. These include Discovery Perpetual Infinity and Die Trying, and Picard The Impossible Box and Broken Pieces.

We see Ortegas flying a shuttle in a combat style landing in the main trailer, perhaps she has a reason to stay with the shuttle (or prep it) even once Pike is in the big chair in his combat gear.

We were promised ‘MOrtegas’ in the messaging leading up to this season. Perhaps they didn’t want to reveal what’s coming for her.

I’m hopeful.

Even linear television dropped to 16, then further to 12 or even ten. Some serialized sci-fi shows are 6.

One thing to keep in mind, especially with science fiction and fantasy shows is that they take an enormous amount of time and resources to make in UHD. It’s a very unforgiving medium that shows up every tiny flaw in prosthetic makeup, costume construction and set and prop fabrication. The primary shooting takes much, much longer for each episode, 1.5 to 2 times what it did in the 90s.

Yes, they can take short cuts but there is a price for it in terms of quality. As a concrete example, Picard season three decided to go with ambient lighting from the set rather than move and recalibrate lights for every side of every scene (usual practice). It reduced the amount of time needed to shoot each scene, as they could go immediately from one side and scene to another. It did however mean that the final product was darker than many older fans preferred, especially if they didn’t have the newest OLED televisions.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the actors want to be able to work on other projects or have time for their families. Many shows have more established cast members simply because working on Star Trek no longer means locking into a single show for seven years of their careers.

Anson Mount has said publicly and repeatedly that he found doing the 14 episode second of Discovery took too much of his life. He particularly noted that the bridge filming days were very long and arduous, even though he enjoyed being together with the whole main cast for them. It’s known then that he personally wouldn’t go for a longer season.