williams_482 @ williams_482 @startrek.website

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182

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2 yr. ago

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I think Vulcan brains are fundamentally different in their ability to (almost) completely block out emotional reactions, but with those barriers lowered they have significantly more difficulty keeping themselves together than humans do. I am told that a human who tried to go "full Vulcan" with their emotions would mess themselves up pretty badly, but Vulcans manage a functional society of mostly decent people doing that.

Spock, therefore, would have found himself experiencing less overwhelming emotional urges than he experienced in his occasional moments of lost control, but with none of the vulcan-specific mental barriers he was accustomed to leaning on he had little choice but to roll with them anyway.

If those Vulcan mental barriers are variable in effectiveness between different individuals and different emotions, that would also present a needlessly technical explanation for why various Vulcan characters fall into obviously emotional patterns while maintaining very Vulcan outward behavior in other facets. Captain Solok and his racist vendeta as an obvious example.

Hey Yerald,

Someone signed up with that name on our instance on June 24, and Lemmy will not allow multiple accounts with the same name. This is two days after your kbin account was created; did you attempt to create an account on here then?

We require posters here to explain their reasoning. Could you elaborate on this episode would make for a good stage play?

We require posters here to explain their reasoning. Could you elaborate on why these two episodes might make for good stage plays?

You realize that ChatGPT has no concept of "true", right? It produces output which looks coherent and reasonable and tends to stumble into truthful statements on accident, by virtue of drawing from a dataset of people saying mostly true things. Of course, the bot is equally capable of spouting off outright lies in an equally convincing manner.

This is a very unreliable way to verify a surprising fact. I strongly recommend against it.

Having said that, I think MLS would be far more attractive to fans if the money paid for designated players was spread out and used to increase the overall wages for the whole team.

I want to agree with this (and there's no question that it would produce better teams that might actually compete with the best of the Mexican league, etc), but the situation with Messi is going to be a powerful indicator of how much influence a perfect designated player situation can have on the league. It may be that Messi really does draw huge numbers of people, some of whom will become real fans, or it may be that the Messi crowds see all the mediocrity around him and decide to stick with whatever they were watching before.

The other position I would take with this is that the owners of MLS/USL should be thinking long term. Their target fanbase is people born in the last 10-15 years or earlier, who very likely play soccer themselves at some level, and whose families are likely to bring them to games. Keep the tickets relatively cheap (which they have done), keep the games at reasonable times (it's a mix) and make sure as many teams as possible have something interesting to play for, for as much of the season as possible. Playoffs more or less mirror the race for Europe in the EPL, etc (although devaluing the team which tops the table in the regular season becomes a problem), but promotion/relegation add real stakes to the bottom of the table, and substantially more excitement to the top of lower leagues.

Or in other words, they should try to do the opposite of all the blatantly consumer-unfriendly things that teams in other American sports routinely do. They are selling an alternative product to what most Americans currently care about, with hopes of becoming a big thing with future generations. Lean into that.

And there's a pretty good chance MLS never will measure up to the top european leagues. They have a ton of competition for national sports interest with the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL; getting on the same level as the lower two of those four would be an extraordinary accomplishment. But that's okay, as long as they can develop enough local interest that they come to games, buy shirts, and keep money flowing that way. Any owner who jumped in hoping to cash out a multibillion dollar franchise some day will be disappointed, but I really do not care.

That is bizare. Those are both static.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha links, and interestingly both fail for me when I attempt to view the images in a new tab. I don't see any different flags in either link, so I have no idea what's up with this.

This after Everton (stupidly) balked at £8M for him. That gave me hope that my Brentford would be in on this, but seeing what he ultimately went for I am merely ambivalent on missing out.

Good for Gyökeres, he's going to dominate Portugal.

As for the oligarchs deciding a rising tide lifts all boats… the tide lifts their boats. That’s all they care about. It’s a cartel where they don’t compete against each-other. Instead they collude against the players and the fans so that their cartel can bring in the most money.

This happening in all American sports leagues is a big part of what has driven me to fallowing european soccer almost exclusively (with the exception of my local USL2 and baseball Futures League clubs, of course). Sports teams shouldn't be investment vehicles, they should be vanity projects for these disgustingly rich people to spend money on, money that would otherwise be hoarded away. There is no reason why we should give a damn about "protecting their investment", we should be forcing them to fight each other for safety, promotion, and silverware. Same as the european clubs.

We're here for the players. I don't watch MLS because those players mostly suck, because MLS does not provide salaries competitive with european clubs, because they are run by people who are used to simply having a cartel of the best players in insert-sport-here and totally unaccustomed to genuine competition from comparable or better players (funded by comparably deep pockets) in other leagues abroad. This kind of genuine competition for top players is sorely needed in all sports, especially baseball, but soccer seems to be the only (semi-)major sport in the US where it exists at all. Relegation is the mechanism by which intra-league competition is enforced, and that competition is necessary to keep these owners from collectively investing the absolute minimum and scraping as much profit off the top as they can get.

Memory Alpha doesn't want people linking their images on external sites (which costs them bandwidth without getting any traffic), so they refuse to render images linked on another site. It's not a legal or moral problem to link these images, they just won't work.

For an example of what this looks like, go to Commander Shelby's page and check out the image of her in TNG. If by some chance you were the person who added that image, either clear your browser cache or go to the page in a different browser to see the problem.

This is a fun idea, and a nice website! Kudos.

One thing to be careful of: warn people not to use Memory Alpha hotlinks for images, or refuse to accept them if possible. They look like they work to whoever tries to post them, but that is illusory; the image is preserved in their browser cache but is not visible to anyone else.

Felt a bit too obviously like mid-season filler or something. Though I didn’t hate it.

As far as I'm concerned, the weakest parts of the show were the parts that tried the hardest not to be "mid-season filler": creating and resolving the doctor's insane daughter-in-transporter-buffer situation, trying to set up a future "big bad" situation with Sybok, etc. I was very concerned from Alex Kurtzman's description of this current season many months ago that they might have learned the wrong lessons from the first season, but thank goodness that they seem to have stuck with what made the first season good: brilliantly executed character driven episodic storytelling.

Much to my own surprise, I'm a complete sucker for this budding Spock/Chapel romance. I just want these two beautiful people to be happy together, damn it! We all know it's doomed, unfortunately, and I hope that whatever inevitably destroys it doesn't turn out to be too painful for the characters involved. Spock and Chapel are obviously not engaged in a romantic relationship in TOS, most obviously in Amok Time when such a pairing would have rendered the entire story trivial.

Someone mentioned in a previous thread that Spock's Pon Farr (seven years before Amok Time) is closing in. I was skeptical in that thread that they would choose to touch on it then, but the events of this episode do make that seem quite a bit more likely, if (again) increasingly difficult to square with Amok Time.

Well that definitely sucks. Sorry you had to deal with that.

Surely, given the events of TOS Amok Time, this will be neatly dealt with between Spock and T'Pring. It won't even merit an episode without a foreign source of drama lumped in.

The first scene of the first episode, even.

It seemed a perfectly harmless and appropriate volume to me listening on headphones. Perhaps your bass needs adjustment.

shares a title with a 1961 Twilight Zone episode starring Leonard Nimoy.

For better or worse, I'm not sure "starring" is quite the right description. Nimoy has like three lines and a couple minutes of screen time. I found it rather jarring to recognize Nimoy early in the episode and then see so little of him after.

I second the glowing recommendation of this podcast, and look forward to listening to these two episodes.

I also recommend Star Wars Oxygen, a Rebel Force Radio podcast which ran from 2014 to an abrupt ending in 2016, for anyone interested in a deep dive on the music of Star Wars. Same guy, same excellent analysis, some things repeated in his current show but a lot more on top of that.

Anyone else feeling a certain lack of Pike in the first 3 episodes? Not against it, it just seems somewhat conspicuous given that I imagine the character is half of the reason the show exists.

Apparently Anson Mount had a new kid right around the time the beginning of the season was filmed, and they decided to give him some extra time to handle that.