Basilisk @ Basilisk @mtgzone.com

He/him

---

Read more

Posts

1

Comments

78

Joined

2 yr. ago

I feel like in the best case it would have been a catastrophe that somehow manages to fall together in a way that actually works, and in the worst case it would have just been bad to the point of being offensively bad, appealing to neither regular filmgoers whole also pissing off established fans.

... But it also feels like giving a chainsaw to a bear: You know whatever's gonna happen you're not gonna like, but also you kinda want to do it just to see what it is.

If that's the case, then the whole process is as wrong-headed as can be. You can only choose an alternative if a viable alternative exists. Transit isn't supported enough to be a universally practical option while electric vehicles are too expensive and have infrastructure requirements that can't necessarily be met by everyone. And speaking as someone who's tried cycling, well, Edmonton is making some big moves, but In Calgary? Maybe I'll give it a shot again when I get tired of living.

And none of that covers the fact that what is being paid at the pump as a surcharge to cover carbon taxes holds no relationship at all with what the oil companies are paying. It's being used as an excuse to bilk the consumer even further and to line the pockets of investors.

Tim Russ also showed up in Dragon Age: Origins, like it was a mini Voyager reunion.

In no particular order:

Steamrunner Miranda D'Deridex Magee Constitution

Hearing his experiences on Voyager, you really have to feel sorry for the guy. The higher-ups really seemed to have an axe to grind with him. It's kind of startling how you go from TNG where even now the cast gets together like family, to DS9 where it was like "It was a good job and the people I worked with were wonderful and professional and we produced something that we can be proud of," to Voyager, where the cast largely describes it as a cesspool of passive-aggressive resentment and largely only mended fences years later.

Trek actively gave opportunities to its actors in the TNG-VOY era to learn and try directing. The number of Main Cast actors who've got directing credits is pretty significant. The full list, along with the episodes they directed, is here: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Cast_members_who_directed

Of the TNG cast though, Jonathan Frakes, Levar Burton, Gates McFadden and Patrick Stewart all have at least one director's credit in the series. Michael Dorn would also later do some DS9 and ENT episodes.

The ENT mini-arc "explaining" the difference between Klingons "then" and "now" was absolutely unnecessary, but I do have to admit to finding it cute that the reason why Klingons became smooth-foreheaded instead of bumpy-foreheaded turned out to be a combination of all three of Bashir's guesses in that scene.

I guess I just fundamentally don't agree with the need for a "backsplanation". I am of the camp that I'm totally OK with the Klingons looking different in TMP than in TOS because it wasn't a 1960s TV show anymore and they wanted the aliens to look more alien, and that's all the explanation that I need. The Enterprise is different between SNW and its appearance in Discovery because it's a different show and they wanted to tweak its appearance some to make it more of a "hero" set. Spock and Sarek never mentioned his having an adoptive daughter/sister in spite of being in two series and a half dozen movies because Michael didn't exist until Discovery and the writers thought it would make for an interesting tie-in.

I have enjoyed the series since TNG in the 80s, and I'd love for it to come true some time in the future. But it's a TV show, it's not a history book. It's fine if there are inconsistencies, none of it is real anyway.

I mean, I do like so-called "Nu-Trek", but at the end of the day this is kind of a tail-wagging-the-dog response. You can explain just about anything in lore after the fact, but when the rubber hits the road the real explanation is that someone in a Hollywood design team said "We want it to be BIGGER," and then left it to the people who cared enough to find a reason why it would be justified.

Far easier to just suspend your disbelief a bit further, I think. Yeah, Discovery is weirdly big. It also flies through space by a man infused with a giant tardigrade's DNA sending the whole ship from place to place through willpower and a mushroom trip. If you can accept the second one, it kind of feels like the fact that the ship is a larj boye isn't that much of a stretch.

Although when they created DS9 in Star Trek Online, they had to massively scale it up because otherwise it would have gotten lost among all the players' ships, both by sheer volume and because so many ships in the game are absurdly large.

The ampersand (&) was so commonly used that for a while it was taught as a letter. British schoolkids in the mid- to late-19th century would include it as the 27th letter on writing work and needlework samplers, usually after "z".

There's some discussion that the Alphabet Song ends with "w, x, y & z" specifically to include it.

Q.E.D. is "quod erat demonstrandum", meaning "thus, it has been demonstrated".

I hated these Dairy Queen commercials so much I haven't done DQ willingly in over 20 years. It used to be a regular thing to grab ice cream in a hot afternoon during the summer.

The real question is if there is something that can exist and "live" in the parts of the universe that are so unusual and beyond our experience, would we even recognize what it is if we saw it?

Assassin's Creed Odyssey and RDR2

The problem is that if the candidate from Party "A" is a competent weasel who wants to undermine everything I stand for, and party "B"'s candidate is an incompetent boob who won't help matters but also is popular and won't actively ruin everything, then it's far more important to my interests that party "A"'s candidate not be voted in than it is to cast a vote for candidate "C". The system is working how is designed to and the only people who are capable of changing it are the ones benefiting from it being broken, so the only way that's likely to happen is if there were somehow a mass exodus away from the big two parties.

The premise is interesting, and the mystery of "what's happening to Tom" as he gets this weird body horror transformation is actually fairly well done. But any time that a scriptwriter types the word "evolution" into a keyboard there's should be an automatic spray bottle that pops out of the computer that spritzes them in the face and shouts "No! Bad!" Because any sci-fi script that mentions evolution is inevitably going to completely fuck it up.

I used to do land surveying in Canada and we'd use "decs" for decimetres when laying out points. You'd put down the rod, they'd tell you something like "dec and a half left" then you'd move closer and it'd be "two cents right" and you'd be even closer and then it's like "3 mils right." Then you'd take the shot and they'd tell you how much closer or farther you'd have to go to get the point. If you were way off to the point where you might have tens of metres, usually for rough layout we'd rarely use "dee-kays" for dekameters, but typically it would be just "30 metres north".

The landscape company that maintains the condo I live in uses them exclusively to "clean" the paved common areas and every time they do, the dust blows up into the air, and then 15 minutes after they pass it resettles right back where it came from, while also leaving a fine film of dust on every flat surface in the apartment, as well as small piles of long-accumulated gunk in every corner and crevice. I can't help but think how much better and quieter this place would be if they just used brooms.

A truly great line from "The Ultimate Computer"

M4 to Daystrom: "I am great. You are great. We are both great."