theinspectorst @ theinspectorst @kbin.social

Liberal, Briton, FBPE. Co-mod of [m/neoliberal](http://kbin.social/m/neolib

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Joined

2 yr. ago

The Schwartz is strong with this one.

'Hi we're Starfleet, and we recruit our captains from among the best and the brightest on 150 member worlds, spread over 8,000 light years! But the vast majority of the time, when it's not Jean-Luc Picard, we just get them from this one particular country that accounts for about 4% of the population of Earth. Weird, huh?'

'Use the Force, Harry! '

- Gandalf

GEORDI LA FORGE WAS ABLE TO BUILD THIS IN A CAVE! ... WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!

Surely they could have just negotiated a deal with the episode writer for one reasonable up-front payment to buy out the rights? The Voyager producers held all the cards - either the writer take the deal or they would (as they did) invent a new character with some superficial similarities played by the same actor.

American police get free doughnuts, become known as pigs.

British police get free lattes from Waitrose ... become known as prosciutto?

GotG3 is definitely worth seeing. Doctor Strange 2 and Ant-Man 3 were pretty missable.

I think the lesson I've taken from this is that the massive multiversal stakes of the latter two - which I assume Marvel thought necessary to try to top what they'd already done with Thanos - just don't really work. They can't top Thanos eradicating half of the universe, and they shouldn't try.

Whereas GotG3 was pretty low stakes by comparison, but as those stakes related to a specific character we had come to care about then it just worked so much better.

We need more migrants in the UK (and Western Europe) more generally. We have an ageing population, life expectancy has increased hugely since our state pensions were set up, and the massive post-war baby boomer generation are all retiring and need their pension paid for likely 20+ years of retirement.

The options for paying for all this are either:

1. Make the state pension offering less generous - less money at later retirement ages.
2. Make the younger generations pay taxes through the teeth to fund the boomers through several decades of retirement.
3. Make it easier for ambitious hardworking young people to come to the UK legally to live, work and pay taxes.

The first and second option both raise big problems of intergenerational fairness. The third option seems like a win for everyone involved.

I think you can hardly fault SNW for a lack of experimentation with random plots.

In the space of three consecutive episodes, we just got a part-animated time-travel crossover, a grim exploration of PTSD in veterans, and a musical.

That's a fair point. On reflection, I also seem to recall that some of the Crusher and Troi convos were also literally about their personal relationships.

Arrested Development, I admit, took me a few episodes.

Arrested Development took everyone a few episodes. Much of the humour is about riffing on repeated jokes set up in previous episodes - you've got to get through a few episodes first for these to start to click.

That's partly why it was never successful when broadcast. It's a show that should have been binge-watched but was released on broadcast TV, an episode a week, but tellingly it only took off in popularity with the DVD release (and later on streaming).

Wow - I hadn't realised Guinan was in that few!

Great point. I did think that Seven and Janeway (who I agree were a very prominent pairing - akin to the attention given to Data and Picard in TNG) would help Voyager, but then discounted it a bit by that pairing only even existing from season 4 onwards. I don't think that's enough alone to explain Voyager doing 42 percentage points better than TNG (44.9% vs 86.9%), but it would certainly have helped a lot!

It's interesting to me that Voyager does that much better than TNG. Both shows had the same number of women in the main cast (Crusher, Troi, Yar/Guinan vs Janeway, B'Elanna, Kes/Seven) so other things being equal there should be similar number of opportunities for conversations that meet the test.

Obviously Janeway being the captain (and therefore a more prominent character, even within an ensemble cast) should give Voyager a boost, but I hadn't anticipated the difference would be so extreme!

This is stupid. I don't use Facebook and I'm certainly no fan of Meta, but they didn't ban news links for the fun of it - they did it in response to the Canadian government making them pay news agencies for news links that gets shared on their services.

I think that's a stupid law, but the Canadians are entitled to do that if they want to. But that means they've intentionally increased the cost to Meta of permitting news links, and Meta has made a commercial decision based on this, which it's also entitled to do. Meta isn't a charity or a public sector agency and to expect this company (of all!) to behave like one is ludicrous.

This is pure cakeism.

http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/spell:ceremony

Wedding. You touch adult humanoids willing to be bonded together in marriage. For the next 7 days, each target gains a +2 bonus to AC while they are within 30 feet of each other. A creature can benefit from this rite again only if widowed.

Pays civil servants way less than they would earn privately, claiming this is a prudent use of public funds.

Civil servants move to private sector.

Pikachu face.

The ULEZ doesn't apply to most petrol vehicles made after 2006, diesels after 2015, or warp drives after 2259.

They mean that the three Spider-Man films have effectively become an origin trilogy for the Spider-Man that exists at the end of the movie - no more Avenger buddies, no more Stark tech, more of a solo friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.

'It ends at the beginning' is a bit of a confusing way of expressing that - and I don't think this was the intention of the trilogy when they set out - but I do think where No Way Home left things will make for a more interesting premise for Spider-Man 4. The MCU has done enormous galactic stakes to death - they can't beat Thanos destroying half of all life in the universe (as Ant-Man 3 showed - it just doesn't work). The only way to progress is to go back to a small scale and more personal stories and stakes, and Spider-Man 4 will be a great opportunity to get that right.

I might be misremembering but I didn't think they brought in Martin Sheen as a late addition. They always wanted the president to be in it and to be played by a big name actor (several were considered - I remember reading that Sidney Poitier and Alan Alda were others) but the original idea was that he'd be a distant figure, included as a recurring character who might only appear every few episodes. Sheen's casting as Bartlet wasn't inconsistent with Sam being the central character. The show was meant to be about the White House staffers and the way Bartlet was treated in the pilot (talked about a lot but only appearing in that one scene at the end) was meant to be the norm.

The change was the decision to then promote Bartlet to a main character who appeared in every (or nearly every) episode and effectively become the nearest thing to a 'main' character for much of the its run.