Much as I like Avery Brooks, he never got a handle on the Sisko character until he shaved and went back to being Hawk but with a son. They should have let him do that from the beginning.

Holy crap. I have Tidal on my phone and Plex at home. I didnt know I could connect them. Thank you!

Lower Decks is stuffed full of funny references to other Treks and specific episodes. Being an incurable Star Trek geek I get all or most of them and it’s part of the fun. That said, all of those references are treated as throwaway lines and aren’t important to the story, so I think it’d still be a good show if you miss those. It might even be more fun when you later watch that one TNG episode and go, “oh that’s what they were talking about”. Either way I recommend Lower Decks. It manages to be silly and fun while not mistreating Trek or its characters.

He’s the male Gwyneth Paltrow selling brain pills instead of Goop. He promotes alt-right and far-right conspiracies. He told people not to get the COVID vaccine. If he just interviewed people – even people from all sides – I’d be fine with it. Problem is he promotes dangerous conspiracies and usually ignores fact checking. He’s using his influence and authority to do harm. And worst of all, I think he just does it for the ratings.

Yep. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Magnificent_Ferengi_(episode)

As an aside, Iggy Pop as a Vorta was freaking great. He just looked so done and irritated with everyone the whole time. Great example of having the one straight man in the middle of a comedy.

The idea of donating alternative posters has already been tried and that particular school board just ignored the issue: https://www.npr.org/2022/08/31/1120239381/texas-in-god-we-trust-arabic-signs-chaz-stevens I’m sure they’d treat a donation of 100s of posters the same way.

And as I (not a lawyer) read the law it only says that a poster has to be displayed in each building and has to be donated or purchased with donated funds: https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/html/SB00797I.htm so I don’t think you as an administrator would get away with plastering up hundreds of posters around your school, but let’s say you did. The parents will complain to you AND the school board (i.e. your boss). They’ll say you’re making fun of their religion, you’re a communist, etc. Even if they law was unambiguously on your side, they’ll only see what they want to see. You’ll find your chances of promotion to be zero, or you’ll just be managed out. Even if the Board somehow agreed with you, you made a stink.

I have friends who are teachers and administrators, not in Texas, who have left or been kicked over lesser issues. The rest are looking forward to retirement.

These bozos passing these laws don’t understand irony. They just want misdirection, conformity, and compliant kids. We just need to directly tell them to fuck off at this point.

I’m sorry for my continued Very Seriousness.

Yeah, I don’t read it as “must display every poster”. It says it has to be displayed in a prominent place in each building and that it has to be donated or purchased with donated funds. https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/87R/billtext/html/SB00797I.htm

No. They’re not interested in playing fair or being consistent. They’ll simply warp the rules to fit their outcome and declare these posters noncomplaint. You can’t out-maneuver people who simply cheat.

The assholes on that side of things are a mixture of those who actually believe and want the US to be a religious state, and those who simply are using religion as a method of control. That second group is happy to see religious conflict because a) it distracts from real problems while they consolidate money and power, 2) they can use the fervor to further solidify their support form that religious base.

This is absolutely not new and has happened before in history. It’s just sad to see the US going down this path.

I have created several variants of [email protected] and then change to a local account after install.

Humans are good decision makers, we’re just not good at paying attention for long periods of time. Which is why I think self-driving cars will eventually be better, but they aren’t yet. And those are expert systems (I refuse to call them AI) trained on a well-curated and limited set of data for a limited and specific purpose. Which is an important difference over the generalized generative models. More data does not make systems, especially more unsorted data.

But here’s another important difference: I can grab the wheel at any time and take over. If we are going to give these systems decision making authority there needs to be an obvious and intuitive override.

The current stuff is smoke and mirrors and not intelligent in any meaningful sense, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous. It doesn’t have to be robots with guns to screw over people. Just imagine trying to get PharmaGPT to let you refill your meds, or having to deal with BankGPT trying to figure out why it transfered your rent payment twice. And companies are sure as hell thinking about using this stuff to get rid of human decisionmakers.

When I was a kid in a restaurant my mother (who had been a waitress) told me, “It’s their job to clean. It’s not their job to clean up after you. You need to understand those are different things.” Never forgot that.

We might have to agree to disagree on the overall look of the thing, but I want to comment on the job part.

It’s always been a bit of a disconnect that you supposedly had this post-scarcity, socialistic, utopia where we have overcome our baser instincts and work cooperatively. But for some reason the dominant organization has military ranks and some people agree to sign-up to take orders and get thrown in jail if they don’t. That never quite squared. But in the real world it’s a simple matter of writing what you know and Gene was ex-Navy so that’s what Starfleet was modeled on. Doesn’t really make sense. It’s also why admirals are so often bad. He had a beef with them.

But yeah I agree I like it better when they talk about their places in Starfleet being a matter of choosing to be a part of it and it being bound by honor and duty. I don’t know why they’re doing that, if it’s supposed to be earlier in the development of the Federation, or if they’re just copying the Orville jokes. I do really like is Una. A lot of that is I always felt robbed by the fact that the network made Gene cut out the idea of a woman first officer after the first pilot and I feel like we’re finally getting to see what could have been with Majel in that role.

When I wrote the above I had not seen the musical yet. It was well-produced and fun, but I think it really undercut the show and I didn’t like it. It made the characters seem silly. Contrast with the Lower Decks crossover which I thought I was going to hate and I thought actually worked fine if you could ignore the cartoon thing. I didn’t mind that it was played for outright comedy because it still took the characters seriously. Much like the DS9 Tribbles episode.

I do think DS9 was great by the way, with a few exceptions, mostly the mirror universe stuff. And Miles calmly encouraging the Ferengi to go on strike because of course that’s what you do, was maybe one of the most subversive things Trek has gotten away with on TV. American media loves to hate on unions so that was a bolder than you might realize and I loved it.

You’re not wrong, but that’s why I like it. Before I get in to that.

Discovery had some good moments and some good acting but was overall a mess.

Picard was like someone gave a big budget to a fanfic and said “I’m not taking any notes.” When a bunch of good actors turn in a lousy performances you know the whole thing is broken.

Lower Decks is just all around fun and I really like it.

Back to your statement. I (American) grew up on TOS reruns in the late 70s. I watched old movies and TV shows that had the American 50s optimism for the bright shiny future, but in the late 70s it felt like we’d failed not just economically but more importantly socially. Trek showed a better possible future where we’d solved our problems and learned to work together. It had the 50s optimism for tech and the 60s lessons in social justice. Gene’s vision (and he was by no means perfect himself) was that humanity had solved its problems and that serious conflict had to be external. We were still humans with loves, losses, and petty squabbles but we didn’t have hatred for our fellow man. But we were still working to be better at accepting everyone. Kind of a throwaway but a great example is Boimler the snotty ensign telling legendary Captain Pike it’s kind of offensive to assume all Orions are pirates.

SNW has been a combination of goofy fun, serious topics, and gut-punches like Lift Us Up Where Suffering Cannot Reach.

I still loved DS9 but it strayed away from the vision a lot. I especially hated the parallel universe bullshit which really undermined the point of the original episode. And it gave my conservative friends license to say, look if we’re not tough we’ll get rolled over and be the underclass. Either be the Terran Empire or be slave. I reject that.

I’m tired of gritty dark Trek. Especially in these times where the future doesn’t look good I want to see a shiny happy future where we overcome the challenges by being smart and cooperative. The sets are bright and polished and everyone is fit but the characters actually feel more like real people to me than TNG. I love that we got to watch Uhura’s progression from scared cadet to confident at her job for example.

Michael Dorn has spent 30+ years delivering deadpan one-liners and I love him for it.

My favorite thing is to just leave a note that says, “I’m sorry about the scratch.”

That was Gene’s vision, that humans had grown and matured to where we could find ways to resolve problems peacefully at least amongst ourselves. The conflict and moral stories were always supposed to be external. Some Treks did this better than others, but it really was that positive vision of the future that I think resonated with people in the midst of the 60s. I’m glad to see Strange New Worlds now doing something very similar but fresh. We need some positivity in these times too.

I love it whenever you see a giant truck with low profile tires.