I’m a younger user of lemmy in the sense that I’ve only been a Fediverse user for less than a year. 😇

Starcraft (1 and 2). I suck. Suck in the “had trouble finishing the campaign on Normal, couldn’t get out of Bronze league” sense of suck.

But I love it. It’s my favourite video game, though these days I only watch it rather than play it, for reasons of see above.

I’ve never given the distinction much thought, but as I recall (and it’s been many years since I’ve read the Ender books) in Speaker for the Dead Jane was pretty much an AI, an evolved form of the fantasy game in Ender’s Game. In later books Card may have more explicitly applied his Mormon-influenced concept of a soul that exists prior to, and after, inhabiting a physical form, to the character of Jane. But when I think of Jane, it’s the Jane of Speaker for the Dead, as that’s the book in the series (along with Ender’s Game) that I read most often.

When I was younger I had a crush on Jane from Speaker for the Dead, so I wouldn’t be weirded out by that person, cause I’d probably be that person. 😅

Artemis is a kbin mobile app in development but, as you say, the developer @hariette is waiting for the API to be deployed. Hopefully this will happen at the planned upgrade in a few days, which should help with uptake.

Honestly Dr.manhattan was kinda dumb. “Oh I need to stop humanity from nuking itself” meanwhile I demonstrate easy ability to travel to other planets.

Doctor Manhattan’s ability to save the human race wasn’t the issue. He was basically a god. It was his willingness. He didn’t feel the need to stop humanity doing anything:

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

I had the same reaction. The real life reason of course would be that the fight scenes wouldn’t last very long if she could just Doctor Manhattan her way through them.

I feel like it’s different when we’re talking about a planet.

I suppose I kind of figure that planets in the Star Trek world are more analogous to cities/countries in our world. Also, “Delta Vega” is such a generic-sounding, human-centric designation anyway that in my head canon the full, formal designation of a planet in the Federation catalogue of stellar objects might be a lot longer, with “Delta Vega” in this case just one part of the full name. Think about the billions of stars that Starfleet has catalogued, and thousands of planets containing life. There’s surely room for more than one “Delta Vega”. Not to mention that planets have different names used by different groups or contexts, just like Earth is also referred to as Terra, Sol III, Die Erde, La Monde etc. So I figure there’s different Delta Vegas around, and people know which one is being talked about from context.

That (monoculture) tendency is built into Trek, for good or ill, and I would say it even applies to humans.

Agreed, and put me down “for ill”, but I like the idea of explaining apparent canon contradictions by expanding the universe beyond the monocultures we usually see. One of my favourite little moments in Picard was Laris tapping Shaban on the Westmore appliance and calling him a “stubborn northerner”. In just those two seconds the Romulan culture got a lot more interesting.

The question is though, is Pike such a foodie that he would throw his weight around be certain that there is a supply of real bacon on the ship for him to use

If we ever see an episode where he hunts down a boar, guts it, dresses it and serves it to his crew with a nice sprig of coriander, we’ll know for sure. ;-)

Exactly. “Money” (or “credits”) would still exist to address whatever scarcity remains. Eg replicators can’t replicate starships (although in Prodigy we get pretty close IIRC). Or if you want to own that genuine Rembrandt (even if you could replicate a very good fake). Or if you want to trade with societies that still use money. But it would be confined to edge cases like that.

I’ve always interpreted the “no money in the Federation” thing non-literally. I think there’s still a financial and economic system operating in the background (otherwise this would be the most radical bit of world building Star Trek has ever done - and Star Trek’s world building has never been particularly innovative), but it’s just that “money” doesn’t have the same primacy in people’s lives as it does in the real world today.

I imagine there would be an electronic system of debits and credits (hence “credits” being the currency) moving around in the aether, with money in its physical form having entirely disappeared. Less “evolved” societies like the Ferengi would still use a form of cash (latinum), as would backward societies like 20th century Earth (hence Kirk saying “They’re still using money” in The Voyage Home).

But even more than the term “money” being associated with physical currency (a concept that’s increasingly being phased out even in the real world), to Federation citizens “money” would be associated with the archaic mindset of capitalism, greed and exploitation - the accumulation of financial wealth for its own sake. As opposed to 24th century people who (with just about all physical needs like health, food and shelter met by virtue of tech like replicators and advanced medicine), can focus on bettering themselves as a goal in its own right. So you might study medicine or law, not because it pays well, but because you’re interested in that field. You might go for a promotion in your job, not because it pays better, but you seek the satisfaction of having more responsibility.

claiming there are two Delta Vegas.

I have no problem with this solution. See for example, the other Paris.

Archer comments that Vulcan females specifically have a heightened sense of smell, but in “The Andorian Incident” it is a male Vulcan monk who comments that the smell aboard the NX-01 “must be intolerable.”

You can reconcile this: To Vulcan males we really smell. To Vulcan females, we really, really smell.

so perhaps that’s a cultural practice that fell out of usage between ENT and DIS/SNW/TOS

There’s a tendency to treat every alien race as a monoculture, but maybe Spock and T’Pol just came from different parts of Vulcan.

As a human Spock chooses to eat bacon

I actually kind of assumed that it might have been facon. While I can see the Enterprise growing real plants on its five year mission (hence Pike’s preference of real herbs), I can’t see it breeding real pigs.

T’Pring and Spock decide to take time apart, but we know this isn’t permanent,

The real question is, when T’Pring finds out about Spock and Chapel getting it on, will his excuse be that they were on a break?

Adding a !Musicals@kbin.social identifier didn’t work, so removed it from the post.

Both Dial of Destiny and Dead Reckoning had similar budgets (around $300M) and similar opening weekends (around $80M). But the reviews and audience reactions have been better for Mission Impossible. This suggests the movie will have longer legs than Indiana Jones. Undoubtedly Paramount is hoping that Dead Reckoning’s trajectory will be more like Top Gun Maverick’s (staggering) 5.66 multiplier and less like (say) Quantumania’s 2.02 multiplier.

edit: The article also mentions that the global opening weekend box office numbers for Mission Impossible are a lot better than the numbers for Indiana Jones, at $235M (ie $80M domestic + $155M overseas) vs $130M (ie ~$85M domestic + only about $45M overseas). That said, it’s difficult to compare overseas numbers without a detailed breakdown of which markets each movie opened in. Mission Impossible may have played in more countries its first few days than Indiana Jones did.

Vulcan system

I choose to believe that the term “system” can be used in different contexts, and that in this case it’s a synonym for “neighbourhood”.

What the script means by “sub-impulse” speeds is also unclear

Possibly thrusters or something similar? Maybe the ship has three different propulsion methods: thrusters (or whatever you want to call it), impulse and warp. Even impulse speed can be pretty quick - eg in TMP they got a fair way across the solar system on impulse before “risking” engaging warp drive.

Spock and Chapel’s confession and clinch, of course, is in opposition to what happened in TOS: “The Naked Time”,

I’m hoping that the writers have an endgame for Spock (and by extension Chapel and T’Pring) in mind. Arguably Spock in SNW has been exploring (or been forced to explore) his human side way too much compared to what TOS established. (By the way, I’m not saying these episodes haven’t been entertaining as hell.) Arguably also then, the impact of pivotal moments of character growth, such as “This simple feeing” in TMP is retconned away if we’ve already seen him come to terms with his dual heritage years earlier.

What I think could work however is if Spock’s arc in SNW is one where he does explore his human half, but then either chooses to reject this in favour of the the Vulcan path before the events of TOS take over; or have his accommodation of his human half stripped from him.

Imagine a scenario where he and Chapel do have a romantic relationship, but that somehow, for reasons of plot, he forgets but she remembers. (Maybe in a “Requiem for Methuselah” “Forget…” moment.) That would actually add a lot of subtext and poignancy to the unrequited love we see Chapel display in TOS in episodes like “The Naked Time” and “Amok Time”. She doesn’t just pine for him because of what she thinks could be, but because of what she knows had been.

I loved Jeff Russo’s main title theme to Counterpart but I have to admit for me his work on Trek (DIS, PIC, SNW) has depended too much on an awkward (to my ears) bookend structure where he:

• starts with a familiar Trek motif
• introduces new theme or a variation/development on a Trek theme
• ends with a familiar Trek musical motif

That said, given the premise of SNW, it’s more justifiable for that show than the other two.

how I sign up to mastodon instances and whatnot with kbin

As I understand it, you don’t sign up to a mastodon instance with kbin. Rather, kbin has the ability to act as a way of following fediverse users and hashtags in the same way as mastodon does.

In other words, if mastodon is the fediverse’s version of twitter, and lemmy is the fediverse’s version of reddit, then kbin is a combination of the two.

However, while kbin’s lemmy/reddit features are maturing nicely, the mastodon/twitter functions are still pretty embryonic. (Bear in mind that kbin is a young project that for most of its life had only a single developer.)

For example:

• On kbin you can follow fediverse users by clicking on the “Follow” button in their profile (similar to the way you can follow users on mastodon), but I don’t think there’s a way of having their posts appear on a timeline yet.
• Similarly, while you can create a magazine that follows certain hashtags in the “microblog” section of a magazine, you can’t currently do that as part of your kbin personal profile in the way you can choose to follow hashtags on mastodon and have them appear in your feed. (And the propagation of hashtags between kbin and the wider fediverse seems to be haphazard at the moment in any case.)

What I would recommend for now is to create a mastodon account on a mastodon instance of your choice, and treat the two ecoystems as largely independent, until kbin’s feature set matures.

“Duet”, as it’s a loose adaptation of the play (originally novel and later also film) The Man in the Glass Booth.

Arts and culture is a very broad topic area. It covers (among other things):

• performing arts (eg plays, musicals, film, TV, radio)
• visual arts (eg painting, drawing, sculpture, crafts)
• literature (eg books, poetry, the various literary genres)
• design (eg fashion, typography, architecture)

Mastodon has several instances focussed on different aspects of arts & culture, eg:

• https://artsculture.media/about
• https://mastodon.art/about
• https://mastodon.design/about

Different lemmy and kbin instances have various arts & culture communities (some are reasonably active, some aren’t). You can use community/magazine search tools to find ones to your liking.

Eg to search for theatre related communities you could use:

• https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=theatre
• https://kbin.social/magazines?query=theatre&fields=names_descriptions&federation=all&adult=hide
• https://browse.feddit.de/

Note that due to the way the fediverse works, these search aggregators aren’t necessarily comprehensive. So it’s worth spreading your search over several tools.

The United Federation of Platforms

Bashir was noticeably nervous in “Past Prologue”, their first meeting. It’s interesting that fans ignore that, or chalk it up to him being nervous because Garak might be a spy, as opposed to accusing the actors and writers of extracting humour out of the “gay panic” trope. I guess it’s because now people know theirs turned into a real friendship (or even more. ;-) ) Although I suspect if “Past Prologue” had aired today, there’d be a lot more outrage.

As mentioned, I think there’s some evidence of Garak being queer, but not a lot of Bashir. That’s where fan theorising comes in. But even in fanon I don’t think people thought they were “in the closet”, ie hiding their sexuality. It was more a case of “what we see on-screen is not the whole story, the fun stuff happens when the cameras are off them”.

This is similar to how a lot of fans saw Seven as queer (even though I personally don’t think there was a lot, if any, evidence of it on screen). But there was sufficient momentum for this fan theory that the writers made Seven canonically queer in Picard.