StillPaisleyCat
@StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website
- Comment on New Star Trek Timelines Book Explores Trek’s Multiverse 2 weeks ago:
I’m down for this one.
The link has just gone to my partner for upcoming gift occasions 😉.
- Comment on Creation Announces First Philadelphia Star Trek Convention For November 2 weeks ago:
Getting into the panels / speaker sessions was always my top priority.
The vendor hall is always worth checking out and it’s fun to mill about and see the cosplayers.
Depending on whether you like that sort of thing or not, paying to meet and get a photo with a cast member or to get an autograph (usually two separate things) is a popular activity.
- Comment on Creation Announces First Philadelphia Star Trek Convention For November 2 weeks ago:
While I won’t be travelling to the US anytime soon, I think it’s great that Creation is getting back into regional cons.
I used to attend them in the late 80s and early 90s and they were a great entry point for newer fans and those who didn’t want the mass experience of something like STLV.
I think that they do more to build a franchise for the long haul than the megacons.
- Comment on The Star Trek Communicator Is Now a High-End Wristwatch 3 weeks ago:
It looks like a 1970s toy. . . Which makes sense given who their target market is.
I would take it as another sign that the franchise has aged out were it not for the fact that it’s always had awful merchandising and licensing.
- Comment on Review — Destination Star Trek: The Next Generation Board Game 4 weeks ago:
Appreciate having the review.
There are a lot of games out there. We used to buy games after trying them out at gaming conventions but we only get to the local ones now.
- Submitted 5 weeks ago to startrek@startrek.website | 2 comments
- Comment on Dif-tor heh smusma. A First Contact Day dinner of salmon and cheese pierogies. 5 weeks ago:
Пироги are always a great choice!
- Comment on Petition update | Petitions to continue *Starfleet Academy* break 30,000 signatures 5 weeks ago:
Amazon took on another 3 seasons of The Expanse with about 130k, Netflix did an additional full 20 episode season of *Star Trek: Prodigy with 35k.
More than that, 32.5 k is a lot for one of these petitions in this amount of time. We don’t know what it will level off at.
The rate of signings is accelerating, with nearly 5k in the past 24 hours.
- Comment on Petition update | Petitions to continue *Starfleet Academy* break 30,000 signatures 5 weeks ago:
I wished they’d used an official image. It’s really odd.
But it was the first petition up so it’s the one with traction.
- Submitted 1 month ago to startrek@startrek.website | 11 comments
- Comment on Star Trek Mystery and Escape Room Games: DS9 & Lower Decks by Beadle & Grimm's Pandemonium Warehouse - Kickstarter 1 month ago:
Cool. I think I’ll be supporting this one.
I’ve been having fun getting new and interesting games through kickstarter campaigns.
My partner is finding this eye rolling, as I’m roping them and one of our teens into play testing. But, I look forward to taking some of these to our regional gaming convention. It’s nice to be able to offer some fresh games with licensed media.
- Comment on 'Star Trek': Andy Weir Apologizes To Alex Kurtzman Over Podcast Remarks 1 month ago:
Meh
- Comment on "It's gone baby... it's all gone"| Sigh .....‘Project Hail Mary’ Author Andy Weir Says Paramount Rejected His ‘Star Trek’ Pitch: Their “Shows Are Sh**” 1 month ago:
Cerebral is definitely not the way I would characterize Weir’s writing.
Middle school or YA science fiction is more like it. I first encountered his work when it was recommended for one of our kids.
- Comment on "It's gone baby... it's all gone"| Sigh .....‘Project Hail Mary’ Author Andy Weir Says Paramount Rejected His ‘Star Trek’ Pitch: Their “Shows Are Sh**” 1 month ago:
Regarding Rick Berman or other showrunners of a large collaboration, my reaction is more complex, because there were so many others involved in the creation.
While a cinematic feature is a huge collaborative undertaking, Weir sells himself as a kind of lone-wolf type author and so invites reactions on that basis.
There’s also the fact that Berman’s abusive behaviour was kept largely secret while the shows were running. So, my love of the specific shows and episodes was already set before I had the full context.
I’d known from friends in the fandom, with close connections to production, that the early TNG years were generally miserable for all involved but hadn’t heard as much by season four. Berman made the other showrunners be the media frontman, spokespersons for production during most of the 1990s. He wasn’t an eminence gris in reality, but might have well have been for the amount of information available for viewers to know what was actually going on.
Watching now, knowing how the actors and crew were treated, hearing their sides to the story, definitely does impact my experience on rewatching, and I am not as likely to rewatch as frequently as I was.
As another comparison, to someone who made himself out as more of an auteur creator, I find that I really can’t rewatch Josh Whedon productions at this point, especially Buffy.
- Comment on "It's gone baby... it's all gone"| Sigh .....‘Project Hail Mary’ Author Andy Weir Says Paramount Rejected His ‘Star Trek’ Pitch: Their “Shows Are Sh**” 1 month ago:
I would argue that very little good science fiction tries to have nothing to say about humanity or the human condition.
There is some very intellectual and intelligent science fiction that takes on and speculates about advanced science and mathematics concepts but these are rarely mainstream and not at all the kind of thing Weir writes.
Some science fiction can be just fun science, engineering or math speculation stories told in prose, but if doesn’t have something to say about ourselves, it’s value isn’t much more than diversion — although diversion and entertainment are valuable in themselves.
Setting aside for now Weir’s rather sour grapes criticism of Star Trek, and stipulating the fact that Star Trek has, from its earliest episodes, had a recurrent pattern of including very transparent and heavy handed allegories to current social and political situations and controversies, let’s consider the general question of what is science fiction for.
Science fiction can be and has been a means of allegorical storytelling, and of pondering the human condition at the individual and the societal level. It tells us about ourselves as much as it tells us about a broader universe.
Huxley and Orwell did this with their dystopias. However, so did hard science fiction greats like Arthur C. Clark. Childhood’s End, Rendezvous with Rama, and 2001: a Space Odyssey were as much about who we are now as what might be out there.
More literary science fiction authors explored themes in psychology and human consciousness from the mid twentieth century on, and high quality science fiction took up those questions in films like The Forbidden Planet.
I didn’t find this kind of reaching about the human condition in either of Weir’s books. I did find them fun rides, the kind of pop fiction that used to be described as “airport” novels — the kind of book people pick up in airport kiosks before a long flight, that are often make into “popcorn movies.”
The science elements in his books are ok, but not astonishing. The level is really middle school, which is why The Martian was reissued in a ‘school edition’ cleaned of the swear words. My own first contact with Weir was our youngest’s ‘school edition’. It wasn’t an overly challenging book for a bright grade 6 student.
What I found in Weir’s writing was a repeating pattern of a lone-wolf individual male hero making some incredibly daft decisions after a catastrophic event that set up his opportunity to MacGyver himself out of the situation. It’s a trope.
It’s not definitive of the genre and it’s not conducive to the ensemble problem solving needed for more complex STEM work in science fiction. And unfortunately Weir’s short fiction has shown that he hasn’t yet mastered the skill of telling stories on a broader canvas.
Fun ride episodes, shows and movies belong in Star Trek and other science fiction too. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t be there. One of the franchise’s strengths has been that it can incorporate the full range of styles. But it’s never been only fun rides and individual heroism or individual MacGyvering. I think we’d see as much scathing criticism if shows tried to be just that.
But back to Weir’s attitude and tone, speaking in his moment of success.
He could have let his work speak for itself, and focused on promoting his film.
Instead he chose to prop up himself by putting down others. I don’t respect that. I don’t see that as having integrity. I see that as being a jerk, and it validates the sense that I got from his books that he doesn’t know himself how to work well with others so he doesn’t write what he doesn’t know.
He didn’t have to shoot his mouth off when baited. Instead, he chose to weigh disingenuously into the ‘culture wars’ by claiming to be above having a message.
He could have chosen at some future moment to drop a mention that he, like many writers had pitched spec scripts to the Star Trek franchise that weren’t taken up for movies or television, that weren’t seen as a fit in the strategic plan of the franchise at the time. That would have likely garnered a lot of positive interest from across the Trek fandom.
Instead, he chose to use his moment to trash the creations of others and, implicitly, the part of the fandom that those shows were written for.
He won’t be getting my money.
- Comment on "It's gone baby... it's all gone"| Sigh .....‘Project Hail Mary’ Author Andy Weir Says Paramount Rejected His ‘Star Trek’ Pitch: Their “Shows Are Sh**” 1 month ago:
This is the second quote of its kind in a day. The earlier one was about ‘woke’ messaging and how he writes to have no symbolism or underlying meaning in his work.
Going on a media tour is something that people are trained for.
They have their messages. They are ready for the provocations and the traps. And this isn’t Weir’s first Hollywood movie that’s done well.
This specific call out against Star Trek is something that he could have easily stepped about. He didn’t need to go out of his way to alienate a significant potential portion of his audience.
- "It's gone baby... it's all gone"| Sigh .....‘Project Hail Mary’ Author Andy Weir Says Paramount Rejected His ‘Star Trek’ Pitch: Their “Shows Are Sh**”www.hollywoodreporter.com ↗Submitted 1 month ago to startrek@startrek.website | 24 comments
- Comment on William Shatner And ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Actors React To News Of Series Ending 1 month ago:
The franchise wouldn’t exist if my 90 something year old mother-in-law and women like her didn’t watch it all and buy the books and magazines since 1966z
Or, if I and my partner and others hadn’t been watching since TOS was in first run.
Having defended TNG against TOS fans who wanted it killed, and having seen TAS killed by fan campaigns in the mid 1970s, I have no time for people in their 40s and 50s who would rather kill a show than have new Trek that might be meaningful to my GenZ kids.
- Comment on William Shatner And ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Actors React To News Of Series Ending 1 month ago:
No one was “shoving anything down your throat.”
You don’t need to watch.
You may have been the key 15-34 year old demographic that advertisers and marketers target back in the 1990s. If so, you are not the key demographic now. Why do you think others should be paying for your preferences?
- Comment on William Shatner And ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Actors React To News Of Series Ending 1 month ago:
Good thing people stuck with TNG season one despite rehashes like ‘The Naked Now’, offensive episodes like ‘Code of Honor’ and most of a season of sub par offerings.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 1 month ago:
It’s possible on a regular basis.
However, as with other high profile accounts, one expects that messages that are high profile would be cleared with the person under whose name the official account is made.
- Comment on William Shatner And ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Actors React To News Of Series Ending 1 month ago:
This makes sense if they want to break down the sets.
- Comment on William Shatner And ‘Star Trek: Starfleet Academy’ Actors React To News Of Series Ending 1 month ago:
There was a report posted elsewhere claiming that the viewership has been greater than expected but they still canceled it.
- Comment on It's sad that people completely misunderstand what Star Trek is about. 1 month ago:
It’s a silver lining to see Shatner using his platform for the greater good.
- Comment on Pluto TV Celebrates William Shatner’s Birthday With Star Trek Takeover Including All The Movies Streaming Free 1 month ago:
This doesn’t seem to be offered in Canada.
The ‘Pluto Spotlight’ still seems to be on Academy Award Winners.
I see the regular TOS all day channel offered, but the movies aren’t featured in the movie channels.
In the ‘On Demand’ offerings, there’s a ‘60 years of Star Trek’ that offers TOS, TNG & Voyager as well as some documentaries as usual.
In fact, it seems that none of the movies aren’t available on PlutoTV in Canada.
- Comment on What's your favorite ship or class of ship? 1 month ago:
I really just want the Aventine Vesta-class.
- Comment on London Science Museum: Star Trek Lates 1 month ago:
Very cool.
I wonder if there will be any kind of installation in Canada this time. I don’t see anything listed in the upcoming events.
For the 50th anniversary, the Canadia Aviation and Space Museum in Ottawa had a special exhibition that ran the whole summer. We were able to take our kids. There were a lot of costumes and props but also some interactive activities including a Kobayashi Maru test.
- Comment on Star Trek: Legacy Series Fans Want Most Is “Never Gonna Happen,” Says TNG’s Marina Sirtis 1 month ago:
I believe that there was mention of some Legacy locations and species to visit too.
Sigh…
- Comment on Star Trek: Legacy Series Fans Want Most Is “Never Gonna Happen,” Says TNG’s Marina Sirtis 1 month ago:
I’m perhaps at the extreme of negativity about the Legacy premise, but what Matalas seemed to be pitching was almost an anthology of legacy characters being visited by the Titanprise with the bridge full of offspring.
So, yes, Sirtis would not be wrong to think the focus of the pitch was the older cast with the younger characters and the visiting Titanprise as more or less the framing.
I have a theory that someone in senior management of the streamer under the old ownership had a strong belief that ‘children of legacy characters’ were a necessary bridge between old and new audiences. There seems to have been no awareness at all of his antithetical nepotism would be to the meritocratic principles of Starfleet.
We have La’an Noonien-Singh for no particular reason in SNW - she’s not even the bridge officer with augmented abilities.
Also, the more I hear about the pitch for Unity the more it sounds like a family saga with all the great things Archer’s offspring are up to as young adults (since the creators were told that they could have them at the Academy as they’d originally pitched).
- Comment on March Star Trek Merch Roundup: Klingon Weapons, Starfleet Academy Pins, New EXO-6 Figures, and More! 1 month ago:
Glad the Fansets SFA combadges are coming out right away with both pins and magnets.
I still have vivid memories of trawling through the vendors at a 2019 local Comic Con, with our youngest and 45 k other attendees, looking for a Disco S2 combadge with magnet that didn’t actually exist.