nicholaimalthus [comrade/them]

Also, why the fuck are Starfleet naming conventions so human centric? We should see a bunch of Starfleet ships with Vulcan, Andorian, and Tellerite names. You can kind of handwave away the ones that are abstract concepts like Enterprise, Voyager, Defiant, etc by saying their names in each language are different. But there are so many ships named after Earth locations and historical figures. Where are the other races in all this?

Thankfully Lower Decks fixed a little of this. Star Fleet is just one fleet organization in the Federation. With apparently the Andorians and Vulcans having their own ships running about doing their own things too. Like the Sh'vhal in Lower Decks, having to come in and save the Cerritos. Star Fleet is just the biggest of the bunch and more likely to be "out there" doing exploration instead of local system patrol or whatnot.

From a storytelling/production standpoint: Humans are easier/cheaper to costume. Human sized corridors easier and cheaper to build for doing shots with human sized chairs you can get out of a Lexus. So Starfleet is a very human fleet. Also in the early days of models, TOS just reused the enterprise over and over with different number combinations on the hull and a different name, so they don't have to build new models. TNG they had money, but kept a design style going cause they had the molds and its cheaper to follow a style rather than start a new ship whole cloth. Thus why some alien ships in TNG are just models they built for the movies turned upside down or backwards and repainted. DS9 and on they started to breach using CGI so they got to expand a little but still had that same style to focus on. Modern trek they got lazy and copy pasted ships :P

Overall it is impossible to write a sci-fi and avoid human centrism in any fashion, even the abstract, because we only know the perspective of being human, and humans are the only ones we yet know writing fiction. Even in fiction where humans are say, the one amongst many, and not the most important in things, (And not throwing a fit about it like Anakin Skywalker. Looking at you Mass Effect) The story is usually from a human persepctive trying to understand the unknown alien ways that exist around them. Kind of like the impression I got from the Chanur novels by C.J. Cherryh but it's been a decade or more since I read it so I may be wrong.

I haven't seen any of Strange New Worlds because the same people IRL who recommended Discovery and Picard are recommending me Strange New Worlds, and I no longer trust their judgment.

A fair and understandable trepidation. I can say, watch SOME of Strange New Worlds. Some of it comes across very very well as a feeling of the old Star Trekish morality play episodic styling. And there's even a Lower Decks crossover episode. Some of it however, is very much like Discovery and Picard.
If you want to avoid that particular feel, caution around these episodes All Those who Wander (Feels more like Alien than Trek, also just turns Gorn into space monsters). The Broken Circle (While a season opening, the directorial, cinematographic and story style just have a Discovery/Picard feel to them) Under the Cloak of War (It's hard to trust someone that might be a killer) Hegemony (Again Gorn are space monsters for shooting and killing, also Scotty appears)

The rest go from strange alien relic stories, to wild musicals and alien entities turning the Enterprise into a storybook. Or actual episodes of moral quandry that don't involve immediately siding with the "hard decision" typical in most other sci-fi writing.

It takes a lot of guts to run a show about the future, while in the midst of the evils and chaos in the world and say, "We will be better in the future, and things will be better too, even if we still struggle." It's nice when you can see it in a show, but rarer, and rarer, and rarer with each new atrocity and economic demise.___

The mindset that began around DS9 and strengthened in the new treks.

While DS9 had some good episodes and good characters, and great acting, it also created fans that began to take all the wrong moral lessons from it, or the ones the creators intended. Militarism, military fetishism, and "ends justify the means" thinking. It was probably a reflection of what would become more and more common amongst the US populace going into the 2000s and onward. Culturally we make excuse en masse for our conflicts or our war crimes or support thereof like Sisko because "It had to be done". Related, I remember the scene with Dax/Sisko and the spent phaser coil from the ship. The "Take a good look people" and then a speech about pride of how long they keep on fighting and hanging that coil up on the wall as a trophy. I feel these sentiments have only carried on in the modern trek series even harder.

Which is why when Boimler in Lower Decks confronted his trigger happy, edgy, fellow crewmembers on the Titan with this line, I smiled<typo>. "I didn't join Starfleet to get into phaser fights. I signed up to explore! To be out in space and making new discoveries and peaceful diplomatic solutions. THAT's boldly going. And you know what? I'd love to be in a string quartet. I love that when Riker was on the Enterprise he was jamming on the trombone and catching love disease and acting in plays and meeting his transporter identical clone Thomas."

And I feel that's kind of what's missing in the newer treks. The sense that the lives of these people in the future are different, and not always conflict focused. They have time to stop, to pursue a hobby, paint a picture, go on vacation, find out what it is to be who they are, and THEN go on a wild space adventure for the episode carrying that discovery their little downtime gave them to provide new insights. Perhaps the lives of the people in new trek are more relatable, because they to have rare downtime and are task focused nearly 90% of the time. But it doesn't paint a picture that things will be better, only the same, with technology we don't yet have.

Unmanagable gas prices: When in a fit of irony, accelerationism slows something down.

Could someone in the know please translate the leagleese in the second portion of the statement? I got lost halfway at point 2 and most of 3.

So. This IS Spinal Tap

Me and my anxieties and escaping to video games know when it's one of those days

Going to good, not funny. Mass Effect. Super Space Neoliberalism and Militarism now is hard to sit through on any playthrough again.

Have to also consider the very earth centric attitude of the Dark Forest theory assumptions.

Earth is all we've known, and it's so perfect (though we ruin it daily). It has the right atmospheric mixture. The right gravity. The right seasons and rotation. All becuase we originated here. And even then we have to live near water because our biology demands it.

So alien comes along, sees earth, probably recoils at it as we might to Venus. Our earth would have a terrible unbreathable atmospheric mixture, gravity too high or low. If they were explorers of some kind motivated as some of us are the emotive desire to discover, they might examine it a bit. If they were conquerers motivated as some of us are by desires of posession and domination, then they may still pass it by cause of the extreme difficulties in holding a location incompatible to their life form as a colonial state.

But, it makes good fiction. There was a book series call The Tripods. Had that situation where the aliens couldn't live in our atmosphere, invaded anyway.

You know now that I think of it, most of the alien invasion literature and movies are from the major colonial powers of the past couple centuries. US and UK. Since a lot of other country has had to live invasion and occupation it probably isn't a popular topic in fiction. But we do it as either a kind of subconcious self reflection, since it rarely seems to be actual self critique, or an ackowledgement we do it and what if the bigger bully comes around and does it to us?

Scientists crossing fingers on the 1:100,250,357 chance the Posadists will be right.

/doom So if it got through, that probably means its bad or neutral for us. By design, especially these days, the body is not made to permit any legislation or person to pass through it if it helps the lower classes. So either the position is inconsequential, or detrimental.

Landlord is a genetic condition?

Oh did they finally start making creature models for Metroid Prime 4?

The Day After was more effective a movie to get people to understand the gravity of this. It offered at the end no hope, no salvation, no recourses. And not in a 'everything just blows up way'. In a long slow painful sickened death. And it terrified people. And for something as bad as nuclear annihilation, that is what you need.

The conflict will not really change, but reinforce, the ideological sentiments. What's happening in Ukraine and the western media narrative related to it gives them a major enemy, an evil empire, to focus on. It strips a good deal of what might be a margainal leftist sentiment from liberals, and helps bind the liberals to a united cause with the GOP, giving them an 'in' to draw them further towards rightward ideology. Liberals may come to want a strong man because only a strong man who 'gets things done' can counter the same. A fight fire with fire sort of attitude. In the upcoming midterm elections, should the conflict stretch on that long, I suspect the DNC will try to convince others they can handle the conflict 'smartly'. But the GOP will try to convince that they can win the conflict.

It's been gross, listening to big media talk about the conflict when it deals with finances. "All this is so awful and terrbile buuut..we don't wanna actually cut them off from SWIFT cause it might move economies away from the dollar and there's debts we're owed shifty looks, wringing hands"

Ughhhh~ I just did more research. There's gender locked classes? Why the hell is this a thing? Why's it still a thing? I really don't know where in the development cycle this comes across as "yeah this is a good idea." But yeah I get your point on the overcompensation. The whole bowl of fruit thing with WoW. Sexy is ok. But what rubbed me wrong with NieR is it's sexy all the time of the day. There's no change to the attire or posture that will take away from the sexy because Yoko Taro says "I just really like girls"

Ugh. See that's a trait that makes me want to give a pass on the game. The part about any woman in the game portrayed between the age of 18 and 25 is in high heels and short skirts and boob window NieR levels of dress for no other reason than to splatter sex appeal all over the screen. It's nice when if they do that at least they do it for both sexes. Final Fantasy XIV was good with this in some ways. It's hard to play US or Japanese or Korean or otherwise games with really blatant traditional gender role affirming stylizations. Just gets gross.

Thank you so much for this insight.

Nerds and Jocks both lost, because they grew up and had to enter the workforce and became at once, consumers. They were as an age group both catered to and tantilized by corporations by hiring from both cliques and trying to narrow their likes into singular focus. Call of Duty comes around, and it's both appealing to nerds and jocks. It has the strongman appeal and the video game aspect. The jock culture was placated in the nerd activity so they stopped going out and getting fit (or just didn't do it as much) because of that cultural satiation. Didn't have to go to a gym anymore, could do it from home. Both groups shared some of the toxicities especially towards women or lgbtq+, and so were easy to merge that way.