Do you know why I stuck with it through s1-s3, even though I couldn’t know if it would get better?

'CAUSE I’VE GOT FAAAAAIIITH OF THE HEART!

I don’t consider Star Wars to be sci-fi. It’s a futuristic space fantasy.

Is that an unpopular opinion? Most sci-fi/fantasy fans I know would probably agree with this. I love Star Wars, but in the same way I love Lord of the Rings.

Also, Star Trek Enterprise is one of the best Trek series, IMO. Top 5.

I would say the final season of Enterprise is arguably the best single season of any Star Trek show so far. But it was a long road getting there…

The human crew (particularly Archer and Trip) were difficult to warm to in seasons 1 and 2 - I found them so much more emotional and overdramatic than an intelligent professional human would be today, and that it made it difficult for me to accept them as the bridge from today to the 23rd/24th century Starfleet we know.

Season 3 was tough for different reasons - maybe it played differently in America, but watching from outside the US a lot of it felt like post-9/11 revenge fantasy. Very proto-‘America First’.

I’ve found it useful for TTRPGs too. Art generators are certainly helpful for character portraits, I also find ChatGPT can be useful for lots of other things. I’ve had pretty mediocre results trying to get it to generate a whole adventure but if you give it tight enough parameters then it can flesh out content for you - ranging from NPC name ideas, to ideas for custom magic items, to whole sections of dialogue.

You can give it a plot hook you have in mind and ask it to generate ideas for a three-act structure and encounter summary to go with it (helpful when brainstorming the party’s next adventure), or you can give it an overview of an encounter you have in mind and ask it to flesh out the encounter - GPT4 is reasonably good at a lot of this, I just wouldn’t ask it to go the whole way from start to finish in adventure design as it starts to introduce inconsistencies.

You also need to be ready to take what it gives you as a starting point for editing rather than a finished product. For example, if I ask it to come up with scene descriptions in D&D then it has a disproportionate tendency to come up with things that are ‘bioluminescent’ - little tells like that which show it’s AI generated.

Overall - you can use it as a tool for a busy DM that can free you up to focus on the more important aspects of designing your adventure. But you need to remember it’s just a tool, don’t think you can outsource the whole thing to it and remember it’s only as helpful as how you try to use it.

But … I thought the 2009 film was an origin story?

It was literally the story of how the Kelvinverse came to exist and it followed Kirk, Spock, McCoy and co from their Academy days.

That was my thought, I’m quite up for this. I enjoyed The Voyage Home, I enjoyed The Trouble with Tribbles - I wouldn’t want all Trek to be like that but there is absolutely a place in the franchise for light-hearted takes on Trek.

But removing Discovery from the timeline seems to be consistent with the prime timeline post-Discovery season 2 (in TOS etc) - e.g. Spock not talking about his human adopted sister, no further use of spore drives, and so on. It’s certainly explicitly the timeline of SNW (which makes multiple references to the events of Discovery s2) and therefore the timeline of Lower Decks.

That suggests the prime timeline as we know it is an altered timeline caused by Discovery’s jump to the future.

last couple of Picard seasons

I mean, that’s a pretty astonishing statement to throw out there, grouping together probably the worst single season of Star Trek with one of the best…

I don’t think the ‘audience’ ratings can be fully trusted though. Any new film or TV show these days with prominent women, minority or LGBTQ characters (Discovery has all) gets routinely review-bombed by alt-right participants who likely haven’t even watched it - that’s just a fact of these ratings. My anecdotal discussions with irl Trek fans didn’t find the same antagonism to Discovery that you find online.

Discovery wasn’t the best of Star Trek, and I ended up switching off early Season 4, but much of the early hostility towards it was either that sort of bad faith, or focused on trivia (which leads me to wonder if it was just cover for the same - I cannot get my head around people who refused to watch because they didn’t like the Klingon prosthetics).

Season 1 was solid, Season 2 was arguably even better (although owed a lot off that to Captain Pike). Season 3 had great promise in its premise but failed to realise it’s potential, and then Season 4 just felt lost.

The movie wasn’t that well-liked and wasn’t the perfect send-off for the original crew of Star Trek.

What a weird thing to say. I’ve always heard it described as one of the best TOS films and I always found the ending quite an emotional and fitting send-off to the TOS crew.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_25th_Anniversary_(computer_game)

Okay, but that’s not really what they did with Sela.

Sela wasn’t ‘Tasha returned’ - she had nothing in common with Tasha (in terms of personality or her role in the show) except for being played by the same actress. She clearly wasn’t just a backdoor soap opera route for Tasha to return.

Also she was only actually in four episodes (on the first of which the character wasn’t identified and Denise Crosby was an uncredited voice only). Sela’s brief appearances were so memorable that we tend to forget how minor her role actually was across the span of TNG - Tomalak had a bigger role, for example.

The reason the board have given is - if true - a very reasonable reason to fire a CEO. The job of the board is to oversee, scrutinise and challenge the management, and if the management were lying to or withholding information from the board then that’s an obvious reason for the management to go.

American corporate governance standards are really hit-and-miss, and in a lot of these tech firms you often end up with situations of CEOs doubling up as chairs of their boards - e.g. Musk, Zuckerberg , Bezos -something that structurally neuters the ability of the board to do its basic job of challenging the CEO! So when I see an American board standing up to a CEO that’s trying to evade scrutiny, I feel that’s something that should be applauded.

The Host - the one where Riker ends up hosting the symbiont.

I mean, they’re obviously not going to, so I guess Zuckerberg better go dust off what I can only assume is his comically large chequebook…

Yes! Have you met humans?

The British equivalents are ‘youse’ or ‘you lot’.

He posted on Kbinmeta yesterday. He’s been busy with family matters but is still spending all his free time worrying on Kbin and working towards a full release at the end of September.

Overall I like the culture that’s developing on Kbin - things feels kinder and more personal here than on Reddit. The integration with Mastodon is a great feature too.

There are still some UI things that need sorting. It still irritates me how many clicks it takes to get to a simple list of my subscribed magazines, and even then that list is spread over several pages and inexplicably not alphabetical. This should be accessible in one click from the top menu (as it was on Reddit and I know it is on Lemmy).

I rarely see that and I definitely judge people when I do see it. Maybe you just live somewhere where anti-social behaviour is normalised?

I had the same panic. That’s not even the title of the article (‘Voyager’s Roxann Dawson Had A Chance To Direct Star Trek But Dropped It For Another Show’) so, unless the website changed it, you have to wonder what OP was doing writing it that way.