“What stuff? Stop that! When I find you, I’m gonna kill you with a flake of my power! I am a skin of evil.”

Lower Decks! Lower Decks!

I somewhat rebut that notion, but still, that is brutally funny, so I have to upvote. I have known a decent amount of jerk Republicans as well; one of my university classes is in a room next to where the campus Turning Point meeting is held, and it boils my blood a bit.

Honestly, my response to a comment on the c/risa version of this post pretty much sums up my point, so I won’t write it up again: https://startrek.website/post/30091443/19306453

You’re forgetting Ad Homicide: Just because you killed someone doesn’t mean you’re right.

(And of course, its vice versa, just because you (or someone with your views) got killed doesn’t mean you’re right, which admittedly is less common in history, but nonetheless something to be aware of to evaluate arguments critically.)

You know, I think Paramount+ could increase its rating by one star just by replacing the mountain in its splash screen with Pike’s face and a huge Pike’s peak.

Of course, another star would come from the app actually working well and allowing you to actually use the resolutions you pay for on all the devices you owned, but the DRM cult continues, punishing paying customers and making pirating a more pleasant experience in some ways.

Another star or two would come from Paramount actually having the spine to stick up to authoritarians rather than sucking up to them in the name of profits, but that’s not going to happen with the oligopoly the American entertainment industry has become.

I mean, that’s fair.

I feel that somewhat by accident, Lower Decks does better capture some aspects of classic Trek than other series, namely being mostly episodic and bringing a sense of humor back to Trek, and it sometimes even attains a level of dramatic skill comparable to the best of classic Trek (namely above all else the exchange between Mariner and Ma’ah in the S4 finale). Also, I’m honestly really impressed that Lower Decks managed to get me attached to its characters and make it feel like they’ve evolved so much in a total runtime less than that of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

That said, Lower Decks does lack the mellow charm and the long(er)-form storytelling of classic Trek. However, considering the Trekiness they otherwise pulled off, I kind of wonder how the Lower Decks writers would do if they were given the opportunity to do a 50 minute “standard” Trek series; I think they might be able to do pretty well.

Similarly, with SNW, while it has some of the strongest writing of social interaction, the sci-fi aspect is often weaker than it should be. For instance, “Four-and-a-Half Vulcans” is almost a brain-dead premise in terms of science fiction, but executed so well in terms of the social dynamics and character writing.

In other words, I can see your desire for a no-compromises, no catches Trek.

Oh yeh. I heard that, just forgot. Thanks for reminding me.

At this point, I’d wonder if some of the older Microsoft Surfaces might be suitable for this purpose. Especially if it’s just displaying photos, you probably wouldn’t even need the Linux-Surface kernel for a lot of things and could just run mainline, avoiding a lot of misery. For instance, a 1st gen Surface Go from 2018 seems to run for ~$70 on eBay these days; I own one and used to daily-drive it on both Windows and Linux, and although there were some annoyances, the display is decent.

Though honestly, I wonder if you particularly need a Linux tablet at all. There are dedicated digital frame devices out there for displaying photos; a lot of them can just display off a USB drive or SD card in the ballpark of 50 bucks it looks like. I’d probably recommend not getting one that supports Wi-Fi, as I think it’s probably a stupid idea to assume some random cheap device you bought online has correctly-implemented network security.

You’re forgetting the 4th one.

Wesley Crusher: Jack Crusher was actually replaced by a surgically-altered Cardassian spy whose goal was to incriminate Picard by secretly impregnating his wife with Picard’s DNA, making it seem like they were cheating on him. Wesley is actually Picard’s child, thus why he’s so weird around Wesley.

(We love you anyway, Wes!)

When you put it that way, I agree.

TNG made a point to avoid doing this as much as possible, and it ultimately worked and arguably usurped the original.

I guess that’s also part of the strength of Lower Decks and somewhat Prodigy; both shows are the only ones of this wave to be mostly focused on original characters. Lower Decks does bring in legacy characters frequently, and Prodigy does have Hologram Janeway and later starts to heavily feature legacy characters as part of the storyline, but both have an original cast as the core of the show that isn’t anyone we know’s brother or cousin. I superficially thought about this, but didn’t think about it in comparison to the other newer Treks before.

I mean, if they struck a balance, it could be enjoyable enough.

It’s not a dynamic we’ve fully explored in Trek. We kind of got it with adult Jake and Captain Sisko in the later seasons of DS9, but we haven’t really fully seen the experience of a Starfleet empty nester.

Still, drama after drama is rather annoying.

After being disgusted by the horribly-done pre-school show, I’d much rather see a Star Trek done in the spirit of Craig of the Creek and Bluey that’s about a friend group of kids running around a star base and getting into fun and trouble and low-stakes ethical dilemmas, preferably while their parents (the crew and civilian residents) deal with DS9 levels of heavy stuff. After saying this to my younger sibling, they have a more developed pitch, having sketched up some concept art for fun.

I would certainly not reject a well-written Lower Decks season 6, so I don’t agree on the animated comedy front.

What always drove me insane about DIS Orions is they all looked the same; same skin tone and same hair color.

Probably the only reason I could tell Osyraa from other Orions was she was the main woman Orion and usually in contexts where it made sense for the Emerald Chain leader to be there. Pretty much all the other people were barely distinguishable from each other.

Lower Decks did a better job on that front I feel; part of it is definitely just that it’s animated and so they can use character design to distinguish them. However, they also did so many things to distinguish one Orion from another that could be done with makeup; there were so many skin tone and hair color variations. For instance, in “Hear All, Trust Nothing”, Tendi has more of a lime green skin tone while Mesk has more neon green one.

To be fair, Discovery was the first series to roll out Orions as a regularly-occurring species. (I consider Enterprise’s use not so regular.) I think Trek has gotten better at it since then. Take SNW’s Remy for example:

I’m not forgetting that guy’s face any time soon. Granted, I don’t think I would count SNW as having regularly-occurring Orions yet. We’ll see if maybe STA does it better.

I think they just had to put something there, so they threw in a joke. They probably never expected it to be visible or readable.

It’s similar in nature to how the DS9 promenade directory has “Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems” from Buckaroo Bonzai, albeit a more dark-humored example.

In universe, it doesn’t exist, I’d say. It’s just a part of the aesthetic, similar to how some things on TOS would look less hokey in real life.

I think it was TNG Tech Manual?

It has its weaknesses, but I think you should watch it if just to form your own opinion.

I’ve only watched through the middle of season 4, where I got a bit tired of it, though I might pick it back up.

Season 1 is interesting, season 2 is weird, and season 3 has its flaws but keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Season 4 I feel like squanders the new setting introduced in season 3; the plot they introduce feels so artificial to me, which is very upsetting because it feels like the new setting has so many stories that would practically write themselves even if you do decide to lean on “Big Bad Villain/Problem” storytelling.

I saw the first part (which I have faded) online and added my response.

Actually, they were stored across the entire station’s computer systems; only part of them was in Quark’s holosuite. It basically took every bit of storage on DS9 to store them.

From what I can tell, their patterns are only on file during the transport, after which they are discarded. They imply it takes a lot of power and data storage to transport, meaning that they can’t just store everyone’s patterns.

There is an instance in beta canon, but just knowing that transporters and the title are related might spoil the entire plot. Thus, I am using nested spoilers so that people can check if it might be something they’re going to read without knowing exactly which thing it is.

However, you could probably try replicating the two containment beams thing that happened to Riker and Boimler, though, duplicating Tuvix and splitting one.

Also, at least according to the TNG Tech Manual, replicators work at the molecular level, while transporters work at the quantum level. Sentient beings generally need quantum precision to be transported or replicated.

Not great. I even got GPU passthrough working once, but you get weird graphics glitches because it’s all being sent over RDP.

I think Cassowary might be better than WinApps, but honestly, at this point, I just gave up on those and just use the VM directly.