MMR April 18 2024 - To Russia, with Love

NIL deals aren't just for college athletes anymore.

Chip on the shoulder Roy. Saying that doing nothing is what people want. That they don't care if something is done.

She would be better off with an Ouija board.

Day 3 of heavy cough and I realize that we might want to check if my wife has COVID. Answer: yup....

😬
🙏🏾 she recovers quickly. Wife and Girlie had it and used Paxlovid. I got it two weeks after they did - no Pax.

It looks like Star Trek is dying on the vine. Most shows don't survive for long and is moved to streaming platforms where they sink into obscurity. I think it is pretty much a victim of the extent in the 90's and early 2000 where it pretty much ran the course on source material. Now it is largely a mess of time jumps. And while you can certainly say something about Star Wars, at least Star Wars did something smart(er). Outside the big movies that provided the big picture lore, most of the shows are now focused on smaller parts in the larger universe. Some is generally in the now (Mandelorian) and others retell before or between main movies. They're not diluting the lore by making these smaller shows main events.

Star Trek on the other hand kept pumping out shows that directly effected the overall lore in the entire universe. It wasn't about a small crew in the overall story of larger events. The crew usually fundamentally drove and effected these large events.

That has always been the problem. Generations, Deep Space Nine and Voyager all played major roles in different part of the galaxy. All effecting major parts of the plot line and intersected with major events driving the lore. This is unlike the Movies with the original crew that dealt with big problems but problems that didn't fundamentally change a big part of the universe. Well, almost. There was this thing about peace with the Klingons. But that was played out over several movies and felt more like a natural part of the story.

Meanwhile in Voyager and Generations they dealt with the Borg, both having prominent parts to play in dealing with the Borg. Deep State 9 dealt with a host of major races and one that threatened that part of the Galaxy. So when those shows were over, they decided to 'reboot' the series (of sorts) while the Generations crew embarked on a serious of movies that further delved into lore changing events (some - not all).

Enterprise went back to when the Federation first started exploring and ended up with a dumb 'time line change'. Something that has effected all shows going forward. Not this time line change; that was reset. But with Discovery they can now jump freely among the start and while I liked Strange New Worlds because it felt at least in the beginning as a 'this crew is just checking shit out' it also got time lined.

And that is the problem with Star Trek. A problem that is what largely sank Babylon 5 as a universe. Babylon 5 tried to add spin offs, but so many of them were aimless. The main show had already dealt with the large players in the show. The few spin offs didn't try to be just a part of the beginning or continue where the main show left off. It too was built as 'oh shit, earth is in trouble' or 'a new massive much WORSE threat is coming'. Both of which were meandering.

There's no wonder Star Trek then went through a reboot with JJ Abrams. Retelling the original show and movies but adding some twists in there, pretty much kicking the lore to the side and added...time travel. Time travel has really been the bane of Star Trek. Once you open that can of worm, you end up on the garbage dump like the Terminator franchise. You can simply just 'redo' all things, murdering established lore and water down any consequences. Take the Mutant X franchise. It was reset through time shit and was so uneven it rarely ended up straight, and MCU is a big straggling mess with multi verses and time jumps.

Once you go down that road, nothing matters. You cannot establish a functional lore because someone else can always change everything later. Spocks sacrifice when the reaction went nuts, ending with him being launched into a new eden of a created world, means nothing, because Abrams changed all of that in a movie that combined basically 3 movies in one. Spock didn't have the journey of sacrifice and rediscovery of himself, and those adventures never happened with the infamous KAHN!

Instead Abrams simply removed that sacrifice, with a whimper. Spock caught Kahn and used his magic blood to fix Kirk after HE was instead exposed to the radiation. By fucking with the time line all the other shit after that was forever changed and muddled. So no wonder the Klingons got a dumb makeover in Discovery. Going from the Mongol looking gnarly heads to some kind of lizard something. All changes that just turned me off. Again, why should I as a fan care about any show that no longer try to make sense lore wise.

Babylon 5 at least died on the vine without too much of that and the lore as established haven't been completely hammered to dust. Star Wars for all their flaws are at least up until the last 3 movies fairly intact. Star Trek is a complete mess. By making the main protagonists the main driver of most events in the universe, they have more or less sunset all major changes and now they're just spaghettying the entire universe through time travel. Why bother.

MCU is largely unwatchable. Pretty movies (at times) but multi verses and time travel or whatever the fuck they do makes it an arbitrary mess.

DC has also done that shit, but the problem with DC other then the fractious nature of its established universe is that it just isn't good story telling. I mean Aquaman was okay and by large they've done okay with Batman. But they have also rebooted that so many time that you don't even know who Superman is today. Several original movies, tons of shows, then the more recent movies etc. It is a mess.

Fallout?

Well, other then the few 'lore' things I mentioned the other day - it is closer to the games than not. What I perceived from the games isn't set in stone. It was never truly established that the government was behind everything. Just as it was hinted that Vault-Tech might be behind everything, it was equally felt that the government was. So maybe the show becomes more of the defined lore. And it will be interesting if they release a Fallout 5 that somehow deals with this a little.

Enough ranting. If you haven't read anything, read at least this. Time travel is the bane of all universes. Once you do that, everything goes to hell. Maybe that is why I really didn't care for Edge of Tomorrow. Compared to say Groundhog day. In Groundhog day one man learned something about himself and largely changed. In the Edge of Tomorrow one man changed the world against a stupid race that required that type of corny anti climax.

A smell is worth a thousands pictures I guess.

Same with me. I had a ghost account to be able to read comments. Since X the whole shit requires me to link my google account and I refuse. None of my saved credentials work.

I don't know if anyone here have played any Warhammer 40k tabletop or computer games, but apparently the idea of female bodyguards of the god emperor of earth (a husk of a creature bound to a throne that keeps his dead body in suspended animation) blew the heads of the idiot right who immediately compared that to pride and all sort of pronouns. The Order Sorority, basically super 'nuns' is okay. But female custodes?

Jesus. The right is eternally broken.

So youtube is now being invaded by Ai images and AI written sci fi stories. The sci fi is the obvious (and the humans something something). The WW2 stories is in the forms of 'Diaries' by all kind of regular grunts. Most are, our boys didn't know how savage the Marines/US soldiers would be etc. The former strings together a bunch of random WW2 images and verbose shit text. The sci fi is the kind of bad writing I did as a teenager together with AI created images. This is both using established IP, such as Warhammer 40k but also just their own shit.

All of this is uncreative shit, by uncreative people, using stupid AI voices. Welcome to the new world of unoriginal shit content.

Y'know, that's one thing I miss from the Legends canon of Star Wars.  My favorite book series is the X-Wing series which mostly follows elite characters but, aside from the Wraith Squadron trilogy, doesn't have any of the main characters (Wedge Antilles is the biggest name outside of Wraith Squadron, Wraith Squadron does have Wedge operating under Han but it's still primarily about Wedge's team and Han only is a main character of the last book).  It really fleshes out the Universe to make these characters like Gavin Darklighter and Corran Horn and Garik "Face" Loran that you can insert into later books.  People like Gilad Palleon and Mara Jade are also huge within the Legends canon and are books only - and of course, Thrawn got so huge they *HAD* to bring him into the Disney canon.

And what is easily the most well regarded of the Disney canon movies?  The movie that involved *NONE* of the original characters.

But every single show thus far has basically taken one or two characters that we already know and gone "let's tell their story"

You have a galaxy with thousands upon thousands of worlds and you can't find someone new?  Someone to build out with?  But there's just not enough lore in the Disney canon, not enough complexity and diversity.  They had to put Thrawn in an entirely different galaxy to expand the world even though they have an entire galaxy to explore.

*sighs*

Even basic things are so crucial.  There were limits to Force powers in the Legends canon with Timothy Zahn having the brilliant idea to suggest that delving too deeply in abusing force powers to always solve your problems carries a hint of corruption of the dark side - it's a tool, not a crutch.  There were limits on hyperspace that prevented you from being able to, say, send transmissions to those en route and not being able to be near large gravity wells or ram into other vessels.  There were dozens of species explore and hundreds of cultures described and the minds of so many writers and editors over the course of decades building this incredible fabric and while some of it was shit, all of it built this dynamic and complicated world.

And Disney chucked it in the trash without understanding why the investment was worth holding onto.  I get resetting the canon, but they shouldn't have reset the Universe.  They had so much to work with and they understood none of it.

Should democrats protect the speaker? I dunno. It won't hurt them if he falls, but it might hurt some other things like aid. And given that they split that shit up anyways it is doubtful anything will come of it. And seeing GOP go through another speakership shows the country what a mess they are now.

But then...putting Johnson in a position where he has to promise to push stuff through can be good. Unless of course he is full of shit, which is fully possible.

I've never bothered with the actual tabletop game, but I think I remember playing Space Crusade on the AMIGA.  Seen a few of the more modern PC games, but never really tried any of them.  (Don't care that much for shooters or most RTS type stuff.)