It was decades ago but Burger King was a bit of a staple for me for a few years when I lived close to a franchise operator that was consistent. It has been awhile and I knew things had gone downhill and some of the franchise operators are very shitty but I was shocked last time we went. The restaurant was filthy and the tables and floors were covered in food. The burgers looked to be thrown together out of bin leftovers. Can’t say I blame staff for the lack of enthusiasm given their employer has a known history of wage theft. We couldn’t tell the differences between the more expensive special and regular whopper so took the mess to the counter to ask what the fuck we were given and why it looked nothing like the photo. The whole family swore off them for life. Never going back.

Prodigy is excellent. A lot of people who would have enjoyed it never got the chance to watch it.

We had the first few episodes on one of our streaming services and the whole family enjoyed them but they must have lost the rights and we never got any more. I signed up to Paramount which wasn’t always available in our part of the world mainly to watch SNW. It was very disappointing to see Prodigy episodes listed but showing video unavailable. They had a fantastic entry point into the franchise for younger viewers that still managed to keep adults engaged.

My junior high school kid said nobody his age even knows what Star Trek is. This seemed crazy to me but then I realized most people have Netflix and or Disney and Paramount+ is practically unheard of here. The movie reboots stopped ages ago. The franchise really is dead for young viewers in large parts of the world. Which makes it even more amazing how badly Paramount has handled the licensing and promotion of Prodigy.

As much as I hate the Disney Borg, they should consider licensing it to the mouse for close to free to save the franchise and create a market for licensed toys and merch. It is as good as any of the Star Wars or Marvel spin offs and it is where all the families are subscribed. Even the BBC is moving Doctor Who there.

If I didn’t have yt premium I would be ad blocking or give up and go elsewhere so I don’t know what youtube ads look like. I don’t tolerate advertising well. Do they really monetise their channel promotions? I guess that is because Paramount is going broke, and also perhaps part of why they are going broke.

It is ridiculous how Paramount region locks promotional content. They operate a global streaming service and I am a legit paid subscriber in a non-US market and probably amongst the first to view new episodes due to my timezone. They are very out of touch.

Yeah, Dawn’s Ballet or something very like it. Cool reference.

Did I hear a bit of the music from Once More With Feeling in engineering near the start?

Or maybe midgets.

It could be bunnies

deleted by creator

The astronauts in the ISS predominantly conduct science research and maintain the station. The only maneuvering it does is orienting itself for thermal management, orbit raising and occasional collision avoidance. A ship like Dragon 2 is highly automated. Yet a lot of astronauts are still pilots and many from the military.

Nobody would be surprised to travel on a commercial aircraft flown by an ex-military pilot.

Star Trek space combat doesn’t seem very realistic but I can understand the value of having an experienced pilot who can function under pressure. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than handing the helm of the flagship full of families over to an unqualified teenage Wesley Crusher. Picard was fortunate there aren’t more mountains in space or that could have turned out like Aeroflot 593.

It is great to see characters who were undeveloped in TOS get fleshed out. The characters feel real and motivated by their history. It beats interpersonal drama designed purely to create conflict within the crew.

I know Orville was widely disliked by critics for uneven tone because they wanted to shove it in a pigeon hole but variety is where episodal tv really shines. I don’t think Orville did this as effortlessly as SNW is currently doing but it had its moments. Given the substantial departure from Discovery and Picard I wonder if Lower Decks or SNW could have existed in Kurtzman’s Star Trek without MacFarlane showing there was still demand.

I hope they use the release of inhibitions in the musical episode to delve into the inner thoughts and feelings of some of the characters as they did in Buffy’s Once More With Feeling. The characters revealed a hell of a lot in that episode. It would be a waste to back off after this episode and not use what on the surface looks like a lightweight episode to dig deeper.

I have a very pragmatic view on capitalism. It isn’t inherently good or evil. Social democracy provides the best compromise where regulated capitalism generates wealth and funds innovation while responsible democratic government protects employees and the environment and provides services that have a strong social benefit.

Unfortunately social democratic policies are undermined in many countries and resisted in others to the point where some young people become frustrated and look to answers in hateful extremist politics which really is a horseshoe.

Regulated capitalism can direct capital to innovation in low/zero emission technologies and disincentivize investment in polluting technology very effectively,. More effectively than a corrupt command economy could do it. Fossil fuel companies have fought against interventions to push the market towards alternatives but the biggest failure has been on the political class and voters who haven’t done enough to push the market in the correct direction. Photo voltaics, storage technology and wind turbines have received a lot of investment and are growing rapidly despite the work of the big polluters to stall action.

I don’t think it was as good as SNW but I enjoyed it for what it was - a reunion special full of cameos. I think anyone who watched TNG, DS9, VOY era would feel the same. Even my kids who never watch Star Trek drifted in while I was watching Season 3 for some reason which surprised me. It was a great one off for the fans but clearly it isn’t the way forward for Star Trek given the age of the actors etc. We are overdue for a proper Enterprise finale given we were ripped off the last time.

I wouldn’t have watched Picard Season 3 or SNW without the Startrek community setting up this lemmy site and some of the great suggestions here.

Great. Now how about making them available on Paramount+ again which is supposed to be the home of Star Trek so kids can actually watch them.

As much as I disliked Disco and Picard, they have to try new things to grow the franchise for shareholders and it offers new possibilities for us viewers as well as more opportunities for creative talent. My kids, who think Star Trek is boring, loved Prodigy but we rotated subscriptions part way through the first season and never finished it and now we are back and all the episodes are listed but the content is all unavailable. Not the smartest way to attract a new generation of viewers.

Having grown up watching matte paintings, shaky plywood sets, bubble wrap monsters and people running up and down the same corridor repeatedly and then decades of soulless bad CGI I have nothing bad to say about modern productions standards. There is something special and human about the artistry of matte paintings, scale models and physical sets but I don’t know that today’s viewers have the same capacity for suspension of disbelief. LED walls allow some story telling that would otherwise be to expensive to visualise.

That was a love letter to trek time travel stories and a nice character piece for Christina who feels less and less like a budget Drummer ripoff. Like any episodal television SNW is a bit hit and miss but better the occasional highs than a season long arc that drags and disappointments.

Rule 10

The admin of my local lemmy instance is very transparent about hosting costs and has a ko-fi for donations. Last I saw there were enough funds to last several months but I have seen additional activity on the donations since. They have a strong focus on a geographic community and it looks like there is no shortage of people happy to contribute because of the need that fills.

It depends on the instance, some don’t have much of a reason to exist and are probably going to be an out of pocket thing for a sole operator as a hobby project until they lose a job or get bored. Others are going to have some more structured organization running them with some sort of funding structure.

Lemmy needs a tag on posts not to export them to federated instances and put the whole of US politics and culture wars behind it.

Meanwhile Rule 10:

A place for major news from around the world, excluding US-internal news.

One of the best things about the reddit migration to the fediverse is having a local tab full of wholesome local non-US content. It would be nice if we could clean up All a bit more. I would be totally fine if my home lemmy instance defederated from all US instances carrying their domestic politics

I don’t think continually rage farming us is going to add anything of value. If a whole country wants to drive themselves insane with increasingly polarized and nonsensical crap they need a private space to do it away from the rest of us because it isn’t healthy and I don’t want to participate.