I love Elite and it’s definitely amazing in VR. For everything in a ship I agree with you, NMS is childish in comparison.

However, NMS is attempting a way more multi-cultural galaxy, and I often wish Elite had more diversity in aliens, and more interesting planets similar to NMS. Especially when Elite has so much grind to do rep etc. I wish just once I’d be doing a delivery quest to an acid jungle planet covered in hostile turtles, instead of yet another dead planetoid with a few outposts sticking out of it.

No Man’s Sky is an incredibly uneven experience. The one thing it does better than its peers is the variety of aliens and flora/fauna. There are easily 30 hours of fun in just exploring around and seeing some cool alien vistas and ecosystems, trying to survive on ice or acid planets etc. The game gives you good reason to visit them too.

However, it sort of falls apart after that. The space flight, mining, and combat aren’t nearly as good as (e.g.) Elite, the quests are pretty meh, the base building is okay but it falls down on automating production of anything you actually care about (I.e. it’s mostly aesthetic, but it can be cool to have a home base in a neat spot). Some of the recent updates added things like big carrier ships, and the game contrives to give you one to captain with a quest… But that sort of obliterates the ship progression.

You may have more fun with something like Elite or X4 depending on what you’re looking for, but if you just want to fuck around and see neat stuff on your own timeframe, NMS could definitely justify its price tag.

As Carlin said: it’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Ah, okay.

That Tawny Newsome show sounded like such a cool premise and angle on the universe, could have been great but yeah I assume it got axed.

Academy also has an S2, not sure if that drops first.

Honestly, I’m kinda happy for Trek to go on hiatus for a while. The Discovery era has been more miss than hit, especially if only considering the mainline live action shows (DSC, PIC, SNW) and with the Skydance acquisition I’m not looking forward to Ellison Trek.

Maybe in another few years, with fresh writers and show runners who are actual Trek fans, etc. but for now, give it some distance and let the influence of Kurtzman/Orci/Abrams be left behind.

Haha, I phrased it that way to note that it was a ratings decision. Anyway, hope you like it.

It’s just awful. The second to last episode includes a good little speech from Archer that really works as a bookend of the show. Then the last episode completely crashes and burns trying to bookend the entirety of 90s Trek. If it’s your first time, you kinda have to watch it, but just know a lot of people (myself included) don’t consider it canon and skip it on every rewatch. It’s that bad.

It’s probably more evenly split than VOY. The show builds in a reason for everyone to get semi-naked and it leads to some pretty egregious scenes for the male 18-49 demographic, but there are plenty of cases with shirtless or underwear clad men too. Everyone on the show is attractive and fit even by TV standards.

Watch Enterprise. It’s a divisive show in the community, mostly because it made a decision to be “sexier” and then got dark in response to 9/11, not to mention the whole theme song debacle or the must skip series finale…

However, there is also a lot of good Trek in there and some insight into humanity post First Contact but pre Federation. You owe it to yourself as a fan to at least give it a chance.

Then you get back to the old way of punching holes in a paper ballot and well… Have you ever heard of a “hanging chad”? That shit has issues too.

Where I vote the paper ballot doesn’t have identifying info and is in your hand for like 10 seconds between the voting machine and the ballot box. Someone would have to be in the polling place accosting me to check how I voted, which would be an issue no matter how the ballot got generated.

I agree, and am not a big fan of Wesley being warp Mozart either, but I think the core difference between those and Discovery is that they were one offs. Plenty of single episodes can be shrugged off (*ahem* Threshold) but in Discovery the spore drive was in every episode, and The Burn was a persistent feature of the future timeline. The show spent seasons dealing with these things.

Totally fair. I honestly didn’t like the mycelial network because it broke the storytelling and the future more than the fact it was unbelievable. Teleportation is way too strong and led to too many situations with Discovery being the only ship “in range” on a show that was already way too action/emergency oriented. It needed episodes that made it feel less like the only ship in the universe.

Discovery could have redeemed a lot of the idea in my mind if they’d destroyed the network. It would have made it obvious why the tech was never pursued more than just spore drive damaging it. Or, you know, by not being a TOS prequel in the first place and taking place after all of the other stories, like it ended up doing anyway…

Love this fact. A major plot point revolving around characters knowing the spectrum of color an element produces when burned feels very old school Trek, quiet competence grounded in science.

Compare this to all the places that newer shows paid lip service to science being cool and then went back to teleporting around instantly with mushrooms or causing all of the dilithium in the galaxy to explode with emotions or whatever.

Haha, I was going to make that joke but then thought aluminum would probably be just as bad or worse than glass.

Obviously the ones on the Enterprise are made of some crazy space age transparent ceramic.

Wow, SNW over DS9? Hot take.

Picard and Discovery were both pretty awful.

I enjoyed the first season of Academy. It is a bit teen drama for some though, and it picks up in the far future Discovery timeline which means its basically a different continuity from the other series.

SNW is good in spurts, not nearly as bad as Discovery/Picard, but it does have some pretty clunky episodes as well as ones that are pretty great.

As others have said though, Lower Decks is easily the best new(ish) Trek show but it’s a love letter to 90s Trek so I wouldn’t watch it until you’re ready to get the myriad references.

There is an element of this, because the people using it for policy or writing headlines always disregard a ton of caveats and qualifications in any field (including actual hard science like physics), but most economics texts I’ve read hide a ton of complexity behind “rationality” that doesn’t exist and are implicitly describing the system that we have (capitalism) without acknowledging that we could do it any other way - which frees them from any ethical conflict with capital/exploitation and lets them pretend they are describing a natural system.

The truth is we are irrational both as individuals and as groups with outside influences, and the economy can function in whatever way we want it to function. In that lens economics quickly turns into psychology, ethics and philosophy. Which, to be clear, would be a useful thing to study in any economic system (all of which have incentives and pitfalls), but it is not nearly as objective or concrete as it currently pretends as it fiddles with interest rates while billionaires run roughshod over our entire society.

It’s almost like we’d have no problem with it if everyone in our society didn’t need to work to survive and it didn’t accelerate the planet becoming unlivable while making the worst people alive even more money.

Weird.