It’s too bad that everybody I know who has a theramin has eventually gotten rid of it. Eventually they realize that it’s just sitting there collecting dust because they never touch it.

This one was hard, for me, to get through. SAM is the character who posesses the most cringe and I don’t like cringe. And, OK, I have to say “for me” because how many commedians and commedies get most of their mileage with effective use of cringe? So I kinda fast-forwarded a bunch of scenes, started to piece together what was going on, and then went backwards to watch it again.

I thought of it a lot like “Data’s Day”. Not exactly, because for poor SAM, the stakes are as high as “Measure of a man” instead of completely low stakes. But the structure is the same.

SAM’s evolved. They said that they had an idea for SAM’s character and then when Kerrice Brooks arrived, they adjusted her characterization based on her and she’s a bit different than she was in the past. She scrunches up her face a bit differently this time? Her movement’s a bit different? Did they just write a memo somewhere between the production of Ep 4 and 5 “Hey, let’s make SAM more Kerrice Brooks?”

There’s definitely some fast-forwarding because we don’t see SAM learning how to go from the kid who nobody greeted to the kid who gets a new name every time. The Voyager episodes where they were trying to teach Seven how to be more human were super-cringe and I’m actually kinda glad that we skipped over that.

Also I kinda wonder if Ocam’s affection for SAM in giving the best greeting is maybe a bit like in Tin Man, where SAM is the only person he doesn’t need to filter out.

I never got around to watching all of DS9. When it was on the air, I thought of it as a bit of a Star Trek universe rip-off of Babylon 5 and had stopped bothering to watch TV most of the time, so I never caught either show. And I remember having a vague rant as they started off with Voyager that what we really needed was a next next generation … which takes us to now, where we have a next next generation that’s going back to DS9. And I guess DS9 had a reasonable ending that people are OK with whereas the Babylon 5 fans recommend that you just treat it like the series ends after season four, which is entirely because the studio shenaned. Also, both DS9 and B5 really could use a nice HDTV remaster and aren’t getting one.

I guess, as far as the DS9 part of the tale, it’s a bit like Deadpool and Wolverine, where they didn’t want to revisit or change the ending for the Logan movie and therefore had to zig-zag around the story. And creativity sometimes needs some good constraints because Deadpool and Wolverine worked out quite well. But the ending of DS9 was constrained because of what Avery Brooks required out of the Sisko characterization. He said he’d be back, which was something very important for him to keep, and they couldn’t violate that. At the same time, he’s retired from acting and overall done with Sisko, which is also his right. So, we end up with Confronting the Unexplainable.

We saw Jake from what he chose to write down, translated into a personality by SAM. We didn’t see Jake. So one might assume any number of things ranging from that Ben Sisko came back and Jake didn’t record it to something more prosaic. And, I dono, we’ve lost some of the elders in my family lately and I guess I have thoughts about how one might interpret taking care of someone from beyond the grave that I won’t go into. But I can accept how it was written.

I was really really slow. I know what Tawny Newsome looks and sounds like. Illa looked familiar but I couldn’t put it together that she was Illa Dax until the reveal and I didn’t put it together that it was Tawny. For a few, I thought they’d brought Terry Farrell back because of the Jadzia Dax manerisms being so spot-on at points, then I read that it was Tawny and suddenly it made sense.

It’s neat to have a Black co-writer doing an episode that focused on a Black character doing a tribute to a show with the first Black captain. So while there’s the very practical story aspects of Jake and SAM, there’s also the meta aspect of the Black experience that the show is able to put a mirror to. I loved Sisko as a character and Avery Brooks’s interpretation of the character but it’s never going to hit me the same way to have seen him for the first time on DS9 as it did for Tawny.

And, conversely, there’s no in-universe reason why the form that SAM took had to be a Black girl, but I like the way the puzzle pieces of casting and character and story are fitting together to bring us here.

I was thinking that I really love the trio of Dzolo, B’Avi, and Kyle and was hoping that we’d see more of them so … we saw more of them. Dzolo and B’Avi always trying to start shit with the two-people one-two punch and Kyle laughing at Jay-Den’s jokes instead.

We see Genesis with her hair down in this episode of the first time.

The San Francisco shots look like they’ve got the extant buildings in the foreground and then substituted skyscrapers as you go back. I am happy that the eyesore that is Salesforce Tower is not present. Whatever out-of-focus building backdrop they found probably in Toronto felt San Francisco enough, LOL.

Digression to San Francisco history, by the way. Today people think of the city as the home of tech and, by extension, tech douchebags. During World War II, it was a critical Navy town for the west coast. There were Navy bars. There was a complicated sort of history for being gay in the military during that era – Check out Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II by Allan Bérubé. The military had to back off on the persecution of gay sailors during WWII because they needed everybody they could have. Drag performers, gay or stright, were men and therefore could be in combat zones and the drag show was a ray of light in dark times. Then between after the war and until they started to draw down the naval presence in San Francisco, where they suddenly didn’t need every person they could, they went back to kicking gay people out of the military. Thus, lot of people got kicked out of the Navy for being gay so they’d get cut loose and, being unwilling to return home after being outed, settled down to slummy inexpensive Victorian houses in the unfashionable Castro neighborhood of San Francisco until it became a hotbed of gay culture.

So, a Starfleet bar with a drag queen tending bar where Kyle and Jay-Den (in a skant) share a moment… yeah, that’s to the heart of what the city once was and still halfassedly tries to pretend to be.

And, on that, I guess we can go back to a video from 2022 about skants and skirts where it’s pointed out that the real thing missing, so far, was that none of the lead male characters appeared in the skant and point out that Jay-Den is one of the leads.

I don’t like the intense save-the-universe plotline that is standard in shows these days. But I do appreciate how we’ve got a lot of call-back to past episodes. We have the change from SAM in the first episode trying to greet people and getting ignored to now having her getting greeted her way. We have the aftermath of the Vitus Reflex prank.

Someone in the writers room has seen Red Dwarf. There’s the Gazpacho incident but also there’s the whole Rimmer/Lister vibe that Kelrec and Ake have. Except they are stealing like artists, because Kelrec isn’t a Rimmer and Ake isn’t a Lister.

I think the B plot, Kelrec’s big diplomatic incident, was a little squeezed and not quite so engaging, but again it does harken back to Capt Ake’s big lesson to the students from ep 3, that you can use patience and empathy to defeat your opponent.

So, yeah, I think I was watching it expecting for this to be the episode that really really really didn’t land. It really could have landed really badly. But it came out pretty good, actually and I think that’s credit to the writers.

We’re like the hell’s angels. We don’t recruit, we just recognize.

The way I see it, each of the cadet main characters could be a Wesley Crusher but isn’t.

Yah, wasn’t really trying to glorify the Ottomans. Have to think about how to re-state that more neutrally.

The Klingon Episode. Also the Jay-Den episode. We really haven’t gotten a lot of details about Jay-Den before this episode, just vague hints.

The Klingons are near and dear to my heart, I’ve not gotten around to watching the Discovery and DS9 and Enterprise eps, but I do so love some of the classic tales and not-canon stuff from John M. Ford.

I can totally see the Klingons being hit hard from the Burn specifically because of the martial society. Learn to run a ship’s reactor by running a nearly identical reactor on land, whereas less martial societies would look at the stack of antimatter containment chambers that would blow a sizable chunk out of an inhabited planet and decide that … maybe not.

Also, if you know your history of the Middle East, one way to view the extremists there is that, in centuries past, the Ottoman empire tried to be more cosmopolitan and eventually Europe and then the US went in and took advantage of them. Ergo, they tried being like the rest of the world and that didn’t work, let’s be more fundamentalist. So, whatever direction they were moving in the past, I can see how the Burn would cause them to be fundamentalist-Klingon in less than a century. It making less sense from an American perspective is probably a good thing – the US has caused so much damage to the Middle East and Africa while bumbling around lacking empathy.

They’ve clearly set up some thrown bricks here? When Jay-Den was a bit weird with how he spoke in the first ep, that was here to set up him really messing it up in the debate society not because he was having problems getting the character’s voice right or because they were having problems digitally altering it. When he freaks out in the first ep about healing Lora Thok that’s because he had just not healed his brother 18 months prior.

Poor Terry Farrell did a damn good job while being thrown through the wringer to represent being Dax, ancient joined Trill, but … Holly Hunter gets to show Capt Ake being similarly old without the benefit of swapping bodies. Including a complicated relationship with Obel and personnel files that took the dadmiral seven years to work through.

Also note that David Keeley is white and … they kept his skin light for Obel. Like, compare how he looks to how Gowron looked. Taking white people and darkening their skin to make them look black is … totally offensive these days. But Klingons are within the normal range of human melanin, which makes it somewhere less offensive than blackface but something that people have changed how they look at these days. A lot of people I know in the cosplay community are dead-set against the darkening or lightening of skin (not counting changing skin colors to something not on the human melanin skin color range) and this thread of discourse is fairly new.

I kinda figured out where the story was supposed to go the second that Faan Alpha was mentioned that it was going to be important for the Klingons to conquer their own new planet. Also, I had just lately watched reruns of “Heart of Glory” and “A Matter Of Honor” and there’s a lot of shared story beats. Presumably all parties knew that it was not a battle-battle but, like in “A Matter Of Honor” they needed to do the ritual and get punched in the face. Hence the USS Riker. What did come as a bit of a surprise was Lura Thok being the Klingon elder and re-interpreting Jay-Den’s father’s arrow missing.

It feels like maybe Capt Ake should have come up with the solution on her own. Riker did, while being distracted by the question “One … or both?” Then again, there’s a certain amount of Starfleet in a Klingon suggesting a course of action for his own culture vs a part-Lanthanite Human saying it and I don’t think it would have made Jay-Den’s path better for him to have gotten the idea that Capt Ake came up with it herself ahead of him.

I found the debate club the least interesting part of the story? I love that we’re returning to the Judge Aaron Satie quote and showing the kids trying to learn, but for me the more important notes was the other kids interacting with Jay-Den outside of the debate. But … there’s a thing there. The colonialist perspective is that we’ve got things to help the “lesser” people of the world so of course we should go in and fix things, but at the same time we’ve got a really really really bad history of really screwing things up. The kids will join the Academy with a perspective that they are there to fix the problems of the universe and will need to become Captains who can answer questions like Tuvix and part of how they get there is not just making good arguments but making bad ones. I dono, not the debate club type.

But, yah, there’s that Problematic Masculinity point with Jay-Den, amplified with Klingon-ness about how one deals with their own trauma… by bristling and being angry instead of by being open.

Lesee, so things keep moving quickly so while a it would be nice to have a little more time to “breathe” and let Caleb and Reymi be bigger assholes to each other, there’s only so many episodes in the season? Lura Thok was all mentor no drill sergeant.

Oh, and the musical callbacks. One thing that I noticed with the Trek movies is that they’d work their own themes in while preserving the big core TMP theme within the larger suite. Klingon music, the TMP theme, the TOS theme … one thing that was I guess less fun about all of the Trek after mid-series TNG was that they did not really preserve the musical language. The soundtrack here was just grand and I’m realizing that I’ve been mad about post-mid-TNG soundtracks for decades now.

I’m not the person to suggest the what, but I’d love to see someone taking the non-white perspective in the writer’s room figure out how to return to Klingons in this timeline in a later piece of Trek. Klingons are brash storytellers. The truth of the American Revolution is far less grand and much more nuanced if you study it in college but the not-quite-as-brash American storytellers turned into it’s own cultural mythology. A follow-up could show, on one hand, the grand mythos of New Qonos. On the other hand, a way of honor and warrior culture that is … a little more Jay-Den and a lot less corrupt.

Ep 2 thoughts …

So, in present day history, we’ve got the US Space Force, newly created, with a logo that looks an awful lot like the Star Trek arrowhead. But Trek has gone back many times to remind people that Starfleet is not the military. There’s a lot to unpack here because actually exploring means that you are potentially wandering off into dangerous places, where you need either semblance of order and discipline (think civilian ships where the skipper tells you to do something) or the ability to defend yourself against someone who might not be friendly.

Thus, Lura’s drill sergeant act fits this model. She doesn’t want to turn you into a killer so much as making sure that you can stare death in the face and not loose your shit.

Likewise, if they write the whole plot with the War College and the Academy next door to each other right, there’s the potential to restate the original base idea behind Star Trek TOS but adjusted for the present day. There was a lot of back and forth about the rank braids on people’s sleeves because they wanted something that shows authority but isn’t too military. Kirk’s stripes were two solid stripes and a broken stripe, whereas the navy would have him wearing four solid stripes because emotionally Gene thought that was the right combination of Authority but not Military.

The Vulcan xenomythology class was perfect, for me. You’ve got one of the many great Vulcan deadpan moments as well as keeping to the very Starfleet ideal of understanding.

Given that they did not know what the heck to do with Troi’s powers as an empath and if they had Luxana Troi there the whole time, the episodes would have been boring a.f. as she’d mind-read powers out of everybody, I guess I respect the choice to play with betazeding. I’m interested in the potential for Tarima in the War College with everything just because I like the never-explored idea that Troi as Counselor was supposed to be Counsel and not Therapist.

Tarima’s cinematography is almost cloying? Science fiction, coming from its roots as boy’s magazine fodder, is always a little bit about that eternal quest to find exotic, sometimes alien, women … and bang them. And the camera lingers, kinda obviously. We have had a bunch of scenes with Caleb shirtless in Ep 1 where the colored lights gave him some amazing muscle definition so it’s equal opportunity. It was far better than Alice Eve’s somewhat notorious underwear scene in Into Darkness.

The Namibia instead of Paris for the Federation HQ was a nice throwaway line.

The … international dialogue in front of the Academy was … something. I really like the 1988 play “A Walk in the Woods” by Lee Blessing and they way they showed the process was two diplomats going for a series of casual walks where they do not at all talk about the negotiations over the course of a year. You could have written almost the same story between Caleb and Tarima and migrated a decent percentage of the story beats over as-is but also I think you’d loose the audience. So having the speeches with an audience where leaders make their demands and then following up most of the time with something else got the idea across while keeping things moving. And I do think that Tarima’s primary goal was to be a member of the diplomatic staff where actually liking Caleb was more accidental. Who better to get the real story than the person who is the least Starfleet out of the entire cadet corps?

Also, diplomacy was always one of the things that Starfleet did, not so much being a diplomat at an embassy but understanding how to avoid conflict and make a good first impression on the species you made first contact with.

Caleb keeps chafing at the order of things and that’s good. I’m assuming that Nahla intentionally put Caleb and Darem in the same room. And so there’s his quest for his mother (however they are going to resolve that) and disrespect but at the same time he’s able to put himself second, albeit with effort. One bit I really like is the reference to his mother studying physics. An oft-ignored thread of Trek was the waste of people’s lives in the 20th century on account of them not having access to that which they need to grow on account of today’s capitalist system. And then also Nahla cutting him off with “It’s not about you”

I knew that there was a Red Dwarf reference coming in Ep2 and it still caught me unawares.

I am curious if they are going to reveal anything about Gideon S. Turner. I can’t entirely tell if Caleb is making stuff up and Tarima is playing along or if Gideon S. Turner has a very strange history. It would be cool if it was a brick joke.

Caleb, Ocam, and Darem all in a room has some serious potential to show … 31st century bros, charmingly?

It really got me towards the end, the idea that rebuilding does not mean rebuilding it exactly as it once was.

So, yeah, it’s landing well for me. Nahla keeps serving as my surrogate in the story because … I watched TNG when it was new and I do think about the world we’re handing the kids of new generation. Uniting the galaxy in peace and understanding is what the Federation was supposed to be out and if they can keep the story moving well enough people won’t be yearning for a big battle scene that kills off a bunch of characters?

My theory is that they are shooting with the spoons and then some team of poor schmucks gets the lucky assignment of burning 12+ hour days 7 days a week to make the spoons look less spoon.

“lucky” assignment.

It kinda makes sense? Spiderman and Deadpool both they spent a lot of time fixing the mask to make the body language work.

The way I’ve been looking at it, if you want a chance at the starships, start with the spandex.

If we want a good and honest chance of being able to do interstellar travel of any sort, we’re not going to get there by building an Enterprise and then hope that someone cooks up a warp drive for it before we finish ruining our only planet.

Maybe physics is all wrong and there really is a warp drive to be had. If there is one, it’s not the sort of thing you can count on. We have to survive as a species until it happens.

Conversely, there’s a real easy bet to be had. In 1.29 million years, Gliese 710 will be 0.17 light years away. The GAIA mission has identified some other candidate stars that are going to get fairly close sooner. So there’s a solarpunk space travel bet of simply providing a stable society over the long term such that we can surf the stars.

Solarpunk is kinda the version that starts with the spandex. I’m at the point in my life where I kinda hate the whole Eugenics-wars/World-War-III thread to Trek because it kinda mutated away from the hopeful idea that we can survive a downturn into the idea that the collapse will create a new world which is … risky.

The last time the fires hit my area I was watching the fire progress via Purple Air sensors. If this one sensor was still sending, then my friend’s place up in the mountains was probably OK. Seems … kinda obvious almost?

The hard-to-solve problem with the news is that reporting on suicides causes suicide (as in: more people commit suicide, not just people who were on the ledge decided to go) yet people also want to know things.

I’m unclear if the usual disclaimers added to the article actually help or just are the only sounds-like-it-might-help thing that comes to mind so at least the publisher can feel better about the added deaths that, statistically speaking, they might be causing. I just remember it being covered in one of my college gened classes and the way it was presented was that everybody threw up their hands in frustration and gave up.

An acquaintance who screwed up her leg really bad and went through a whole process of getting bolted back together et al decided that she wasn’t going to tell people what happened. Because everybody always asks “how’d you do it?” as if it was some curse that she had personally triggered that they could avoid. And I thought about how the first question in my mind was “how’d you do it?” and I guess it made me think about the inanity of making sure to check for flying herring while traveling backwards hanging out the window of a train going between Albuquerque and Phoenix after having signed up for a triple indemnity life insurance plan… or something like that.

The only exception, of course, is you are doing something that the news orgs consider “wrong” like doing drugs or being certain categories of mentally ill or riding a bicycle for transportation.

I feel like Starfleet in Trek accidentally but directly led to the modern US Space Force.

Trek always had to soft-sell some of the socialist ideals (e.g. “we don’t need cash” without really explaining how things really do work) and then also a lot of science fiction that was popular in the more literary side of things during the 80s was actually frighteningly right-wing.

There’s not really a good version of conservatism that works in this modern era, especially when you come to where the parties are staked in the US, but even in general. You can’t have a modern society with all of the complexities and interrelations and cost and then have it be entirely hands-off conservative capitalism. This is why even when you talk to people who are nominally part of the right wing and actually go through the checkboxes of things that they must necessarily adhere to, you see a lot of people who are so-called RINO people … and then a bunch of weirdos who nobody likes.

The brain’s got a bunch of structures probably to prevent us from spiraling into depression when we were hunting the African savanna when our buddy got eaten by a tiger and there wasn’t anything we could have maybe done about that that cause today’s cognitive dissonance.

So basically the only way you can get a frighteningly actually unpopular platform through the electorate is by taking advantage of cognitive dissonance. Because you have to project this idea that a fundamentally backwards idea is going to move us forwards somehow.

If Copyright hadn’t been extended for so many centuries, Trek characters would already be in the public domain and we’d see them fictionally used much in the way that we use all of the characters from actual public domain works. Shakespearean heroes, for example. But, even as things are now, the characters of Trek have had such a presence in the media scene that they do kinda take that aspect on. Thus, basically repeating the plot of part of the Babylon 5 episode “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars” where you have the crew of Babylon 5 being used by a new fascist empire being holographically simulated to say 1984-esque things… one of the weapons to maintain a state of cognitive dissonance is to go back and kinda put fascist words into leftist mouths.

So it’s a bit of an accident on the part of the person, who is being dragged along politically, but it’s very much part of the conservative movement to “reclaim” old media and the relatively milquetoast treatment of alternatives to capitalism and a complete abandonment of queer issues in middle-era Trek makes that kinda easy, which I guess is why NuTrek does go through some pains to state things a bit more forcefully.

Well, one option, which can be pushing the boundaries of selfhosted for some, would be to use a hosted k8s service for your public-facing stuff and then a home real k8s cluster for the rest of it.

A few years ago now I was thinking that it was about time for me to upgrade my desktop (with a case that dates back to 2000 or so, I guess they call them “sleepers” these days?) because some of my usual computer things were taking too long.

And I realized that Intel was selling the 12th generation of the Core at that point, which means the next one was a 13th generation and I dono, I’m not superstitious but I figured if anything went wrong I’d feel pretty darn silly. So I pulled the trigger and got a 12th gen core processor and motherboard and a few other bits.

This is quite amusing in retrospect.

From the article: “Tesla began delivering the Blade Runner-inspired truck in November 2023”

Me: Fuck you. That is an insult to Syd Mead’s legacy.

I hope that, at some point in the series, they reference his prized bottle of Chateau Picard that he’s been saving for a special occasion.

It’s the Pravda of the VC-centric tech scene and has been for a very very long time.

(I am referencing the Soviet Union implementation thereof, for clarity)

It’s never going to bite the hand that feeds it, where people will voting-ring or the owners will just force-edit it to prevent that from happening. Outside of that, sometimes it might say something useful. The problem is that today’s problems are not because of a lack of advanced mathematics understanding or new programming languages.

I mean, I think he’s a textbook example of why not to do drugs and why we need to eat the rich, but I can understand the logic here.

When you navigate a car as a human, you are using vision, not LIDAR. Outside of a few edge cases, you aren’t even using parallax to judge distances. Ergo, a LIDAR is not going to see the text on a sign, the reflective stripes on a truck, etc. And it gets confused differently than the eye, absorbed by different wavelengths, etc. And you can jam LIDAR if you want. Thus, if we were content to wait until the self-driving-car is actually safe before throwing it out into the world, we’d probably want the standard to be that it navigates as well as a human in all situations using only visual sensors.

Except, there’s some huge problems that the human visual cortex makes look real easy. Because “all situations” means “understanding that there’s a kid playing in the street from visual cues so I’m going to assume they are going to do something dumb” or “some guy put a warning sign on the road and it’s got really bad handwriting”

Thus, the real problem is that he’s not using LIDAR as harm reduction for a patently unsafe product, where the various failure modes of the LIDAR-equipped self-driving cars show that those aren’t safe either.

It’s important to realize that the nerd you saw on the news has always been someone wearing nerd as a costume and the entire history of technology is loaded with examples of the real nerd being marginalized. It’s just that in ages past the VC’s would give a smaller amount of money and require the startup to go through concrete milestones to unlock all of it so there was more of a chance for the founder’s dreams to smack up against reality before they were $230m in the hole with no product worth selling.

… you mean the skies are looking Fantastic tonight?