For me, it was more of "Holy shit, tomorrow is MARCH already??"
ur obvs not a Pisces
Nope, that's not it. Cause I'm a Pisces and I'm definitely feeling the "Shit, tomorrow is March?" thing here as well.
Edit: Though, to be honest, it flips between "Already March?" and "Still March?" frequently.
see317 on
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Element BrianPeanut Butter ShillRegistered Userregular
edited February 2022
I think the cold snap across the country may have contributed a bit to it too. Late Feb ended up more cold than most of winter at a time when people are expecting rain and the sun coming back
to keep this star trek aligned, remember when Keiko got turned into a child and then was miffed at Miles for not being into it? Poor guy can't win.
I'm watching Discovery on Paramount+, and they have these ads for some shitty Star Trek mobile game, but they got Frakes, Spiner, and Burton to be in them, and it's goddamn adorably bad. I get the sense they all went out to Chili's and had a few margaritas then drove over to an abdandoned warehouse in Burbank, still a little tipsy, to record these scripts on a green screen. I hope they got paid well, but I am certain they did not.
Kurtzman, for all his faults, wants the various games to be part of a big happy family. He got Kate Mulgrew and a bunch of Discovery actors to do voice gigs for STO, schedules fell through with Patrick Stewart a couple years ago (Picard was supposed to be in Measure of Morality) but there's persistent rumors that it's not completely dead. He probably does the same for the mobile crap.
And now that Tomas Marrone and Hector Ortiz from Cryptic have shown up in show credits it looks like he maybe wants it to be a two way road. I mean, yeah, I still say he's worse for the show than Berman and Braga ever were, guy really wants his damn MCU. We'll see what comes of it, Cryptic is doing an announcement on Wednesday or Thursday, so...
On the subject of mobile crap, they're making a Lower Decks game that looks like Timelines with Badgey.
There was a commercial that aired in the late 90s of a goofy family of hardcore Trekkies who were living their best Trek life and ordering merch from an official catalog that was very similar to The Highlander catalog floating around at the same time.
My wife and I just finished watching TNG. I had seen it as a child but much of it was barely remembered. I am glad it held up as well as it did. I remember it being very important to my taste in science fiction. Watched the first episode of deep space nine tonight and even though I was over when it was on, I don't remember it as well. Maybe after that we can try Picard or Discovery. Sadly did not enjoy any of the lower decks episodes I watched. Just not a fan of whatever kind of humor you want to call them.
I'm watching Discovery on Paramount+, and they have these ads for some shitty Star Trek mobile game, but they got Frakes, Spiner, and Burton to be in them, and it's goddamn adorably bad. I get the sense they all went out to Chili's and had a few margaritas then drove over to an abdandoned warehouse in Burbank, still a little tipsy, to record these scripts on a green screen. I hope they got paid well, but I am certain they did not.
All caught up on Discovery and I gotta say, S4E10 especially I feel like this show is
You know the cliche “finding its feet” I always kind of thought of as the showrunners figuring out how to use the cast and writers room they had, to learn how to dial in the kinds of stories that combination tell well and then tell those stories.
Discovery, though, feels more to me like all the different people working to tell the story are dialing in how to best tell the kind of Trek story they have been trying to tell all along. Like, the Cosmic Threat is still there, and the moments of connection between and among the crew are still there, but the proportions and focus are refined? Watching S4 has made the first three seasons retroactively better in my mind, because thinking back on them I can more clearly see what they were aiming for, even when they missed the mark a little (or a lot).
Figure out a way to bring Rainn Wilson’s Harcourt Fenton Mudd into the 32nd Century and I would be perfectly content with this Discovery.
It's going to end in a compromise of both solutions. They'll need to make contact and understand 10C, but something will happen that means they have to destroy the controller anyway.
Just so Book and Tarka won't have spent the whole season being nothing but an obstacle.
I'd guess it's an automated system or something that doesn't know it's makers have gone extinct. They'll have to find a way to communicate to get it to stop, but the current Earth-threatening DMA will be too close to shut down in time, so time for explosions.
The anomaly HAS to be some new way to torture O'Brien. It HAS to be.
"Admiral, the anomaly wasn't destroyed. It collapsed into an anti-time eruption. It's now traveling backwards in time and was heading in the direction of the Bajoran Wormhole. If anyone were to come into contact with it they could undergo severe temporal dislocation."
Edit: the best part of this is that it could be one of several sufferings.
STO tie in is well done, nice "I know that ship," moment for the players and viewers get a fleet that actually has different ships indifferent roles. We the Inquiry-class again, but also a bunch of other familiar classes (the original Excelsior is still in service).
As for the ships borrowed from the game, they're mostly 2400's variants classic Starfleet designs. The Ross, Sutherland, and Reliant are Galaxy, Nebula, and Miranda variants respectively. The main action piece of episode one takes place on the USS Stargazer, which is a Gagarin-class, a modernization of Discovery's Buran. Kind of disappointed not to see the Odyssey, since CBS owns it, but the Gagarin is a beautiful ship all upscaled and greebled up for TV.
The Ross is a double crossover in a way. That was made as a crossover with the Star Trek Adventures stream Clear Skies.
Story:
Interesting to see a more sinister Q. During the preview at the end, there's a clip where he says, "This is not a test. This is a penance." Much more like the early seasons Q, when he stood as judicator over humanity's continued existence, rather than the later season Q who was more of an unfriendly and scolding mentor.
Interesting to see what the Borg are in the canon timeline, and it jives better with STO than with the novels where the Borg ran rampant post-Voyager (in STO the Borg are still numerous, but weakened from a string of catastrophic defeats and direct attacks on their collective intelligence and now can be fought conventionally rather than finding the cheat codes). Between species 8472, Voyager's rampage in the finale, and all the other groups we see pulling the loose threads of the Collective this is a weakened and desperate Borg. It's not clear if their request to negotiate was in earnest or not - Seven fired first and the Borg made a point not to retaliate with lethal force or assimilate the crew, and everything goes sideways before we see what they wanted with the Stargazer.
Still doing the mystery box shit so at this point we know literally nothing of what's going on, ESPECIALLY the stuff we do know. But it's already addressed season 1's gravest sin.
the new Stargazer isn't a Gagarin, Gagarin is a modernized Shepard from DISCO; two nacelles, nearly flat profile. According to the designer (via Twitter and Memory Alpha), Rios' new four-nacelled ride is a Sagan-class.
"I think the real final frontier is time". From the man who has -either personally or those under his command- been involved in time shenanigans no less than *9* times.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
"I think the real final frontier is time". From the man who has -either personally or those under his command- been involved in time shenanigans no less than *9* times.
I'm just waiting for Picard to give the speech that they have to fix the past to save the future... again. Like he's just so sick of this shit by now, he already kicked the Borg's ass in the past.
the wine harvest had the most hilarious little thing. It's partially done by drones, that are anti-gravity propelled, and use teleportation to pluck the grapes. But then they transport them into little buckets that just stand around on the drones
the wine harvest had the most hilarious little thing. It's partially done by drones, that are anti-gravity propelled, and use teleportation to pluck the grapes. But then they transport them into little buckets that just stand around on the drones
You know, that kinda makes me wonder about automation and labour in the Trek universe.
At one extreme, if you want wine, you can just replicate a bottle of any of the finest vintages in history, or build a fully-automated mass-producing wine factory on an asteroid somewhere. At the other extreme, you can go full Amish, pick the grapes by hand and stomp them by foot. Clearly, neither extreme is desirable - people want some measure of authenticity in their wine so replication and factories are out, but on the other hand 100% labour is both wasteful of effort and too low production to be useful.
So that leaves us with the middle ground - automate some of the production, but leave labour in the loop for authenticity. The Picard winery seems to be on that spectrum: you have drones replacing workers, but those drones replicate the work workers did, picking grapes and putting them in buckets to physically move them to processing, while Picard himself becomes something of an overseer for the worker drones. Other compromises are possible, higher-labour ones such as having workers walk through the fields with transporter guns like in Gambit to quickly and easily pick and move grapes, or lower-labour ones such as having the overseer use long-range sensors to detect ripe grapes and beam them directly without leaving their office. I don't think any of them are inherently preferable to the others, unless you're some hipster wine-bro who "can really taste the teleportation in this vintage". So long as your winery implements some balance of labour and automation you're responding to customer needs, and that balance is basically up to you.
After watching most of season 1 of TOS I have decided that Enterprises comitment to half exploring a sci fi idea so they can have an action scene is the most accurate to the original vision.
Like god there’s being some good episodes and some fun but bad ones. It’s incredible though how much the format of ‘cool sci fi, half written characters, too much action (with the same torn Kirk shirt)’ exists for the majority of the show so far.
I'm really enjoying S4 of Discovery, but the writers are definitely are finding their footing in this new setting. S3 was much tighter (though they did have the benefit of tying multiple seasons of loose ends for plot fodder). Some of the stuff this season has been downright hammy. Every moment between two crew members is a somber exchange of emotion and understanding while the universe is burning outside. It's like watching a bizarro-world version of Crimson Tide where everyone is waiting to launch a nuke but has to wait for Denzel and Gene Hackman to finish their delicately scipted argument.
I'm also getting increasing cynical when it comes to Paramount's handling of Trek as a franchise. We've got nicely delineated Trek blocks now: Nostalgia Trek, Kids' Trek, Progressive Trek, Conservative Trek...It feels about as organic as vat grown meat.
Eh, no real complaint here. Just weird aging through decades of a creative work that keeps getting buried, disinterred, rebuilt with bionic parts, killed, buried, and dug up again to repeat.
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daveNYCWhy universe hate Waspinator?Registered Userregular
the wine harvest had the most hilarious little thing. It's partially done by drones, that are anti-gravity propelled, and use teleportation to pluck the grapes. But then they transport them into little buckets that just stand around on the drones
You know, that kinda makes me wonder about automation and labour in the Trek universe.
At one extreme, if you want wine, you can just replicate a bottle of any of the finest vintages in history, or build a fully-automated mass-producing wine factory on an asteroid somewhere. At the other extreme, you can go full Amish, pick the grapes by hand and stomp them by foot. Clearly, neither extreme is desirable - people want some measure of authenticity in their wine so replication and factories are out, but on the other hand 100% labour is both wasteful of effort and too low production to be useful.
So that leaves us with the middle ground - automate some of the production, but leave labour in the loop for authenticity. The Picard winery seems to be on that spectrum: you have drones replacing workers, but those drones replicate the work workers did, picking grapes and putting them in buckets to physically move them to processing, while Picard himself becomes something of an overseer for the worker drones. Other compromises are possible, higher-labour ones such as having workers walk through the fields with transporter guns like in Gambit to quickly and easily pick and move grapes, or lower-labour ones such as having the overseer use long-range sensors to detect ripe grapes and beam them directly without leaving their office. I don't think any of them are inherently preferable to the others, unless you're some hipster wine-bro who "can really taste the teleportation in this vintage". So long as your winery implements some balance of labour and automation you're responding to customer needs, and that balance is basically up to you.
The Federation is pretty much post-scarcity so I don't think that efficiency and production capacity are that important to the decision of how much to automate. At least not in the same way that we think of things like efficiency and production. Whatever a vineyard does is mostly just going to depend on what the vintners enjoy doing, or at least think is important to do for reasons that likely have no impact on the wine. Like that guy in The Culture who hung out at a bar on a GSV cleaning tables. Just for fun.
Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited March 2022
I would also imagine that in a post-scarcity society, giving people gifts of traditional wine would be quite significant. Even though it's explained in Orville rather than a Trek show, there is still an economy of reputation in play. Anybody can replicate some wine, but you have to know people to get the "real deal". And when anybody can order up that wine in seconds but somebody gifts you a bottle of real wine that used real grapes and required somebody's own personal time to make, that's gotta be pretty meaningful.
I would bet anything that, within Federation society, people seeking hand-made originals of anything would absolutely be the norm. Not to be snobby or anything, but just because it seems a society that is perfectly willing to use replicators but also fully appreciates a set of a hand-forged eating utensils or a cup somebody personally made from glass.
the wine harvest had the most hilarious little thing. It's partially done by drones, that are anti-gravity propelled, and use teleportation to pluck the grapes. But then they transport them into little buckets that just stand around on the drones
You know, that kinda makes me wonder about automation and labour in the Trek universe.
At one extreme, if you want wine, you can just replicate a bottle of any of the finest vintages in history, or build a fully-automated mass-producing wine factory on an asteroid somewhere. At the other extreme, you can go full Amish, pick the grapes by hand and stomp them by foot. Clearly, neither extreme is desirable - people want some measure of authenticity in their wine so replication and factories are out, but on the other hand 100% labour is both wasteful of effort and too low production to be useful.
So that leaves us with the middle ground - automate some of the production, but leave labour in the loop for authenticity. The Picard winery seems to be on that spectrum: you have drones replacing workers, but those drones replicate the work workers did, picking grapes and putting them in buckets to physically move them to processing, while Picard himself becomes something of an overseer for the worker drones. Other compromises are possible, higher-labour ones such as having workers walk through the fields with transporter guns like in Gambit to quickly and easily pick and move grapes, or lower-labour ones such as having the overseer use long-range sensors to detect ripe grapes and beam them directly without leaving their office. I don't think any of them are inherently preferable to the others, unless you're some hipster wine-bro who "can really taste the teleportation in this vintage". So long as your winery implements some balance of labour and automation you're responding to customer needs, and that balance is basically up to you.
The Federation is pretty much post-scarcity so I don't think that efficiency and production capacity are that important to the decision of how much to automate. At least not in the same way that we think of things like efficiency and production. Whatever a vineyard does is mostly just going to depend on what the vintners enjoy doing, or at least think is important to do for reasons that likely have no impact on the wine. Like that guy in The Culture who hung out at a bar on a GSV cleaning tables. Just for fun.
That's literally why Sisko's dad runs a resturaunt: because he likes cooking people food.
the wine harvest had the most hilarious little thing. It's partially done by drones, that are anti-gravity propelled, and use teleportation to pluck the grapes. But then they transport them into little buckets that just stand around on the drones
You know, that kinda makes me wonder about automation and labour in the Trek universe.
At one extreme, if you want wine, you can just replicate a bottle of any of the finest vintages in history, or build a fully-automated mass-producing wine factory on an asteroid somewhere. At the other extreme, you can go full Amish, pick the grapes by hand and stomp them by foot. Clearly, neither extreme is desirable - people want some measure of authenticity in their wine so replication and factories are out, but on the other hand 100% labour is both wasteful of effort and too low production to be useful.
So that leaves us with the middle ground - automate some of the production, but leave labour in the loop for authenticity. The Picard winery seems to be on that spectrum: you have drones replacing workers, but those drones replicate the work workers did, picking grapes and putting them in buckets to physically move them to processing, while Picard himself becomes something of an overseer for the worker drones. Other compromises are possible, higher-labour ones such as having workers walk through the fields with transporter guns like in Gambit to quickly and easily pick and move grapes, or lower-labour ones such as having the overseer use long-range sensors to detect ripe grapes and beam them directly without leaving their office. I don't think any of them are inherently preferable to the others, unless you're some hipster wine-bro who "can really taste the teleportation in this vintage". So long as your winery implements some balance of labour and automation you're responding to customer needs, and that balance is basically up to you.
The Federation is pretty much post-scarcity so I don't think that efficiency and production capacity are that important to the decision of how much to automate. At least not in the same way that we think of things like efficiency and production. Whatever a vineyard does is mostly just going to depend on what the vintners enjoy doing, or at least think is important to do for reasons that likely have no impact on the wine. Like that guy in The Culture who hung out at a bar on a GSV cleaning tables. Just for fun.
ok, but you just described a scarcity.
You're telling me that a bunch of Starfleet cadets don't want to get sloshed on Chateau Picard, and you're telling me that some enterprising individual doesn't see that and exploit the lack of non replicated wine?
All you need is a hydroponics lab that can automatically replicate all the conditions of the Picard estate, grow the grapes and have holograms stomp on them for that extra level of authenticity. All that's left is figuring out how many Chateau Picard bottles it takes to buy an original Buck Bokai card.
In general I view star treks post scarcity as not the end to all scarce products.
Instead it’s a limit to how capitalist it can really be. There’s obviously original Picard wine that has value as a gift and a product for savants to enjoy. It’s limited by the fact that those vintages are all scanned into data bases.
So the ‘real’ thing has prestige only in the social sense but is identical to what anyone with that access to replicators has after a month or two.
Like, the sad fact is, especially with interaction with cultures like the Ferangi, that there is going to be some black market (or sub market) scarcity and trade going on, but ideally that's all for "wants" and everyone's "needs" are entirely met. So your food, water, shelter, healthcare needs are all met, and if you just want to enjoy a simple bottle of win, you can replicate that shit. However, if you want to go all the way down the wine hobbiest path and try a 2210 bottle of Chateau Picard or a 2197 bottle of Blood Wine, your either going to need to be gifted it, or find someway of trading/paying for it.
The important thing is nobody is starving, ill or exposed because they don't have money.
the wine harvest had the most hilarious little thing. It's partially done by drones, that are anti-gravity propelled, and use teleportation to pluck the grapes. But then they transport them into little buckets that just stand around on the drones
You know, that kinda makes me wonder about automation and labour in the Trek universe.
At one extreme, if you want wine, you can just replicate a bottle of any of the finest vintages in history, or build a fully-automated mass-producing wine factory on an asteroid somewhere. At the other extreme, you can go full Amish, pick the grapes by hand and stomp them by foot. Clearly, neither extreme is desirable - people want some measure of authenticity in their wine so replication and factories are out, but on the other hand 100% labour is both wasteful of effort and too low production to be useful.
So that leaves us with the middle ground - automate some of the production, but leave labour in the loop for authenticity. The Picard winery seems to be on that spectrum: you have drones replacing workers, but those drones replicate the work workers did, picking grapes and putting them in buckets to physically move them to processing, while Picard himself becomes something of an overseer for the worker drones. Other compromises are possible, higher-labour ones such as having workers walk through the fields with transporter guns like in Gambit to quickly and easily pick and move grapes, or lower-labour ones such as having the overseer use long-range sensors to detect ripe grapes and beam them directly without leaving their office. I don't think any of them are inherently preferable to the others, unless you're some hipster wine-bro who "can really taste the teleportation in this vintage". So long as your winery implements some balance of labour and automation you're responding to customer needs, and that balance is basically up to you.
The Federation is pretty much post-scarcity so I don't think that efficiency and production capacity are that important to the decision of how much to automate. At least not in the same way that we think of things like efficiency and production. Whatever a vineyard does is mostly just going to depend on what the vintners enjoy doing, or at least think is important to do for reasons that likely have no impact on the wine. Like that guy in The Culture who hung out at a bar on a GSV cleaning tables. Just for fun.
ok, but you just described a scarcity.
You're telling me that a bunch of Starfleet cadets don't want to get sloshed on Chateau Picard, and you're telling me that some enterprising individual doesn't see that and exploit the lack of non replicated wine?
All you need is a hydroponics lab that can automatically replicate all the conditions of the Picard estate, grow the grapes and have holograms stomp on them for that extra level of authenticity. All that's left is figuring out how many Chateau Picard bottles it takes to buy an original Buck Bokai card.
I'd say this is describing a luxury good, and the point of a luxury good is that personal attention went into it. There are, of course, various levels of high-classiness. If you replicate some grapes, crush them yourself, then leave them in your basement for years, you don't end up with an Official Picard Vintage, but you still end up with something that people value more than just replicating a bottle of wine.
You're telling me that a bunch of Starfleet cadets don't want to get sloshed on Chateau Picard, and you're telling me that some enterprising individual doesn't see that and exploit the lack of non replicated wine?
All you need is a hydroponics lab that can automatically replicate all the conditions of the Picard estate, grow the grapes and have holograms stomp on them for that extra level of authenticity. All that's left is figuring out how many Chateau Picard bottles it takes to buy an original Buck Bokai card.
Though the Federation doesn’t “use money”, there is still ownership. Jean Luc owns Château Picard, Joseph Sisko owns his restaurant, Beverley Crusher owns a house inhabited by a sex ghost on Planet Scotland, etc.
So presumably, these enterprising cadets—though they may be replicating Château Picard for all practical purposes—probably aren’t actually trying to pass it off as the original “Château Picard”, and—since Picard makes wine because he wants to make wine and not to support himself—what does he care if there’s a knock-off (as long as it’s not harming his reputation)?
the wine harvest had the most hilarious little thing. It's partially done by drones, that are anti-gravity propelled, and use teleportation to pluck the grapes. But then they transport them into little buckets that just stand around on the drones
Gotta give people something to do.
Picard S2E1 Non-Spoiler Thoughts:
-The writing is smoother than season 1 and it's finally letting the characters breathe. The newbies felt more like real people in this one episode than the previous ten.
-I love that we're seeing more civilian life in the Trekverse. It adds texture to the world, like it's a place that exists, in way that reminds me of Star Wars.
-Every returning veteran, like Goldberg and De Lancie, easily slip back into their roles. It's humbling and heatwarming.
Spoiler Thoughts:
-Picard needs Riker around to be his wingman, in all senses of the word.
-The Stargazer, apparently Sagan-class, is a sexy beast and I can't wait to fly her in STO. I wonder what they'll do in-game for the "Borg component" stuff.
-Seven's discomfort on the Stargazer rang a little hollow since we've never seen anyone from Starfleet mistreat her. All the anti-Borg stuff on screen has come from pirates and other scumbags.
-I love that Picard is mentoring the first Romulan in Starfleet like he did the first Klingon. I know it's a pipe dream, but I'd love to see a Star Trek: Worf show with Elnor as a main character. There's so much fertile ground there that the shit writes itself.
-I wasn't sure about the new uniforms, but they're growing on me. I still like the 2385 digs best, but these are miles better than the ultra-bland 2399 unis.
Predictions:
-I'm betting they'll end up going to Guinan for help in 2024, just like they did in Time's Arrow.
-The Borg really were asking for help. Q is mad that Starfleet (or Starfleet-adjacent in Seven's case) fired the first shot.
-Picard and Laris will get together by the end of the season, which I'm ambivalent about. On one hand, Laris is awesome and they would be adorable. On the other, Picard and Crusher got history, you know?
The Stargazer, apparently Sagan-class, is a sexy beast and I can't wait to fly her in STO. I wonder what they'll do in-game for the "Borg component" stuff.
Given how Star Trek Online has historically treated this sort of technology…
…they’ll probably lean into it and do the most terrifyingly Borg-ish thing they can think of. Federation Officers can already friggin’ assimilate their enemies, and the currently running event awards a ship console that does the same thing to an entire enemy ship and forces it into a suicide run on another enemy.
Borg technology has already pushed the Federation into full-on “Hans, are we the baddies?” territory. It’s really quite off-putting.
Sneaks on
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
the wine harvest had the most hilarious little thing. It's partially done by drones, that are anti-gravity propelled, and use teleportation to pluck the grapes. But then they transport them into little buckets that just stand around on the drones
You know, that kinda makes me wonder about automation and labour in the Trek universe.
At one extreme, if you want wine, you can just replicate a bottle of any of the finest vintages in history, or build a fully-automated mass-producing wine factory on an asteroid somewhere. At the other extreme, you can go full Amish, pick the grapes by hand and stomp them by foot. Clearly, neither extreme is desirable - people want some measure of authenticity in their wine so replication and factories are out, but on the other hand 100% labour is both wasteful of effort and too low production to be useful.
So that leaves us with the middle ground - automate some of the production, but leave labour in the loop for authenticity. The Picard winery seems to be on that spectrum: you have drones replacing workers, but those drones replicate the work workers did, picking grapes and putting them in buckets to physically move them to processing, while Picard himself becomes something of an overseer for the worker drones. Other compromises are possible, higher-labour ones such as having workers walk through the fields with transporter guns like in Gambit to quickly and easily pick and move grapes, or lower-labour ones such as having the overseer use long-range sensors to detect ripe grapes and beam them directly without leaving their office. I don't think any of them are inherently preferable to the others, unless you're some hipster wine-bro who "can really taste the teleportation in this vintage". So long as your winery implements some balance of labour and automation you're responding to customer needs, and that balance is basically up to you.
The Federation is pretty much post-scarcity so I don't think that efficiency and production capacity are that important to the decision of how much to automate. At least not in the same way that we think of things like efficiency and production. Whatever a vineyard does is mostly just going to depend on what the vintners enjoy doing, or at least think is important to do for reasons that likely have no impact on the wine. Like that guy in The Culture who hung out at a bar on a GSV cleaning tables. Just for fun.
ok, but you just described a scarcity.
You're telling me that a bunch of Starfleet cadets don't want to get sloshed on Chateau Picard, and you're telling me that some enterprising individual doesn't see that and exploit the lack of non replicated wine?
All you need is a hydroponics lab that can automatically replicate all the conditions of the Picard estate, grow the grapes and have holograms stomp on them for that extra level of authenticity. All that's left is figuring out how many Chateau Picard bottles it takes to buy an original Buck Bokai card.
Except the wine would not have been made by hand and notably by Picard, so it's just wine. The point isn't the flavor or that it was harder to make, the point is the connection in the form of something being made by one person and given to another, even when the person giving the gift could've easily replicated a better-tasting wine in unlimited amounts. The point of the product isn't the scarcity, it's to enjoy making wine. People enjoying the wine is entirely secondary, and whether or not there is a demand for it is not a concern at all.
Further, if somebody hands you a bottle of wine and says it's personally a gift from Picard, the way Federation society works means that it had damn well better be from Picard. You can't actually buy anything with the exchange, so why lie about Picard holding somebody in high enough regard to get a bottle of actual authentic wine delivered to them in space? It's all about those reputations, not how much wine there is or even if it's any good.
The Stargazer, apparently Sagan-class, is a sexy beast and I can't wait to fly her in STO. I wonder what they'll do in-game for the "Borg component" stuff.
Given how Star Trek Online has historically treated this sort of technology…
…they’ll probably lean into it and do the most terrifyingly Borg-ish thing they can think of. Federation Officers can already friggin’ assimilate their enemies, and the currently running event awards a ship console that does the same thing to an entire enemy ship and forces it into a suicide run on another enemy.
Borg technology has already pushed the Federation into full-on “Hans, are we the baddies?” territory. It’s really quite off-putting.
That's just MMOs in general though, isn't it? I've not played every MMO, but the ones I have always seem to, at some point, come down to "Go here, kill these people, get a shiny new weapon to kill more people faster".
In STO, you don't have to play a Borg captain, or take the Borg ship components or use the new console that assimilates a number of enemy ships turning them into missiles. Just playing the game to level cap means you've got a body count in the millions and have left a bloody swath of broken ships in your wake, both through space and time.
On the subject of post-scarcity wine (or other trade goods)...
Does a bottle of authentic Chateau Picard wine lose it's value if it's teleported?
At that point, is it the original bottle, or is it a duplicate, no different then you could pull out of a replicator at will?
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ur obvs not a Pisces
Arch,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_goGR39m2k
Nope, that's not it. Cause I'm a Pisces and I'm definitely feeling the "Shit, tomorrow is March?" thing here as well.
Edit: Though, to be honest, it flips between "Already March?" and "Still March?" frequently.
to keep this star trek aligned, remember when Keiko got turned into a child and then was miffed at Miles for not being into it? Poor guy can't win.
Arch,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_goGR39m2k
Edit to add links!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3IXh3YQXBs
And now that Tomas Marrone and Hector Ortiz from Cryptic have shown up in show credits it looks like he maybe wants it to be a two way road. I mean, yeah, I still say he's worse for the show than Berman and Braga ever were, guy really wants his damn MCU. We'll see what comes of it, Cryptic is doing an announcement on Wednesday or Thursday, so...
On the subject of mobile crap, they're making a Lower Decks game that looks like Timelines with Badgey.
Does anyone remember the Star Trek catalog or the commercial?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SN6mp5hVSSc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c42RytltXNA
PSN:Furlion
I have been playing this for the past couple of years. Its actually quite fun.
You know the cliche “finding its feet” I always kind of thought of as the showrunners figuring out how to use the cast and writers room they had, to learn how to dial in the kinds of stories that combination tell well and then tell those stories.
Discovery, though, feels more to me like all the different people working to tell the story are dialing in how to best tell the kind of Trek story they have been trying to tell all along. Like, the Cosmic Threat is still there, and the moments of connection between and among the crew are still there, but the proportions and focus are refined? Watching S4 has made the first three seasons retroactively better in my mind, because thinking back on them I can more clearly see what they were aiming for, even when they missed the mark a little (or a lot).
Figure out a way to bring Rainn Wilson’s Harcourt Fenton Mudd into the 32nd Century and I would be perfectly content with this Discovery.
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(So I can try to forget it)
ETA: Cheers mate!
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Just so Book and Tarka won't have spent the whole season being nothing but an obstacle.
I'd guess it's an automated system or something that doesn't know it's makers have gone extinct. They'll have to find a way to communicate to get it to stop, but the current Earth-threatening DMA will be too close to shut down in time, so time for explosions.
"Admiral, the anomaly wasn't destroyed. It collapsed into an anti-time eruption. It's now traveling backwards in time and was heading in the direction of the Bajoran Wormhole. If anyone were to come into contact with it they could undergo severe temporal dislocation."
Edit: the best part of this is that it could be one of several sufferings.
Special effects/shipwank:
As for the ships borrowed from the game, they're mostly 2400's variants classic Starfleet designs. The Ross, Sutherland, and Reliant are Galaxy, Nebula, and Miranda variants respectively. The main action piece of episode one takes place on the USS Stargazer, which is a Gagarin-class, a modernization of Discovery's Buran. Kind of disappointed not to see the Odyssey, since CBS owns it, but the Gagarin is a beautiful ship all upscaled and greebled up for TV.
The Ross is a double crossover in a way. That was made as a crossover with the Star Trek Adventures stream Clear Skies.
Story:
Interesting to see what the Borg are in the canon timeline, and it jives better with STO than with the novels where the Borg ran rampant post-Voyager (in STO the Borg are still numerous, but weakened from a string of catastrophic defeats and direct attacks on their collective intelligence and now can be fought conventionally rather than finding the cheat codes). Between species 8472, Voyager's rampage in the finale, and all the other groups we see pulling the loose threads of the Collective this is a weakened and desperate Borg. It's not clear if their request to negotiate was in earnest or not - Seven fired first and the Borg made a point not to retaliate with lethal force or assimilate the crew, and everything goes sideways before we see what they wanted with the Stargazer.
You know, that kinda makes me wonder about automation and labour in the Trek universe.
At one extreme, if you want wine, you can just replicate a bottle of any of the finest vintages in history, or build a fully-automated mass-producing wine factory on an asteroid somewhere. At the other extreme, you can go full Amish, pick the grapes by hand and stomp them by foot. Clearly, neither extreme is desirable - people want some measure of authenticity in their wine so replication and factories are out, but on the other hand 100% labour is both wasteful of effort and too low production to be useful.
So that leaves us with the middle ground - automate some of the production, but leave labour in the loop for authenticity. The Picard winery seems to be on that spectrum: you have drones replacing workers, but those drones replicate the work workers did, picking grapes and putting them in buckets to physically move them to processing, while Picard himself becomes something of an overseer for the worker drones. Other compromises are possible, higher-labour ones such as having workers walk through the fields with transporter guns like in Gambit to quickly and easily pick and move grapes, or lower-labour ones such as having the overseer use long-range sensors to detect ripe grapes and beam them directly without leaving their office. I don't think any of them are inherently preferable to the others, unless you're some hipster wine-bro who "can really taste the teleportation in this vintage". So long as your winery implements some balance of labour and automation you're responding to customer needs, and that balance is basically up to you.
Like god there’s being some good episodes and some fun but bad ones. It’s incredible though how much the format of ‘cool sci fi, half written characters, too much action (with the same torn Kirk shirt)’ exists for the majority of the show so far.
I'm also getting increasing cynical when it comes to Paramount's handling of Trek as a franchise. We've got nicely delineated Trek blocks now: Nostalgia Trek, Kids' Trek, Progressive Trek, Conservative Trek...It feels about as organic as vat grown meat.
Eh, no real complaint here. Just weird aging through decades of a creative work that keeps getting buried, disinterred, rebuilt with bionic parts, killed, buried, and dug up again to repeat.
The Federation is pretty much post-scarcity so I don't think that efficiency and production capacity are that important to the decision of how much to automate. At least not in the same way that we think of things like efficiency and production. Whatever a vineyard does is mostly just going to depend on what the vintners enjoy doing, or at least think is important to do for reasons that likely have no impact on the wine. Like that guy in The Culture who hung out at a bar on a GSV cleaning tables. Just for fun.
I would bet anything that, within Federation society, people seeking hand-made originals of anything would absolutely be the norm. Not to be snobby or anything, but just because it seems a society that is perfectly willing to use replicators but also fully appreciates a set of a hand-forged eating utensils or a cup somebody personally made from glass.
That's literally why Sisko's dad runs a resturaunt: because he likes cooking people food.
ok, but you just described a scarcity.
You're telling me that a bunch of Starfleet cadets don't want to get sloshed on Chateau Picard, and you're telling me that some enterprising individual doesn't see that and exploit the lack of non replicated wine?
All you need is a hydroponics lab that can automatically replicate all the conditions of the Picard estate, grow the grapes and have holograms stomp on them for that extra level of authenticity. All that's left is figuring out how many Chateau Picard bottles it takes to buy an original Buck Bokai card.
Instead it’s a limit to how capitalist it can really be. There’s obviously original Picard wine that has value as a gift and a product for savants to enjoy. It’s limited by the fact that those vintages are all scanned into data bases.
So the ‘real’ thing has prestige only in the social sense but is identical to what anyone with that access to replicators has after a month or two.
The important thing is nobody is starving, ill or exposed because they don't have money.
I'd say this is describing a luxury good, and the point of a luxury good is that personal attention went into it. There are, of course, various levels of high-classiness. If you replicate some grapes, crush them yourself, then leave them in your basement for years, you don't end up with an Official Picard Vintage, but you still end up with something that people value more than just replicating a bottle of wine.
Garak is a treasure far greater than a chest of latinum.
Though the Federation doesn’t “use money”, there is still ownership. Jean Luc owns Château Picard, Joseph Sisko owns his restaurant, Beverley Crusher owns a house inhabited by a sex ghost on Planet Scotland, etc.
So presumably, these enterprising cadets—though they may be replicating Château Picard for all practical purposes—probably aren’t actually trying to pass it off as the original “Château Picard”, and—since Picard makes wine because he wants to make wine and not to support himself—what does he care if there’s a knock-off (as long as it’s not harming his reputation)?
Picard S2E1 Non-Spoiler Thoughts:
-The writing is smoother than season 1 and it's finally letting the characters breathe. The newbies felt more like real people in this one episode than the previous ten.
-I love that we're seeing more civilian life in the Trekverse. It adds texture to the world, like it's a place that exists, in way that reminds me of Star Wars.
-Every returning veteran, like Goldberg and De Lancie, easily slip back into their roles. It's humbling and heatwarming.
Spoiler Thoughts:
-The Stargazer, apparently Sagan-class, is a sexy beast and I can't wait to fly her in STO. I wonder what they'll do in-game for the "Borg component" stuff.
-Seven's discomfort on the Stargazer rang a little hollow since we've never seen anyone from Starfleet mistreat her. All the anti-Borg stuff on screen has come from pirates and other scumbags.
-I love that Picard is mentoring the first Romulan in Starfleet like he did the first Klingon. I know it's a pipe dream, but I'd love to see a Star Trek: Worf show with Elnor as a main character. There's so much fertile ground there that the shit writes itself.
-I wasn't sure about the new uniforms, but they're growing on me. I still like the 2385 digs best, but these are miles better than the ultra-bland 2399 unis.
Predictions:
-The Borg really were asking for help. Q is mad that Starfleet (or Starfleet-adjacent in Seven's case) fired the first shot.
-Picard and Laris will get together by the end of the season, which I'm ambivalent about. On one hand, Laris is awesome and they would be adorable. On the other, Picard and Crusher got history, you know?
Given how Star Trek Online has historically treated this sort of technology…
Borg technology has already pushed the Federation into full-on “Hans, are we the baddies?” territory. It’s really quite off-putting.
Except the wine would not have been made by hand and notably by Picard, so it's just wine. The point isn't the flavor or that it was harder to make, the point is the connection in the form of something being made by one person and given to another, even when the person giving the gift could've easily replicated a better-tasting wine in unlimited amounts. The point of the product isn't the scarcity, it's to enjoy making wine. People enjoying the wine is entirely secondary, and whether or not there is a demand for it is not a concern at all.
Further, if somebody hands you a bottle of wine and says it's personally a gift from Picard, the way Federation society works means that it had damn well better be from Picard. You can't actually buy anything with the exchange, so why lie about Picard holding somebody in high enough regard to get a bottle of actual authentic wine delivered to them in space? It's all about those reputations, not how much wine there is or even if it's any good.
Like, for all Q gets all the funny episodes he’s an existential threat like if a lovecraft showed up in setting.
All the funny jokes about him stop working when it’s clear he’s willing to unmake all of humanities history based on a current time frame snap shot.
That's just MMOs in general though, isn't it? I've not played every MMO, but the ones I have always seem to, at some point, come down to "Go here, kill these people, get a shiny new weapon to kill more people faster".
In STO, you don't have to play a Borg captain, or take the Borg ship components or use the new console that assimilates a number of enemy ships turning them into missiles. Just playing the game to level cap means you've got a body count in the millions and have left a bloody swath of broken ships in your wake, both through space and time.
On the subject of post-scarcity wine (or other trade goods)...
Does a bottle of authentic Chateau Picard wine lose it's value if it's teleported?
At that point, is it the original bottle, or is it a duplicate, no different then you could pull out of a replicator at will?