Tank

It's def the bast space porn from Trek in a long time. I HATED the copy/paste fleet from S1. Hate the hero ship they've had in all 3 seasons. Hated how Discovery treated ships as fast moving blinky lights with no weight. DETESTED the designs of the Abrams films. The Titan feels old school and great-- but I will say this. Rewatched TWOK the other night for the 32456312th time, and the Ent-A in that movie still feels more real. CGI can rival model work, but it tends to over-do it with lighting and effects. Sometimes the Titan looks a little cartoony. But what no one seems to get is that half the reason the movie era ships looked so legit is because they were being shot with film cameras a slow speed. A flyby was achieved by having the 300 pound camera rig move past an immobile 12 foot model spaceship. That natural camera movement is programmed into me, and knowing that CG models can do any sort of movement they want is a thing my brain dislikes. Also, they MUST be holding back the Enterprise-F for the fleet day parade, right? I'm a little surprised they went with the Titan over an Enterprise for S3-- in fact. It seems so odd to me I feel more and more like we're going to get the same sort of back-door set-up we got for Strange New Worlds in Disco when the Enterprise showed up there. The graphic on Raffi's detective work showed the E-F and it had the tag "scheduled for early decommission". I know it's the ship designed for Star Trek Online, which they are trying to semi-canonize... wonder if they want to put away the video game ship to roll out a new design for a future show. Can't remember if I posted this or not, but the end credits shows a graphic of the fleet museum Picard mentioned Geordi running in the first episode. One of the ships listed in its inventory (along with the Voyager) is the Enterprise-A. If THAT ship shows up in this season I will totally fanboy out.

Forgot to say— LOVE old Worf!

I thought that too— but remembered Worf was there for half its run, haha. But yeah, I feel like this season could end on setting up Seven as a Captain, and I’d totally watch a 25th century show with her and a mix of new characters and a few familiar faces from the TNG/DS9/VOY Thought the Picard/Bev scene was amazing, thought the fight between Riker and Picard got extremely repetitive. Beyond that, solid fun episode:

100% this. Episode 301 was criminally boring and uneventful. It literally had two story beat: Mando has to take a bath on Mandalore, and he wants to bring back the IG droid for some reason. While not as awful as BOBF it was clearly an entire episode that was designed to be a status quo reset. Not a great sign if you ask me, but hopefully next week it kicks in.

The more they do with Luke post ROTJ the more TLJ will hurt butts.

Well this aged interestingly...

We are less than 10 years away from a live action Luke series. I have no doubt his appearances in Mando, BOBF, and probably Ahsoka are a test bed for it.

In real world terms, Vadic is like an international bounty hunter with WMDs who's managed to get her hands on a attack frigate, sitting off the coast of Florida in international waters, challenging the US Navy to turn over a prisoner because he's wanted in Zimbabwe or something. It's bonkers hahaha.

As much as this is looking to TWOK for inspiration, it’s doing it in a much smarter way. They KNEW we’d all call Jack being Picard’s kid from the start, any of the other newer Trek’s would just double down on trying to oversell he wasn’t (see Cumberbatch as Khan in ITD). Instead, they let Riker be the fan voice early in the episode and be coy about it. It’s not about a big twist or reveal that Jack is Picard’s son, it’s about us watching Picard come to accept this and catch up with us. This season has just as much fan service as any other new Trek, but it doesn’t act like it is smarter than the fans. That gains you so much more acceptance and goodwill. It’s like Rogue One and Andor compared to Book of Boba Fett. The former were so outed by the same things that inspired Star Wars, while the latter was Star Wars inspired by Star Wars.

I keep seeing promos for Mando and I am still SO annoyed by how terrible this show was, and that you basically have to watch it to be caught up on Mando. It's such a cheap ploy it has left a terrible taste in my mouth. Mando S2 was so cool, and Fett in it was cool, and they just ruined any good faith I had with BOBF.

Lore installed a "get old and pudgy" program.

Rando thoughts— I love that they co-op-ed Seven into the cast. I’d love to see a couple other DS9 or VOY faces. Raffi is still awful. Not sure how I’ll feel when they reveal the kid is Picard’s. They called the Titan a refit, but it’s an entirely different class and as an -A reg. The line about Riker’s jazz made it more confusing. Shaw can’t be long for the world. Season 3 tops. ”Hear that Jean Luc? Nobody likes the fat one.”

Man, they went hard on the TWOK vibes: I had a few complaints over some details, but overall, that was better than the two previous seasons combined.

Comes out tomorrow… have to say, all signs are pointing towards it being awesome. I’ve actually spoken with the showrunner a few times (not about the show) and he seems like a legit fan. Zathras— the spaceship porn is going to be legit!

Agree that Namor was great in terms of portrayal and the actor— just felt like he was wasted.

Finally saw this— it wasn’t aggressively awful like Eternals but I was bored to tears. Not sure how I feel about them trading the movie’s heart on the actual death of Chadwick Boseman. Granted it had to be addressed, and I’m sure everyone involved had true grief for the guy, but it felt like a cheat to me. I don’t think Leticia Wright was the right choice to center the movie on. She just wasn’t compelling and I don’t think she was a good enough actor to really give us what they wanted. I’ve wanted Angela Basset to be Storm for half my life so making her Black Panther would have been great. They used her to put over Wright, when they should have let her carry the whole thing. Or for that matter, Okoye would have been better. She at least had the passion. Namor was wasted and anticlimactic. I kept waiting for the bigger turn— we think it’s about Vibranium when really it’s about colonialism and multiculturalism… but no, it was really about vibranium and planning for war as opposed to showing us a war. I know it had to basically be scrapped after Boseman died, and Leticia Wright was a problem on set— I just can’t help but think they should have let this one go and not make it until they could build up to a new Black Panther like they did the first one with Civil War. THAT said, this is all very keeping with whatever Marvel phase this is.

I saw a video. No one punched Jacob so I stopped watching.

Josh Duhamel and Timothy Olyphant should play brothers in a movie.

No shocker that when the best game ever is adapted with a top notch show runner working with the game creator, and given the best casting possible and $10mil an episode, you end up with a pure gold show. Loving it. Thus far all the changes from the game have made sense for the change in medium.

Yeah I feel bad for using MJ at all now, but I did a lot more than just prompt. I fed it compositions I hacked together out of photos and my own bad drawings to fear compositions, had MJ give me a unified line art style, then did all the color and texture work myself… but I get the arguments for sure. In my case I have a novel of original stories that are fully mine and the actual work I’d want to sell.

So I had to do the hardest thing ever and tell my kid he has to live with his mom full time in a couple months. With Hollywood imploding and an impending strike I am about out of money and can’t afford this city on a single income. The gf and I are going to live together to save money, but everything has got so over priced it makes the most financial sense to keep my place and have her move in— but there isn’t room for all three of us. The kid was upset, cried, but at the same time said he totally understands. To be real, he'll be turning 18 when this happens in a couple months, he has a car and a job and keys so he can come over whenever, and I only live 5 minutes from his mom. Seeing him and spending time together won’t be difficult, and again— he’s 18 and in theory he could be moving in with friends or going out of state for school… also I have to hope things will recover post strike and I’ll make money again, and if the next move is an upgrade, I can offer a home. But I still feel like I have let him down.

ChatGPT is interesting in that it can emulate a style and form really well. But it can’t be creative. You give it enough to work with it might seem like it’s doing something, but it can’t do subtext, it can’t do complex nested arcs, it can’t do irony, symbolism, anything else like that. As a creative writer, it doesn’t scare me at all. But if I was a professor having to read term papers- woo buddy. That’s where it’s going to make an impact. As for the visual art, I am torn. I’ve been a designer and photographer, but I could never draw as well as I liked. I got into Midjourney hard, and spent the last few months maki g an illustrated novel, which I have wanted to do for 20 years. I admittedly didn’t think it was unethical, but now I can’t even show what I’ve made without fear of being berated. Commercial Illustrators should definitely be worried, but like ChatGPT, the lack of a soul makes doing anything narrative, like comics or sequences of illustrations with common elements, near impossible without feeding it visual references.

That was a close to Grogu’s arc. The plot dangler— which is being picked up on, was the Darksaber/Mandalor/Bo Katan stuff. But Grogu is a huge draw so they needed him back in and didn’t want to spend to long on getting to it so they piggy-backed it onto BOBF (which was already being shot on a shoestring budget leftover from Mando S2.)

EpisodeS. He’s in like 3 of them.

Mando S3 trailer has made me reflect and make adjustments... I think I'd rather watch AOTC again than BOBF. ESB ANH R1 Mando S2 Andor S1 Mando S1 ROTJ Obi-Wan S1 TFA TLJ SOLO BOBF (Mando episodes) ROTS TPM TROS AOTC BOBF S1