Some Assembly Required (2)

They lost me when the ‘Vulcan’ commodore (ROMULAN SPY!!!) turned up wearing Ray-Bans.
Heh. If she had a moustache, I’m sure she’d be twirling it. I suppose the Ray-Bans are meant to imply that Commodore Oh is actually a Romulan spy, not a Vulcan with extra eyelids, as if this hadn’t been telegraphed sufficiently; but yes, it’s one of those supposedly clever winks that just looks a little silly and, more to the point, throws you out of the story, such as it is. The reliance on contemporary nods and winks does make the suspension of disbelief rather difficult.
And we’re now a third of the way into a ten-episode mini-series and I still don’t much care about what’s happening, or about any of the characters so far introduced. The writers are leaning heavily on exposition – on telling rather than showing, which is fairly tedious – and I find myself watching largely out of grim determination. I want it to be good, and maybe it will belatedly hit its stride, but at this point I’m thinking “One more episode, a last chance, and then we’re done.”

Ooh, that’s a good one.
It does, I think, capture something of the phenomenon.
See also this.

I only just slogged my way through episode 1.
So far, episode one is the high point, now receding in the rear-view mirror.
But we now have Angry Reefer Chick, Generic Slacker Captain, and Hugh The Fuck Cares. So you’ve that to look forward to.

Angry Reefer Chick, Generic Slacker Captain, and Hugh The Fuck Cares.
That. 😀

Star Trek: Picard is still testing my patience with what feels like an interminable and badly-written prologue, with each episode being slightly less interesting than the one before.
Locutious of Bored.

Locutus of Bored.
It is quite dull and the pacing is all over the show. Episode three feels like where things should have been knocked up a gear, introducing some much-needed narrative momentum, but instead the thing slows to a crawl. It seems to me that if you can’t set up your set-up in two episodes – ninety minutes – then something needs rethinking. And the duller the thing gets, the more you start noticing the shortcomings in the dialogue, acting, editing, casting, etc.

Argh, that was supposed to be loquacious of borg.
I just assumed you were typing with your forehead again.

Angry Reefer Chick, Generic Slacker Captain, and Hugh The Fuck Cares.
https://twitter.com/orchidtreks/status/1226322258878058496

I only just slogged my way through episode 1.
I gave up at episode 1 when time was spent telling the viewer that the new synthetics are indistinguishable from normal humans, but then showing one leaping 40 feet in the air and landing on concrete without even a bruise. At that point, I’m thinking Bones (TOS) with a simple medical tricorder would have immediately been able to say – Jim, her bone density and fast twitch muscle fiber count is off the charts – or something like that. Plus Picard is looking really, really old – just can’t bring forth the required level of suspension of disbelief.

I just assumed you were typing with your forehead again.
Doesn’t everybody?

One would think that all the effort being put into trying to force people to say obesity is super awesome could be better applied…………ugh, never mind. I just can’t even with this crap anymore.
I, for one, would love to just roll out of bed, not comb my hair, pick some clothes off the floor and head out into the world and demand that everyone agree that I am super hot and sexy. However, most people would rightly look at me and think, what a slob and any potential partners might assume not to expect a level of caring for them that exceeds how much I care for myself.

WTP, well was really using attire as metaphor, to avoid saying that those who take the time to look their best physically are unlikely to want to caress the flab and folds of those who do not, because I’m a nice person. 🙂
However, your point is well made, one look around any office these days makes an old-schooler like me sad.
I recently came across a family photo from 1965 in which my brother, mother and I are decked out in our finest attire. A friend asked the occasion; Easter, 1st communion? No, we were headed to the airport, flying out that day. A fancy day, to be sure.

Just wondering: Has anyone who is reasonably well put together, rational, normally civil – male or female – ever declared their normal appearance and moderate behavior to be a political statement or art and therefore immune to criticism?

Policing seems to be transitioning to becoming a matter of watching social media to detect and prosecute incipient hate crimes,
Scolding and threatening people for being rude on Twitter, a task that by and large the public doesn’t see as terribly pressing, is generally more comfortable and considerably less hazardous than apprehending predatory sociopaths and dragging them into the nearest dungeon. A task that one might think would be a higher priority.
Not entirely unrelated.
And as I said in the thread linked above, we’ve gone from the ideal of burly chaps who will apprehend lawbreakers as forcefully as necessary and send them on their way towards the nearest dungeon, to ladies in funny hats who will be terribly sensitive and empathise with our loss, while we get used to the idea that whatever wrong was done to us will most likely go unpunished.

is generally more comfortable and considerably less hazardous
Not to mention much, much easier. People on twitter and facebook still represent themselves as themselves and even if they didn’t those service providers seem quite prepared to turn over the real contact information if the police ask nicely.
Whereas, finding someone online who is undertaking nefarious activities isn’t quite so easy to find. Someone posted a picture of my house on Kijiji offering it for rent at a ridiculously low price. We had people knocking on our door for days. The police said they couldn’t do anything and Kijiji refused to give us any information about the poster. In fact it took us close to 5 days to get them to take the add down.

Picard feels old. The whole show. Not just Patrick Stewart. There isn’t anything fresh in the story telling. It is following a fairly genetic plot. Which is sad. Sci Fi is a great platform to explore ideas. To discuss new technologies. To make dreams come alive. So far Picard is disappointing on all these points.

Picard feels old. The whole show.
To oldly go where every man has gone before.

To baldly go where no one gives a damn.

“Locutus of Bored.” 😄 *chortle*
I didn’t watch this. I rarely watched the original TNG ( I did like the Borg, they were about the only time I watched). I hope it improves for everyone.

Can we be banned from seeing it too?
I suspect our publicity-seeking racist realises that she’s more likely to receive default flattery from other woke racists, who will be more inclined to let any shortcomings pass unremarked. Though we mustn’t say that out loud, of course.

If anyone has trouble with comments not appearing, email me and I’ll rattle the spam filter.

I would like to share the latest in the world of “art”.
I give you, from a time before many of us were even born, 90 Cans of the Artist’s Shit.

I give you, from a time before many of us were even born, 90 Cans of the Artist’s Shit.
On that subject, WTP, you might enjoy this. The late Sir Roger Scruton being as superbly disdainful as only he could be: https://youtu.be/W5tuGjzXJ9k?t=641

Cap’n N, agree to some extent. At the front end of the clip, for about half a second, was a Jackson Pollack. Was just in a discussion yesterday regarding modern art, or post-modern art, or WTF the demarcation lines are, in regard to Pollack, in which I said:

The problem with post-modernist art is not entirely in it’s post-modernism. It’s in it’s near ubiquitous. I’ve always respected the first minimalist who mocked the idea of minimalism with the blank canvass. The numerous pretenders to come along later with subtle variations were just posers. Again, not that I’m a big fan of either. Any form of art, on a minor scale, I find at least somewhat interesting. It’s when it’s so bloody easy to imitate that it gets imitated with no real additional substance added that is the crime. Especially in regard to it being publicly funded.
Which isn’t to say that post-modernism itself, culturally speaking, has much positive value.

Then someone brought up Rothko (which I had to look up, though was familiar with the style). My more general thing here is, and this goes to novelists and musicians and others, they let these “This is not a pipe” people expose how simple most art is. Especially the minimalist stuff. And yet I can spend a good bit of time enjoying the chaos, etc. of a Pollack painting. I just wouldn’t pay $140 million for one. Or even $140,000. Or even $14,000. $1400? We can talk.

I’m rather enjoying ‘Picard’! I like the ‘Ooh, maybe the Federation isn’t the hippy love-in we thought it was’ that ‘Discovery’ promised initially.
Ah, well. Series 2 of ‘Altered Carbon’ is on the horizon.

I like the ‘Ooh, maybe the Federation isn’t the hippy love-in we thought it was’
I’ve been told that episode four is better, so I live in hope.
It’s definintely moving slowly, but then this is not standalone one hour episodic TV, this is a sevensomething hour long movie that’s been sliced into ten bits—David Gerrold had his comment about crib girls, but this time instead of every 15 minutes, it’s now 44 minutes. . . .