I like dogs, so I'm reaching for a use case that justifies the little robopuppy. I reluctantly concede that the virtual cane is likely far more practical.

>I'm hugely open to the idea that other life forms might not share our morphology. So why do they all look like humans with big fucked-up heads?

Two reasons: the more 'alien' your aliens, the more difficult it is for an audience to interpret them, and production costs.

The goal is to tell a story within a budget, so as Pat Tallman once said, "they sit you down in a chair and put a vagina on your face".

The dog is good for carrying the power required for extended run time (though you give some of that back to the motors making it move) and for providing physical cues through the harness.

My change would be to route the voice system through a Bluetooth headset. There's no need for the dog to talk to the entire environment, and it would be harder to hear in urban settings.

Looking at this a day later, I can't really see a valid reason for doing this. It costs them nothing to post to X. In fact, X was one of the places I saw the *most* engagement with them. Bluesky is not a nice place, Mastodon has limited engagement. I would think that they'd want to remain on a platform where some folks really needed to see what they were saying. Now they've cut themselves off from a potential audience.

Looking at their board of directors, and into their past associations, it's now a lot more obvious. They pushed John Gilmore out in 2021.

Remember this? https://yro.slashdot.org/story...

First comment is "a time of transition. Wonder if they will make it through with their integrity intact? Only time will tell."

Now we know the answer.

Except that was already done, and done brilliantly by Deep Space Nine. In reality, the Star Fleet Academy idea had a very old lineage, to the smoking shambles that was Star Trek V, when the idea was posited of having a prequel with the TOS characters, or at least the main ones, portrayed by younger actors, during their Academy days. It was pretty quickly rejected because at the time they didn't think audiences would buy the idea of new actors playing Kirk, Spock and Bones.

Of course, in the end, that was effectively what the first part of the 2009 Star Trek, which, for me at least, proved that the guys who rejected the idea in 1989-90 were spot on. But other people like the Kelvinverse films, so to each their own.

The real problem isn't writing per se. There were no lack of justifiable complaints against Voyager and Enterprise. The real problem is that no one really knows where to take it. The whole 32nd century gambit is because no one really knows how to portray the technology of the intervening period. The Enterprise temporal war rubbish demonstrated just how incredibly problematic it can be for an established sci-fi franchise to push itself across a broad timeline when you start with ships that go multiples of the speed of light, create holodecks and replicators and have computers so intelligent they can create conscious beings, and that's just by the 24th century.

With James Bond they can just keep resetting the character over and over again, and updating the gadgets along the way. Star Trek, for all its faults, has established a sort of permanent 70s-ish technology vibe, and because it's more fantasy then science fiction, the controls for the super planet buster never have to change! That franchise fell on its sword more because of a lack of imagination, lazy writing and an obvious desire not to pay Extended Universe authors some royalties for a cache of rather interesting ideas, and ultimately having to go there anyways.

In all cases, I think the fan base is the worst enemy. No franchise like Star Trek is ever going to measure up to the mythology of the older series. TOS really has entered the realm of cultural myth, and TNG, though everyone forgets how much the first season was disliked (and on rewatch a few years ago, I have to say it feels like a wonder that it ever got a season 2), isn't far behind. Even DS9's critics have finally stopped talking, and for my money, it is the most consistently well-written and well-acted of all the Star Treks. But that kind of legacy is absolutely toxic, because if you try to be too different everyone screams "It isn't Star Trek", and if you try to be similar in tone, then everyone complains "We've seen it all before!"

"Strange New Worlds was a nice partial deviation from this - they still made sure to pander to all the current 'sensitivities', but if the writers of the show didn't love the original series and its fundamental qualities, I don't know who does."

Have you even seen the original series? Racism, bigotry, classism, human rights, ethics, not to mention nationalism, were all dealt with. TNG went further, particularly with Riker's penchant for rather open sexual interests, and of course DS9 dealt with everything from war crimes to the undermining of civil society. Voyager and Enterprise in their turn covered similar issues, though perhaps not always as ably as the first three series did.

While I would agree the way Nutrek at times has tried to do social commentary has perhaps suffered from a lack of metaphor and allegory, which the older series' writers at times had to work through since things like interracial kisses and non-binary identity would have, at the time, caused stations to go apoplectic (and indeed some did, with the Kirk-Uhura kiss). But I suspect more than just some iffy writing is at play here. Everyone accepts, well almost everyone that is, that mixed-race couples can kiss in public, and most people accept gay couples and class and racial equality. But if you try to push further into social liberalism, past what many conservative elements in society have been forced (kicking and screaming the whole way mind you), well suddenly it's all evil woke trash trying to reprogram our brains.

In other words, many have not progressed very far at all, and because TOS and TNG in particular had to hide the underlying message beneath makeup and latex, the less progressive fans can watch it and, well, almost willfully miss the point of The Outcast (TNG) or Let That Be Your Last Battlefield (TOS), assuming, I suppose, that the metaphor is buried so deeply they don't have to challenge their prejudices.

I'd argue TOS wasn't bad. By today's standards, sure, and there were some episodes where the writing failed to overcome the budget limitations, but it was adult science fiction taken seriously and often based on very good stories in days when that was uncommon.

It wasn't Lost in Space.

There's a difference between being inclusive and pandering. TOS didn't pander. Well... maybe a bit. Roddenberry wasn't above it.

Still, there did seem to be a more genuine (though occasionally ham-fisted) attempt at inclusiveness. I doubt a focus group of the times would have given us the Star Trek we got.

The new stuff is often hollow. It's checking boxes. It's pandering. That works better in pop music than in science fiction.

Picard shit the bed from the beginning. From watching an old man survive a massive explosion, throwing in a trailer-dwelling drug addict and a Romulan ninja, through to wasting Seven and ending on a big Reset Button.

Oh, and "Main character is dying"? That's inconvenient... let's replace him with an android running a simulation of his brain and keep on going. Jesus, but that was dumb. I'd have called the show "Star Trek: Legacy" and moved on from Picard in season two... maybe passing the baton to Seven. You don't start out with a big premise and end with, "just kidding", that's high school level writing.

Strange New Worlds managed to give us a musical episode as well as one about an energy being that likes mucking about with people using its magic reality altering powers... and make those episodes not suck.

I liked the Nurse Chapel updates. I even liked the Spock stuff, though like any over-analytical fan I have notes. :)

I hope the writers of that show go on to other successes, because they executed exactly what the premise required while adapting it to a modern production.

That's a silly right-wing red-piller idea.

There's nothing wrong with, you know, not marginalizing groups of people.

Now, throwing bones to the perceived 'woke' crowd based on a checklist... that's going to fail. You can have LGBTQ+ characters so long as that's not why they're on the show (unless your show is specifically about members of those groups). When the character description starts and stops with "non-binary gendered", that is a reliable indicator that the show will be garbage.

Easy enough. "Star Trek fans"

Plenty of them clamored online for "Starfleet Academy" as a series concept for years to get away from the "Ship goes to the planet of the week".

Star Trek went Disney long ago - churn out ill-considered concepts and scripts plastered with nostalgia designed to appeal to the fan base and zeitgeist and certified by a panel ensuring all the right boxes were checked off.

Strange New Worlds was a nice partial deviation from this - they still made sure to pander to all the current 'sensitivities', but if the writers of the show didn't love the original series and its fundamental qualities, I don't know who does.

The rest of it has been pablum. Academy sounded great until you read the synopsis. "Let's subvert tropes" followed by "Yeah, the academy is actually just another starship, and we'll give the kids superpowers". Their attempts to drop little Easter eggs for classic fans were just insulting - like having aliens show up with the writers obviously having zero idea that in the original series the whole point of their appearance was to watch them die in an unnecessary final act of self-imposed genocide.

Throwing Star Fleet uniforms and phasers into a setting doesn't make it good. Let it rest until they figure that out.

The car dealer isn't looking to get you into the right car for you, they're looking to get you into the right for them. And they're a business, you expect that. The traditional issue is that car salesmen have zero shame about using every social engineering trick in the book to pressure you into spending more than you care to.

An AI kiosk won't be able to do that to anywhere near the same degree - the dealer will save on commissions but lose on sales.

If you want to present yourself as a friendly social media platform so you can digitally rape 'suckers' and monetize their data, this may not be a legal issue of free speech, but it is a PR issue of free speech.

If it works, you're showing people your platform's ability and willingness to control the message. If it doesn't, you're showing your weakness.