ValueSubtracted

Naveen Andrews is such a perfect choice, I'm mad I never thought of it before.

The Roddenberry Archive is probably the best place - navigate to the section called "765874".

They just link to YouTube videos, but I find the actual YouTube channel challenging to find stuff in.

It seems to be improving now - it was over 10 days behind at one point.

Hmm. This unfortunately only just made it through to the instance, thanks to the large lag we've been experiencing from lemmy.world.

I guess I agree with the premise of the article to the extent that the ensemble cast was pretty charming, and I honestly wouldn't mind seeing any of them again in the future.

The most "successful" part of the movie to me was Georgiou's arc - she's really the only character to get a complete arc in the movie, and it was admittedly pretty thin.

Like Brian, I would love to see an in-depth book about the first two seaons of Disco in particular.

Related to this article, VFX supervisor for "Picard," "Strange New Worlds," and season 4 of "Discovery" posted this rather interesting thread to Mastodon:

Reading the article going around about Bryan Fuller’s Discovery, and people’s “What If” scenarios reminds me of 2016 and my brush with it interviewing for the VFX department there:

I got a chance to interview as a potential Compositing Supervisor. It’s a trend which continues today that some productions have small in-house groups to concept things, sometimes do shot work, directly interface with a show to do certain things faster and cheaper than going to vendors, like previs.

I get to Los Angeles Studios downtown to talk to the Producer, and the first thing I notice in being in the offices; no real concept art to be found, no white board with scheduling info; I think I saw 3 pieces of artwork (only one of which was ever reflected in the show, but more about that later). No one really in the office yet, but it was also a late evening and they weren’t in production yet.

Kinda a red flag, but maybe the stuff was somewhere else I just couldn’t see.

I go through a pretty standard interview process, and when asked what questions I might have, I start with some pretty standard ones: How many hours a week? 60. How big a team? 20ish. What types of work are you planning on doing, concept, prep shots, actual shot production? All the VFX work of the show.

OK big red flag.

That is not enough to do this kind of show in the 2010s. Maybe a TNG show with TNG amount of effects an episode, but not modern TV.

When do you start shooting? In months. Do you have scripts to breakdown and budget staff? No. Any scripts at all? No.

WHAT? These two things do not go together, especially on a new show. Pilots for shows will float around for sometimes years being prepped and budgeted.

Do you have art for phasers, transporters, warp, or even ships? They showed me like a temp transporter. And the 3 pieces of art on the walls. Maybe they had more and didn’t want to show me. I did sign an NDA

What kinds of shot pipeline do you have? We have Lightwave and Nuke. No I mean pipeline. Nope.

At that point, I knew this was going to be a disaster and wanted no part of it. I finished up pleasantly with them, and got the hell out of Dodge. There is bootstrap small high performance team work, which I’ve been a part of, and there’s throwing yourself into a meat grinder. It didn’t matter if they wanted me, I didn’t want them. Which was crushing for a lifelong Star Trek fan.

Months away from shooting and no scripts on a completely new show that was supposed to launch a streaming network is a recipe for disaster.

Later, I found out that after spending millions of dollars in prepro, Fuller had “departed” and all those people were sacked. Fuller, while being responsible for some really loved shows, also has a history of lots of aborted projects, or projects he left really early on. But I’m sure other people actually know that story better than I.

At that point Alex Kurtzman was brought in to actually make a show that could be produced. I went back to the VFX place I was working for, and would just be a viewer like everyone else. I wouldn’t get a chance to work on Trek until 2019 working on Star Trek: Picard for DNEG.

Anyway millions were wasted for nothing that was able to be shot. Just something to consider with “What Ifs” of Star Trek. I really hope someone writes a book about Star Trek production someday.

The Federation didn’t need 31 to win the war

Do we know that for certain? The cure to the virus was actually pretty fundamental to the Female Changeling ordering the Jem'Hadar to stand down. She refused to surrender until Odo linked with her and cured her.

It thankfully stops short of "meat":

Such animated characters are composed of solid matter arranged by transporter-based replicators and manipulated by highly articulated computer-driven tractor beams. The results are exceptionally realistic "puppets," which exhibit behaviors almost exactly like those of living beings, depending on software limits.

Objects created on the Holodeck that are pure holographic images cannot be removed from the Holodeck, even if they appear to possess physical reality because of the focused forcebeam imagery. Objects created by replicator matter conversion do have physical reality and can indeed be removed from the Holodeck, even though they will no longer be under computer control.

Obviously, there is an inconsistency here, as we saw that later holographic characters could not be removed from the holodeck, and therefore must not have been replicated.

The Technical Manual explanation is not that replicators create matter out of pure energy - they are a type of transporter that dematerializes raw material and rematerializes it to match a molecular pattern. They are "matter-energy converters" only in the sense that the stream of particles during the materialization process could be called an energy stream.

These replicator system headends are located on Deck 12 in the Saucer Module [of the Enterprise-D] and on Deck 34 in the Engineering Section. These systems operate by using a phase-transition coil chamber in which a measured quantity of raw material is dematerialized in a manner similar to that of a standard transporter.

Instead of using a molecular imaging scanner to determine the patterns of the raw stock, however, a quantum geometry transformational matrix field is used to modify the matter stream to conform to a digitally stored molecular pattern matrix. The matter stream is then routed through a network of waveguide conduits that direct the signal to a replicator terminal at which the desired article is materialized within another phase transition chamber.

Okay then, the next election will happen when the next election is called.

Let me know if I used any words that are too big for you.

The likely scenario is that, immediately upon Parliament resuming next month, the Liberals will immediately lose a confidence vote, triggering a snap election. The opposition parties have all stated that they will initiate a confidence vote at the earliest opportunity.

In the unlikely event that doesn't happen, I imagine JT would remain on as PM until the mandatory election this fall. Were he to step down, he would probably appoint a sitting MP as interim PM.

As a fun(?) aside, Canada has had two PMs who served while members of the (unelected) Senate, and MacKenzie King and John Turner both briefly governed without a ministerial seat.

No one is expecting Carney, or anyone else, to serve as an unelected PM.

I clicked hoping for a shot of the "Academy" set and left disappointed, but it's a neat article regardless. The opening anecdote is great:

Olivia Chow has a model starship in her office.

It’s the USS Toronto, a Parliament-class vessel slightly bigger than her hand. An accompanying plaque features a quote from her husband, Jack Layton, who died in 2011.

“Always have a dream that will outlast your lifetime,” it reads.

Layton, the former federal NDP leader, was a fan of “Star Trek.”

I'd like to know where the model came from - was it a gift?

I'm quite happy with the way it ultimately went, but it's a pretty interesting thought experiment.

It'll make one hell of an oral history some day.

This is a few months old, but I don't remember seeing it before. I'm a sucker for this kind of "inside baseball" information.

Unfortunately, I think the need for defense spending is increasingly clear these days, no?

It makes me wonder about how much background information Mount was given along with the sides he was reading - honestly, probably very little, or nothing at all.

He certainly seems to be playing the role in a stern-but-friendly way, which is likely not what they were looking for in the case of Lorca.

Does it get any better than Dadmiral Vance?

When it comes to the overlapping shows, it might be better to frame things around events rather than series. Like, Dominion War, Romulan Evacuation, etc. But then, there are still some gaps in there, or unrelated adventures that aren't really defined by those major events.

It seems like JT is handling the situation just about as well as could be expected.