Well, now I know who was the executive on the org chart responsible for all of Viacom and more recently Paramount Global’s stunningly awful corporate strategic communications.
There have been a lot of senior or management changes one tier down since the merger, but perhaps what was really needed was for Baklish and his top VPs to exit.
I just noticed today that old.startrek.website isn’t loading properly. The fact that zero people have said anything to the admins makes me wonder if anyone’s using it at all. So speak up if you are! I will be happy to fix it for you, but otherwise may just uninstall....
SkyShowtime seems to be a pilot version of this in Eastern Europe and the Netherlands. Not that it seems to be doing all that well. However, I’m not sure what Peacock offers that’s original content so it’s questionable what a bundle would add.
In any event, this seems a daft thing to do when they’re trying to sell the firm. One of the biggest problems Paramount+ has had is that it doesn’t stick with a strategy and has been so tangled up in previous licensing or partnership deals that it can’t pursue its plans in any reasonable or systematic way. Tying the hands of a new owner with a poison pill deal with Comcast doesn’t seem to benefit anyone.
I’ve tried including tags for Mastodon user accounts here previously, but was never sure if the users were getting notifications. Nice that Brian Tatosky confirmed it and that he was able to reply directly.
So they think it’s better to get a tax write off of half the cost, and sell it to a streamer to cover the other half, than make money and profit with a global cinematic release?
Well, I’m not going to assume that every decision made by the senior decision-makers in a company is rational for the firm or for ‘maximizing shareholder wealth’ in the long term.
CEOs and executives may act in their own, or their firm’s short term interests, they can however also get complex decisions entirely wrong. Not to mention tax law can incentivize some sub rational behaviour.
There are enough historical cases of absolutely bad thinking running companies into the ground, with deceptive practices that leave lenders and subcontractors short.
The stock market’s reaction to act against bad management can be tardy.
(I’m setting aside corporations taking responsibility for larger societal benefits here because US SEC norms for publicly traded corporations don’t provide for that the way they are in Canadian or European law. In the other hand, there may be some arguments that some of these actions are anticompetitive, and worthy of antitrust investigation.)
One thing that I think would be nice would be to have a true plethora of custom star trek emojis available for us to use here. (Perhaps this is already a thing and I just dont know about it?)...
On Mastodon, the tenforward.social instance where the @Admin & @ValueSubtracted have accounts, has its own set of emojis. Some of these seem to have been contributed by users.
It would be great if our leadership here could check in with @guinan to see if she would generously share her protocol.
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve been experiencing quite a bit of sluggishness and errors (failure to post, failure to mark as read, failure to fetch comments, etc), my feed seems to get stuck for long periods of time without updating, and any time I try to open my profile view, it can take a full minute (it might be...
Have been able to load communities and content on Voyager since the last fix yesterday, but am still having issues with images in the main post, especially on c/risa.
On Voyager, I’m seeing just a little blue square in the middle of the box where the meme image should be. It’s not consistent though so it could be some kind of incompatibility with the upload and storage format.
There has been good MCU content that actually has coherence - Agents of Shield, She-Hulk, Loki - but they’ve effectively had Showrunners.
Why Marvel thought it was optional, and everything could be fixed with editing in post is bizarre, but I’d argue that they’re just at the extreme end of a continuum.
Even with showrunners, some of the early seasons of the new era of Star Trek seems to have fallen into the same trap. To many big ego EPs each doing what they want and Kurtzman trying smooth it all out with editing in post.
Osunsami has kept coherence in the direction of Discovery in Toronto, but Picard season one and two was all over the place, frequently ignoring the tone laid down by Hanelle Culpepper in the pilot.
Just before Picard had its run, Alex Kurtzman was talking up the idea of having one-shots, movies and limited series focused around established (legacy) characters. He argued that the franchise has matured to the point where this was now possible for the next phase.
The Georgiou S31 movie was supposed to be a show, but with Yeoh’s star power, it seems impossible to schedule. So, it’s become the rest case. I hope it’s successful and smooths the way for more.
With Paramount retrenching and Matalas pushing his own Titanprise nepotistic nostalgia tour for an early 25th century show, the window for this seems to have past. Not to mention Paramount’s overall turning away from CBS’ focus on diverse representation.
I know that the utterly incomparable Bruce Horak came back not as Hemmer but as the Klingon for this episode. However the singer, was that Bruce too? If so then I’m genuinely shocked. I thought for sure that it was Weird Al. It sounds almost identical. If it’s not Weird Al himself then it’s a pitch perfect double....
I knew about the singing from the reviews of the Goblin MacBeth, because there’s musical improvisations in that live theatre piece.
Bruce Horak’s family seems to all be creatives.
I recall an interview from 2022 where he talked about being the youngest of 4 very competitive boys, with older brothers who are musicians. I believe his dad was a high school drama teacher(?), and an amateur cartoonist. Mum also in a creative field.
The painting / visual arts career is what caught me off guard actually. Horak said his dad encouraged him to make his own comics as a child to write stories. Here’s a piece on his one man show ‘Assassinating Thompson’
$16,000 for the credited writer of a one hour episode of a ‘big budget series’ of $30 million or more seems incredibly low. Most writers get only one or two script credits out of a 10 episode season, and many EPs take shared credit with the junior writers in the room.
And the rates for streaming residuals seem to be based on domestic uptake in the first 3 months, ignoring ‘sleepers’ and shows that sell well globally. All to say, this doesn’t get around the ‘Suits’ problem.
Yes, the writers get a base pay for being in the room, but it’s still not a lot out of a major property.
Who can live in LA on a couple of script credits a year?
A solid round up of some of the broader industry issues as the WGA contract moves towards potential endorsement by WGA East and West leadership Tuesday in preparation for a vote by the members.
I think this is a misread. Management is getting the blame in this article for making everyone worse off including themselves.
The unions aren’t being blamed at all in this for the strike. If anything their commitment is credited with bringing AMPTP back to the table early.
The article links back to earlier reports from May that AMPTP had a deliberate union-breaking strategy, and planned to refuse to negotiate or to come to the table before late October.
It’s not anti union to point out how management bad faith behaviour and refusal to negotiate is negative for an industry and the broader economy that surrounds it.
Strikes are a blunt and costly tool, but an essential tool. When they last for months as this one has, and one party has been refusing to negotiate on many terms for even months before the strike, everyone in the industry suffers. One of the key points in this article is that AMPTP has managed to lose the PR war of this strike, as they very much deserved.
CNN has been consistently reporting on how the AMPTP has been refusing to bargain, and it’s in this context that it’s weighing the costs of the strike. In comparison to the Hollywood-based media that are owned by the content conglomerates (e.g., Deadline) this is much more neutral reporting.
Amid some speculation about the questionable neutrality of major Hollywood media sources, owned by AMPTP members, CNN reports from “a source familiar” that WGA has been sent a ‘best & final’ offer....
But sources familiar with the matter told NBC News, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter on Saturday that one major sticking point was the language surrounding the use of artificial intelligence. According to Variety, those negotiations had largely come down to matters of fine print, signaling that a breakthrough may be close.
But sources familiar with the matter told NBC News, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter on Saturday that one major sticking point was the language surrounding the use of artificial intelligence. According to Variety, those negotiations had largely come down to matters of fine print, signaling that a breakthrough may be close.
The article mentions that the SAG-AFTRA negotiators and leads have been kept in the brief by WGA.
So, it sounds as though the writers have been conscious of the precedents they’re setting and there shouldn’t be surprises when the negotiations move onto the actors.
Many WGA veterans urged caution at getting hopes too high for what may come out of the AMPTP negotiating room later today, after a third day of talks between labor and management that involved four CEOs....
I have the series on DVD but I’ve never seriously cracked it, only seen a few episodes. Was wondering what people here think, is it as good as the internet often says it is? I know it was an inspiration for one of my favorite franchises (Mass Effect) and The Orville had a cute reference to it by making its main actor the...
The first season can be hard to slog through due to the alternating wooden performance / theatre extreme facial expressions of the principal character.
I had really enjoyed the 90 minute pilot (with a different first officer) and was surprised how stiff he was when the first season.
While there’s a lot of important set up in the first season, if it’s too much of a barrier that you’re not watching B5 at all, better to skip ahead to season two.
Better to skip the first season than not watch at all.
I am someone who noped out of the show mid season one during its original broadcast run, despite being really psyched by the pilot, and fortunately gave it a second chance for season two when Boxleitner was brought in.
The thing is there were great physical models in other shows. It was just Straczynski’s determination to go completely digital that was driving it.
DS9 was made with models because Paramount understood the technology wasn’t there yet. I just wish they’d kept high definition analogue film rather than video.
Leaving aside bias towards the American market and critics, this latest criticism of Rotten Tomatoes influence comes from this September 6th piece from Vulture. The report provides new evidence of PR firms paying critics and persuading them to keep negative reviews off of Rotten Tomatoes tracking....
All the more reason not to perpetuate a question on which the IP owner has a settled position. It wasn’t neutral.
I get that BBC has engaged an expert from the community, but in such a case the expert is under all the greater responsibility to ensure their neutrality. This isn’t presented as an opinion or perspective piece the way it might have been on the official site.
Had they written that there has been a long debate about TAS status, in part due to documentable statements by and those attributed to Roddenberry by his representative (I.e. Richard Arnold), and that there continues to be many fans that have reservations about its canonicity, that would be factual and neutral. This isn’t.
The name also reminded me of MGM’s incredibly influential mid 1950s groundbreaking high-end feature Forbidden Planet.
Any fan of Star Trek, Star Wars or other 60s and 70s science fiction who hasn’t seen Forbidden Planet should make the effort to hunt down a copy just to know where a lot of the tropes and design came from.
Variety - Top Marketing & Communications Executive leaving Paramount Global (variety.com)
More departures of former Viacom senior executives from Paramount Global in the wake of Baklish’s firing.
Is anyone using old.startrek.website?
I just noticed today that old.startrek.website isn’t loading properly. The fact that zero people have said anything to the admins makes me wonder if anyone’s using it at all. So speak up if you are! I will be happy to fix it for you, but otherwise may just uninstall....
Paramount and Comcast are reportedly considering a streaming partnership (www.theverge.com)
In case you missed it, Brian Tatosky (Trek's VFX Supervisor) jumped into a convo on /c/StarTrek! (startrek.website)
Link to post, cool of @StillPaisleyCat to summon him.
"For All Mankind" season ending coming up - Star Trek fan thoughts?
Amazon Will Inject Ads Into Prime Video Starting Jan. 29th (gizmodo.com)
‘Coyote Vs. Acme’: Warner Bros Setting Up Screenings For Streamers Of Axed Looney Tunes Film; Amazon A Prime Candidate – The Dish (deadline.com)
The film has been partially de-Zaslav’d.
StarTrek.website now has a wiki (and mission statement)! (wiki.startrek.website)
https://wiki.startrek.website/uploads/images/gallery/2023-09/scaled-1680-/xFQnPBtcbdNjky6A-1-copy-2.jpg...
Paramount+ Sets Premium Tier Rollout Dates And Pricing For Canada, Mexico, Australia, Brazil; Ad Tier Coming In 2024 (deadline.com)
Suggestion: User Submitted Emojis
One thing that I think would be nice would be to have a true plethora of custom star trek emojis available for us to use here. (Perhaps this is already a thing and I just dont know about it?)...
[support] Has anyone else been having trouble interacting with Lemmy off and on these past few days?
I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’ve been experiencing quite a bit of sluggishness and errors (failure to post, failure to mark as read, failure to fetch comments, etc), my feed seems to get stuck for long periods of time without updating, and any time I try to open my profile view, it can take a full minute (it might be...
Star Trek, including timeloops, meets Hallmark (www.themountaineer.com)
StarTrek actors have a strong showing across the Hallmark movie offerings this year....
‘Daredevil’ Hits Reset Button as Marvel Overhauls Its TV Business (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
Disney is apparently (re)discovering that they need to treat TV shows like…TV shows....
iCarly sequel canceled on Paramount+ after 3 seasons (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
Paramount+ recently canceled iCarly, popular show that originated on Nickelodeon....
Bruce Horak on Deaf & Disability arts (youtu.be)
Because we can’t ever get enough Bruce Horak content....
Anyone know the singer for the Klingon portion of 'We Are One'?
I know that the utterly incomparable Bruce Horak came back not as Hemmer but as the Klingon for this episode. However the singer, was that Bruce too? If so then I’m genuinely shocked. I thought for sure that it was Weird Al. It sounds almost identical. If it’s not Weird Al himself then it’s a pitch perfect double....
Revelations from Google Antitrust trial - manipulation of search terms (www.wired.com)
This is a major revelation from the trial....
As AMPTP comes to the negotiating table with SAG-AFTRA, guild leadership flag differences from WGA concerns (www.npr.org)
This NPR coverage is interesting....
What are some of your favorite communities?
I’ve been looking around for some more communities to subscribe to and thought I should ask you guys
WGA Strike To Officially End At Midnight As Guild Leaders Approve Tentative Deal With Big Gains (deadline.com)
CNN analysis of WGA strike outcomes and impact (amp.cnn.com)
A solid round up of some of the broader industry issues as the WGA contract moves towards potential endorsement by WGA East and West leadership Tuesday in preparation for a vote by the members.
Sources (likely AMPTP) say ‘final deal’ sent to WGA for consideration (amp.cnn.com)
Amid some speculation about the questionable neutrality of major Hollywood media sources, owned by AMPTP members, CNN reports from “a source familiar” that WGA has been sent a ‘best & final’ offer....
WGA and Studio CEOs Near Deal Finish Line, Working On Fine Print (deadline.com)
Latest WGA-AMTPT negotiations report from Variety (variety.com)
Many WGA veterans urged caution at getting hopes too high for what may come out of the AMPTP negotiating room later today, after a third day of talks between labor and management that involved four CEOs....
What's the consensus here regarding Babylon Five?
I have the series on DVD but I’ve never seriously cracked it, only seen a few episodes. Was wondering what people here think, is it as good as the internet often says it is? I know it was an inspiration for one of my favorite franchises (Mass Effect) and The Orville had a cute reference to it by making its main actor the...
Newly Discovered Spiders Get Star Trek-Inspired Names (gizmodo.com)
Is anyone planning to get Star Trek - Infinite? I never got into Stellaris, but this looks like it could be fun. (youtu.be)
Spotlight on / controversy about corporate manipulation of Rotten Tomatoes (www.vulture.com)
Leaving aside bias towards the American market and critics, this latest criticism of Rotten Tomatoes influence comes from this September 6th piece from Vulture. The report provides new evidence of PR firms paying critics and persuading them to keep negative reviews off of Rotten Tomatoes tracking....
100 days into strike WB television ‘suspends’ agreements with 6 major production companies. (www.hollywoodreporter.com)
Earlier this week Disney announced (whinged) that it expected a $ 300 million revenue loss attributable to the strike....
Shouldn’t we expect better fact-checking from the BBC? Even a pop-culture writer profiling Star Trek The Animated Series? (www.bbc.com)
I was initially delighted to see BBC amplifying the celebration of TAS’ 50th anniversary. Then I read this piece....
Favorite sci fi film (thats not Star Trek)?
Just looking for some recommendations because I’m in a sci fi mood. And btw, my favorite sci fi film is Planet of the Apes (original).