StillPaisleyCat

@StillPaisleyCat@startrek.website

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StillPaisleyCat,

Some interesting stuff in this article.

It looks like Skydance thought that getting the non-voting class B Paramount shareholders on board would put pressure on the voting ones.

But it seems like Redstone was sensitive to the minority group of voting shareholders and that they were not on side. That is, it wasn’t enough to have the Redstones as the majority holders of class A NAI shares, and the majority of non-voting class B Paramount shareholders, Shari Redstone felt she had to have sufficient support from the minority of voting NAI shareholders to avoid problems such as accusations of imposing losses on a group.

“According to a source familiar with the talks, Redstone’s request for a “majority of the minority” vote, in which other Class A shareholders could vote to approve or nix the deal, was a nonstarter for Skydance, and the studio was anticipating a regulatory review of more than a year, which gave Redstone pause given the constraints it would have required of the business in the meantime.”

StillPaisleyCat,

Great to see Discovery cast getting picked up for principal/star roles in new projects.

StillPaisleyCat,

While I’m still burning that SNW introduced the first main cast person with disability and killed them off just to lean on the crutch of development-by-death-of-mentor for Uhura, I’m super happy that Bruce Horak is now being regularly cast in guest star and recurring television roles in Canada.

It’s a long way from a Star Trek stint being a career-limiting choice as it was viewed in the past.

New warp drive concept does twist space, doesn’t move us very fast (arstechnica.com)

The researchers did indeed discover a warp drive solution: a method of manipulating space so that travelers can move without accelerating. There is no such thing as a free lunch, however, and the physicality of this warp drive does come with a major caveat: the vessel and passengers can never travel faster than light. Also...

StillPaisleyCat,

It’s disappointing in its limitations, yes, but another step in bringing warp-driven travel into a more mainstream conversation and line of theoretical research in physics.

As with Albucierre’s proof, theoretical research always starts with the corner solutions and odd cases to reduce the variables.

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

Not sure what you mean by this actually. . .

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

Loved season one. Had a major WTF reaction to a development in season two and hoped it would never be referenced again. But nope.

I bailed one third through season three. The one storyline involving an unlikable character’s unhealthy obsession just became too much.

If you tell me that season four gets away from that, I might be willing to finish season three (fast forwarding through the obession-related scenes).

StillPaisleyCat,

Remember viewers are again a product to sell to advertisers rather than customers of a streaming service.

StillPaisleyCat,

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?

StillPaisleyCat,

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.)

StillPaisleyCat,

There are more production folks on Mastdon

  • Aaron Waltke EP Prodigy has an ID here as well as @goodaaron
  • Brian Tatosky - vfx supervisor SNW, Disco S5, Picard S3 @virtualbri

Also, a few Treklit authors are on Mastodon:

@DavidMack is quite active, as are

unamccormack@wanderingshop

James Swallow - jswallow@mstdn.social

@daytonward hasn’t posted since February.

StillPaisleyCat,

Not sure I have much more to add at present.

I do have a related profile on Mastodon however and follow Trek folks who are active there.

So, if you’d like I could keep filling in for that platform as others join or get active.

StillPaisleyCat,

Not convincing me to switch from Bell Media’s CTV Sci-fi Channel.

Other than Star Trek, Paramount seems to be really targeting a market that just isn’t anyone in our household.

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

[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...

StillPaisleyCat,

Voyager is still not working this morning. Can upvote only very intermittently. I haven’t attempted to post or comment.

Logged in through a browser, I am not having upvote issues, but failed to post a comment on the first attempt.

All to say that Voyager is part of the problem, but not all.

StillPaisleyCat,

Thanks for your care.

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

Not a reboot, more a continuation with most of the same cast. But the characters aged with the actor.

StillPaisleyCat,

Who knows?

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.

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....

StillPaisleyCat,

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’

StillPaisleyCat,

Uhm, here’s another odd song from Bruce “Honky the Christmas Goose”

StillPaisleyCat,

There are a couple of competing Sci-fi and Movies and Television communities on various instances that are building traction.

Suggest using the Lemmy community browser and/or the community tab of the Lemmy Explorer to search for topics that interest you. Once you find one, copy its url and use that in the community search here on your home instance.

StillPaisleyCat,

$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?

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

Here’s a bit more cautious perspective in a round up of reports from The Daily Beast:

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

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...

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

I can’t recommend Andromeda.

I attempted unsuccessfully to slog alone through the first season. Our kids bailed after a few episodes.

The fact that it’s fans say the early seasons are the better ones gave me no incentive to persevere.

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

I liked season five too.

StillPaisleyCat,

Nah, it looked video gamey and cheesy even then. Season four was better, but the main station model never kept up l.

I just didn’t think the resolution was there to make completely CGI models believable.

StillPaisleyCat,

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.

StillPaisleyCat,

But they’re so cute!!! All those extra eyes are adorable.

And they only suck fluids rather than dissolving bones…

StillPaisleyCat,

I’m going to. I’ve been waiting for a Star Trek release on Steam so will reward the developers by getting in early.

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....

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