Picard Season 3 review: Not Positive

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Feb 112023
 

I haven’t seen it, so don’t blame me. But this reviewer *really* didn’t like it:

Don’t watch ‘Star Trek: Picard’ season three, it’ll only encourage them

The third season is yet another misguided waste of everyone’s time.

Whoa.

The previews look better than the first two execrable seasons, but that’s a low bar indeed.

I am reminded of a reaction video I recently saw. Even in my advancing decrepitude that’s not that big of a mental achievement, considering I saw this video yesterday:

The young lady in question watched “Galaxy Quest” without the benefit of being a fan of Star Trek. Without, in fact, the benefit of actually knowing much about Star Trek. And yet, with minimal exposure to TOS or TNG… she got “Galaxy Quest.” Maybe a few of the jokes skipped past her, but the main themes? Fully understood, accepted and appreciated. A point she raised that caught my attention: near the end when the nerd-kid is contacted and learns that his favorite show is actually real, the young lady stated that she thought that this must have been the dream of many Star Trek fans. Little does she know: whole generations of Trekkies and Trekkers  lived in the desperate hope of living in the world of Star Trek. For some this meant daydreaming about serving aboard the Enterprise. For some it meant doing what needed to to become authors or actors or film/TV show makers in the hopes of bringing their own dreams of trek to life (looking at you, Seth MacFarlane). For some of us it meant going into science and engineering in the hopes of starting mankind on the road to trekking the stars. And her realization got me thinking.

Over the last twenty-some years some “Galaxy Quest,” it has been almost universally hailed as one of the best Star Trek Movies. It is certainly one of the movies that shows most clearly a love and understanding of the original Star Trek. Within the movie, an alien race has picked up TV transmissions of the sci-fi series “Galaxy Quest,” and they decided to rebuild their entire society to conform to the vision of “Galaxy Quest,” and in doing so the saved themselves from oblivion and gave themselves hope and a new reason to go on. So… my thinking is this: the “Galaxy Quest Test.”

The test is simple: take a series or a movie that claims to be Star Trek, and imagine that it gets beamed out into space. It is picked up by an earnest alien race capable of understanding it. They have much the same ethics, hopes and fears as humanity, even if they don’t look anything like us and are really rather innocent, despite the fact they are being ground out of existence. What are the chances that these aliens will watch the show or movie and decide that the vision they’ve watched and understood is such a wonderful thing that they will choose to emulate it?

I can see this with TOS. I can see it with TNG. I can see it with Lower Decks and certainly Prodigy. I can see it with Voyager. I can kinda see it with Deep Space Nine. But the Kelvin movies? *Any* season of Discovery or Picard? Not a chance in hell.

So, when watching Star Trek Picard season three, keep this question int he back of your mind: “What would Mathesar think of this?”

 

 

 

 Posted by at 5:59 am

What an utterly surprising development

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, news, politics, weapons, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 102023
 

Fetterman hears voices like the teachers in ‘Peanuts’ after stroke, struggles to adjust to Senate life: report

I’m shocked.

 

Also, he went into the hospital Wednesday sue to light-headedness. There was some early speculation that it was another stroke, but apparently it wasn’t. It’s being downplayed… but as I understand it he’s *still* hospitalized. For light-headedness. Everything is fine. Nothing to worry about.

 

I can’t imagine why America’s opponents are seeing us as weak and ineffectual these days. Regarding which:

US military shoots down ‘object’ flying in territorial waters over Alaska

Another balloon. It’s reportedly smaller than the Chinese spy balloon (with a “car-sized” payload), was flying at about 40,000 feet, and it took an F-22 and an AIM-9X to bring it down. Wreckage crashed onto ice and has been recovered.

 Posted by at 8:13 pm

An advertisement for homeschooling

 AARRRGH, Crazy, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Feb 032023
 

Increasingly, the admission “I send my kids to public school” is tantamount to “I abuse my kids.” If this sort of thing is a reasonable prospect to be inflicted upon your kid… move to a better district or homeschool. Along with getting a better, safer, less CRT-based academic education, you also have the opportunity to teach them subjects such as “basic self defense” and “how to recognize danger.”

Several of the children in this video need to be removed from not just school, but *society.* Hopefully the little girl will recover. And hopefully she’ll learn some valuable lessons.

 Posted by at 4:03 pm

The Final Boss Karen

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Feb 012023
 

WOW. This woman is the very epitome of entitled. I *hope* she’s stoned or drunk or whacked out on *something,* cuz if this is how she is sober… WOW.

 

Clearly she is well practiced at this. This behavior has gotten her what she’s wanted in the past… and it more or less worked here, too. It won’t last forever, of course. Someday she’ll try that with someone with a lot less patience than the cops shown here. Someday she’ll try it with quota-stuffer cops like the ones who beat Tyre Nichols to death. That will be an interesting experience for her.

 Posted by at 10:59 am

Ha Ha NOOOOOOOOOOO.

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Forward!, Gah., politics, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 292023
 

Once again, virtually inevitable technology. And once again, people are dreaming up terrible uses for it. In this case, brain wave monitoring devices to track your mind while on the job to make sure that:

1) Your mind doesn’t wander from the task

2) That you don’t think about other employees

3) That you don’t make plans with other employees for things the company doesn’t want

 

 

 

Any tech like this that can be legally allowed to be mandated by an employer is tech that a government can make legally mandatory for all subjects.

 

 Posted by at 8:56 pm

Yeah, good luck with *this* search

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., news, nukes, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 282023
 

Urgent public health warning issued over lost radioactive capsule in Western Australia

The capsule fell off a truck somewhere along a 1,400 kilometer trip. What they’re hoping to find:

 

 

Any motorists who have travelled along the Great Northern Highway between Newman and Perth since January 10 should check their tyres, in case the capsule has become lodged in them.

 

Yeah. Good luck with that.

 Posted by at 11:01 am

Workplace… or shopping mall?

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, politics, Worldwreckers, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 272023
 

Granted, there are people who actually *work* at shopping malls. But these “tours” of the Google offices in LA really don;t seem like tours of work sites. There are not a whole lot of people in evidence, and the vast majority of those seen doing something are shown relaxing, playing, eating, drinking.

 

I’m sure hiring a large percentage of the workforce to simply tick quota boxes seemed like a good idea to *somebody.*

One might wonder why I’m suddenly yammering on about this. I think it’s because this sort of thing offends me… it’s not that “work” should be an oppressive, dreary existence (been there), but because works should be about The Work. Granted I used to be an aerospace engineer, not a software worker; if Google’s latest update is a little wonky, who cares. If the latest jetliner is a little wonky, people *die.* So industries that actually matter should take themselves seriously. No goofy TikTok dance videos, no on-site clowns or cry-closets. The things that made our society successful have in recent years been not only neglected but denigrated. This has included objectivity, being on time, having a good work ethic, recognition of cause and effect and so on. I see these adult daycare centers as part and parcel of this. The people who work there seem to *not* actually work there. Granted *somebody* has to be doing the job; Price’s Law suggest that the square root of the number of employees are doing half the actual work. Regardless of how true that is, any place where *anything* gets done has to have some people who are actually working. And surrounding hard workers by slackers who are getting paid just as well as them and who are visibly being coddled… that has *got* to be a morale-killer among the productive. And doubtless many of the slackers would have turned into hard workers who would derive great and substantive meaning from being productive… but they’re being indoctrinated into a culture of bland excess and sloth.

 Posted by at 11:27 am
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