I’m Not Gonna Lie; I Got A Little Caught Up When I Saw That Picard Had Kept That Banner In The Picard

That modern Captain Planet discussion you guys had at the beginning of the latest @transmediacrity podcast was surprisingly resonant to me, @wyattsalazar. I’ve been chewing on this essay criticizing the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, and it seems like the attitudes and beliefs that the liberal TNG era was built on are now also verboten, and have been replaced by sadder, crueler things.

Esther, speaking as a big ol’ Star Trek fan, your friends were right. Season 1 was rough. A lot of the time it comes off as an attempt to make a 1960s-era Trek show in the 1980s, and it does not work at. all. Production was also a nightmare, to the point where the TNG writers’ room gained the reputation as one of the worst places a writer in Hollywood could work at. There’s a documentary called Chaos on the Bridge that discusses some of what went on, but it has its own biases and axes to grind. Still, Season 1 TNG did give us this incredible moment. (cw: more gore than you’d ever expect to see on an episode of Star Trek) If you ever want to give the show another shot, I’d recommend just watching any episode whose summary sounds cool. TNG was made with an eye to syndication, so the writers were discouraged from any heavy serialization. Anyway, great podcast, and I hope Madiha has recovered from finally seeing the Super Best Friends stumble their way into one of the worst (in all senses of the word) endings for Detroit: Become Human.

Transmediacrity Episode 23: You Deserve To Be A Space Kid

I'm not down with the catholic church; I just want to dress this way.

Please do not listen to this episode on full blast volume earbuds, there’s A Thing.

Topics include: Heart to heart about being depressed all the time; Madiha reads HAKAIOU ~ GAOGAIGAR VS. BETTERMAN; 2017, a year of closure for Betterman; the story of GGG vs Betterman; a brief, confused summary of GaoGaiGar; combining the tones of GaoGaiGar and Betterman; Linker Gel Dyalisis; THE POWER; Esther is back into Shin Megami Tensei Apocalypse; masters of reusing assets; god’s toilet; sexy nun; it all sounds like a doom level; SMT Mobile, why the fuck would I play that; did you get the dick chariot; CAN’T ESCAPE FROM CROSSING FATE; BACK IN to Honkai Impact; but first the masocore gacha hell of Bang Dream!; 29:00 warning for volume; this is like hell; NOT EVEN A FREE ROLL; thank you Honkai Impact; Sakura Samsara, the open world content; Theresa, the old small nun; Mihoyo storytelling; FGO is a demon monster gacha game; PUT HONKAI ON STEAM MIHOYO; honkai impact is warframe for lesbians; warframe anxiety; impossible to progress; FUCK DAVID CAGE. Send us timestamped suggestions for the Transmediacrity podcast sampler for newbies!!!

Outro theme is “Ashura-Kai Authorized Shop” from the Shin Megami Tensei IV OST.

Email us at transmediacrity@gmail.com! Check out our TUMBLR and TWITTER.

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Check out our YOUTUBE CHANNEL. Subscribe, and like our videos!

Special thanks to Velt for our cover art! Check her art here. (Not worksafe.)

You can find us at:

Madiha: Twitter, Tumblr, The Solstice War. Esther: Twitter, Tumblr.

Pour one out for all the stories you'll never find again, that you barely remember in totality, but that left an impression on you that you'll never forget.

The short stories from standardized tests that you only had a few minutes to read, but those minutes will last a lifetime.

The books on the library display shelf you used to occupy time until your mom could come pick you up from school.

The graphic novel you picked up when you were first getting into comics and could never find again.

The single lines or themes from stories you otherwise don't remember, save for the one thing that you saw and internalized as a new part of your personality.

Let's pour one out for the books that built us, even if we never could find them again, and couldn't of we wanted to.

Bane/Bad Sean Connery Impression: “Oi am Rehpublic Schity’s rehkoning.”

Daily Kuvira #132

You know I had to.

As someone who has an interest in sf/fantasy depictions of WWI, I’ve been puzzling for years as to why authors dabbling in steampunk have been reluctant to tackle the conflict. My own theory is that steampunk is, at heart, an American creation, and the Great War is an event that has mostly vanished from the American consciousness. For most American writers, steampunk is a fantasy world set in an imagined version of 19th-century Britain or America which draws more from other stories than from reality, and the question of international politics and war doesn’t really come into it. That said, I have found British authors working in steampunk to be far more willing to broach the subject of World War I, both because the war had such a huge impact on the British national psyche, and because it ties into the greater question of what Britain is, its relationship to the empire, what role Britain has in the world after empire, and so on. As for examples, two authors stand out to me. While a hard sf writer by trade, Stephen Baxter’s steampunk excursions always seem to be haunted by the war. His 1993 novel Anti-Ice is for the most part a romp about a 19th-century excursion from the Earth to the Moon thanks to the titular substance, an exotic form of antimatter. However, by the end of the book the use and exploitation of anti-ice has led to Britain, France, and Germany locking themselves into a Cold War-style nuclear arms race. His 1995 book The Time Ships is a sequel to the The Time Machine that riffs in all manner of ways on HG Wells’ work, but the middle third of the book is set in an alternate 1938 where the First World War has dragged on for decades, transforming Britain into a dystopian state influences by Wells’ most pessimistic views. (While I haven’t read Baxter’s 2017 followup to The War of the Worlds, entitled The Massacre of Mankind, some of the elements I’ve seen, like a police-state Britain and a bloody Russo-German war in Eastern Europe, suggests that the Martian invasion of the original book has become the Great War of the sequel’s world.) For something a little more literary, Ian R. MacLeod’s Aether duology, The Light Ages (2003) and The House of Storms (2005), is set in an England where a magical substance called “aether” has locked the country (and by extension the rest of the world) in a sort of static industrial revolution for centuries in some ways reminiscent of Keith Roberts’ Pavane (1968). Change does eventually come to this static eternal England, sadly in the form of a civil war whose depiction draws heavily from that of the Western Front.

I didn’t include it in the list of favorite stories because I like it more in idea than in execution, but Caitlin R, Kiernan’s story Goggles really hit me hard.  She says it was her idea of where all steampunk is leading, but most authors don’t want to admit: the conflict that became World War I in our world destroys the steampunk world in technologically advanced nuclear fire.  I read it yesterday and I can’t get the concept out of my head.

Not gonna lie, first time I saw this post I immediately thought of that scene in Prometheus where Fifield splashes the hammerpede’s blood onto his helmet and his visor just melts onto his face which, while not the most horrific way to die, is definitely up there in the top 20.

Geode (x)

Picard: “...well, fuck me, I guess.”

The important thing to remember about the Star Trek universe is that the formula for Coca-Cola was lost during the Eugenics Wars, while PepsiCo was forcibly nationalized in the 2050s by Colonel Green, who dismantled their bottling plants and had much of the workforce executed on the grounds that they produced, quote, “an impure beverage”. (RC Cola still exists in the 24th century, but nobody drinks it.)

The most unrealistic part of Star Trek Deep Space Nine is the idea that root beer is exceedingly popular. Root beer is gross and a hyper-advanced humanity isn't going to embarrass themselves by drinking that in front of the aliens

Changing Direction

Okay, I’ve been on this site for a year, I’ve vaguely figured out the basics, so let’s start using it! This is going to become my personal fandom tumblr, mainly to sort through all the various pictures and posts I’ve liked over the past year.

Eeeeeee I love it!:D

I've got another sketch idea for you: Kuvira as Captain Kirk, and Bataar as Spock! (It's a bit of an in-joke; Todd Haberkorn, Bataar's VA, also played Spock in the online fan series "Star Trek Continues".)

Daily Kuvira #30 - NEEEEEEEERRRRRDs

You can tell this was Baatar’s idea.

Also bonus from my fav podcast: