Latest Posts by nesterov81 - Page 2

INTERIOR - CABIN JEAN-LUC PICARD: You’re...James Tiberius Kirk? Right? JIM KIRK: Yes, I am him. JEAN-LUC PICARD: Why? <puzzled silence> - a scene cut from the shooting script of Star Trek: Generations (1994)

what if after the five year mission, people treat captain kirk like they treat tony hawk?

like people don’t recognize tony hawk unless he has a skateboard, and people don’t recognize kirk unless he’s in uniform

Hmm...if this is real, it looks a lot like the old New Orleans class from the Wolf 359 graveyard in TNG, or sort of a halfway point between the N’awlins class and the Lafayette, the 2410 update of the N’awlins from *Star Trek Online*.

It’s a good design for a smaller destroyer/light cruiser type of ship...but it raises the obvious question of why they didn’t just use the N’awlins instead. :/ (If it’s just fanart, I retract all my complaints.)

U.S.S Cerritos by Simon Marino

today Meatball abruptly realized that there are refugee office plants in the kitchen (they have been there for weeks) and has decided his singular purpose in life is to eat them 

Sometimes I wonder which poor bastard from Geordi’s engineering staff got his skull flayed to give Data that half-face.

It’s like reverse Phantom of the Opera mask

“Congratulations son, you’ve reinvented Romulans.” (Actually I imagine most Romulans would find these guys incredibly tedious to be around.)

I’m just reblogging this to tag on a recommendation for Gemma Files’ novel Experimental Film, a horror story about Lady Midday and the forgotten world of hobbyist silent filmmakers at the dawn of the 20th century. (Plenty of female characters to boot as well!)

The ray of blazing, scorching, devouring sunshine.

I’m imagining something like that one scene in Lord of War where Nick Cage’s plane full of guns is forced to make an emergency landing somewhere in Liberia, and within twelve hours the whole thing is stripped to the skeleton. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQgdZTgpczM

Sis and I discussing The Mandalorian, episode 2.

So here’s two questions: can airbenders only bend ordinary air, or can they bend other gases? Are there limits based on the state of various elements, compounds, and solutions at particular temperatures and atmospheric pressures, or does every substance have a particular “essence” that only a specific type of bender can manipulate? (i.e. can an airbender bend steam?)

can waterbenders bend oil can earthbenders bend glass can airbenders bend sound can firebenders bend mixtapes

Troy Baker drinks Red Bull, so you know he’s evil.

Well....at least we can still drink piss water Monster Energy after the apocalypse...

This actually came up in the movie Shadow of the Vampire, where two members on the production team for the original Nosferatu ask actual vampire Max Schreck (played by actual vampire Willem Dafoe) what he thought of the book, though the movie plays the question more for melancholy and absurdity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgqgSaDCgC4

the best gag in dracula by far is how the entire time jonathan harker is imprisoned in dracula’s castle, dracula is pretending to have a full household of servants when in reality it’s just him running around doing everything, and it would be CRIMINAL to write a drac-centric adaptation and not milk this gag for all it’s worth. dracula dropping off harker in the carriage, pulling into the stables, then sprinting through the castle to answer the front door. dracula lurking outside harker’s bedroom for him to leave so he can sneak in and make his bed and fold his pajamas. dracula in the kitchen struggling to make food when he hasn’t eaten anything except blood in centuries. dracula giving up, turning into a bat in frustration, flapping over to the nearest farmhouse, stealing a pie off the windowsill, and proudly presenting it to harker for dinner.

Something to keep in mind when watching ENT is that Archer is a contemporary of all those starship captains from the late 22nd and early 23rd century that got their crews killed or committed horrendous Prime Directive violations that Kirk and Picard had to clean up a century or two later. Hell, Archer’s probably the one who gave the Iotians that gangster book.

Captain Archer’s smugness is so annoying. Especially because he is so wrong. They go down to the planet and all get high and paranoid off some chemicals in the air, and Trip tries to kill T’Pol.. You know, chemicals that they might have detected with a probe, but fuck caution you know

Okay, let me see here: 1. The Mummy (1999)

2. Pride and Prejudice (2005)

3. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

4. Frozen (2013)

5. Star Wars Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)

6. Gladiator (2000) 7. One of the Lord of the Rings movies...I’m gonna guess Return of the King? 8. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) The gif was vague enough that I couldn’t place the movie at first, but your comment gave the game away. ;) 9. Jurassic Park (1993) 10. Star Wars Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017) Tag me in and I’ll see what I can do! (Assuming, of course, that Tumblr has any gifs for the movies I like.)

10 Movies Meme

Post ten gifs from ten favorite movies without naming them, then tag ten people.

@skybound2​ tagged me for this meme, and it was a lot harder than I expected! I think aside from a significant few, movies tend not to stick in my head as much as TV shows and video games do. 

I’ll tag anyone who’d like to do this!

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)

I’ve had those dreams too (I usually end up getting to the exam without having taken any classes), and so does my dad, who’s a good three-four decades older than me. If I had to guess, I would say that the life-or-death importance many of us attach to our education, combined with being in such a state for several years, is so intense that it seeps into our subconscious and stays there long after we graduate. I’ve heard stories of personal assistants having dreams about their bosses calling for them, so it isn’t just limited to people in uni.

I keep having this recurring nightmare that I’m in college, but somehow have either forgotten or otherwise blown off all my classes. And it’s getting near the end of the term when I suddenly realize I haven’t gone to class at all, and have missed all of the tests and assignments and I’m going to fail everything. 

It’s been ten years (!) since I graduated college, and back then I think I skipped class no more than one or two times total, so I have no idea why my subconscious is so fixated on something that never happened. Brains are weird. 

“He reminds me of that delightful FBI agent with the future-glasses from that old David Cage game.”

These aliens have names like Garvin, Skorin, and Talur. And this kid comes up with Jayden. The hell, writers?

I thought my parent’s cat Archie was really serious about his breadmaking, but this is a whole other level. (His brother Claude, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to knead that much.) Also, Bodhi is getting so big!!! <3

I remember back in the day when this blanket used to be mine…

The mirror universe, transporter accidents, other parallel universes, time travel, cloning technology operated by unscrupulous doctors and scientists, the holodeck...the list goes on and on.

The “would you fuck your clone?” question is so uncomfortably real in Star Trek because of the Mirror Universe.

I’m not gonna lie; I got a little caught up when I saw that Picard had kept that banner in the Picard trailer.

The only one that really comes to mind is, well, Jim Kirk himself. He spent a fair chunk of his tenure as a cadet on the USS Republic instead of at the academy, and he managed to get field promotions to acting ensign and acting lieutenant. (The details of his academy days are kinda unclear and contradictory, since they changed things around between episodes, but this seems to be the generally accepted consensus according to Memory Alpha.) What all this means, of course, is that Jim Kirk surpassed Harry Kim before he even graduated.

About the cadets ask, I'm going through TNG rn and as far as I can tell, acting ensigns get credits for their practical experience in the field so it's probably like Work Study programs in college. But like the Ultimate Work Study program cause I cant think of anything cooler.

I always thought Wesley was just like a weird exception. I can’t think of any other acting ensigns, but I’m probably wrong?

So instead of making the story about the political maneuvering in the former EK they’re going all-in on the mind-control plotline? Sigh... At this point, I think it’s safe to say that Bryke don’t know how to write political stories. Every time they introduce a political topic like relations between benders and non-benders in Republic City or discord between the two Water Tribes, they always end up walking it back, changing the subject, or having the issue hinge on some piece of magic or technology rather than on the thoughts and actions of the characters. There’s no shame in not having the knack for writing politics, but when you keep trying to do it despite making a hash of it every time, you really need to step back and reconsider a few things. Heck, Faith Erin Hicks is handling the divisions in proto-Republic City in the AtLA comics far better than Bryke ever did. On a more speculative note, a part of me wonders if DiMartino is actually going to go so far as to walk back the end of B4 and Kuvira ruler of the Earth Kingdom again. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing. (Also, is it just me, or Asami just become a damsel in distress for Korra to save ever since their relationship began?)

It’s Korra and Kuvira vs Mako, Bolin, and Asami in The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire Part 3!

We now have the cover and description and they come with a major bombshell: Part Two is still months out and Part Three even further after that, but Mako, Bolin, and Asami become brainwashed and turned against Korra, along with others across the Earth Kingdom, .

This could be the result of the scientific experiments using spirit energy the Earth Empire remnant was conducting.

This is actually kind of exciting because we’ve never seen Team Avatar battle each other before and that’s now a possibility. Of course, Korra should realistically have a much higher base power level, but who knows what the spirit energy experiments have up their sleeve…

Here’s the full description:

“Kuvira’s true nature is revealed, and the Earth Kingdom will feel the consequences!

Thanks to Commander Guan and Doctor Sheng’s brainwashing technology, all hope for a fair election in the Earth Kingdom is lost. Korra works with Toph, Su, and Kuvira to plan a means to rescue not just the brainwashed Mako, Bolin, and Asami, but everyone else caught up in Guan’s plan! With the Earth Empire potentially on the rise again, Kuvira pulls another trick from her sleeve … but whose side is she truly on?”

You can see the cover and description for Part Two here. It comes out November 12th.

Part Three arrives on February 25th, 2020.

source

it’s a tragedy that dinotopia was adapted as a weird gritty looking tv movie with bad cgi when it’s, without exaggeration, the most ghibli any book has ever been

As a fan of alternate histories of various stripes, there’s nothing more disappointing that a story that imagines a world where history went differently, but almost everything is still exactly the same. The whole point of the concept is to have fun extrapolating the changes. On the subject of Beatles-themed alternate histories, Ian R. Macleod, one of my favorite sf/f authors working today, wrote a novella back in 1992 called “Snodgrass” which imagined Lennon leaving the Beatles in 1962 over a fight with a studio executive, only to spend the rest of his life being haunted by the road he never took. It was eventually adapted as a short drama a few years back with Ian Hart as a bitter Lennon in his fifties.

Can a Beatles Fan Believe in ‘Yesterday’?

Our resident hardcore Beatleologist on why this fantasy about a Fab Four-less world should have fixed its holes

… there’s no attempt to have fun with the Twilight Zone possibilities. There’s no humor about the “butterfly effect” in erasing the Beatles from the world they changed. It’s a parallel universe where Coldplay and Neutral Milk Hotel exist without the Fabs, and where all the men have longish haircuts that would have been unthinkable before the mop tops came along. As British critic Dorian Lynskey noted, “‘A world without the Beatles is a world that’s infinitely worse,’ says one character, in a film where a world without the Beatles is almost exactly the same.”

Yeah… I was about to make the argument that you can’t make a movie where everyone save one schlub “forgets”: the Beatles without re-imagining a musical climate in which the Beatles, arguably the biggest pop band of all time, nor their inevitable influence, never existed, but apparently this is too pedantic for Hollywood. 

You’ve hit the nail on the head. While I have a conservative temperament, I don’t agree with a lot of traditional North American conservatism. And yet I’ve loyally read the works of a few conservative writers for years now, because they shared the qualities you listed. They’re able to articulate their beliefs so you can understand where they’re coming from, they try not to caricature their opponents and give credit where credit is due (sometimes), and they have a lively awareness of themselves and their blind spots. (Having a sense of humor about all of this is also a big help.)

I don’t think the solution is to follow a bunch of people from across the political spectrum to ensure that you’re not ensconcing yourself in an echo chamber, but to follow smart people. Period. People who aren’t afraid to criticize their own tribe. People who don’t speak entirely in buzzwords. People who’ve given some indication that there’s a brain in there, not just a collection of ideological talking points.

Ah, “Alter Ego”, the episode where Tuvok is stalked by an alien incel who got too deep into RPing.

if you relate to having an idea for a story for 4 to 8 years with almost zero progress towards actually writing it down, clap your hands

This is excellent commentary, but I would argue about your interpretation of Mirror Garak. In her series of blog posts about DS9 @abigailnussbaum argued that one of Garak’s central tragedies was that he was someone who believed in the ideals of his society, but was smart enough and cynical enough that he could never believe in them wholeheartedly. I would say that Mirror Garak is someone who either never had those doubts or taught himself to ignore them, becoming the good little soldier who steadily advances in rank even if his society marches him off a cliff. It’s not for nothing that Mirror Garak is a boilerplate Cardassian military goon instead of an Obsidian Order agent. (Additionally, Andrew Robinson noted in the DS9 companion that he played Mirror Garak as a “toady opportunist,” and he never had that much affection for that iteration of the character.)

One thing I treasure about this parallel in TOS is that it reminds us that being a “good person,” while it can ultimately become part of our being, is a series of constant, difficult choices. We are shaped by our experience and circumstances, and choosing to do good is more difficult in some situations and for some people than others.

It’s much more admirable knowing that Jim makes the choice over and over again to do the “good” thing, despite everything that has happened to him, so that he becomes the person the people who know him best think of as having an unassailable goodness, rather than just making a simple claim that some people are born to goodness and some are not. This extends to every character on the show, and into our own lives.

Goodness is not who we are, it’s what we do. Eventually, those actions become “what kind of people” we are. Knowing the other choice was possible makes the decision more meaningful.

There’s something deeply distressing to me about how there’s been this steady push over the past twenty years to transform all forms of media from things you can physically buy and use as you see fit into things you essentially rent in perpetuity from publishers and hosting services. It’s like there’s this assumption that we can rent these things forever and never have to worry about the Internet ever going down or one of these digital landlords deciding to take them away from us whenever they want. Movies and PC games are my beat, but I've certainly had to stockpile a number of hard copies over the years due to rights issues or lack of interest keeping them out of the digital marketplace.

On the Existential Fear of Losing Your Online Persona

…

“Digital is about access, it’s about sharing,” Schwartz said. “But once you digitize something, suddenly the object is not human-readable anymore—not readable like a stack of letters in your attic. With digital you have to preserve the letter, and you have to preserve the software, and the machine that can read it.”

That means that as technology evolves, the types of data it can read evolves as well. Think about the floppy discs you almost definitely have in a box somewhere—or DVDs, to pick a more recent example. My current laptop doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive at all. I couldn’t watch my Mona Lisa Smile DVD if I wanted to. So you can see how delicate that media is.

Thinking a lot about this since Apple announced the demise of iTunes. One great thing about iTunes was the convenience of digital while still owning a physical library. I spent a good chunk of the 90s building a music collection. It defined me, which was the things worked then. It’s no coincidence that the transition from aesthetic to moral signal occurred alongside the transition from owning a physical to a virtual library. If the things we own can’t define us, then what does? When I was twelve or thirteen, I would have killed for something like Spotify where all the music I could ever dream of was at my fingertips, but there’s no hunt, no sense of personal value.

Juliette knows exactly what she’s doing, doesn’t she? Between this and that old picture of her where she tore down that shower curtain when she was a kitten, I’m beginning to suspect this cat is an agent of chaos.

I ordered some clothes online, and the plastic bag they arrived in is the most exciting thing to happen to Leo and Ellie in a while.

Meanwhile, Julie is content to lie directly on the clothes themselves (and get hair all over them).