Latest Posts by nesterov81 - Page 6

Fun fact: in the early stages of production for “The Pegasus”, the script initially called for the titular Pegasus to be a new ship design that was essentially a Ambassador-era take on the Miranda/Nebula-class hull profile. However, budget and time constraints led the TNG team to go with an Oberth instead. All that exists of this original Pegasus is an quick sketch Rick Sternbach did, and it’s neat to see it come to life in a roundabout fashion through this model.

Apollo-class for Star Trek Bridge Commmander

Good to see this post making the rounds again. I forgot to include that link in my first response, so here it is again for good measure. It digs a bit more into the matter and makes a point that Kuvira may be more of an modernizing authoritarian than an out-and-out fascist. (A very fine point, yes, but an important one to keep in mind.) Come to think of it, I’ve been wondering for the longest time if Amon may have been the actual Nazi. Certainly when you look at Book 1 of Korra as a whole, it’s not hard to make a case that for all the talk of equality and the downtrodden nonbender, Amon’s ultimate goal was the elimination or expulsion of all benders from the United Republic, and his first act upon seizing control of Republic City was to round up the benders and strip them of their powers by force. While I don’t know the correct word to describe benders as a subset of all humans in the universe of Avatar, I don’t think anyone could disagree that Amon’s plan for all benders was essentially ethnic cleansing.

A piece I did for avatarfanzine - Children of the Earth zine, which if you pre-ordered it, should be getting it real soon. I wished Kuvira would’ve had a longer season to shine a lot more. She genuinely saw herself as the hero of the people.

That comic is an online goof, but there is an actual official DC comic about a communist Superman. It’s called Superman: Red Son, and it’s one of those Elseworld “what-if” comics DC used to put out on occasion in the 1990s.

The basic premise is that baby Superman’s capsule crashes in one of the less ravaged parts of the Ukraine in the 1930s instead of Kansas, so Superman grows up as an ardent Marxist-Leninist. After doing the superhero thing for a few years, he becomes Stalin’s successor as general secretary in the early 1950s and makes it his mission to make the world a better place. By the middle of the 1960s almost the entire world is united under technocratic socialism, and America is a decaying hermit kingdom wracked by civil unrest and rapidly sinking into geopolitical and historical irrelevance. (Sadly, America ends up winning in the end, because of course it does.) This comic has gotten a fair bit of praise over the years, probably more than it deserves. Still, I have a soft spot for it, if only for the fact that it was the first superhero comic I ever bought, and one of the few I didn’t get rid of later. For something a little grittier, I’d highly recommend looking for The Winter Men, an obscure noir crime story set most in late Yeltsin-era Moscow and dealing with the fate of a number of Soviet-era superhero programs.

Well, as it turns out, I managed to pick the right ship.

This big beautiful girl here is the U.S.S. Madiha Nakar, NX-122030. While she is what Star Trek Online calls a “science command battlecruiser” (even though she’s bigger than the Enterprise-D, she’s a “battlecruiser”), her appearance is a kitbash of the saucer and neck of the Geneva-class science CBC with the engineering hull, nacelles, and pylons of a Presidio-class tactical CBC.

As the name implies, her main role in battle is to command and support the rest of the fleet. To that end she has a hangar deck full of runabouts to harass and hinder enemy ships, three types of automated turrets to deploy around the battlefield, and the ability to give massive bonuses to other ships in her team if she survives in combat and uses a lot of abilities. (She could also be further optimized with bridge officers with specialized command abilities, but I prefer to be a space wizard and throw science magic all over the place.)

As for loadouts, I’ve kitted her out with a whole pile of Romulan endgame gear (hence the green), which means that in battle she spends most of her time spraying firey green death plasma in every direction. She’s not my favorite starship in STO, but whenever I need to throw a lot of damage at something and I’m not sure what’s waiting for me, she’s the one I go to and she’s always served me well.

Stupid-serious question: if Madiha Nakar was a starship, what kind of starship would she be?

Some kind of flagship with a lot of battlefield analysis and C&C equipment.

Befitting my WWI obsession, I’d kill for a chocolate cake in the shape of a British Mark V. I want a goddamn rhomboid prism of cake, and I want it now.

I want a T-14 cake for my birthday sometime. I think the T-14 is among the more cake-like modern tanks, and also I am a Russian nationalist,

Not only that, but if you don’t enjoy the podcast you’re probably a prokaryotic organism.

If you’ve never listened to an anime club podcast please try to listen to the Wixoss podcast. I know Betterman was definitely a hard sell, but Wixoss rules.

But also go back and listen to the Betterman podcast sometime. If you don’t I guarantee your T-Cells are fucking weak,

Look, @coppermarigolds, Space Kuvira rides again!

The most passive-aggressive move Star Wars’s tie-in novels ever made toward their scifi franchise competition: the cover artists started drawing the evil Admiral Daala in a very similar way to Voyager’s Captain Janeway.

I still haven’t played the Mass Effect games yet, but these sound like the sort of things the Enterprise-D comes across in the middle of a normal planetary survey or supply run that turns into some delightful adventure about missing time, lizard aliens, and good old-fashioned space madness.

Mass Effect one is like, oddly surreal and full of little mysteries. Like you go on any planet with the mako, and you come across all sorts of stuff. Like debris from space ships, abandoned tents and rovers, and even dead bodies in the middle of nowhere??? Or a random beacon with the dog tags to some captain. Let’s not forget the mummified Salarian on some lifeless planet out in the middle of nothing remarkable space.

There’s a gas giant in a system in like Hades Gamma or Gemini Sigma or something with a moon notable for having the abandoned ship of a Turian general that served in the Krogan rebellions. All it says is that he was nowhere to be found, only a deliberately depowered ship was found. Like???? Or the gas giant with mysterious machines beneath the clouds that no one knows the origin or purpose behind.

Therum has a town of 13,000 on it for the mining, but we never see it?? The planet that’s 90% ocean also has a settlement and we don’t see that one either! In any of the games we never get to visit Elysium, even though it’s mentioned several times.

Another planet has some weird history and prothean ruins or something else super mysterious on it, and Earth universities want to study it but it’s stuck behind what could be decades worth or arguing with the council about it.

How did the Thresher Maws get scattered to so many random planets, and what they eat there??

And then there’s random outposts on these empty planets but we don’t know what they were researching?? The one planet where the mine is filled with husks, but we are never given any reason as to how they turned into husks in the mine. Or the occasional empty freighter ship orbiting a star that has some bizarre reason for it being abandoned and forgotten.

How did the pirates or scavengers get on these planets and appear in hideouts or trying to salvage some debris, but there’s no ship around? Did they get dropped off and someone was coming back to pick them up or what?? Where are the big pirate gangs based at? Some place akin to Omega or Illium or just a base on some empty planet?

Some of this confusion with logic, but most of these are like, so mysterious and I want to know all the answers.

I’m a big boring nerd who likes uniforms, so I was always Templar. 'Course I do have a soft spot for both the Kingdom (mummy gangsters!) and the former Red Hand (communist magic!).

Time for the hard question: Templar, Lumie, or Dragon?

Illuminati, real meme hours.

i wish orson welles was here to run a toxic blog

“GREETINGS CITIZENS. THE DATE IS SUNDAY, APRIL 14, 1974: CIVIL RESURRECTION DAY. PLEASE PROCEED TO THE LAGOMORPHIC DISPENSIARY IN BLOCK 5 BETWEEN 1000 HOURS AND 1630 HOURS TO RECEIVE YOUR SUPPLEMENTARY DIETARY ALLOTMENT COURTESY OF THE GLORIOUS STATE. BE WARNED THAT NONCOMPLIANCE MAY RESULT IN DEMERITS ON YOUR FAMILY RATION ACCOUNT. WE THANK THE LEADER FOR THIS GIFT; MAY SHE LIVE FOREVERMORE. MESSAGE ENDS.”

The SOS Brutalism Team wishes you Happy Easter!

RT @BrutalHouse   Behold! The Brutal Easter Bunny Returns — (Jyväskylä, Finland 1982) https://twitter.com/BrutalHouse/status/979631924586172416

This is very embarrassing, but I forgot to link the blog post that discussed Kuvira. It’s right here: https://futuristdolmen.wordpress.com/2015/08/23/kuvira-an-appraisal-of-the-woman-and-her-works/

A piece I did for avatarfanzine - Children of the Earth zine, which if you pre-ordered it, should be getting it real soon. I wished Kuvira would’ve had a longer season to shine a lot more. She genuinely saw herself as the hero of the people.

You can’t fool me, Madiha, you’re clearly a Belarusian bot, here to tempt us with pro-tractor propaganda.

we did it guys we caught all of them. mission accomplished. now nobody can call me a russian bot. we have a list theyre all there

Speaking as someone who does a fair bit of reviewing and occasionally writes for an ezine filled with people steeped in academia, I often feel the same way. I'm always worrying that I'm not being "insightful" enough or that I don't know the correct language to properly discuss a particular theme. I find it helps to remind myself that, at the end of the day, I don't really want to be an academic or write in that environment (or have to force myself to learn that unfathomable prose), and that it's far better to work on something I enjoy doing rather than making myself miserable slaving away on something just to sate my insecurities or gain the approval of some imaginary person I don’t care about.

i feel dumb because i write fiction instead of theory or critical work

Custom-tailored sweatsuits for chilly tanks. :3

Super heavy tank

The duality of cat.

If your ever feeling embarrassed or frustrated with your voice just remember S.H.O.D.A.N from System Shock got to remake herself in her ideal of beauty and decided to have a stutter and inconsistent tone.

Honestly, you’re actually one of the most interesting people I know, and I’m glad I got to know you.

i know im not very interesting but i try so hard that you should all humor me

The fact that ProZD sounds exactly like Jason Alexander disturbs me greatly.

thought this was an odd choice for the new trailer

Original post by airlesscell

“Behold, the bringer of light.”

Nuclear Bomb Testing in the Nevada Desert (May 25, 1953)

I may not understand any of what’s going on in the show, and I may still believe that Algernon is a kind of furniture polish, but hearing you guys talk about Betterman always brightens my day.

I feel not good but I did manage to record Anime Club with @plumerium 

This is why Bryke didn’t want to introduce guns in The Legend of Korra.

The perfect match. @lazarus-cell

Alien Covenant (2017)

Today I started separating my 2900+ likes into various sideblogs just so I can keep track of them all, and I appear to have accidentally created an architecture sideblog.

I’ve always been very reluctant to equate Kuvira to either Chaing or Mao. Part of the problem is that if you start looking for 1:1 historical analogies in fantasy worlds you end up developing tunnel vision you miss out on what the writer is actually trying to do with their setting. The other issue is that Bryke never really made it clear what Kuvira’s beliefs and ideology were beyond a few speeches and a handful of background details that don’t entirely fit together. Back when B4 was airing the revelation of the Earth Empire’s internment camps caused a stir in the fandom (at least among the Kuvira fans), since there was literally nothing in Kuvira’s backstory or behavior to explain why she would be an ethnic chauvinist. This old blog post took an interesting tack by discussing Kuvira’s context in the world history of Avatar and suggesting that she might be closer to Kemal Atatürk than any figure from modern Chinese history. (There’s also some neat discussion of the personal and political relationship between Kuvira and Suyin too!)

A piece I did for avatarfanzine - Children of the Earth zine, which if you pre-ordered it, should be getting it real soon. I wished Kuvira would’ve had a longer season to shine a lot more. She genuinely saw herself as the hero of the people.

“Who killed Palpatine?”

reblog if you remember what it felt like to walk into blockbuster

A selection of the 3D character models in Minsk-based artist Dmitriy Bezrodniy’s portfolio.