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Spensor is a giant alien robot that is millions of years old and one of the few survivors of a dying race at war with itself. He can shape shift into virtually anything, is only an idiot when it's funny, always gets away with not doing the work he is supposed to do and constantly makes cringey references to 90s pop culture and doesn't get punished for it.

Yeah, it did kind of end rather abruptly - partly because I couldn’t think of a suitable ending which wouldn’t make it too long and partly because I was running out of writing time and didn’t want it to drag on too long.

I know those aren’t very good excuses, but...I might write a follow up today or tomorrow if I have time.

If you search for "Thanos" (though it might be under certain contexts, this is a link that's known to work for this) and then click the gauntlet in the box on the right, half the search results will disappear.

- Tomash

Damn good movie, 'Nuff said.

So, I like how this piece is a nice bit of worldbuilding for the long-running series of prompt fills you've got going. It's also a nice seen overall.

One thing I noticed is that, for me at least, it seems to just stop, more than end. This is probably because the last thing that happens is Tiger going to look for a place to hide, and I'm sort of expecting followup.

If I could post a gif here, I'd post that one of Cap from Age of Ultron. Sorry for violating that rule there.

Dear god, that's exactly the point I'm trying to convey here. It isn't Star Trek if it ain't Star Trek.

Crazy Minh has the right idea when they say: "From episode one, they set out to wreck as many of the tropes and themes of Star Trek as they can. They introduce a abrasive cast, who can never work together without rowing in the classic reality-TV style of angsty-drama that I absolutely hate."

And that is the problem in a couple of sentences. The setting itself has been fundamentally changed. We know a lot about how the Federation is run and how people are chosen to crew starships, and none of these people would have made it past Starfleet Academy, let alone become high-ranking officers, without either learning how to cooperate or dropping out to do something else.

This is true on a large scale, too. Star Trek is supposed to be a setting where we're better at running our world than we used to be; though people still make mistakes and mess up, they've learned how to compensate for the weaknesses of individual humans, and of humanity in general, to work out a system that supports basic rights, prefers diplomacy to hostility, embraces diverse viewpoints, and has as its chief goal not just the well-being of its own citizens but the well-being of the universe as a whole.

If you dump that, it's not Star Trek anymore; it's a character replacement for an entire universe.

Ask yourself this: If this were fan fiction, what would you think of it? It might not be quite as bad as "Cursed Child", but... it's in that neighborhood.

Turns out I have the logs; just had to unblock the mythcreant account on discord. Some of the stuff here might be potentially triggering. I'll screenshot it, and if someone wants them just dm @Helsinki#2328.

It should probably be noted, although it would be nice to have something to show for future readers who weren't around at the time.

Folks, does anyone have logs of zdimensia causing trouble in PMs?

—doctorlit

You've done a lot of good work. Thanks for that, genuinely.

(And as a sidenote, perhaps somewhere in the wiki it should be mentioned that there was some harassment in PMs. I don't have the logs; having since long deleted the conversations and removing the user, but I hope my word is enough.)

YMMV means Your Mileage May Vary. Your opinion may be different from mine because our perspectives etc. may differ. Just because one person holds one opinion about something doesn't mean that every person will hold that opinion on that one thing. Or at least, that's how I take it.

By the way, WMG is (I believe) Wild Mass Guessing

YMMV? I mean, I've seen that label on TV Tropes, but I still don't get what it is meant to actually be. Same with WMG, which I assume means 'What May Go', although I'm unsure on that front.

Would you mind explaining the meaning of 'YMMV' please?

Bring out the cake!

But I feel something should be said here.

For the majority of your post, I feel like it's part YMMV and partly that you may not be part of the audience the people behind Star Trek Discovery were aiming it at. I suspect that they didn't make it for the hard-core Trekkies, they made it for people who are new or newer to the series, maybe those who remember some episodes or some characters from some of the series' that came before but not the hard-core fans. Now I'm not saying that's the right move, but it is generally seen as a good move in the wider world because by making it more accessible to newer people they can attract a bigger audience and get more money, rather than having it become more of a cult classic that attracts Trekkies but perhaps alienates other people. This kind of thing happens.

Take Warhammer 40k for example, 7th edition had a load of rules that while simple still required a couple of hundred pages of rulebook to understand, which is understandably daunting to new players but the older, more regular players could take it in their stride, better a couple of hundred pages rulebook now than the close to a thousand pages from a few editions ago (I may be exaggerating slightly). 8th edition is now so laughably simple and easy that while more new people have started playing Warhammer 40k since it's release, a lot less regulars have because (this is in the words of a Games Workshop employee I'm friends with) "They find it too easy and too different to see as the same game that they used to love playing." It sucks, but it happens and I'm very annoyed that it's happened.

Anyway back to Star Trek. Can I just ask where you got that 'Burnham was the first mutineer in Starfleet'? Because I can't find a source that says that from about 15 minutes of research. Although, technically if all trace of someone is removed from the record books then that person would no longer be the first person to do something if they n longer exist (I'm aware this is me being pedantic, I'm sorry. But it also helps preserve canon and continuity and so is important to say). And yes, maybe the classification of the whole of Season 1 stuff is a patch over it, but at least they tried to apply one rather than leave it rampant and do nothing at all. If they didn't care for the continuity, they would of probably left it a lot more open than they did.

I can't change how you feel about it, so I'm not going to. To pretend to be able to do otherwise wouldn't be appropriate on my part. All I can do is look at what I can see and give my opinions as a counter argument for it. That being said, I am sorry to hear that you felt that way after looking forward to it for so long but unless you have that time travel machine I mentioned in my last post, I'm not entirely sure what, if anything could be done to change it.

Novastorme

Now I've gone and written a fourth part, in which Valinor (ie, east Asia) is compared to Chinese mythology.

hS

Ralph Damiani is an artist whose work I only ran into recently, but instantly put onto my desktop wallpaper rotation. Just today, it's popped up with this image of Minas Tirith.

The differences from Fonstad's version (thanks, Snowy) are remarkable. Rather than seven more-or-less concentric circles, Damiani gives us seven stacked circles, with each circle extending forward from the sheer back face of the mountain. I haven't exhaustatively compared it to the text, but it doesn't seem to obviously contradict it. (I'd quibble some of the detail - the 'keel of rock' appears to be missing, or else the city is significantly skewed - but the principle works.) It actually makes more sense of Pippin's wanderings: with each circle almost a semicircle of settlement, there's a lot more room to get lost. You end up with something like this:



With the widest part of each circle about 130 meters; for comparison, the old Roman walled city of Chester was less than 600m across; Roman Colchester was barely 500m. So, given the multiple circles, that pretty much works. By setting the citadel further back, you also lengthen the road up, which lets you decrease the slope even further.

I love the idea of each circle having a different feel to it. I'm sure Anarion didn't intend it to be that way - but people will be people. Even if the gates stay permanently open, they're a mental barrier, so yes, viewing the circles as separate neighbourhoods makes a lot of sense.

Dinotopia! Those books are seriously gorgeous. I was so delighted when Journey to Chandara came out, you would not believe. ^_^ Still hoping Gurney makes another one someday...

hS

Ok. I REALLY don't want to turn this into a flame war. And no, that's not a opener for a flaming post.

Discovery isn't bad because of the cosmetic differences. It's not 'bad because it's new'- I had absolutely no problem with Enterprise when it aired, even though it was cosmetically more advanced in a era set before TOS. I actually liked that aesthetic a bit...because it wasn't all that different. I would link to a excellent analysis of Discovery that takes apart the camera work, lighting and set design- and then compares it to Enterprise...but unfortunately CBS has apparently gotten that video copyright striked for a few clips taken from STD.

No. Discovery is bad because it takes the whole formula of Star Trek- its soul if you will- and rips it to shreds. Star Trek- yes, even DS9- felt like Star Trek for a handful of reasons. You had a setting that was inherently optimistic (in the very words of Gene Roddenberry himself 'In the 24th century there will be no hunger, there will be no greed, and all the children will know how to read'), even if the people living it were flawed beings, just like every person alive today. You had a distinct visual style that evolved with each era depicted on the show, with clear visual padigrams changing between the distinct eras, and others staying more-or-less the same. You had a formula for each cast: people who were paragons, who (as ruled by Gene himself) didn't fight with each other- but instead worked as a team- and were clearly professionals in their field (although some characters like Kirk are a little loose on the professionalism, and I'm not counting the various space-madness episodes); people who represented the best of humanity, not the worst; and above all, people who you could feel affinity with. One of my childhood heroes is Captain Jon Luc Picard, and the fact that CBS is now setting out to shred the best captain ever to captain the Enterprise is heartbreaking for me.

STD is having none of that shite. From episode one, they set out to wreck as many of the tropes and themes of Star Trek as they can. They introduce a abrasive cast, who can never work together without rowing in the classic reality-TV style of angsty-drama that I absolutely hate. The style of the ships is all wrong for the era in which STD is set, and the uniforms are nowhere close. There's obviously some bits that the writers have drawn from canon, but not much is right (I.e. the new Enterprise Bridge has the targeting scanner on a arm. That wasn't part of the helm console until a mid-season refit during Kirk's era. It shouldn't be there)

The writers obviously haven't fact-checked stuff. They say that Burnham is the first mutineer in Starfleet. I mean, Spock apparently says otherwise in a episode of the Original Series set at least ten years later, but hey! Who gives a crap about continuity, eh? Even their dumbass explanation for why no one will ever mention anything that happens on their show again (it's classified!) strongly smells of a need to patch the off-the-rails canon-defilement that happened all through season one, in a effort to get people to forgive them for their stupidity.

It blatantly tries to make something that would work for sure as a standalone work...but is in NO WAY Star Trek. No way.

I've been raving about this for nearly two years now, so forgive me if this was a little incoherent. I have so much repressed hatred for this bloody show. It came out two days after my birthday. Not the best present, I can tell you that.

What's worse? I was actually LOOKING FORWARDS TO THIS!!! It was so disappointing that I sobbed into a pillow for a hour after watching the first three episodes.

Saw Captain Marvel with my brother yesterday. Captain Marvel is cool. Also, Captain Marvel is cool.

Spoilers follow for . . . let’s see. Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain Marvel, The Avengers, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. season two, Guardians of the Galaxy and Avengers: Infinity War.

Starting off with the “Thank you, Stan” version of the opening Marvel logo: adorable, and funny, and sad. What an excellent way to lead off the first movie since his passing!

The mystery of Carol’s backstory is set up and presented so well in this film! I feel like the film starts out with just enough ambiguous information, through the nightmare sequence, to inform the audience that something is missing, without making us too suspicious of any particular party right away. The pieces of Carol’s backstory that are given to us are seeded in just the right amounts at the right frequency, that the final revelation of the truth, and the discovery that the Kree were the real bad guys all along, simultaneously feels surprising and satisfying, because there was definitely something off about Kree society up to that point. (And I’m only talking about in this film; I was wondering how they were going to present the Kree as good guys when we’ve already seen them as villains to various degrees in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Guardians of the Galaxy before this point. I think they did a decent job.)

I loved all the little details that showed how primitive Earth’s technology is compared to the Kree tech Carol: having to hook various parts together into a payphone to get it to make intergalactic calls, her utter difficulty with using a keyboard and mouse, and her bemusement that the parking lot security guard didn’t have immediate contact with higher levels of military authority. (Though that’s more a contrast with Kree culture than technology.)

It was fun seeing Coulson, Fury, the Tesseract and, yes, even Ronan again. I was glad they let Ronan’s actor use a more normal-sounding voice, rather than the comically over-the-top baritone from Guardians of the Galaxy. The CGI making Samuel Jackson look young again was astounding; it never actually looks like a computer trick at any point. It legitimately looks like they pulled Jurassic Park-era Jackson forward in time to play the role. Absolutely amazing! My brother and I couldn’t settle the question of whether Coulson’s actor was also digitally de-aged, but I personally think Clark Gregg still looks young enough that they just needed make-up for him. Maybe I’ll look that up quick: Ah, they actually did use computer effects on his face, as well.

Going back to the Tesseract, my brother and I both got a bit confused, because we were under the impression that the Tesseract had been recovered at the same time as Steve Rogers, just before The Avengers took place. But apparently, Howard Stark went searching for the wreckage of Steve’s plane, and was only able to recover the Tesseract at the time. I can’t remember if that was actually mentioned on screen anywhere or not. But another timeline problem that seems less easy to reconcile is how many people saw Carol blasting energy out of her wrists, or saw Skrull transforming their appearance. Pretty much all the weird sci-fi stuff that took place during World War II could have fairly easily been covered up by S.H.I.E.L.D. (most of the people who saw HYDRA’s laser weapons got incinerated by them, and only Steve himself saw Red Skull’s real face.) So it seemed like the general world populace only became aware of the sci-fi elements of their universe after The Incredible Hulk and Thor took place. But I don’t know how S.H.I.E.L.D. could have convinced all the people on that bus that what they saw was swamp gas, or whatever. Seems like it breaks the timeline.

I like that the Skrull turn out to be good guys in the end, not only because it’s unexpected, not only because it avoids an “always chaotic evil” culture, but also because it appears that they are not involved with Earth in any way after this film, which means the fan theory that anyone who died in Avengers: Infinity War was really just a Skrull is almost definitely wrong.

A couple of errors, courtesy of my brother, who is in college to become an airline pilot, and therefore Knows Planes. Some of the planes used in this film in the 1989-ish flashbacks were wrong for the time period, and also changed between cuts within the same scene. (I’m not going to bother naming specific model numbers, because I’ll get that wrong.) But he chocked this up to the limited time and access the film crew probably had to be using actual military bases for filming. Also, the reason Carol and Maria were acting as test pilots is because they were barred from serving as proper Air Force pilots due to being women. But the U.S. Air Force started allowing women pilots in 1976, so women being barred from flight in the late eighties is anachronistic.

—doctorlit, Marveling

“No, no. This spoiler’s taken.” “No, no. This spoiler’s taken.” “No, no. This spoiler’s taken.” “No, no. This spoiler’s taken.” “No, no. This spoiler’s taken.”

Honestly? The Orville is much better. Plus, it was actually written by a Trekkie, rather than the guy behind the Mummy 2016, most of the Bayformers movies, and Star Trek We forgot the Colon. (aka Into Derpness). Imagine Star Trek: The Next Generation, but more funny. Also, it was created by Seth Macfarlane, the creator of Family Guy and American Dad. Also the Ted movies and 'A Million Ways to die in the West'.

I was never going to argue against that.

Except for one thing: I looked up the spore drive and the mycelial network on Memory Alpha, and I have to agree with you: that whole thing is really super dumb.

What's really frustrating is that it didn't have to be, though, if only they hadn't made it a literal subatomic mushroom network accessed with literal mushroom spores. If the whole explanation were a metaphor to make the quantum physics concepts (real or fantastical) more accessible to a lay audience, I'd buy it, but they didn't do that. They went with literal mycelia. And literal mushroom spores. And magical space tardigrades.

And I facepalm.

Still, like Nova says, they've given it a pretty serious limitation, so it's not going to take over from the warp drive anytime soon. Or ever, probably.

And there's no need to be quite so vitriolic about any of this. Most of the stuff you've mentioned is cosmetic, IMO. Perhaps jarring at first, but not really that important when compared to storytelling. I know you've said you're not impressed with the writing, either, but that's something I think I'll have to see and judge for myself.

~Neshomeh

While I've never watched Discovery, I have been reading up on some things.

- Can't say about the character, but that sounds more like personal opinion for you rather than an 'everyone thinks this' based off of what I've read and what I've heard from friends and colleagues who have watched the show. However there is precedent for Spock having unmentioned siblings until they appear due to the plot. Think Sybok from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, funny how he wasn't mentioned before, huh? Star Trek has done it before so in some ways it shouldn't surprise people too much that they've done it again.

- So this Spore Drive that breaks everything, the Spore Drive that's only installed on two ships in the Federation full stop, one of which *SPOILER ALERT* while managing to jump to the Beta Quadrant and back in 1.3 seconds also had all it's crew wiped out, the ship itself was scuttled and it was only able to do this at all due to an alien creature 'improving' their jump capabilities. Losing all your crew seems like a fairly big downside to being able to jump to different quadrants in seconds. Oh and the reason why this tech is never mentioned again? Because all information on it, the Discovery (the sole remaining ship to use it at that point) and her crew was sealed away in 2258, the same year Kirk beat the Kobayashi Maru test. Probably a fairly good reason as to why it's never seen again.

- Eh I'll take the Klingons, although they could be a rogue faction or something like that. I believe the explanation used for their different looks in TOS to the rest of the Star Trek TV shows before Discovery was that the Klingons in TOS were bred with human DNA and became dominant, the later series is the more Klingon DNA taking dominance, but maybe Discovery's Klingons are from before they were bred with human DNA in the first place, I mean the distinctive face ridges are there and they are identifiable as Klingons because of it. Who knows? Maybe it'll be addressed at a later point.

- Holodeck. Yes, it's said that Federation ships don't have full holodecks before the late 24th Century, but they do have and have encountered holographic technology from way before that. From what I remember Discovery isn't equipped with a full holodeck as you are trying to make out it is, it is instead equipped with a holographic combat training suite, which I assume is a rather basic, smaller version of a holodeck that may run off the same technology but isn't as big or advanced or equipped to run as a full holodeck as in Voyager which, IIRC could run things from having the crew think they were in WW2 era France to the Adventures of Captain Proton.

- MAJEL BARRETT DIED IN 2008! I DON'T SEE HOW SHE COULD VOICE ANYTHING UNLESS YOU HAVE A FUNCTIONAL TIME TRAVEL MACHINE OR THE ABILITY TO RESURRECT THE DEAD!!!

- You're making it sound like adding a computerised voice to something is so advanced that they'd only have the ability to do it with technology from the 24th century. Despite the fact that we actually have the ability to do it now. Personally I'd chalk to down to Captains/Shipbuilders personal preference. It's not that groundbreaking or problematic.

- You seem to think of the Federation as many hands being controlled by one brain, when in fact you should view it as many brains trying to control one hand. Paraphrasing various people from The Lost Fleet series here, but I think it holds true. There are many faces of the Federation I believe and while the previous series' may have concentrated on one faction of them for lack of a better word, Discovery may simply be focusing on another, one that hasn't really been seen beforehand. I think in this case it's a YMMV moment.

- I think you're doing them a disservice with the bridge, yes it's been updated with the extra snazzy bits that being 50 years but look at the captain's seat, it's almost exactly the same, the railings are in the same place, and while they've changed the colours slightly, they're still the same colour everywhere the colour was the same on the original. The seat positions are almost exactly the same (from what I can see in the picture you put up). Even the legs at the bottom of the chair are the same as in the originals. Yes things have been updated, but is that a crime? No.

And again with the ship, have they changed it's shape? No. Have they changed it's number? No. Does it have the glowy red bits at the forward facing end of its wings? Yes. The only thing I could possibly fault it on is that the 'neck' of the ship is slightly shorter than it looks on the original Enterprise and that it's been updated with more flashy lights to be windows and things to glow for the engines. Is that second thing a fault? No.

Is everything very very wrong with this show? From my point of view? No, no it's not. Nostalgia can be a brilliant thing but "it sucks because its new" (which is how you are coming across to me, no offence meant if you're not) should not be used as a valid argument.

Novastorme.

Tiger walked over to the drinks table, ignoring his fellow teenage party-goers who were socialising and desperately trying to get each other to eat or drink things which probably contained sleeping potions.

He was at the annual Spring Party, or at least the students’ version of it. Of course, this place being what it was, it wasn’t just a party; rather, it had been turned into a furious competition to see who could “poison” the most people with sleeping potions.

That, naturally, meant that Tiger was extremely cautious about what he ate or drank. He moved over to the nearest jug, containing some kind of pale reddish-pink juice, and carefully cast a basic potion-detecting charm over it.

He couldn’t sense any potions, but that didn’t mean there weren’t any: there were plenty of spells which could confuse a detection spell. So he closed his eyes and held one hand over the top of the jug, trying to sense the tiny disturbances in the air which were, to the trained senses, the unmistakable signs of magic.

He sensed nothing. There were, of course, still possible explanations for this, but at this stage the most likely was that the juice was actually just juice, so Tiger poured himself a glass of it.

The next stage in his plan was to cast a sensory charm which effectively let him see behind himself without turning around (glancing around to see if you were being watched automatically made you look suspicious).

He was relieved to find that he wasn’t, and so he took a vial of sleeping potion out of his pocket and dropped the contents into the juice. Finally, he cast a spell to prevent the potion from showing up under a basic detection spell.

That done, he wandered casually away and took a sip from his own glass, which he was about seventy-five percent certain didn’t contain potions.

He heard a slight commotion behind him and turned around to see what was going on: from what he could make out amongst the flail of limbs, Scarlet was trying to force-feed Robin a croissant.

“Um, Scarlet,” said Tiger, “you know you’re meant to be subtle about this, right?”

Scarlet disentangled herself from Robin and came up to Tiger. “Hey, Tiger,” she said, “would you like a croissant.”

“That depends on whether it’s poisoned or not.”

“It isn’t.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I can prove it,” she said, and cast a poison-detection charm on the croissant. “See? Not poisoned.”

“I still don’t believe you.” This conversation was rotting his brain. He turned and walked away, looking for a corner to skulk in or anywhere where he wouldn’t actually have to engage with anyone.