Quark's

A Canadian was one of the original innovators to create ActivityPub. Who knew?

Good to see a basic survey of the concept and history written for a mainstream audience.

All Tuvix related arguments should now be .03% more efficient.

I really like the potential for this community to let us discuss and compare the broad scope of Trek against the broader cultural conversation of sci-fi. So, I’m throwing out conversation starter in case there’s anyone else ready to play…

Major Vanguard series book spoilers ahead! (Seriously, it’s a great series and I don’t want to spoil its puzzle.)

Star Trek takes a lot of heat as a franchise for taking and reworking concepts and tropes from any and all other literary and visual media works.

As recent examples, Picard season three’s final episodes have been criticized for ‘copying Star Wars’ while SNW’s season one episode ‘All Those Who Wander’ earns derisive comments along the lines of ‘It’s a straight up copy of Aliens!!!’

More famously, in the 1990s, Paramount had to defend itself against claims of IP theft in DS9 by the creator of Babylon 5 who had pitched a space station-based show at one point. (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to make their own judgement about how similar or different are the overall story arcs of the two shows.)

I’ve always thought however that Star Trek excels in taking ideas from other media and then reworking them in its own universe with its own characters. ‘The Cage’ owes a lot to MGM’s Forbidden Planet (as does some of the original visual code of Star Wars for that matter), but The Cage is very much an original work. Voyager’s ‘The Thaw’ is a retelling of the movie adaptation of King’s ‘It’ but I like Voyager’s rendition far better.

I was truly surprised then when I caught up with watching The Expanse to find that the central mystery, the ‘protomolecule’ seemed to be a direct lift of the Shedai meta-genome of the excellent Star Trek Vanguard novel series that had been rolling out over the previous decade.

I’d been wishing that CBS would adapt Vanguard into a serial streaming series, but when I binged through to the third season of The Expanse, I thought that anyone who didn’t know the Vanguard book series had concluded just as the first Expanse book was published, would see a Vanguard show as derivative of The Expanse. The later seasons of the Expanse just seem to go more in the same direction, even continuing with overlapping plots with some of the Vanguard follow-on Seeker books.

As it happened, I had tried reading the first book of The Expanse book series, Leviathan Wakes and its sequel, when they first came out but DNFd. I didn’t make the connection to the Vanguard books at that point.

I did nonetheless find the first Expanse novel Leviathan Wakes very derivative, seeming to tell stories of miners and exploitation that were better done in CJ Cherryh’s Company Wars. The protomolecule mystery wasn’t really clear enough for me to see its close correlation with the Shendai meta-genome at that point.

Trek tie-in authors (David Mack, Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore) created the meta-genome for the Vanguard Series to explain the basis of the Genesis project that first appeared in TOS movies. It also provides a genetic technical backbone across the Litverse, such as for later 24th century technologies like the dermal regenerator and other medical wonders.

Vanguard’s backdrop of vulnerable colonists and ancient technology is a classic going back to TOS, but Vanguard puts it in a long running suspenseful frame with inter species competition for new territories.

All of this has been percolating in my head for a few years.

Anyone game to discuss?

I saw in the news the actors are not allowed to do any promotion of current or past works including:

• Tours
• Personal appearances
• Interviews
• Conventions
• Fan expos
• Festivals
• Panels

If the strike is not resolved by August 3rd will Star Trek Las Vegas be delayed? My wife and I already arranged time off work and made other reservations to coincide with our trip. I am extremely nervous if everything will be able to moved, if we still be able to attend the new dates, or if not, how much of it can be refunded.

How long do you think the strike will go on for? Have there been any official updates from the event organizers? I don't see anything about it on their website or twitter so far.

Edit: ~~Armin Shimerman tweeted they are not not prevented from making appearances related to past projects! This is encouraging, but still seems like it might be iffy for actors on the currently airing shows? Hopefully there will be more communication soon.~~

Edit 2: ~~Anson Mount suggests the con wont be affected since they're making personal appearances. I do hope he answers the next reply asking for explicit confirmation of his attendance though.~~

Edit 3: ~~Creation Entertainment finally confirmed the con will continue as planned, but that doesn't necessarily mean every panel will still be held.~~

Edit 4: Creation Entertainment deleted the previous tweet and posted a new one saying the conventions will continue as planned with the current guidelines in mind. People attending the currently ongoing Creation Entertainment event for The Vampire Diaries Orlando are reporting the panels are not allowed to discuss the show at all, even though it has already concluded.

Edit 5: Armin Shimerman and Anson Mount are now uncertain about STLV. I really hope they are able to negotiate an end to the strike soon. If they can't manage that or reach an agreement for independent conventions, I will be out of pocket for some of my arrangements, but I'd much rather Creation Entertainment postpone the con than force us into a convention without actors who are able to talk about Trek.

One of the joys of ST:SNW for me is sharing the experience with my kid, they way my mom shared TNG with me in the 80s/90s. And I grew up with micromachines and those 1-2 foot long ships (the ones with a few buttons that made noises and lit up), many of which are still in a bin in my mom's basement.

When I go looking for something my kid could play with, all I can find are snap-together models. Fine, OK, but not the same as something he can fly through our living room making a warp speed wooosh sound. It's really a shame they don't have any good SNW ship toys. I'd buy some in a heartbeat.

Many years ago now I tried Artemis. For those that don't know it's a bridge simulator with each station being run on a different computer. We played it at a LAN and did a ship vs ship battle. (In hind sight we should have disabled nukes). It is fun and you really do feel like you're the captain of a star ship.

I have also tried the VR Star Trek Bridge Crew and that was kinda cool but the VR aspect made it feel more alienating compared to physically looking at someone.

I may have the chance next year to run a bridge simulator at a local con' so I've been looking into it again. Holy heck I've gone down the rabbit hole. There are so many options and I'm keen to check them all out. I've even found some amazing LARP's that make use of the bridge simulators.

What's your experience with bridge simulators? (I feel like I've said bridge simulators too many times now).

Back in the 2000’s, I was decently involved in the tech world, especially privacy and following/using FOSS. I fell off in a major way as the strain of work and college took over and I just didn’t have the energy to devote to the cause and maintenance of my own resources. During the pandemic, I deleted my Facebook account as I watched friends and family become hateful. I stopped using Twitter as well and finally deleted it when the Musky Boy took over. Reddit was still a community I had trust in as it was relatively anonymous and the user experience was customizable so I could avoid the worst parts. With Reddit’s anti-user and especially anti-accessibility moves I woke up. Y’all at startrek.website gave me a safe starting point to the Fediverse, and I dove back into taking control of my computing experience. How has the upheaval of corporate social media changed your online life?

Receiving positive feedback from Wall Street since the WGA went on strike May 2, Warner Bros Discovery, Apple, Netflix, Amazon, Disney, Paramount and others have become determined to “break the WGA,” as one studio exec blatantly put it.

Three episodes into "Secret Invasion," I have to admit I'm prett underwhelmed. By all rights, this series should feel like a spiritual successor to The Winter Soldier, but it's falling flat for me on nearly every level.

The cast is doing a great job, Ben Mendelsohn in particular, but they're being let down by the material.

Also, the die-hard "Agents of SHIELD" fan in me is just waiting for Director Mackenzie to show up and save the day.

Quarks is fun! Come right now! Don't walk, run!

I for one am having a lot of fun in this place. Small communities which are growing and changing are the most fun. The distributed nature of this platform means that I bet we all have a lot to share with each other.

Other Communities

I game a lot and so far of all the gaming communities I've found, the one at Beehaw is my favorite. In one month I think I've discovered more interesting indie games there than I did for the entire past year on Reddit.

I also run a few home servers mostly for Plex and home automation so I've been digging the Self Hosted community over at Lemmy.world. It seems just as knowledgeable if not more so than the equivalent communities I left behind.

Apps

As a former Apollo addict, thank god Voyager exists. I've been dabbling with Memmy as well, but Voyager just goes right down my existing dopamine pathways and I keep coming back to it. Didn't like Mlem at all, which is unfortunate since the name and icon are great.

What have you found out there?

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I swear, I thought this might be a fine time to revisit Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" essay.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Welcome to startrek.website's fourth community, Quark's!

This community is a general off-topic zone for the insightful and good looking explorers of this Lemmy instance. Why make an off-topic forum for a Lemmy instance, you ask? As you are probably already aware, this Lemmy instance is different from most as we are phaser-focused on Star Trek. But the fans are just as an important part of Star Trek as any other part, so we want to provide a place for Trekkies to be Trekkies together as we embark on the adventure that is growing the Fediverse together.

Put differently, if the rest of this instance is the rest of the station where we are all "on-duty"—talking about Star Trek—together, this community is for having a blood wine, Aldebaran whiskey, or even a root beer together.

What kind of stuff might you chat about here? Good question! Some examples might be...

• Lemmy and the Fediverse at large. What are your second, third, and fourth favorite instances? Have your found fun Star Trek or sci-fi content on other ActivityPub based services such as Mastodon or Pixelfed? Have you found an app you like? Talk about it here!
• Other sci-fi have you been reading, playing, and watching? What do you recommend? What book is your all time favorite? What game did you get in the Steam sale that you can't stop playing? What show are you binging that almost interfered with keeping up with Strange New Worlds season 2?
• startrek.website itself. Young platforms and new communities love to talk about themselves; some people are into that and some aren't. We're scoping that kind of discussion to here so it can be easily found or ignored depending on your desires. More to the point, sometimes we need a place to talk about startrek.website itself. Information related to downtime, instance upgrades, and important security updates will be posted here.
• Anything within reason and good taste, really. It's an off-topic forum!

The one rule is don't make Odo come down here, i.e. don't be a jerk. We're converting all your tabs from latinum to Fed credits so drinks are on the house. And of course, this is more suggestion than rule, but don't get sucked into a conversation with Morn. You'll be stuck here for days.