StillPaisleyCat

@GoodAaron@mastodon.social suggests there will be some new information on Prodigy tomorrow.

Is it possible that there may be some announcements at San Diego Comic Con?

Let’s keep boosting Prodigy positively.

For those who are willing to engage in change.org’s petitions (regrettably monetized), the Save Star Trek Prodigy petition is nearing 30k signatures, and could use the support to break the threshold during the SDCC weekend.

The Directors’ Guild of Ontario hotlist is a fairly reliable source for production guild news. Star Trek preproduction in the Greater Toronto Area usually shows up there before any official announcements of production dates.

Today’s hotlist update adds a rumour for a CBS Studios television movie to start production in October.

Is ‘Dovercourt’ the working pseudonym for S31 this round? Or is there some other made for streaming movie in the schedule for CBS Stages Mississauga? Only time will tell…

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.

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?

Some reflections on the Australian experience and what they might mean for Canada.

After Google’s move on Thursday, Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez sent a written statement calling the companies’ moves “deeply irresponsible and out of touch … especially when they make billions of dollars off of Canadian users” with advertising.

Australia’s regulatory experiment – the first of its kind in the world – also got off to a rocky start, but it has since seen tech companies, news publishers and the government reach a middle ground.

As Janeway would have it, temporal mechanics can make our heads hurt.

Several of us here are still wrapping our minds around the implications of SNW 2 x 3 Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow for the Prime Universe timeline. The Romulan agent confirmed that key events in history have been resilient to temporal incursions, but their exact dates may change as time heals itself.

While this appears to warrant some deep dives on c/Daystrom Institute once we’ve had a bit of time to process this onscreen confirmation a bit more, I thought to look back to see what astrophysicist and Star Trek science consultant Dr Erin MacDonald has said previously on this point.

At the main link above, there is an episode of MacDonald’s Astrometric Episode Club where she reviews the temporal science of Voyager Relativity and DS9 Children of Time that appears on point.

There’s a few passing references to other time travel incidents along the way. These touch on the resilience of time, not least the causality loop in First Contact where the Borg incursion into the 21st century causes Enterprise to return and get Cochrane into space when needed even though the events weren’t quite as they were originally. The timeline is preserved in this essential key event no matter the details.

There’s also a report on Time Travel on StarTrek.com about an STLV 2019 presentation by Dr Erin MacDonald. (The piece itself was written by a professor of physics and astronomy.)

Gizmodo’s James Whitbrook has yet more to vent on Paramount+‘s cancelation and erasure of Prodigy.

I hadn’t considered the cancelation from the perspective of systemic misogyny, which Whitbrook effectively is carating.

However, given that Janeway was surely chosen as the legacy captain for Prodigy because Voyager had proven itself to be an effective gateway for younger and new viewers on Netflix, Whitbrook’s inference Paramount views her less important to the franchise than Picard is biting.

Paramount wouldn’t dare treat what it’s done for Patrick Stewart and Jean-Luc Picard as a tax break. Casting aside everything that Prodigy stood for, and in the process doing the same to Mulgrew and Janeway’s legacy, is a cruel twist on what is already a cruel fate for the show.

My spouse felt commemoratively inspired and asked me to post.

(It’s the Eaglemoss Kelvin D-7. The peony petals just did their own thing.)

This is a very carrotty 70s health food version. It has a loose moist crumb, and uses a lot of oil (sunflower or safflower). Baked in an 8x8” or 9x9” square pan, it rises quite high. Still a family favourite though.

1 cup safflower oil 1 cup white sugar 3 large eggs

1. Beat together, adding sugar into oil, then one egg at a time.

1 1/3 cup flour 1 1/3 tsp baking powder 1 1/3 tsp baking soda 1/2 tsp salt 1 1/2 tsp cinnamon

2. Sift the dry ingredients and add, in bit by bit to the rest. Beat.

1/2 cup chopped walnuts tossed in 1-2 tablespoons flour 2 cups finely grated carrots

3. Add in the walnuts (if desired) and grated carrots.

4. Beat well.

5). Bake approximately 1 hour at 300 degrees F.

Use cream cheese icing.

Cream Cheese Icing recipe

1 cup icing sugar* 1 tablespoon butter 1 tsp vanilla 4 oz cream cheese **

• icing sugar is a powdered white sugar mixed with a small amount of finely ground starch, usually corn starch or potato starch. It’s just a few % by weight so that a teaspoon starch per cup of powdered sugar should do it.

**The cream cheese icing recipe states ‘Philadelphia’ brand, but it’s not what we’ve used since the firm began to add guar and other gums. We use an all natural cream cheese from a local dairy.

How are folks using the decidedly beta Mlem doing?

It’s not as fully built as the developer’s demo pages would suggest.

However, it can do more than some have criticized.

It’s definitely idiosyncratic at this point.

So, I’m curious, in the spirit of assisting in getting this community going, to share what people have figured out that works.