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Barudak
May 7, 2007

Something like 1/3rd to 1/2 of the US's gay bars have closed in the last decade for a variety of socio cultural factors but Im mostly gonna blame it on Chris Pine not getting fully nude in the Nutrek films.

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Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


VinylonUnderground posted:

When Star Trek was first created the Space Race and the Sexual Revolution were in full swing. The possibilities for the future were endless and bright. There was also the Cold War and the constant threat of nuclear annihilation. But the only thing holding humanity back was humanity. Hell, the Cuban Missile Crisis, terrifying as it was, was a clear example that if well-intentioned people just spoke to each other they could solve anything.

Now we live in a weird cyberpunk dystopia. I can get Logan's Run-type sex through my phone but few people call that liberating. There's an app literally called Grindr because it is all a bit of a grind. They've also destroyed cultural centers like bars -- even before Covid gay bars were dying as cultural centers because apps give the sex without the community. There are no well-intentioned people either. Who can sit down to stop global warming? It's a multipolar world where responsibility has been diffused to so many different heads of state and CEOs that no one can make it stop even if we all see where the train is going. And our differences aren't just ideological. It isn't Communism vs Capitalism. Look at Covid. It's insane conspiracy poo poo where people roll coal and will infect themselves with deadly diseases to "own the libs".

How do you go from where Star Trek started to now? How does the vision of Star Trek make sense today?

The 60s had its own nightmares with poverty and wars and alienation. The extent that our cyberpunk dystopia feels inescapable is more effect than cause of Star Trek (among many, many other forms of fiction) turning their hand at "better things aren't possible."

VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos

Tulip posted:

The 60s had its own nightmares with poverty and wars and alienation. The extent that our cyberpunk dystopia feels inescapable is more effect than cause of Star Trek (among many, many other forms of fiction) turning their hand at "better things aren't possible."

I'm either not parsing your statement correctly or you have a lot more faith in fiction driving history than I do.

FunkyAl
Mar 28, 2010

Your vitals soar.
We need a new phrase than, "cyberpunk dystopia"

VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos
Corporate hellscape? Modernity? It's the SciFi forum so I'm going to use SciFi words.

Like, I could time travel to the '70s and write about a dying Earth where there are islands of trash in the ocean and when you drive there are no bugs on your windshield. It would be considered absurd.

Bogus Adventure
Jan 11, 2017

More like "Bulges Adventure"
Star Trek should be bright, positive, progressive, and fun. Some of the best shots in the JJ movies are when you see people on Earth. Whoever designed it basically said to themselves, "Let's take the spirit of the 1960s idea of everyone wearing beehives and other snazzy haircuts and do a 21st Century take on it." I think that owns.







This is a reminder that Aisha Hinds was in Star Trek Into Darkness

nine-gear crow
Aug 10, 2013





Bogus Adventure posted:



This is a reminder that Aisha Hinds was in Star Trek Into Darkness

Her and the dude who was straight up a robot that got more screentime in the Hewlett-Packard tie-in commercials they did for Into Darkness were straight up two of the best parts of that film and it sucks that neither of them were in '09 OR Beyond.

Up Circle
Apr 3, 2008

VinylonUnderground posted:

Yeah but how would you have a sit down discussion to solve it? Who is Kennedy and who is Khrushchev? How do you solve "owning the libs" as an ideology through discussion? TOS also had an answer for Nazis, and that's throwing some old Western-style haymakers.

But what about global warming? There is no Kennedy and no Khrushchev there. There is also no Nazi Germany nor Imperial Japan we can punch into submission. There is a rot inherent to the Neoliberal world order where these insane conspiracy theories make sense. Not because they are real but because they aren't. People want a Kennedy and a Khrushchev so they imagine a bunch of hook-nosed people in a room together conspiring to make the world a worse place. Modern Trek, post-TNG, is grappling with that issue -- even DS9 has shades of it and that is the most progressive Trek. Who causes global warming? Who made Covid? Who made the worldwide response to Covid so terrible?

If you are honest, you end up with a lot of little Eichmanns but we can't say that anymore because of 9/11.


Quoting this just because LOL.

I'm not sure I can agree with any of your thinking honestly because I don't see the same things. In star trek the point is that we didn't sit down and solve those old problems. There's a few reasons why I don't like the cold war and cuban missile crisis examples you bring up, but ultimately within the universe the answer is that those problems weren't resolved, the backstory of the federation is humanity is brought to the brink of extinction by a nuclear holocaust. It's only the development of warp travel and the contact with other species in the galaxy that humanity is able to galvanize itself out of 100-150 years of an almost total breakdown of formalized government, culture and massive societal-scale misery and injustice. within the universe humanity didn't solve these issues at all, they barely survived them, and it gave humans a grave maturity that enabled them to look back. The federation is specifically not meant to be a smug, know it all group of over-achievers, even if that's how it can come across at times, especially in TNG. All of the high-minded ideals of star trek are intended within that world to have been learned at the price of near-extinction.

part of the point of star trek is that humanity is just holding itself back with all of these self-inflicted battles and wounds. Within the external world, you can easily point to those same issues you demonstrate and show how they are just the fruits of humanity's discordance. Global warming? It's provably the result of humanity's push for an unsustainable lifestyle that is specifically rooted in competition and conflict with each other to hoard resources at the expense of the broader race. It's completely plausible that we could arrest global warming, but will we reach the harmony and the cooperation necessary to do so? Covid? An ideological issue here in the states, undeniably, but also in the grand scheme of things it's not going to break down the world. It's a speed bump. But if you want to roll with that idea, you can still use what's happening in the US as a model for it. Human greed and selfishness, demagoguery and petty squabbles (think of Newsom or Cuomo and the Covid-related scandals they instigated) prevent a society that is totally capable of weathering a health crisis from actually managing to do so and lead to it running rampant and causing a catastrophe. There are tons of examples of that same thing happening in the modern world. You could easily use those as fuel for the collapse of humanity if you are searching for systemic issues that paralyze and very nearly cripple human society. I don't think that Star Trek was actually presenting the answers to the questions you ask about it in the 1960s, either.

TOS didn't have an answer for Nazi's at all, because that was a solved problem in the 1960's. The nazis were already defeated. That's a solved problem in world history, especially in 1960's American perspectives. Gene Roddenberry wasn't writing TOS as a repudiation of fascism or ethno-states, although obviously multicultural, progressive ideals were (mostly) a bedrock theme for the show and the in-universe ideals of the federation.

VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos
I guess we do disagree about Star Trek because you talk about a lot of background stuff that nobody gives a poo poo about.

I'm talking about what we see every week: Captain Kirk or Picard dealing with a thinly veiled issue in the real world and solving it. Commander Sisco too, though his issues took some time to untangle.

All of Trek is the episode where people hate each other because one is white/black and the other is black/white or where people consign themselves to death because that is how MADD works. Talking about how, "Well, actually, in 2321 Kahn finalized his conquest of Asia when he won the seminal 'Siege of Mumbai' and began the Eugenics Age." To me that entirely misses the point.

Up Circle
Apr 3, 2008
Trek isn't ever going to have answers to issues like that though, besides the core message of "We can be better" that runs through all the episodes. Modern trek, or any other sci-fi, isn't going to have a more satisfying reply to modern problems that aren't already contained in the several hundred episodes of the 1966-whenever enterprise ended run.

Disease? Xenophobia? Authoritarianism? Poverty? Terrorism? The environment? Every issue you talked about existed back then, along with a hundred other issues that will never have any clear answers. That's reality. No media can fill in those gaps for you. Trek already had a message for all of those impossible problems you seem to think modernity faces, and it's really simple.

I wrote all that poo poo about the backstory of Trek's history because a fundamental part of the show is that humanity rebuilds from almost nothing, there is never a point where you are too far gone to change for the better, etc. It is not the show's goal to present realistic problems and it's not a bad thing that it simply tells you the future can be better than it is today without spelling out the steps you have to take to get there.

People don't like Trek because it told them how to fix the world, they liked it because it said that the world is capable of being fixed. Star trek is moralizing and aspirational! Kirk makes two enemies shake hands and then the crew flies away, roll credits. The message is that you should have hope that you can solve these seemingly intractable problems. It never provided any answer of how that really happens. It's not the goal, or the point of storytelling of any kind to do that for you.

I'm not sure if you just have a desire for pop culture that wallows in nihilistic despair or if you think that's how the world actually is.

Cerv
Sep 14, 2004

This is a silly post with little news value.

Up Circle posted:

one last fact: why can't we have star trek without gay bars? I'm a little confused by that part.

star trek is supposed to be a utopia.
I for one can't imagine utopia without gay bars. it'd be lame & boring as all hell.
simple logic

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


VinylonUnderground posted:

I'm either not parsing your statement correctly or you have a lot more faith in fiction driving history than I do.

I'm talking about fiction's ability to drive and affect fiction, and quickly following that, emotions. I don't have a lot of faith, really any, that our fiction meaningfully reflects any particular non-fiction.

Bogus Adventure
Jan 11, 2017

More like "Bulges Adventure"

nine-gear crow posted:

Her and the dude who was straight up a robot that got more screentime in the Hewlett-Packard tie-in commercials they did for Into Darkness were straight up two of the best parts of that film and it sucks that neither of them were in '09 OR Beyond.

:agreed:

Brute Squad
Dec 20, 2006

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human race

FunkyAl posted:

In this universe, O' Brien is never born, because his grandfather dies fighting a kligon with a knife.

truly the worst universe

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


I've always found a lot of that aspirational stuff rang hollow because the answer was usually "someone invented a magic box." Like no poo poo we could solve poverty if we had access to functionally unlimited free energy through anti-matter reactors and a magic box that gives you anything you want when you ask. The series does much better by those principles when it's interacting with alien places that are allegories for Earth instead.

Fantastic Foreskin
Jan 6, 2013

A golden helix streaked skyward from the Helvault. A thunderous explosion shattered the silver monolith and Avacyn emerged, free from her prison at last.

That's basically all TOStrek was. Aliens are doing bad earth thing because of tradition, Kirk says "could you not?" and a fistfight or two later they say "yeah I guess we don't have to."

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

Defiance Industries posted:

I've always found a lot of that aspirational stuff rang hollow because the answer was usually "someone invented a magic box." Like no poo poo we could solve poverty if we had access to functionally unlimited free energy through anti-matter reactors and a magic box that gives you anything you want when you ask. The series does much better by those principles when it's interacting with alien places that are allegories for Earth instead.

Actually I think Voyager made a repated point that it was very easy to do awful things with federation technology and we see it get misused time and time again.

reignofevil
Nov 7, 2008

Defiance Industries posted:

I've always found a lot of that aspirational stuff rang hollow because the answer was usually "someone invented a magic box." Like no poo poo we could solve poverty if we had access to functionally unlimited free energy through anti-matter reactors and a magic box that gives you anything you want when you ask. The series does much better by those principles when it's interacting with alien places that are allegories for Earth instead.

I actually found this to be one of the most useful conceits of the series because it meant that the writing could get down to the nitty gritty. It was like "Okay. We've got a magic box and we can do just about anything we can imagine with it. What do you do when someone tells you they don't want the magic box? What do we do when someone says they don't want the magic box and they're letting someone else suffer because they won't take the box? At what point can we or should we try and demand they take the box? Will our actions lead to consequences outside of our control if we go around forcing our magic box on others? Once we've given someone or forced someone to take our magic box, where does our responsibility for maintaining their ethical use of the magic box end? Will we as a society have the patience and the attention span necessary to meet our responsibility for maintaining the ethical use of the magic box?"

And while I don't always agree with the conclusions put forward as the writers proceeded to explore the ethical dilemmas brought around by this line of thinking I do feel like the conclusions drawn from it helped me inform my own philosophy and better prepared me to make moral decisions on my own in a day to day environment.

reignofevil fucked around with this message at 20:40 on Mar 17, 2021

Yvonmukluk
Oct 10, 2012

Everything is Sinister


Defiance Industries posted:

I've always found a lot of that aspirational stuff rang hollow because the answer was usually "someone invented a magic box." Like no poo poo we could solve poverty if we had access to functionally unlimited free energy through anti-matter reactors and a magic box that gives you anything you want when you ask. The series does much better by those principles when it's interacting with alien places that are allegories for Earth instead.

Trekonomics makes the point that canonically the Federation had moved past currency and scarcity before the invention of the replicator, indicating they solved those problems, then came the magic box.

It's a pretty good book, IMO.

Defiance Industries
Jul 22, 2010

A five-star manufacturer


Yvonmukluk posted:

Trekonomics makes the point that canonically the Federation had moved past currency and scarcity before the invention of the replicator, indicating they solved those problems, then came the magic box.

It's a pretty good book, IMO.

There's a lot of people in TOS who talk about getting rich so I'm not sure I buy that.

Yvonmukluk
Oct 10, 2012

Everything is Sinister


Defiance Industries posted:

There's a lot of people in TOS who talk about getting rich so I'm not sure I buy that.

But by Voyage Home, the Federation doesn't have money (and we see in Undiscovered Country they're still making food the old-fashioned way, so replicators either don't exist or haven't proliferated yet). Clearly Kirk's era is a period of transition.

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

I was under the impression that the federation paid starfleet officers in credits? Then they only really use that for trade.

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

Lawman 0 posted:

I was under the impression that the federation paid starfleet officers in credits? Then they only really use that for trade.

They dont pay them, the ships quartermaster keeps some on supply. Though starfleet officers tend to be portrayed as having some personal credits, latinum, etc to use for their own interests, and sometimes they'll throw it around if the mission calls for it

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

Sanguinia posted:

They dont pay them, the ships quartermaster keeps some on supply. Though starfleet officers tend to be portrayed as having some personal credits, latinum, etc to use for their own interests, and sometimes they'll throw it around if the mission calls for it

.... :confused:

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~


Is there something complicated about "Starfleet doesnt pay people, but the ship has money and sometimes the people have their own independent money?"

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

Sanguinia posted:

Is there something complicated about "Starfleet doesnt pay people, but the ship has money and sometimes the people have their own independent money?"

No but I just never heard of that before.

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

Lawman 0 posted:

No but I just never heard of that before.

I might have pulled it from a novel or something, its a tidbit I've had in my head for a lot of years. It makes sense though.

mossyfisk
Nov 8, 2010

FF0000
There's no consistency about Star Trek economics. It's just a TV show.

CarlCX
Dec 14, 2003

I hate these movies, not because they are bad, but because I have liked to think of myself as a balanced kind of person who does not get overly invested in hating things and yet they make me genuinely, actually angry and in doing so prove I am a liar.

David D. Davidson
Nov 17, 2012

Orca lady?
Congratulations you're now a Star Wars fan.

VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos

Up Circle posted:

Trek isn't ever going to have answers to issues like that though, besides the core message of "We can be better" that runs through all the episodes. Modern trek, or any other sci-fi, isn't going to have a more satisfying reply to modern problems that aren't already contained in the several hundred episodes of the 1966-whenever enterprise ended run.

Disease? Xenophobia? Authoritarianism? Poverty? Terrorism? The environment? Every issue you talked about existed back then, along with a hundred other issues that will never have any clear answers. That's reality. No media can fill in those gaps for you. Trek already had a message for all of those impossible problems you seem to think modernity faces, and it's really simple.

I'm not sure if you just have a desire for pop culture that wallows in nihilistic despair or if you think that's how the world actually is.

I'm hoping for optimistic Trek which is why a lot of modern Trek is bad. I'm just saying that modern problems are harder to deal with. A planet where people are obsessed with making the great Computer hit zero. The crew realizes it's a doomsday device but are utterly unable to convince the people who have based their lives around making the number hit zero that hitting zero would actually be very very bad. But instead it is just conspiracy theories and other crap.

At least we have the Orville but you'd think actual Trek would be able to make it work.

Sanguinia
Jan 1, 2012

~Everybody wants to be a cat~
~Because a cat's the only cat~
~Who knows where its at~

VinylonUnderground posted:

At least we have the Orville but you'd think actual Trek would be able to make it work.

Orville makes it work by being a microwave reheat of TNG with modestly updated story fringe. I'll take experiments in evolution that don't quite work over comfort food any day of the week.

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

I think that's because even as far back as the mid-90s, Star Trek had written itself into multiple corners and had outlived its usefulness as a setting.

Now instead of doing the obvious thing and just remaking Star Trek but from a starting point of 2000, understanding that the internet exists, didn't make the Eugenics Wars/WWIII a given, and didn't automatically make transporters/replicators a thing, everyone clings to the original IP and tries to Brundlefly old stuff with whatever generic sci-fi the rightsholders want to try. It became the worst of both worlds-- achingly precious about the past and stubbornly lacking in vision about the future.

VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos
It's not just Trek, there is a dearth of good anthology shows now too. Part of it is that the format has fallen out of favor for more serialized story telling but part of it seems to be that modern corporate entertainment just has less to say.

mind the walrus
Sep 22, 2006

I think it's also that several decades of the blockbuster models + video games have created an entertainment industry that doesn't value the theater traditions TOS and the best parts of TNG/DS9 were built on.

You could legit run most of the top 20 episodes of all Trek as stageplays where the special effects would be seen as charmingly incidental to the meat and potatoes of the story. That art was absolutely lost by the back half of VOY.

Bogus Adventure
Jan 11, 2017

More like "Bulges Adventure"

mind the walrus posted:

I think it's also that several decades of the blockbuster models + video games have created an entertainment industry that doesn't value the theater traditions TOS and the best parts of TNG/DS9 were built on.

You could legit run most of the top 20 episodes of all Trek as stageplays where the special effects would be seen as charmingly incidental to the meat and potatoes of the story. That art was absolutely lost by the back half of VOY.

That's what made a lot of 1950s-1960s sci fi so good, like Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. They knew they had budget restrictions and were limited in special effects, so they had to focus more on the writing and the story to make it work.

Tulip
Jun 3, 2008

yeah thats pretty good


Replicators are not a necessary condition for the post-scarcity economics of Star Trek, and more to the point are not sufficient. I'd hope to god by now that everyone here is aware that a post-scarcity situation can be turned into a scarcity situation through political power and force.

mind the walrus posted:

I think that's because even as far back as the mid-90s, Star Trek had written itself into multiple corners and had outlived its usefulness as a setting.

Now instead of doing the obvious thing and just remaking Star Trek but from a starting point of 2000, understanding that the internet exists, didn't make the Eugenics Wars/WWIII a given, and didn't automatically make transporters/replicators a thing, everyone clings to the original IP and tries to Brundlefly old stuff with whatever generic sci-fi the rightsholders want to try. It became the worst of both worlds-- achingly precious about the past and stubbornly lacking in vision about the future.

See, this to me feels like holding onto the parts of Star Trek that are worn out while discarding the parts that are still fertile. At least to my mind the flaw is that Star Trek sticks so rigidly to portraying an incredibly narrow slice of the Federation. Lower Decks is boundary pushing just by making the Captain & friends secondary characters rather than primary characters.

Most of the complaints that people have here, me included, are that Trek has been infected with gritty high-tension war on terror action morality, about hard men making hard choices to prevent mysterious shifty terrorists from doing their mysterious shifty plots. It's Tom Clancy crap that we've seen a billion times and wasn't even interesting the first time, and I don't really think the transporters or Irish Unification of 2024 or what have you is the problem.

Lawman 0
Aug 17, 2010

In all honesty I would dig a show just showing how the federation deals with its captains going on wild adventures and keeps this multi species state going.

Animal-Mother
Feb 14, 2012

RABBIT RABBIT
RABBIT RABBIT
Time cops spinoff.



If I was Sisko, I would be mad at people coming into my office and handling my ancient artifact. :argh:

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VinylonUnderground
Dec 14, 2020

by Athanatos

Sanguinia posted:

Orville makes it work by being a microwave reheat of TNG with modestly updated story fringe. I'll take experiments in evolution that don't quite work over comfort food any day of the week.

What's "new" about nuTrek? To echo what other people are saying, abandoning the theatrical tradition it was based on in favor of . . . whatever everybody else is doing but not doing as well and only after someone else has is hardly experimental.

The last good Trek was based on a stolen series bible. After that it's been trash.

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