What is this whataboutism?

TNG Season 8 was great fun. Mike McMahan also wrote Warped: An Engaging Guide to the Never Aired 8th Season, that is basically full episode outlines for an entire season, based on his TNG_S8 posts.

Additionally, I’d recommend https://bsky.app/profile/foundepisodes.bsky.social, which I recently discovered, and is inspired by TNG_S8

Best episode of the season so far, pretty easily. One of the best episodes of the series.

Gene Roddenberry could claw his way out of his grave, drive to my door with a platter of my favourite Tex Mex to soften the blow, and personally tell me that atrelene is, was, and always has been a Q, and I would still call bullshit.

• T’Pring!

• Orions!

• Black & White episode!

• TOS hair Uhura!

• Dragon!

• Trelene… ̄\_(ツ)_/ ̄

I cannot express frequently enough how much it bothers me that his current iteration of Paramount own Trek, Avatar – martial arts and friendship, not blue cat people – and TMNT.

Regardless of what I do or do not want, Paramount keeps announcing that they’ve got movies in pre-production.

Interesting that they didn’t include Sam Magg’s credit as the writer of Star Trek: Picard’s Academy, one of the worst comics I’ve ever read.

Considering that there’s unlikely to be a new Trek television series for quite some time now, I think any claims that some bit of supplementary media is canon is unlikely to be tested any time soon.

Okay, but what if she was also T’Rul gathering info on Starfleet before taking on the Seska role?

My complaints are things like “this is the first time anyone in Star Trek (outside of time travel) mentioned inches.”

Why are you blaming Disco for something that TNG did?

I dunno, I’ve never heard of it.

Not canon, but

Basically, the AR wall is a giant LED screen that they can use to display a background of some sort as opposed to having the actors acting against a green screen. It allows them to create some interesting locations for stories without without having to build a full set or find an appropriate location.

SNW even uses it for their main engineering aboard the Enterprise, though that’s why we didn’t see main engineering at all in season three; it apparently takes too long to set up and break down in front of the AR wall.

The technology is becoming increasingly common, and some of them do use generative AI. However, the one the Star Trek productions use does not.

I remain skeptical. Unnamed sources claiming it was someone on the art department who hand drew it is not entirely convincing. I’d like to see the layers. Or, failing that, an explanation for why the characters are so inconsistent and indistinguishable from one panel to the next. Why the shadows don’t make any sense. Why the hands when we see them don’t make sense.

Also, the article claims the AR wall is using machine learning, and I’d like to see a source on that. My understanding, based on what the VFX supervisor for Disco, PIC, SNW, and SFA has said is that their AR walls do not integrate machine learning.

The PIC s3 writer’s room.

Not to belabour the issue, but it seems like Tatosky might not be entirely convinced that those panels are not LLM generated.

I follow Brian Tatosky on mastodon as well, and he says, “as far as I know” it was drawn and coloured by the art department. That is not a confirmation one way or the other.

But I went through and screenshot every image that was on screen of the comic pages. I would believe the art department mocked up the cover, but you cannot convince me the interior pages shown weren’t shat out of an LLM.

I am a lot more annoyed at an official Trek production using AI slop comic book art that I probably should be.

That aside, this episode didn’t do much for me. I like SFA when it’s about Academy cadets doing school stuff. I really could not care less about Captain Ake’s tragic backstory, or Nus Braka.

Well, yeah.

I only listed things the Federation was directly involved in, unlike the OP.