…and with Annalee Newitz as editor in chief. This could be good!

Posted only two days ago, only linking to Hillebrand’s tenforward.social account rather than his blusskey one.

Back from the dead, judging from the cover art. I’m trying not to pick sides in this matter, I can’t code in either language 🫣

Here ya go 😄

Rest in power, Captain.

I opted for “The Tholian web”, and it opens on Chekov. Maybe he’s not super prominent in it otherwise, but it’s a peak TOS episode.

Edit: Watching it now, he has some good away team scenes, and that great freakout on the bridge when Kirk’s fate is uncertain. Definitely a Koenig showcase!

Such a great little album 🖤

Yeah, 27 years is a lifetime. Tbh, that movie is all I associate with the title, so I appreciate the info on the series.

Speaking of the nineties and wild west steampunk… anyone else remember Brisco County, Jr.? 😄 That must have come from nostalgia for the the same show?

…you do remember the Will Smith movie they made of Wild wild west in '99, right?

When they do Time tunnel, they really should get Peter Capaldi in for a cameo.

Get McAvoy, Tom Hardy, and Ed Speleer together for The Picard Dynasty. It’ll write itself 😂

I genuinely think X-files and specifically Fox Mulder was a huge factor bringing a lot of that conspiracy mindset into the mainstream. It was already there as an undercurrent, but having a hit show on the air weekly for so many years — that was tinfoil hat normalisation spelled large.

So having people of colour in the leads and as a show runner? Yeah, I think/hope it will get some wingnut viewers’ panties in a knot 😄

Oh! Oh! It gets better!

[After failing at running comic shops as well,] Wilhite started attending Lamb of God Lutheran Church in Humble in 1989 and wrote a Christian memoir looking back over his involvement in comics and gaming. In it, he warns readers about the dangers of occult activities like playing Dungeons & Dragons or watching horror movies.

Apparently all his failures were not due to his own shortcomings, but signs from god to stay away from all of that occult scifi stuff or whatever.

There’s also a bit of info in this Houston Press article from 2014:

In 1982 there was supposed to be a con to end all cons here in Houston. And there was, but not in a good way. It was billed as the Ultimate Fantasy, a product paired with the respected name of Houstoncon, which had been providing a quality and successful con experience in the city since 1967.

Thereafter it would be known as the Con of Wrath, or the Ultimate Fiasco, and its failure is the stuff of geek song and legend.

[…]

Ultimate Fantasy was ambitious even by today’s standards. It was to be a huge stage show hosted in the Summit and featuring a rotating stage and a laser light display. The guests would be most of the stars of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, who would re-enact parts of the film. Nothing like it had ever been done before, and Wilhite was convinced he could pull it off.

So convinced, actually, that he got several investors to mortgage their houses. Billboards went up all over the city. Ads appeared in TV Guide and Starlog. Wilhite believed that Ultimate Fantasy and the associated Houstoncon at the Shamrock Hotel would draw 10,000 people, including Trekkies, from as far away as Japan and Europe.

Organizers needed 5,000 people just to break even. Two months before the event, barely 400 presale tickets had been sold.

[…]

When the stars of the convention appeared, they found out that their hotel rooms hadn’t been paid for. They were forced to pay out of their own pockets.

As the con progressed, it became apparent that the thousands of attendees needed would not appear. Vendors and venue realized that they were not going to be paid. Shamrock management contacted all the dealers in the hotel and told them that unless the remaining balance was collected by that evening, they would all be thrown out. They passed the hat to keep the doors open and hoped to sell enough to recoup their losses.

And Jerry Wilhite had disappeared. No one could find him. Or any of the money that was supposed to materialize. With him he took Houston’s reputation as a place for comics and science fiction pop-culture acceptance and celebration. Word went out from guests and dealers alike to avoid the city. The people in Houston didn’t know what they were doing.

[Edited to add source link]

True. And can she transform all of that to an arresting comics story? We don’t know.

Do comics do ghost writers?

I mean, there is the Marvel Method where Stan Lee would brainstorm with artists, let them go off and do the brunt of the work, and take a writing credit for filling in dialogue.

More to the point, I guess nobody has as much head canon about Dr Crusher as McFadden. She’s spent decades creating back story for character motivation where it may not have existed on the scripted page. As I understand it that’s pretty much par for the course.

I’m pretty sure IDW have “support writers” in staff to make those ideas conform to industrial narrative standards and formatting…

“Far future”? This was supposed to be for Discovery, which is initially set around 130 years from now. How much visible evolution do you imagine would take place in such a short timespan?

I sat down and rewatched “Affliction”/" Divergence" last night after this whole discussion. It is very much a not good storyline, and one that hadn’t needed two episodes if not for some poorly motivated character shifts with Trip and Malcolm.

Yeah, the racially charged complaint against the DSC design doesn’t entirely add up given the darkface makeup used in all previous versions of (white people playing) Klingons, including the TNG through ENT depictions.

I did like the DSC Klingons as aired, and if people had the patience required for things to play out, they could have waited for future writers to make up an elegant answer like the augment virus in ENT 🙂