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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • At a certain point, I realized that from another perspective, the big divide seems to be between those who see continuous distributions as just an abstraction of a world that is inherently finite vs those who see finite steps as the approximation of an inherently continuous and infinitely divisible reality.

    Since I’m someone who sees math as a way to tell internally-consistent stories that may or may not represent reality, I tend to have a certain exasperation with what seems to be the need of most engineers to anchor everything in Euclidean topography.

    But it’s my spouse who had to help our kids with high school math. A parent who thinks non Euclidean geometry is fun is not helpful at that point.





  • Fair enough. I mentioned Marcelle as they have truly been the hypoallergenic North American brand for a half century. One used to only see their line at compounding pharmacies.

    Single ingredient lines are very difficult, or even ones that just exclude the top allergens. There have been some smaller Canadian lines, but they seem to come and go - or like Ilia, a originally Canadian brand manufactured in the EU, they go big and move their head office to the US.








  • We’ll have to see whether David Ellison reorients the scheduling strategically. It’s hard to imagine he will not.

    5 years ago, as the transition was happening after the remerger, the demographic statistics I saw showed that CBSAA/P+ had the best range of demographics. And it had the best youth/teen/kids audience after Disney+.

    Unlike, NBC Universal’s problem with Peacock and Discovery+, which had two very different demographics with little interest the content the other offered, Paramount+ launched with a broad and diverse base.

    But the programming and production choices of the past five years have brutally squandered that. It seems that the millennial, middle age Bro, and older male audience has been the target — live sports, Taylor Sheridan everything etc.

    It already feels as though P+ has been reprogrammed to make the current US administration happy, pushing a certain kind of American exceptionalism, but that’s not a successful global business strategy.

    It’s really only the content coming in from CBS linear and Star Trek that’s kept the balance on the platform.

    We keep hearing about content being produced in Paramount’s South American studios or in agreements with partners in Spain and France, but none of that richness in offerings are making it to the North American platform. Netflix remains dominant in offering high quality content from outside Hollywood.


  • I agree. The more we see, the more enthusiastic I am.

    The concept of an Academy show was in development hell for so long - basically, since the hiatus after Discovery’s first season.

    And we know that it was originally kicked around before TNG went into production.

    So, this seems to have been a hard one to make work. The cost to produce a high quality VFX-rich show that appeals to a teen and young adult demographic, requires that the show must also be rich enough elements to draw the wider Trek base.

    I’m hopeful that, as with Prodigy, Starfleet Academy may be one of the rare shows that satisfies a mass demographic despite the streaming era.

    The risk is that, like Prodigy, Paramount may not promote it broadly enough.

    However, with A-listers heading the cast, one can hope that it will get a lot of promotion beyond the genre media.





  • I’m going to say any or none of the suggestions here may be right.

    And some of them, like Inner Light, are awful choices simply because their impact is very dependent on having the context the rest of the series and characters.

    The main thing is that Star Trek has a wide variety of tones. The way to success is to provide excellent examples of very Trekie episodes that are in the genre or tone that your brother already likes.

    Don’t show them action if they like cerebral mystery. Don’t show them romance if they like action. Don’t show them intense drama if they’re into comedy. If they’re into animated comedies or anime, start with Lower Decks or Prodigy not TNG.

    Examples from this perspective…

    If they like psychological horror, then TNG’s ‘Schisms’ or Voyager’s ‘The Thaw’ might be best.

    If they like action, Discovery’s two part pilot might be the one or even the movie Star Trek (2009).


  • We rotated treatments to kill them off. No single one could do it.

    The mineral oil one was fairly successful.

    There was a great herbal product called Quick Nits from Australia that could be applied and left in a cap overnight but it seemed to come and go from the Canadian market in just a couple of years.

    One thing worth knowing is that heat and drying them out is effective. While there are protocols for blow dryers, old fashioned bonnet hair dryers are an another good way to kill them and the eggs as well as avoid infections.

    After the first lice infestation, we literally tracked one down and had our kids our kids use it once a week while playing on a computer or tablet. It cut down the reinfections.


  • It seems that Christina has been able to convince the Showrunners to incorporate some of her own enthusiasms into La’an’s character.

    In a TrekMovie piece, she’s quoted saying that she and Ethan Peck had a total of 75 hours of dance and fight choreography preparation over the season. The heaviest episode is in the back half of the season.

    While I enjoyed the edgier La’an, Goldsman seems to have a very rigid idea that, in drama, trauma is the foundation of character development. It’s tiresome when every single character has to have a traumatic backstory, experience trauma in the show, or look forward to trauma (in Pike’s case).

    So, as an example, it seems that the only way for Ortegas to have a character arc is for her to be traumatized and go through the process of overcoming that.

    In that case, it’s better to have La’an move on. Between Tomorrow cubed and Hegemony II, we’ve seen two very significant life events for her that make it credible that she could finally more on.