Quark's

Leaving aside bias towards the American market and critics, this latest criticism of Rotten Tomatoes influence comes from this September 6th piece from Vulture. The report provides new evidence of PR firms paying critics and persuading them to keep negative reviews off of Rotten Tomatoes tracking.

The Bunker 15 employee replied that of course journalists are free to write whatever they like but that “super nice ones (and there are more critics like this than I expected)” often agreed not to publish bad reviews on their usual websites but to instead quarantine them on “a smaller blog that RT never sees. I think it’s a very cool thing to do.” If done right, the trick would help ensure that Rotten Tomatoes logged positive reviews but not negative ones.

Collider has its own overview and retrospective on previous examples of corruption in reviewing, headlined “Rotten Tomatoes has always been mouldy at its core.’ It notes the inherent vulnerability of RT as it is owned by NBC Universal and Warner Brothers. Collider summarizes the recent criticism and analysis of RT as follows.

THE BIG PICTURE

Rotten Tomatoes' binary system oversimplifies complex works of art and diminishes the role of nuanced film critics.

The recent controversy surrounding Rotten Tomatoes reveals the site's susceptibility to manipulation by PR companies.

The dominance of Rotten Tomatoes in film discourse has led to a diminished appreciation for the human element and individuality in film criticism.

Earlier this week Disney announced (whinged) that it expected a $ 300 million revenue loss attributable to the strike.

Today, The Hollywood Reporter says sources are reporting cost-cutting at Warner Brothers Television Group.

the studio has suspended a number of overall deals for its top creatives including J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot (Duster), Greg Berlanti (Superman & Lois), Chuck Lorre (Bob Hearts Abishola), Bill Lawrence (Shrinking), John Wells (Maid), Mindy Kaling (Sex Lives of College Girls). Sources say Lorre’s multiyear pact with his decades-long studio was quietly suspended in May, a week into the strike, with Wells’ deal a month later.

Deadline has a similar report but interprets the news as more likely ‘suspend and extend’ arrangements.

One has to wonder why the major content producers are continuing side with Netflix, Amazon and Apple which are primarily streamers.

I was initially delighted to see BBC amplifying the celebration of TAS’ 50th anniversary. Then I read this piece.

Half a day later I’m still annoyed at the number of easily verifiable errors and that with the BBC’s trusted source credibility, the power that this piece can have to create uncertainty on settled issues.

First there are 22 episodes of TAS not the 20 claimed in the article.

Second, it’s established that Gene Roddenberry’s rejection of TAS as canon was overstated or at least inconsistent (and that Richard Arnold’s own view was a factor in magnifying this question in early TNG production). The BBC article overstates this as fact.

Third, it ignores the fact that Paramount as the rights holder has decided to treat TAS as canon. The article concludes with a statement that this continues as an open question. While it might have been fair to say that for a number of fans, this remains a question, it’s not accurate to portray this as an official position even just implicitly.

Anyone else irritated by this?

This is thanks to a project called mlmym (Github link) for those of you old enough to remember the good ol' days...

FYI- you'll have to log in separately (still using your regular startrek.website account).

Labour Day statement from guild/union leadership as cited in article …

Keyser called out these contentions on Monday, emphasizing that, “These things must be resolved. And not with contract language that has a one-to-one ratio of promises to loopholes. Truly resolved.”

“Of course, that’s not the AMPTP way. And it’s a hard thing to give up on something that has served them so well for 40 years,” he continued. “They are in the process of wrestling amongst themselves, ramping up their public relations, and coming to terms with the fact that – with writers on strike – and actors on strike behind them – this negotiation is different. And they are going to have to do more – offer more – than they usually do. Much of our frustration with how long this is taking stems from that – from their internal bargaining. But they will get there.”

Thank you for everyone's patience while we were migrating hosts . I know I said "a few hours" and it turned out to be over a day. Clearly I need to work on my Scotty estimates. During transport the team found a backlog of extremely low effort memes caught in the pattern buffer and we had to go through the copies one by one determining which were the evil versions.

You may notice some wonkiness/slowness the next 24hrs as we get re-federated with everyone. Basically every other Lemmy instance will bombard us with traffic for a while.

Our new host is designed for Lemmy in particular, meaning in the long run we should see increased stability, improved load times, and better scaling as we inevitably become the dominant Lemmy instance!

This is probably old news to other people but I only just noticed this. Seems like a pretty interesting guy!

What potent drink recipe can we create for inclusion in the remake of the show?

reference, south of Equator in December... bushfires: "The most severe fires peaked from December 2019"

Since gasses in the air seem to be a heat factor leading to surface fires... a better name than "fire-baton" that has planetary gas-buildup in the name theme?

Couldn’t resist sharing this video trailer.

Horak continuously overturns preconceptions about integrating differently-abled actors.

Apparently, in addition to the upcoming run of Goblin: MacBeth at Stratford Festival, Rebecca Northan (Horak’s collaborator) is already working on developing Goblin: Oedipus for an Alberta production next year.

Beats negotiating, I guess...

I kept thinking all day, isn't there something I should be doing today?

I’m somewhat more understanding of Goldsman’s approach to character development after reading this.

Fascinating article, with numerous examples where significant characters make trivial residuals on hit shows with significant streaming runs.

It also has implications in terms of explaining why kids of people who work in the industry are working in the industry. If you’ve got parents in LA and NY and they can help support you, you’re more likely to hang in a business that’s not actually paying a living wage.

It gives a different lens on Mica Burton’s appearance in Picard season three as a recurring character for example.

Burton, the daughter of the "Star Trek" star LeVar Burton, tweeted about how little she got paid when she appeared in five episodes of "Star Trek: Picard" earlier this year.

In response to a thread regarding misconceptions about the union, Mica wrote: "Please read this thread. I said before, there is no way I could survive as a working actor if I didn't have my 100 other side hustles. Yes, I was on Star Trek. I also do not qualify for SAG health insurance and was paid almost the same fee my dad was paid for Roots back in 1977."

Three episodes into "Secret Invasion," I have to admit I'm prett underwhelmed. By all rights, this series should feel like a spiritual successor to The Winter Soldier, but it's falling flat for me on nearly every level.

The cast is doing a great job, Ben Mendelsohn in particular, but they're being let down by the material.

Also, the die-hard "Agents of SHIELD" fan in me is just waiting for Director Mackenzie to show up and save the day.

Quarks is fun! Come right now! Don't walk, run!

I for one am having a lot of fun in this place. Small communities which are growing and changing are the most fun. The distributed nature of this platform means that I bet we all have a lot to share with each other.

Other Communities

I game a lot and so far of all the gaming communities I've found, the one at Beehaw is my favorite. In one month I think I've discovered more interesting indie games there than I did for the entire past year on Reddit.

I also run a few home servers mostly for Plex and home automation so I've been digging the Self Hosted community over at Lemmy.world. It seems just as knowledgeable if not more so than the equivalent communities I left behind.

Apps

As a former Apollo addict, thank god Voyager exists. I've been dabbling with Memmy as well, but Voyager just goes right down my existing dopamine pathways and I keep coming back to it. Didn't like Mlem at all, which is unfortunate since the name and icon are great.

What have you found out there?

Apropos of absolutely nothing, I swear, I thought this might be a fine time to revisit Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" essay.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Welcome to startrek.website's fourth community, Quark's!

This community is a general off-topic zone for the insightful and good looking explorers of this Lemmy instance. Why make an off-topic forum for a Lemmy instance, you ask? As you are probably already aware, this Lemmy instance is different from most as we are phaser-focused on Star Trek. But the fans are just as an important part of Star Trek as any other part, so we want to provide a place for Trekkies to be Trekkies together as we embark on the adventure that is growing the Fediverse together.

Put differently, if the rest of this instance is the rest of the station where we are all "on-duty"—talking about Star Trek—together, this community is for having a blood wine, Aldebaran whiskey, or even a root beer together.

What kind of stuff might you chat about here? Good question! Some examples might be...

• Lemmy and the Fediverse at large. What are your second, third, and fourth favorite instances? Have your found fun Star Trek or sci-fi content on other ActivityPub based services such as Mastodon or Pixelfed? Have you found an app you like? Talk about it here!
• Other sci-fi have you been reading, playing, and watching? What do you recommend? What book is your all time favorite? What game did you get in the Steam sale that you can't stop playing? What show are you binging that almost interfered with keeping up with Strange New Worlds season 2?
• startrek.website itself. Young platforms and new communities love to talk about themselves; some people are into that and some aren't. We're scoping that kind of discussion to here so it can be easily found or ignored depending on your desires. More to the point, sometimes we need a place to talk about startrek.website itself. Information related to downtime, instance upgrades, and important security updates will be posted here.
• Anything within reason and good taste, really. It's an off-topic forum!

The one rule is don't make Odo come down here, i.e. don't be a jerk. We're converting all your tabs from latinum to Fed credits so drinks are on the house. And of course, this is more suggestion than rule, but don't get sucked into a conversation with Morn. You'll be stuck here for days.