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I like the new, sweary, bantering, characters,

Seriously. They are a breath of fresh air in a show that, while good, is not great due in part to how self-serious it can be. Bel and his husband are not "fun" exactly, but they are recognizably human as well, which makes them good POV characters.

I haven't read the books, though I understand they're almost unfilmable at any kind of reasonable budget and Asimov's character work was kind of beside the point. Sounds like a faithful adaptation would be... inaccessible. There's always a spectrum on these things, but I reckon this skews way more towards Sci-Fantasy space opera than the books did. That's fine as far as it goes, but I do feel sympathy for those readers who dare to hope their beloved property will be the exception. Seems the only thing you can really do is pull an Expanse: write it as pot-boiling space opera to begin with, so your actual sci-fi ideas can be slipped in without scaring the suits too badly.

The show is fine, I guess. Its version of Psychohistory is basically magic; it's a plot device rather than a complex idea to be dug into. The show is more interested in exploring themes of legacy and what it means to be family and what it means when "family" betrays you, alongside of some court intrigue soapiness. There's a healthy dose of prestige-TV's obsession with the "drama of paranoia" that's not badly done, but I admit I'm kind of personally over it. Pointless secrets, poor communication, and obtuse scheming are as key to modern drama as they were to Seinfeld.

Anyway, the Gaal/Salvor/real(er) Harry plotline is still joyless and ponderous and the worst of the three despite being tasked with the heavy lifting of being presented as the "complete" one, but the other new characters actually bring some humanity and occasionally a hint of fun (is that allowed?). Poly, Constant, Hober, Bel, Glawen, Sareth, and Rue are all outshining the S1 cast, though Lee Pace finally gets to have some fun in E7.

LOL, please subscribe to /c/ obscure and specific pet peeves that an odd human has confused with universal annoyances @ wtf.lemmy.

Going off on a tangent here, but the chances that Shakespeare truly invented any words or more than a handful of distinguishable uses is vanishingly small. What Shakespeare did was (1) be a half-educated middle class rube, (2) get popular enough that his colleagues wanted to collect his plays and a printer wanted to publish them, and (3) retained his reputation through the generations so that volume of plays wasn't left to rot.

He was absolutely brilliant, don't get me wrong (most Anti-Stratfordians are a weird combination of classist and ignorant), but the brilliance lies in the ways he played with the forms of poetry and drama, how he found the humanity in so many of his characters (though not all), and how he corralled all of his influences, cultural, literary, personal, and historical, into wholes that were way beyond the sum of their parts. Given the rigidity of Tudor education and expectations of the upper classes, I'd argue a unique voice like his would almost have to come from an "upstart crow." From the perspective of linguistic novelty though, by and large his was just the first known use of words, which were likely in some degree of use in at least one of his various communities (actors, writers, Londoners, and Strafordians to name a few). The OED can only cite the earliest written sources its researchers have found. The fact that so many of "his" communities were poorly documented in the historical and literary record probably explains most of the words ascribed to him.

I haven't watched it since the original version. Frankly, it was barely okay as it was, but the structure was one of the things that made the obvious scheduling issues bearable. If you don't structure around it and sort of hang a lampshade for those who were following the production, then yeah, you just get a remarkably weak season of Arrested Development. Never bothered with 5.

Sometimes a staff has moved on and a moment has passed. Looking at YOU, various Covid reunion shows.

Like yours though, it never went anywhere and was literally just a simple framework with nothing to run in it.

Why are you talking about the QBasic sprite-based RPG "engine" I wrote in 1999? I was very proud that you could move the selection box with the arrow keys.

Of course, I was also in college and not a tween, so maybe English was the right degree path for me after all.

My "completed" QB projects were (1) a text-based "RPG" set in the era of the historical Macbeth, with (IIRC) five scripted encounters, and (2) a single-player Star Wars "Sabacc" card game based on 90% of the rules listed in the old West End Games sourcebook. The "AI" was a set formula not unlike the newbie blackjack rules posted everywhere. I think. Maybe that was planned for v2 though. I was fairly proud of the graphics engine that imported text files and assigned colors to pixels based on which ASCII character you'd used.

These days, I don't do anything more complex than editing keyboard configurations in KMK.

If something aims for GoT it could still be pretty watchable as long as it lands in "The Last Kingdom" territory.

Indeed. Pour out a little pocket sand, everybody.

::sad sha-sha noises::

If you're in the US, Ryobi has changed chemistries once or twice, but they haven't changed the voltage or physical format of their batteries for 20+ years.

Put me in the "like it don't love it" camp. It is very clearly Seth MacFarlane's love letter to 90s trek, pulled some good ideas from that era's writers, and has more heart than it seems in the first couple of episodes. Some of the character work is actually quite touching, and it seems like they're having fun with the show, so it's rarely a slog. Overall though, it is way too uneven to be great or even really good.

Seth is not a great actor, and several members of the cast are MUCH worse than him, like "low-end dinner theater" bad. The set design, costume, and prosthetics are pretty weak, and Seth's sense of humor just doesn't work for me, so in a context where he's trying to find the right balance with a Star Trek show, it hits even more awkwardly. It's also very specifically SETH MACFARLANE'S love letter to Star Trek, so there's way too much emphasis on 1980-2000 American pop culture, and I say that as someone who's only a few years younger than him. It's distracting how narrow the set of references are in a show that traffics in them so liberally.

There's also something just a bit off about the messaging of many of the more serious episodes, like Seth feels a need to come down on a definitive answer to the moral questions that come up. I dunno, I am having trouble recollecting specific scenes, but it's a lingering feeling I have. I almost imagine 20-something Seth in a dorm room at RISD screaming at Picard that he should have just shot that Romulan!

You're, uhhh, not wrong. The secret is that it's supposed to get us Americans to calm down for a moment and realize everyone else exists! 🤣

It's intentional in the sense that they all involve intangible works of the mind and are only "property" in the legal system due to developments much, much later than the "I'll bash you with a club if take my food" or the "I'll stab you with a spear if occupy my farm" social contracts of personal and real property. It was very useful for those learning the law.

You're right that they do very different things in society though, and it's not particularly helpful outside the legal profession to bundle them so tightly together. Trademarks in particular should only protect branding and identity and when not abused provide a pretty valuable direct service for consumers in that you know who you're dealing with.

The other two protect creators and therefore indirectly promise to "encourage innovation" that should benefit everyone, but they're literally nothing more than legalized, if limited, monopolies. As Disney has shown though, you can smear the edges of copyright and trademark until they start to blend together.