_NetNomad

i would vote

“purity test” implies attention to detail which is the opposite of what i’m arguing. i’m advocating for a “stink test.” a lot of people here are arguing whether or not it should be ok to post art by a guy who stinks, but no one is arguing that he doesn’t stink. i don’t care if a comic inherently stinks or has the residual stink of it’s creator, i just want to open a window

that’s my whole point: regardless of if the comics were fine, later in life he was a jackass so who cares? we can look at every comic he ever made under a fine-tooth comb to see if those later values show up in dilbert at the risk of alienating the groups of people he hurt regardless of the comic, or we can just say “fuck that guy” and move on with our lives

i mean, yeah… let’s ban dilbert. even if adams was a saint when it was in serialization, posting it today platforms who he is today. we could pick apart edge cases all day but that’s a lot of work to maybe be able to post comics everyone has already seen, or we can err on the side of caution and spend all that time reading good comics by decent people instead

i thought you were kidding until i saw the wikipedia link. that’s fascinating, and very cool that they still have the penny

for longer drives i queue up albums or an audio book, but for shorter drives i always use the radio. there’s something fun about “fishing” for a good song and those morning talk shows are stupid but endearingly so in small doses

when i lived in buffalo, we had this amazing station WECK FM that was what an oldies station was back when what an oldies station is now was modern, so like all 50s and 60s early rock and pop. five years living there and i was somehow still constantly hearing stuff i’d never heard before

i absolutely adore this art style

emulate stadium emulating pokemon at 2x speed at 10x speed for u n l i m i t e d p o w e r

that’s the opposite of the point he’s trying to make. he’s not critiquing TNG, he’s parodying bad faith critiques of modern trek by showing how easy it is to turn those criticisms on the show those same people claim to love. he gets especially meta when comparing TNG to TOS, claiming “TOS would never do that” but every single example is something the original series also did. turns out star trek was always about compassion and inclusivity!

Part of it is that Voyager has the unenviable role of being one of TNG’s two successor shows. The other was DS9, and everything looks bad sitting next to DS9. Part of why DS9 was able to do the wild things that it did was because the writing team had minimal supervision and were allowed to go buckwild- paramount were keeping a closer eye on first TNG, and then Voyager. Because of that, Voyager plays it safe and worships the status quo even when the fiction is begging to go in another direction, and the whole series has this feeling of having been written by committee. This even frustrated the writers, one of whom left the show out of frustration to go write the Battlestar Galactica reboot, which is essentially gritty, serialized Voyager

that said, I watched the whole thing and largely enjoyed it. you kind of have to meet it where it is, and accept that major plot details get glossed over and everyone takes turns holding the idiot ball. for me, the characters are what salvages the underwhelming plot. being a smaller ship, younger characters like Kim and Paris are able to be movers and shakers, giving the show a coming-of-age quality not found again until LDS and Progidy. Janeway is great when she’s not holding the idiot ball, it was really awesome seeing a captain who came up through science instead of command. When the blue or gold shirts give most captains a solution to a problem, they’re glad the problem it solved, but Janeway would get excited about the solution itself, sometimes even finishing Belana’s sentences.

Neelix had never so much as heard of starfleet, and had none of the training or skills even a crewman would need, but his good nature and see-a-need, fill-a-need ethos arguably makes him the most starfleet person on the boat. Kes is similar, with the added twist of dedicating herself to a voyage she won’t live to see the end of.

the doctor is an interesting inversion of the good idea/meh execution pattern because his concept is unremarkable- essentially a rehash of Data learning to be human, just accidentally and with sarcasm- but the execution was incredible. later on when 7of9 joins the cast, she displaces him as The Data but he remains a main character and takes on a mentorship role which allows him to develop even further

all in all, it’s a show full of then-new and brilliant ideas that regularly fumbles the execution. and that isn’t for everyone, especially with the plethora of other great trek out there. but if you watch it and are able to forgive the not great scenario writing you might enjoy it nonetheless