unconed 🛸💫🌞

New post by me, about the flaw in bezier curves that most drawing apps ignore:
acko.net/blog/curvature…

Earlier Star Trek is not woke.

TOS was pushing internationalism which wasn't particularly surprising during the cold war. Aside from the much discussed Uhura-Kirk kiss, it was the setting that was progressive, not the scripts. Not woke.

TNG's main prog shtick was New Age-ism and therapy culture as the solution to interpersonal problems. They notoriously shied away from gay characters to play it safe. The episode that was supposed to be an allegory for gay exclusion/AIDS was so obscured audiences didn't get it. The Klingons were portrayed as a warrior culture where even the women were basically crude and rude men. While many admirals and other guest stars were women, they largely behaved and were written like their male counterparts. Not woke.

DS9 had a handful of stereotypical "racism is bad" episodes but eagerly embraced flawed characters with tragic arcs, with Kai Winn being the poster child for what spiteful wokes are actually like. The bajorans are generational victims but are often portrayed as flawed, prideful and petty. The commander being black was a footnote that mostly did not figure into the writing. Many episodes end on a dark note with no clear good guys. Not woke.

VOY had the "first female captain" only in 1995 a few years before Will and Grace became an international hit show. Yet still no gays on Trek, and largely the expected series of Star Trek morality plays. The first few seasons revolve around VOY being threatened by weaker and primitive civilizations. Seven of Nine in heels and a body suit provided nerd eye candy that would not pass muster today. Ensign Kim was the token Asian. Chakotay's native american culture was a non-stop cringefest of hamfisted and clueless whitesplaining that would get you sent to the gulag today. Not woke, but teetering on the edge of irrelevance.

ENT continued in the same vein. Early seasons had a lot of "decontamination room" softcore eye candy of both sexes, and the female Vulcan provided the tits again. Enemies were alien, the crew's cameradery was natural, and it didn't try to tackle anything on the level of DS9 or VOY. The captain was a white man again. Not woke.

Compare to Discovery which rewrote the canon, made the main character an unlikeable and unheroic black woman who couldn't be criticized, had "quirky" crew dialogs, not a single straight while male core member who wasn't a villain, and generally ditched any notion of duty or service in the every day interactions of a military crew. Woke.

Or Picard which also ignored canon, had actors act like the actors instead of the characters they played 20 years ago, visually and thematically ripped off Mass Effect, and shoehorned in a thin allegory to early 2020s left wing politics. Woke.

Dishonorable mention also to The Orville which started as a decent homage but devolved into beating you over the head with 2020s trans politics and girlbossing, substituting absurd woman logic and struggle sessions for credibility. Woke.

Woke doesn't mean progressive. Woke means shoehorning in political themes in a way that's artless and talentless and which reveals the writers don't actually understand the opposing arguments at all.

ayy lmao

ffs stop letting your clankers add useless tests

In this house we do not watch or listen to ads.