Fedilab is a Fediverse client for (according to the website) Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, Pleroma, GNU Social and Friendica. You can also follow kbin users (and, I assume lemmy ones as well, though I haven’t tried). The app will allow you to manage several accounts on Mastodon, Peertube and Pleroma instances.

You can block content by keywords or phrases (either hiding them with a warning or hiding them completely) but I don’t know if you can bulk upload keywords. (You can add several keywords/phrases at a time manually.)

Unfortunately (for you) the app is currently only available on Android.

Stormgate and ZeroSpace are looking like the spiritual successors to Starcraft, with the former developed largely by ex-Blizzard staff and the latter by some prominent members of the Starcraft community.

I’ve always maintained that TWOK is not just a really good Star Trek movie, not just a really good science fiction movie, but a really good movie period. It transcends the franchise and the genre, which I don’t think can be said of any other Trek movie.

It’s a movie that’s about something meaningful - getting older, confronting mortality and legacy, and renewal through sacrifice. Kirk starts out feeling old, worn out, but ends with him saying “I feel young”. Maybe it’s a little trite when put so bluntly, but it’s executed in an elegant and impactful way.

TWOK evolves Kirk in a way we hadn’t seen before. He is a different person at the end of the movie than he was at the beginning (or throughout the TV show). Less cocky, more aware of the consequences of his actions, because it literally cost him his best friend.

Spock’s death scene was the first time Star Trek ever made me cry. You can argue that TWOK is more militaristic than Star Trek normally was, but the themes of friendship, loyalty and sacrifice is pure Trek idealism. One could even argue that TWOK is about exploration, but an inner journey not an external one: Kirk encounters for the first time (by which I mean in a way that truly hits him) “death, the undiscovered country” (the film’s working title).

In David Marcus and Saavik TWOK introduces what might have been a new generation of characters, to whom the torch might have been passed if they hadn’t been killed off and sent to the home for pregnant Vulcans, respectively, in later movies. In either case, these two new characters - especially in light of Spock’s death (a death sadly temporary, to the franchise’s long-term detriment) - tie into the themes of mortality and legacy.

TWOK has what’s arguably Shatner’s finest performance - certainly in Star Trek, maybe ever. Everyone else is also in top form.

TWOK has the best antagonist. So compelling was Khan that they keep on trying to remake the “so-and-so is out for revenge” story. Montalban was so good Paramount even launched a “For Your Consideration” campaign to get him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nod. And Montalban’s Khan easily has the best chest of any Trek villain.

Even though Khan is the best villain, Khan and Kirk actually never physically meet. Their entire confrontation is carried out over comms. They never get into a fistfight or even breathe the same air, something that took me years to realise. Because theirs feels like the most visceral, tense and personal battle of any movie.

Even though TWOK was made on a very limited budget, a lot of the production design and visual/special effects hold up - there’s a reason why Robert Fletcher’s monster maroons are so iconic for instance. So many effective little moments. Eg the Genesis simulation (one of the first uses of CGI in a movie), though primitive by today’s standards, still looks really cool because of the way it was storyboarded by ILM, with the camera sweeping ahead of the Genesis effect, then the effect catching up to it.

The battle scenes have real weight. I’ve always thought that Meyer’s conceptualisation of starships as capital ships - rather than as jetfighters - made for better fight scenes. The entire movie is basically Roddenberry’s “Horatio Hornblower in space” idea realised (hence touches like the bosun’s whistle and the old-fashioned look of the uniforms), an idea which carried over to how he staged the battles, with Enterprise and Reliant squaring off like galleons at sea.

Speaking of battle sequences, the “gatling gun” phaser effect is still the best phaser effect in Trek. And you’ve never felt the pain of the ship getting hit as acutely as the “can opener” shot: another example of a shot which is unremarkable at a technical level today, but which still has an emotional impact. Ditto the Ceti eels.

Horner’s music is arguably the best of any of the movies. There are individual tracks in other movies that might rank alongside or above the best of Horner’s tracks - eg Goldsmith’s First Contact theme or Giacchino’s “Enterprising Young Men” - but as a whole I don’t think you can surpass TWOK’s score.

There are so many iconic moments and lines. “Aren’t you dead?”, the Dickens and Melville quotes, “I never forget a face, Mr… Chekov”, “I don’t like to lose”, “He’s so… human. / Nobody’s perfect Mr Saavik”, “I have been and always will be your friend”, “Of all the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most… human”.

Is it a perfect movie? No. Eg while a lot of production design works, some of it looks cheesy (like Meyer’s obsession with blinkety lights). Some of the supporting characters aren’t utilised as well as they might have been. (But then, the TOS movies have all been Kirk movies - it’s worth remembering that TOS was not an ensemble show, but one with a clear primary, secondary and tertiary character.) But the elements in TWOK that don’t quite work don’t detract from its overall impact and quality.

I just love how pervasive the hate

The opposite of love isn’t hate. It’s indifference.

Yes.

Troy is the first Sinead O’Connor song I ever heard. It’s filled with so much love and pain and rage. I was too young to understand it, but I listened to it a lot. It remains one of the most powerful artistic expressions I’ve encountered. Here is a live performance and the music video.

A place clone would still be hosted on a single instance (presumably). It would be good if someone could develop a multi-user event that took advantage of the federated nature of kbin/lemmy or even the wider fediverse also. No idea what that could be though.

Vulcan system

I choose to believe that the term “system” can be used in different contexts, and that in this case it’s a synonym for “neighbourhood”.

What the script means by “sub-impulse” speeds is also unclear

Possibly thrusters or something similar? Maybe the ship has three different propulsion methods: thrusters (or whatever you want to call it), impulse and warp. Even impulse speed can be pretty quick - eg in TMP they got a fair way across the solar system on impulse before “risking” engaging warp drive.

Spock and Chapel’s confession and clinch, of course, is in opposition to what happened in TOS: “The Naked Time”,

I’m hoping that the writers have an endgame for Spock (and by extension Chapel and T’Pring) in mind. Arguably Spock in SNW has been exploring (or been forced to explore) his human side way too much compared to what TOS established. (By the way, I’m not saying these episodes haven’t been entertaining as hell.) Arguably also then, the impact of pivotal moments of character growth, such as “This simple feeing” in TMP is retconned away if we’ve already seen him come to terms with his dual heritage years earlier.

What I think could work however is if Spock’s arc in SNW is one where he does explore his human half, but then either chooses to reject this in favour of the the Vulcan path before the events of TOS take over; or have his accommodation of his human half stripped from him.

Imagine a scenario where he and Chapel do have a romantic relationship, but that somehow, for reasons of plot, he forgets but she remembers. (Maybe in a “Requiem for Methuselah” “Forget…” moment.) That would actually add a lot of subtext and poignancy to the unrequited love we see Chapel display in TOS in episodes like “The Naked Time” and “Amok Time”. She doesn’t just pine for him because of what she thinks could be, but because of what she knows had been.

“Duet”, as it’s a loose adaptation of the play (originally novel and later also film) The Man in the Glass Booth.

The United Federation of Platforms

So reddit will pay memelords but not mods?

You mean… embrace and extend?

We see this bear out in Miles O’brien

IIRC Roddenberry’s idea was that everyone in Starfleet was a commissioned officer, but later writers overrode that.

One of the things that was good in the way O’Brien was written is that he was clearly a senior and respected member of the command structure. But that did not mean he had the positional authority to disobey a commissioned officer’s orders should he disagree with them. Something that came out in… err… I think it might have been “Hippocratic Oath”, where even though O’Brien had more years of military experience, and Starfleet experience, he still had to obey Bashir’s orders (who might still have been a Lieutenant Junior Grade at the time?).

This is one of the reasons Discovery effectively promoted Tilly rapidly (all the way to being the XO for a little bit) because she was a pivotal part of the cast and needed screen time.

It’s a testament to Mary Wiseman’s acting that the writers sought to give Tilly more screen time. But the way they did it made my eyes roll through the roof. I did not for a second consider it believable that an Ensign, only a couple (?) of years out of the Academy, would be skyrocketed through the hierarchy to become the Chief Operating Officer of the ship.

Tilly’s promotion was even more unbelievable than when Jed Bartlet made CJ Cregg his Chief of Staff, elevating her above her Toby Ziegler (whom she reported to) and Josh Lyman. I know why the writers did it - because Allison Janney was the best actor in a world-class ensemble, and they wanted to give her more to do. But it didn’t ring true to me (even though there is an argument to be made that all the West Wing characters are so hyper-competent that reporting lines are mere formalities).

Sure, you could argue Starfleet has a history of promoting promising youngsters unbelievably fast - like when they gave that cocky repeat offender fresh out of school command of the most modern ship in the fleet simply as a reward for saving the world. But even so.

This actually goes to a related point about DIS and how the writers treated the rank of its main character. Discovery was notable in that it was the first show where the lead actor was also not the most senior member of the crew. As David Gerrold pointed out in The World of Star Trek (IIRC), there’s a reason why the captain is the star of the show. Because in a crisis all decisions come back to that role. And the ability to make decisions is what makes for good characterisation (Hamlet notwithstanding). But if the command decisions, the decisions around which the plots and the drama pivot, are ultimately made by someone other than Michael Burnham, more senior than her and who can overrule her, what do you do then? Well, you make the Captain a baddie (like in season 1) or you find other ways of making the main character go against orders (which Burnham did repeatedly). Unfortunately that led to a backlash because the character, Mary Sue-like, was always proven to be correct whenever she went rogue.

I actually liked the fact that the lead character in DIS wasn’t the CO. But - like Tilly’s promotion - I just wish the writers had found a better way of exploring that dynamic. Having Burnham assume the traditional captain’s seat in season 4 was - in some ways - an admission of defeat, but an understandable one.

Lower Decks of course pulls it off, but as a comedy the stakes are generally lower, and the fact that the main characters often don’t know what’s going on, or aren’t in a position to decide how to shape events, is part of the gag.

@Fgbd009 There could be different reasons for this. One is that federation with the home instance might be broken or slow.

Another reason has to do with the way the activitypub protocol that the Fediverse is designed around, basically assumes you’re only interested in new content when you subscribe to a magazine/community.

For what it’s worth, I’ve discussed why this causes problems for new users in more detail here:
https://kbin.social/m/fediverse/t/131225/Making-threadiverse-communities-more-discoverable-some-suggestions

@pure_honey As moderator of a niche and currently tiny community - https://kbin.social/m/Musicals - I admit to a level of vested self-interest in making this post. :-D

3. BRING OVER SOME CONTENT WHEN FIRST FEDERATING COMMUNITIES

When an instance first federates a community, it should bring across at very least the last (let’s say) 100 threads or the last (let’s say) 7 day’s worth of threads from that community (plus associated comments), whichever is greater.

This will prevent the following scenario: A user finds a community that’s hosted on another instance, joins the community, but then finds no evidence of activity on their instance, because when an instance federates a community, it only starts pulling across posts from that moment in time. It makes it look like the community is dead, even if it isn’t. While there may be a “Browse this community on the original instance” message, but that may well confuse people, and it doesn’t mitigate the initial impression that the community has not posts.

Related to this - any pinned posts from a community should also be brought across by default, as these posts often contain information that a new user will find useful or that the moderators want all users to be aware of.

4. IDEALLY BRING OVER (OR ALLOW TO BE SEARCHED/SORTED) ALL CONTENT WHEN FEDERATING COMMUNITIES

The shelf life of posts in most communities is pretty short. If you subscribe to /news it probably doesn’t matter if you can’t see the top-ranked post from three years ago. But other communities curate content that has a much longer shelf life. A community like /askhistorians for instance, or /buyitforlife, where a user might want to search the archives for a great overview on the events leading up to the building of the Berlin Wall, or recommendations for the best compression socks. Allowing new users to search the complete history of a community, or sort posts by something like “most upvoted by all time”, makes the community more useful.

So ideally if you subscribe to a community hosted on another instance on your home instance you should be able to browse/search/sort that community’s entire archive.

I know you can click a link to browse a community on the original instance, but that can be confusing because suddenly you are now browsing on a site where you do not have an account.

Copying over the entire database for a community has storage/bandwidth implications (although I would argue data consumption issues are inherent to the fediverse model, which could lead to another discussion around the fediverse’s scalability limitations). But perhaps there is a way for searches and sorts to interrogate the host instance of a community (which presumably has the most complete database) rather than the local instance.

2. ALLOW COMMUNITIES TO BE DISCOVERED MORE EASILY ON UNFEDERATED INSTANCES

Communities should automatically (unless the community owner deliberately prevents this) be registered with one or more community directory services. The lemmy/kbin community search facility should use these services by default so that a new user’s search results are not limited to communities that have already been pulled into that user’s instance.

Multiple directory services should be available for the search service (similar to how you can switch between DNS servers) in order to eliminate single point sensitivity, which is part of the fediverse ethos.

The current method of finding new communities not already federated (“enter the exact, direct address of the community, and/or search and wait for a day before any results show up for anything not already on this instance”) should be deprecated and only be used in the event these community directory services are down.

This will prevent the following scenario: A new user chooses an instance, creates an account, and searches for a community related to their interest on that instance. They may find a popular community (eg /gaming), because other users on that instances have already joined it (or because someone has created this community on their instance). But even moderately obscure communities will likely not appear in the search results because they’re hosted on another instance, and nobody on this instance has subscribed to them yet. This makes it look like the fediverse is a lot emptier than it actually is, because niche communities (the long tail of communities that are the secret sauce of reddit’s success) are difficult to discover.

Basically, every community should easily be discoverable from any instance on first search (unless the community owner deliberately chooses to hide their community from the directory services).

I know there are already some websites that act as a directory of communities, but you have to be aware of these in order to use them. They are not built into the native community search functionality of lemmy or kbin, so 99% of users (especially new users) will not be aware of them.

1. MAKE FEDIVERSE-WIDE SEARCH MORE FRIENDLY

Search should, by default (ie unless constrained by the user), search communities and posts and users, and present the results grouped into these categories, with communities displayed first or at least prominently.

The current default fediverse search screens - especially on lemmy - are intimidating and require the user to know how the fediverse works before searching, eg knowing the difference between “local” and “all” or the difference between a “community” and a “creator”.

Rather than putting the onus on the user to narrow search parameters before searching, have a general search bar that group the results after searching into easily distinguishable groupings, ie communities, posts and users.

Reddit search does this very well, and offers additional quality-of-life features like suggesting communities related to your search term even as you type.

Advanced users should still be able to specify search parameters in more detail up front of course, but it’s important to hide any complexity from new users.

@AnonTwo @ernest is aware of the issue: https://codeberg.org/Kbin/kbin-core/issues/80

Hopefully this will be changed soon, as the current system is confusing can be off-putting.