• 6 Posts
  • 18 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • Yes, I found it well-written but not all that enlightening. I recognise that it made sense for SpaceGhost/CheapSkate to build his sites out by hand in the true spirit of DIY, but that doesn’t seem too practical or advisable for most folks.

    The various federated software & networks may have their weak points and inconsistencies, but far as I can tell it’s still best for volunteer site runners to work within that framework so as to remain connected to something bigger than just their little personal corner of the internet. Is it really so expensive a thing to federate? I seem to recall that some instances can host for only ~US$20, which doesn’t seem bad at all. Images are arguably best stored at other sites like Imgur, anyway.

    @Blaze@reddthat.com





  • You are playing up the ‘ad hom’ stuff like nobody I’ve ever seen before. It’s gone from disappointment to embarrassment, frankly. Talk about a tiny bit of internet power being used to attack someone else, then hide behind the sub’s ‘rules.’ And of course, sidestep actual facts to back up your argument.

    The fact that you’re so utterly clueless about all this indicates to me that you have a long ways to go towards being a self-aware, professional, neutral mod.

    This will be my last reply to you on this matter, and of course you can do what you like with your mod toolbox. In any case, here’s a suggestion to be better in future, and good luck to you.


  • So you’re relentlessly attacking a 3rd person’s character, and are now offended that I’m mildly mocking you as a response, asking you to share proof?

    As a ~25 year admin and mod across various sites & projects, you disappoint me.

    As I see you’re a mod here, let me give you a suggestion-- be more professional and neutral, in future. Don’t be both a community leader and someone who viciously tears in to one of the franchise’s most beloved actors without proof, next time.


  • Okay, mister high & mighty, sinless judge of people,
    go ahead and give your specific references, books and page numbers, interviews and timestamps with Shatner’s colleagues calling him a ‘bad and shitty person.’

    Take your time, and I’ll keep an open mind.
    When that’s done, I’ll duly compare that to what I’ve read and heard from interviews, and attempt to fit the pieces together.

    EDIT: And yeah, you sound utterly obsessed at this point. As if it was a nuclear disaster that someone didn’t share your extremely negative take on Shatner.


  • I have no problem with the accuracy of any of that, and appreciate you laying out the details based on your readings and knowledge.

    For my part, putting this all together in to ‘Shatner is a bad person’ is going way too far. To me he’s got his positive qualities and negative ones, and the negative ones mainly involve him being an asshole and little more. Well, I can live with that and appreciate his art and career no problem as opposed to people like Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein, who were obviously way, way more than just assholes to people.

    Hollywood is filled with egoistic jackasses, and Shatner’s behavior is just a blip on the radar to me. Not to mention, he’s great fun to mock in certain ways! To wit, the greatest blog I’ve ever read: https://shatnerstoupee.blogspot.com/


  • You’re in the ballpark with that stuff, but you’re also significantly off on a lot by my readings and understandings. For example:

    • Shatner’s co-stars were annoyed with him not because he was rude to them per se, but because he was a line-hog, which could actually cut in to their future opportunity & salaries because they had less content online via ST. I’m not trying to excuse that, but let’s call the situation for what it is, and let’s also not forget that he took ownership of that later on, and had good relationships with Nichols, Kelly, Nimoy, and Koenig, with Takei and Doohan scorning him.

    • Yes, he was arrogant, and I believe always was, but so are a tonne of leads, big stars, and very talented people. Yes, in an ideal world it wouldn’t be like that, but… what are you going to do? Reinvent humanity?

    • He and Nimoy did NOT hate each other for any significant years AFAIK. In fact from my readings they clashed early, found a way to work it out, and were in fact fast friends for many decades until they had some kind of falling out late in Nimoy’s life. Please let’s not get it twisted, dude.


  • I mean Shatner is a total dick but I still love Kirk.

    Meh, I think I for one can respect Shatner’s “dickery.”

    As in-- he’s a really good actor who never wanted to be typecast as Captain Kirk, and is rightfully a bit short with ST fans on average. OTOH, it’s not like he goes out of his way to stir shit up or cast aspersions. More like he’s typically wanted to be left alone by Trekkies & Trekkers, and I can understand that.

    He’s also taken the time to write a lot of interesting books, some of them biographical, some of them about ST, and also do an interview series.

    I would never in a million years expect that I could walk up to a big star in public and expect to be treated like some long-lost friend of a fan. Some stars are amazingly good with that, but that’s on them.








  • Haha, I think maybe I feel you on that.
    Filmation worked so much better when it came to shades of comedy & farce, and for me, there was a tonne of understated comedy & farce in He-Man, hearkining back to lots of H-B farce. (never watched Godzilla personally, have no interest at all, sadly or unsadly)

    So Filmation to me were mostly disappointing (and again, the damn limited budget) when it came to TAS, but they also had to walk a sort of line, just like Rankin-Bass with The Hobbit, and then the “Return of the King.”

    The first one was fairly charming (and the songs were absolutely awesome), based on a children’s book, but the latter?

    Yeah, that shizzle just didn’t work for a serious fantasy epic. Okay, I’ll admit it had its points, but Rankin-Bass was so *not* the animation studio to do RotK, other than bringing back the super-charming… Glenn Yarbrough (sp?) as the narrator-singer.


  • I both liked and disliked this series. I thought it so impressive that they got most of the original cast back together, had DC Fontana running it, and had some really top-notch writing talent. Also, with animation, there was the promise of doing all kinds of interesting special effects that weren’t possible with TOS.

    The problem is that the animation budget was so limited! I didn’t mind that sections of scenes were recycled, something which also happened here and there in the original series, but that the Filmation art & technique was just so mediocre. As in, not nearly as interesting as some other studios were putting out, such as Depatie-Freling. Even some H-B series had far more interesting art & backgrounds, like Scooby Doo.

    Another problem is that the weak budget meant that poor Jimmy Doohan had to voice virtually every male character outside of the core cast. Similar with Nichols & Barrett having to do all the extra female characters. It got pretty identifiably ridiculous even just a few episodes in, and was a shame, because Hollywood’s always had an amazing stock of versatile voice actors that worked surprisingly economically. (Mark Evanier’s blog is a good place to read about that sort of thing)

    OTOH, I sort of enjoyed the animation bloopers, and there were many. One of my favorites was the way background characters would sometimes be larger than foreground characters. So, interesting to read that many of such ‘bloopers’ were in fact by design:

    “There were also only so many layers you could use before the colors started changing. Sometimes, you’ll see a missing leg or something like that. It’s not always a blooper, it’s just that they only had so many cells that they could use.”

    “If they wanted to have an animation on top of whatever was happening, sometimes they’d have to sacrifice something that maybe nobody will see this,” states Harvey. "At one point, Scotty’s doing something and he has no legs. He’s just a floating torso. For me, that’s part of the charm. It’s just the idea that this wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, we’re being caught careless.’ It was, ‘We have to make a decision on how we’re going to do this.’ That was the process. That’s a very abbreviated version of that process.





  • Wow, what a great mini-essay. I’d love to see it posted such that more ST fans could enjoy it.

    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.

    Hmm, the idea of ‘cockiness’ is an interesting one that seems to meet the eye test, but I’m not sure I really agree with. That is-- altho he could indeed bluff, boast and ‘exert his personality’ here and there in the series, it felt to me like there was almost always a stone-cold, calculating nature behind it.

    TWOK has what’s arguably Shatner’s finest performance - certainly in Star Trek, maybe ever.

    I’m tempted to agree, altho reading something like Shatner’s Toupee, I was impressed by how many strong performances he turned in over the years. For example, I’d never heard of Incubus nor The Defender before, but that amazing blog introduced those and many other interesting acting he’d done.

    I also feel that in the series proper, Shatner showed an amazing versatility in terms of ways to react and play various scenes, to the extent that I can’t imagine how much more dull the show would have been with Jeffrey Hunter as lead. So I think it’s fair to say that while his TWOK performance was great, he also turned in a load of other great performances as Kirk and other characters. Which was ‘finest?’ I suspect that’s a pretty monster and/or nebulous debate, really.