I Wonder Where This One Came From. I Want To Say From The Allied Front In Murmansk/Arkhangelsk, But Given

I don’t know much about opera in general, but I always thought stories about power struggles in the Kremlin in the days of the Soviet Union would make good opera fodder. Larger than life personalities, plots and counterplots, occasional bloodshed; how could it miss?

Hey, there’s an opera about Nixon’s visit to China; anything’s possible nowadays.

Weird Operas

What are some things you think would make good opera plots?  Pull from whatever source- anime, pro-wrestling storylines, telenovelas, whatever.  What’s the season program for the Martian Opera House?

Custom-tailored sweatsuits for chilly tanks. :3

Super heavy tank

I think your best bet might be the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, which has mountains of bibliographical entries for obscure and forgotten sff authors. The SF Encyclopedia is another good source, but that's more focused on SF in general rather than solely authors. There's also the SFE's sister work The Encyclopedia of Fantasy; it hasn't been seriously updated since the turn of the millennium, but if you're looking for an old fantasy author, you might get lucky.

the peril of reading old scifi/fantasy is i’m left trying to navigate author websites that were clearly hand coded in html 20 years ago and haven’t been updated since when i just want a nice neat list of all their books that they somehow don’t seem to have 😭

TNG still had a fair number of godlike energy-based or “sufficiently advanced” beings outside of Q. Off the top of my head there’s the extradimensional god of the Edo, Nagilum, Kevin Uxbridge, and “Isabella”. Beyond TNG, I do think you’re right; there really weren’t any in DS9 outside of the Prophets, and VOY and ENT avoided the trope entirely. There are other ways the consolidation of the Trek universe under TNG changed the types of stories that were told. There was a recurring trope in TOS of fellow captains who suffered some sort of horrible tragedy and ended up going off the reservation in some way, and the only time that plot comes up in TNG is with Benjamin Maxwell and the Cardassians. @abigailnussbaum also made the point in her old TNG critique that as the show went on, the planets-of-the-week Picard and co. visited were increasingly worlds that had preexisting relations with the Federation rather than being new discoveries. While this didn’t really change the types of stories that were being told, it had the effect of making TNG more about maintaining the Federation than exploring strange new worlds.

One of Star Trek: The Next Generation's missions was to give coherence to a world originally developed as a frame for the one-off episodes – completely disconnected SF stories using the same stock cast and setting – of the original series.

There's an abortive first season plot about corruption in Starfleet that's dropped once it's established Starfleet isn't interesting enough to bear more weight than as a plot device telling the Enterprise where to go this week.

Something underappreciated as a success though is that the original series had scads of godlike but trickstery or inhuman beings because individual writers (the Trek franchises were famously full of episodes by published SF writers and continued to take freelance episode pitches well after this had been widely abandoned in TV) kept finding the notion of the Enterprise dealing with one a solid premise.

And in TNG we instead get Q, this type condensed into a single recurring character, introduced in the pilot, getting 6 episodes to himself and then blessing the finale, going on to appear in other Trek shows across multiple galactic quadrants (also, basically My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, as the John de Lancie-voiced season 2 big bad Discord)

Ah, “Alter Ego”, the episode where Tuvok is stalked by an alien incel who got too deep into RPing.

Hmmm.

I don't understand how tumblr works.

Daily Kuvira #46 - memes never end

When you can’t remember if you locked your giant killer robot.

You’re not an awful person, Madiha. You’re passionate about what you believe in and you stick to your principles, but you’re always willing to be open-minded, which is so hard to do in this day and age. That doesn’t sound like a bad person to me. I am probably the last person who should be an amateur counselor, but remember: those negative thoughts you have are not. true. They are years of insecurity and fear twisted by depression into a cudgel that give you a false view of reality and convince you that you deserve to be unhappy. Nothing they say is true.

We do not think that way about you.

You deserve to be happy. You will be happy. Whenever those thoughts start to roll in, remember that they are do not reflect reality and they are lying to you. Hold on to that. (This is really weird for me to write, but it tears me up to see you burdened with so much and know there’s almost nothing I can do about it.)

im really afraid im just a like, completely awful person but just utterly deluded in my own goodness that i dont see why everyone hates me

Well, as it turns out, I managed to pick the right ship.

This big beautiful girl here is the U.S.S. Madiha Nakar, NX-122030. While she is what Star Trek Online calls a “science command battlecruiser” (even though she’s bigger than the Enterprise-D, she’s a “battlecruiser”), her appearance is a kitbash of the saucer and neck of the Geneva-class science CBC with the engineering hull, nacelles, and pylons of a Presidio-class tactical CBC.

As the name implies, her main role in battle is to command and support the rest of the fleet. To that end she has a hangar deck full of runabouts to harass and hinder enemy ships, three types of automated turrets to deploy around the battlefield, and the ability to give massive bonuses to other ships in her team if she survives in combat and uses a lot of abilities. (She could also be further optimized with bridge officers with specialized command abilities, but I prefer to be a space wizard and throw science magic all over the place.)

As for loadouts, I’ve kitted her out with a whole pile of Romulan endgame gear (hence the green), which means that in battle she spends most of her time spraying firey green death plasma in every direction. She’s not my favorite starship in STO, but whenever I need to throw a lot of damage at something and I’m not sure what’s waiting for me, she’s the one I go to and she’s always served me well.

Stupid-serious question: if Madiha Nakar was a starship, what kind of starship would she be?

Some kind of flagship with a lot of battlefield analysis and C&C equipment.

This is something Trek fans have been arguing about since Discovery was announced. While the high production values of a limited-run can’t be beat, there are a lot of areas where the storytelling style of serials struggles. With serials, you can’t really have many low-stakes “monster of the week” episodes or put different sets of characters together for an episode to explore their interactions. Everything in the show has to contribute to THE ARC. There’s also the problem where these shows don’t have the time to experiment or retool elements if things aren’t working. If a relationship falls flat on the screen or if an antagonist doesn’t come out right and you’ve built your scripts around them, too bad.

I think TV show producers need to stop making shows with 13 or fewer episode seasons. I don’t know why they think it’s such a good idea.

Notice that good shows like ATLA or Star Wars: TCW are longer 20+ episode seasons because they have more time to think and draw things out while 13 episodes feels like a rushed mess like Voltron and Legend of Korra.