davextreme: startrek

Showing posts with label startrek. Show all posts

10 August 2010

How Star Trek artists imagined the iPad... 23 years ago

To understand the thinking that lead to the design of the Star Trek PADD, we spoke to some of the people involved in production of ST:TNG (as well as other Star Trek TV series and films), including Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler.

Ars Technica

13 May 2009

Why Lil' Kirk Was Listening to the Beastie Boys

Why Lil’ Kirk Was Listening to the Beastie Boys

YouTube - i made old star trek look like new star trek!

ToS + lens flares!

io9 - J.J. Abrams Admits Star Trek Lens Flares Are "Ridiculous" - Star Trek

J.J. Abrams Admits Star Trek Lens Flares Are “Ridiculous”

I liked the glossy look of the film.

11 May 2009

Star Trek Fashion Smackdown

Loved the retro-chic uniforms in the new film. One gripe: there’s no apparent rank insignia on them. On the original series stripes on the cuffs served this purpose.

06 April 2009

STAR TREK Line of Urns and Caskets

Dear Santa…

10 February 2009

PADD

(I’ve deleted and started this post over five times now. For some reason I can’t put words together about this topic I’m happy with.)

The Kindle 2 doesn’t appeal to much more than the Kindle did. Though I can see some uses for e-readers, and there are good arguments for their advantages, especially in saving printing and distributions costs for publishers, I really like reading novels.

What I’d like is not a book reader but a magazine reader. I actually feel guilty reading newspapers and magazines because I’ll often only read a few articles. I look at all that paper that was printed for my to read just a small percentage of the words. Sure, most of the articles are online, but the Web isn’t a great place to read newspapers or magazines. You get a column of text with maybe some embedded photos. None of the nice layout you get on the real deal. You often don’t get the sidebars or inset graphs, or if you do, they’re squeezed into what the Web can do.

I’d like to see a device with some size to it, maybe 7″×10″ or so with a color screen that can display a full page of magazine text. Give it pinch-to-zoom like the iPhone has for smaller text, and a sensor to let it flip to landscape for double-page spreads. Then you just need a subscription service (I think the Kindle already has this) where you can pull down each new edition of a publication when it comes out. Ditto for comic books. Lots of time is being spent trying to replicate comics on the Web, but reading tiny lettered text on a computer monitor feels unnatural. On a handheld device I think it’d work very nicely.

In other words, someone please invent this.

25 November 2008

YouTube - Shatner comments on the new Star Trek XI trailer

15 October 2008

Why I Don't Think Apple Will Ever Release a Tiny Laptop

Whenever Apple has a big product event coming up, rumors inevitably swell about the company releasing a tablet computer or, more recently, a “netbook”. People want Apple to put out a tiny laptop that costs well under $1000. I don’t see them ever doing this. At least, not the form the PC-minded tend to expect. Why not? Keyboards.

Steve Jobs’s Apple will never release a computer with tiny keys. He frequently mentions the high quality of the keyboards on their laptops, and often makes fun of the cheap keys on their competitors’ machines. During the most recent iPhone event he mockingly referred to the “tiny plastic keys” on the Blackberry. Jobs doesn’t like cheap, tiny keyboards. This limits the physical size of any Mac Apple ever releases to a little over 12″ across. Any smaller and the keys will have to shrink which, I think, sets off an alarm in Jobs’s head that screams “cheap”. For all the neat things the Kindle might have going for it, do you ever see Apple putting out a device with buttons on it that look like they came from a plastic calculator or a TV remote?

I can see Apple releasing a tablet device that’s all touchscreen. Picture a Star Trek PADD: like an iPhone, but with a screen the size of a novel. I don’t know that Apple will—they’d have to come up with a marketable reason to release such a device—but I can see something like that coming from the company. Maybe it can stand up on its own and connect to a wireless keyboard. May Apple would even add a book and magazine store section to iTunes for it. But there has to be a reason for it to exist other than just that the press thinks it might be cool. Likewise for touch screens on their Macs. It’d be cool, but I’m not sure it’d improve your productivity any, and it would probably create an entire new category of repetitive stress syndrome from having to hold your arm up all day to operate the screen.

13 March 2008

Games in Star Trek

A short page about games in Star Trek. What, no 3-D chess?

12 March 2008

On the St. Elsewhere Multiverse

St. Elsewhere (spoiler!) ended with the reveal that the entire series happened inside the imagination of Tommy Westphall, an autistic child in the series. Homicide featured an episode in which one of the doctors on St. Elsewhere was investigated. Thus, both shows share a continuity, and, since St. Elsewhere was a figment of Westphall’s imagination, so must be Homicide. Turns out that 278 other shows cross over with Homicide.

Very neat, but I do have some qualms with their methodology. They include a show, with some exceptions, whenever a character or event crosses over with another show, or when a character, event, or item from a show is mentioned within another show. The first is a given. The second, I’m not so sure.

Direct character crossovers certainly apply and confer status that two shows exist within the same multiverse. All the events of Friends coexist with the events of Joey, as do those of Mad About You, via sisters Phoebe and Ursula.

All of the Star Trek series feature character crossovers, but I don’t buy this connection: “John Larroquette Show referenced Yoyodyne. Many years in the future the same Yoyodyne built starships for Starfleet in the 24th century, including the U.S.S. Brattain and the U.S.S. Phoenix on Star Trek: The Next Generation, which features the adventures of the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise-D.” They also use Yoyodyne to connect to the Buffyverse. Must it be the same Yoyodyne? It’s not just a funny name that happened to be in all the series?

Often TV shows are produced by the same companies (as with Star Trek), and little easter eggs pop in. An example: “Charlie from Lost was in a band named Driveshaft. Alias Sydney threw a party and the music playing at the party was Driveshaft song.” Is the existence of Driveshaft’s We All Everybody on Alias enough to say that both exist in the same continuity? Probably. How about this one: “In the Jan 25th episode of Veronica Mars Veronica’s fortune contained the numbers that won Hurley from Lost the lottery.” Here I’d have to say no. The numbers are important to Lost, and their appearance all over the place on that show is a plot point, but their appearance on Veronica Mars is an homage. Inside Veronica Mars’s continuity, those numbers would just be numbers. (Battlestar Galactica, however, is explicitly reference as a work of fiction in episodes of Veronica Mars and The Office (USA).)

“Charlie of Lost once dated a girl whose father worked for a paper factory in Slough. The paper factory in Slough is the paper factory of The Office (UK).” (My memory is that Hurley also owns this company, and I think Locke worked there.) Does the mention of a paper factory in Slough necessitate that the factory is The Office’s Wernham Hogg? Again, I’d say no. It’s a coincidence, but it’s not enough for me. The Office was a BBC documentary within its own universe. If we saw characters of another show watching it, I think we could say that they share a universe, or even if we saw its logo somewhere on some stationary, but just mentioning the factory doesn’t cut it. I think a concrete crossover (a character, a direct reference to an event, a recognizable physical item) is enough to justify a link, but an homage or some sort of reference which would be mere coincidence inside the diagesis isn’t.

Now here’s a very good one: “On a balloon capsule on Lost all of its sponsors are listed and among them is Nozz-a-la Cola. Nozz-a-la Cola is a fictional product created by Stephen King & mentioned and consumed in Kingdom Hospital.” Even better, though the writers of this page don’t seem to know it, is that Nozz-a-la Cola appears in The Dark Tower, which establishes that all of Stephen King’s books are connected, and establishes its own multiverse containing “a billion” other worlds. Stephen King himself appears in the story as the author of itself. This being true, it means that not only did Tommy Westphall imagine the world of St. Elsewhere and those of all the other shows connected to is, but also Stephen King the author, all of his books, and their sprawling multiverse which all spin around The Dark Tower. And all things follow ka.