Kelson Reviews Stuff - Page 6

What might have been…

Full disclosure: I don’t like the premise of Section 31 (the organization) in the first place. IMO it undermines the concept of the Federation rather than complicating it as Deep Space Nine’s more gray-area episodes did. I didn’t like it when it showed up in DS9, and I was so tired of it by the end of Discovery season 2. (More about that later.)

But I was going to watch this anyway, because Michelle Yeoh is always compelling. As awful a person as Mirror Georgiou is, the character is fascinating to watch – particularly when she’s navigating the different rules of the Prime universe. And she does not disappoint!

The Verdict

Viewed as a pilot for a Star Trek series, it’s…okay. The only really good pilots the franchise has had are “The Caretaker” (Voyager) and “Second Contact” (Lower Decks), with “The Emissary” (DS9) coming close.

As a stand-alone movie, though, it’s a mess. Too much exposition, too little story. Characters drawn with bullet points to be filled in later. A cliffhanger halfway through, with a stark change in setting and supporting cast making it clear that it was two regular-length episodes. And an epilogue that does nothing for this story, serving only to set up a series that won’t happen.

It could have been retooled as a good heist film like Solo (no, seriously), but the seams are way too visible, especially considering that (IIRC) the decision was made before shooting started.

(And as cool as that ship at the end is, it makes absolutely no sense given what it’s being used for.)

Fridge Logic Time

It took a while to figure out that this was Georgiou after her disappearance in Discovery Season 3, having popped up again in the prime universe about halfway between TOS and TNG. That still puts her several decades out of sync with her own time, something which messes with the timeline of her contemporaries in her home universe.

Side Note on Deep Space Nine

Sisko is willing to bend the rules on the regular because he’s working in a place where things are messy, but he bends them to avoid breaking them. We see the murkier side of things during the Dominion War, and when O’Brien gets dragged into an undercover intelligence investigation. But while there’s a lot of gray area, they’re still striving to keep in the light, and there’s a point beyond which the darkness is not acceptable. In “Paradise Lost” Sisko comes down hard against a conspiracy that’s willing to throw out the Federation’s ideals wholesale, claiming that they’ll come back in some nebulous future.

“In the Pale Moonlight” works because it’s a last-ditch plan, and because it shows the decision process. We watch Sisko work through the moral quandary and conclude that this time, in this place with this situation it’s necessary to violate those ideals in order to preserve them in the long run. Whether the audience agrees, he’s at least grappled with the problem.

Similarly, Discovery Season 1 made a very clear point about Starfleet’s ideals being something to keep aspiring to, not to discard for the sake of expedience. Lorca’s approach may have been effective in the short term, but that didn’t mean it was the only solution, or the best one, even in wartime.

That’s a far cry from an entire organization dedicated to assuming the dirty work is always going to be necessary and simply tossing ideals out the window to do it, even if it’s framed as making sure other people don’t have to.

Like everyone else in the Los Angeles area, I installed Watch Duty in mid-January when fires were burning down entire neighborhoods in Altadena and Pacific Palisades and scouring the mountains. This is what official alerts should have been: Clear maps of fire perimeters and evacuation zones, and alerts when conditions changed.

While the LA Times fire map is always useful, it’s not always specific enough, especially when you want a sense of which side of the fire perimeter is still burning, which zones are under orders vs. warnings, etc.

And the official alerts going out on emergency channels tend to be too specific, except when they accidentally went out to the entire county.

Being able to look on a map and see things like, “Oh, that alert is only for the Eaton fire in Woodland Hills, it hasn’t burned over the mountains and through 10 miles of city in the last 5 minutes” was really helpful!

It’s a non-profit, volunteer organization, and the emergency alerts are free. I decided to buy the $25/year membership to help keep it going. It’s a small price. Especially since I’m going to want this through fire season, which is year-round these days.

A no-nonsense SSH client for Android. You can set up profiles for each system you connect to, with or without auth keys. When using the on-screen keyboard it adds buttons for Control, Escape, Tab, arrows, and all the function keys you don’t have on your phone. When using an external keyboard that still doesn’t have Escape, you can use Ctrl+[. Works so well I’ve never bothered to try out other SSH clients for my phone or tablet.

One of the problems with the modern corporate web is the constant surveillance tracking your activity from site to site to site (mostly used for targeted advertising). Even if you’re willing to see ads, you may not want to be tracked so thoroughly.

Originally, EFF’s extension for blocking trackers was useful mainly because it would automatically detect tracking activity and block it. Eventually someone figured out how to detect that and use it for fingerprinting, so now the extension uses a pre-trained list (updated periodically) instead. Though you can choose to turn auto-learning back on if you want to.

With most browsers offering to block third-party cookies these days, and some specifically including tracking protection and/or ad blocking, the obvious question is: what does Privacy Badger offer that just changing my settings on Firefox or Vivaldi – or installing an ad blocker – doesn’t?

1. It automatically configures settings like turning off Chrome’s misleadingly-named privacy sandbox and turning on Global Privacy Control, even in browsers that don’t have built-in support. (more about that below)

2. It replaces embedded social media widgets, including share buttons and embedded posts, with placeholders. So you can choose whether to enable a Facebook post or TikTok video on some random article or blog post, instead of letting Meta or ByteDance track you as soon as you open the page. (Brave picked up this idea too, but only does it for Facebook, LinkedIn and “X.”)

3. It can still protect browsers like Chromium that only let you block cookies and not other tracking methods like local storage.

The widget placeholders and GPC support are the main reasons I still use it with Firefox and Vivaldi.

Plus, it works on mobile Firefox too!

Wait, what’s GPC?

Global Privacy Control is an automated way to tell websites that you don’t want them to sell your data instead of writing to them one by one. It’s mainly useful in jurisdictions like California that require companies to honor this sort of opt-out.

Some sites will honor it silently. Some will tell you they got the message. I’ve noticed grocery stores including Vons/Safeway and Ralphs/Kroger showing a banner on the first visit in a browser session letting me know that they got the signal and will honor it.

On the flip side, Yahoo shows me a pop-up asking me to please turn it off, I’m missing out of so many things they could do for me if I just agreed to let them sell my data.

Firefox and Brave have settings to enable GPC. Privacy Badger is one of several extensions that can add support for Chromium, Vivaldi, Edge etc.

Sometimes you go back and watch something years later and it’s better than you remember.

Sometimes it’s not.

We’ve started re-watching Star Trek: The Next Generation from the beginning, and “Planet of the Jogging Bimbos” falls solidly into the latter category.

The arbitrariness of the law, the fact that no one on the planet thinks to tell anyone about capital punishment until the second visit, the fact that the crew thinks it’s a great idea to send 14-year-old Wesley down to a planet where casual sex among adults is like a handshake without checking how their kids interact first, the general vapid characterization of the Edo, the lack of urgency in the editing, the shallowness of the argument and “solution,” all add up to something that was trying to present a moral dilemma, but has all the depth of a word problem on an exam with a lingerie picture next to it to spice it up.

Tip of a Hat

That said, Picard’s attempts to find a diplomatic solution don’t bother me as much as they did back when I was (checks airdate) 11, and frankly if the episode had taken time to really dig into ways they might actually negotiate with the Edo and their “god” – instead of making sure there was enough skin visible in the background on the planet scenes, and then just beaming up while saying that justice can’t be absolute, it might yet have transcended the ridiculous premise. As it is, the starship side of the plot does give them a reason not to just beam Wesley out of there and sort things out afterward.

I did appreciate the sarcasm in the “oh, you must be more advanced than us, so tell us how advanced your justice is” remarks at one point, though it’s not clear in the delivery. And it is amusing to watch the interaction between Troi and Riker during this season, before they’ve decided they definitely aren’t getting back together…knowing that eventually they do.

Any Hat

Yes, “Planet of the Jogging Bimbos” was a contemporary nickname for the episode. Strangely, searching for that exact phrase online only turns up one result on Google or DuckDuckGo, a forum discussion from 2007…almost half as long ago now as the original airdate. (And about as old as “The Apple” was when this episode aired, give or take a bit) I don’t know if the nickname was just local to the fannish circles my family moved in and didn’t make the jump to online usage, or if it’s yet another example of search engines not finding things anymore.