There’s also factors like modern TV format and audiences. The shorter one story arc seasons don’t allow any room to maneuver. Bottle episodes got an undeserved bad reputation from the segment of viewers who want a linear sprint to the conclusion. It’s like a boring generic first person shooter with only a straight line from start to finish. No exploration. Writers aren’t allowed to write.

They give the audiences what they they think the audiences might want. That is the safe, easy to write 6-10 episode plot. Sometimes the audiences like it. Sometimes the don’t. Either way they’ve strayed from actual writing anymore. Bottle episodes add dimension to characters. Multi-path seasons add depth and breadth to the entire ensemble.

A side effect of modern TV format is more focus on action. When they don’t have room to maneuver then they substitute with brief action. A bit of plot. More quick action. Advance the single main plot again. Maybe a little B-plot. Repeat until episode 6 to 10. That segment of viewers are so tunnel-visioned on squeezing everything out of less than a dozen episodes. They’re scared of one going to waste on bottle episodes or “filler”.

Writers don’t have any room to explore several different plots. Some spanned entire seasons or even multiple seasons. Some were just one episode. There is no room for it in modern television. Whereas before instead of pointless actual filler of action sequence, they could have started a whole other plot that lead to several more episodes later in the season. That would have opened up a whole world of characters that would be one dimensional side characters in modern television. Discovery was chock full of wasted potential in chracters.

If Chief O’Brien happened in modern TV and for modern audiences, he would not be the O’Brien who suffers. He would be a stereotypical snarky engineer who reads off the scripted technojargon. They’ll give him a likeable character quirk that is relatable to the young STEM crowd and then maybe kill him off randomly, ostensibly to make him a worthy character because he died. That’s as much depth as we’d get. A one dimensional character that people like superficially.

The disdain for bottle episodes might be one of the worst things to happen to the medium. That’s not to overshadow the other issue that TV shows do not have the level complexity they used to.

Literary and technical literacy are orthogonal. All you’re achieving here is to denigrate yourself.

Yeah, this was the most predictable thing ever. Did anyone else see the clip where ICE steals all the guy’s shit from his shopping cart. I guarantee you they left him somewhere else after robbing him.

Maybe if they wanted to be more cruel they tortured him. Maybe they put him through the whole ICE renditioning system anyways.

There’s 100% chance there have been a lot torture and assault just for the sake of it. Keep in mind these guys are basically state sponsored klan gangs. Crazy seeing history in real time.

Do you want the cool shit from Star Trek’s imaginary future or not?

You lost me there. Conflating a fictional future utopia with the product your trying to sell is cheap trick.

Anyone who uses this bad faith tactic loses all credibility. Post read and disregarded.

People get offended whenever I’ve said that even random app developers are part of the problem. They can’t or won’t see that what we have arrived at is a Kafkesque world. It has been death by millions of papercuts. The collective rush to make an “app for everything” was in net effect building a global surveillance dragnet. It was inevitable the aggregate of data would turned into an authoritarian system of oppression.

All you wanted to do was make a 99 cents a sale for your basic phone app. You blindly stuffed it with copy-paste analytics APIs that voraciously collect data from users without transparency at all. You insisted that these random data brokers are 100% super honest. Just trust them, bro. You ridiculed anyone of trying to warn people how reckless this is. Good job, guys.

America is definitively passed their point of no return. I personally like many think that was a long time ago but there are still people out there who cannot internalize it. They’re in denial.

The world is trying to tell you guys this. Yes, you will have to put your body on the line. You will miss work. You will miss your bills. You’ve already lost so much. You will lose more. It’s a foregone conclusion. The question is what can you salvage at the point.

No, telling the rest of us to put our own bodies on the line will not change your situation. Ukrainians have no choice but to fight their oppressor. Gazans have no choice but to fight for their lives. America is no exception. You’ve slid into fascism. You have to fight for your freedom now.

You never were the exception. This mentality has been your undoing. The system isn’t fixing itself because of some higher innate quality of being American. You have proven this yourselves. You tried voting. It didn’t work. You tried protesting. It didn’t work. You tried your systems of checks and balances. They’ve all been torn the shreds.

You will fight like the rest of the world fights for their freedom. The idea of American peace, liberty, and justice for all was a fun fantasy while it lasted. Your own weapons of oppression are pointed at you. It’s time to wake up to reality now. This is the America that the rest of the world knows.

Maybe now Americans will understand those around world didn’t hate you because you were better. They hate you because of the very oppression you now face yourselves.

The revolution will not be paid hourly. The revolution will not come with a salary.

It would be one thing for a corporation to misuse the term open source as they’ve been doing lately. It’s pretty bad for one of the biggest and oldest tech news sites to be doing it.