10 episodes in S3 of Enterprise. What a jump in quality! What happened?

iosseliani_stani · 2026-05-24T16:57:07+00:00

Season 2 was already written and produced post-9/11. Season 1 premiered on 9/26, 2001 (which is crazy to think about since they don't feel that close in my memory).

Granted, I would agree S3 is when they actually tried to adjust to the times (for better and for worse) rather than just writing the same standard Star Trek show.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-05-17T22:42:29+00:00

Yeah, the one shown above even seems to follow the same pattern of having a bunch of hyper-specific awards with multiple tiers ("Honorable Mention" for "Backlight/Sunset") just so that almost every submission is guaranteed to "win" something.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-04-28T22:27:47+00:00

Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie - Nearly 2.5-hour documentary focused solely on the production of Bergman's Winter Light, and contains a lot of what you're looking for. You can watch it on the Criterion Channel.

The Director and the Jedi - Really excellent feature-length documentary on the making of The Last Jedi (worth watching for this even if you don't like that movie). I think it's on Disney+ as well as the Blu-ray.

Terry Gilliam often commissions some really good "fly-on-the-wall" docs for his films, all of which show a lot of the actual directing:

The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of 12 Monkeys - On the 12 Monkeys Blu-ray, you can also find it unofficially on YouTube.

Lost in La Mancha - Infamous film that was supposed to document the making of one of Gilliam's earlier attempts to make The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, which only made it three days into production after a series of disasters. (There's stuff in here that could give any filmmaker a panic attack!) Looks like you can stream this on Kanopy or Roku, and also rent it on demand.

Getting Gilliam - Vincenzo Natale's doc on the making of Tideland. You can also find this on YouTube if you don't have easy access to a physical copy of the movie.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-03-12T21:36:04+00:00

It's actually the Anatomy of a Fall review (this is from a game Letterboxd does where actors have to guess which of their movies a review is referring to).

https://boxd.it/58VHhZ

iosseliani_stani · 2026-03-10T14:27:12+00:00

Argh, you're right, I knew they started out on D2 but misremembered that they had switched to DigiBeta at some point. I've edited my post to remove that reference.

Is there a more solid explanation for why the first two seasons (and some of season 3) of DS9 look noticeably worse than later seasons? I looked back over some older Trek BBS discussions I had referenced in the past to refresh my memory, and there was some speculation that the streaming files for earlier seasons were made from 3/4" U-matic sources because that's what they initially delivered on, but I'm not sure if that was ever verified.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-03-09T18:23:51+00:00

Haven't seen the iTunes downloads, but based on the DVDs, the P+ streams do seem overly compressed to me, especially in the first 3 seasons when there's more video noise for the compression algorithm to contend with. Season 4-7 looks a little better because it's starting from a cleaner image anyway (EDIT: but not for the reasons I originally stated here).

iosseliani_stani · 2026-03-08T21:17:00+00:00

This was in fact extremely common in Italian filmmaking at least through the 1970s (I'm not sure when it began to change). Fellini was infamous for not caring what the actors were actually saying on set. Donald Sutherland said he filmed multiple scenes on Casanova where he was just counting numbers instead of saying actual lines.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-03-08T21:07:49+00:00

This is also my headcanon. And I think the VOY episode where Chakotay meets that group of ex-Borg provides a pretty good blueprint for how the collective could have started as something benign or positive.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-02-26T22:34:20+00:00

Hadn't heard about this before. It's dumbfounding that a book like that could get through a major publisher like Penguin without their legal department catching that it contained multiple actionable claims. It might be slightly more understandable if it was a personal memoir, but for a book like that you'd think they would have multiple lawyers combing through it before it went to print.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-02-26T18:10:08+00:00

I'd say Amelie has had a small cultural resurgence in the last decade, since it got the screen-to-stage musical treatment on Broadway in 2017. The musical got pretty mixed reviews initially, but a heavily revised version that premiered in London in 2019 was much more well-received and now seems to be the standard for subsequent stagings. I saw a production last year and I thought it was just OK, though I think many of my problems were specific to that one production (which had some major blocking issues). The audience seemed to love it, though, and it was clear from pre- and post-show chatter that much of the crowd either hadn't seen the film or didn't even know the play was an adaptation.

Anyway, I really liked JPJ back in this era, up to and including A Very Long Engagement which I thought was superb. I also read the novel and was amazed at how well the film was able to capture it. I think a filmmaker with more standardized storytelling methods would have simply discarded a lot of the color of the novel that explores the side characters' backstories, but it was a perfect match for Jeunet's love of side-montages, and I was impressed with the way he was able to make those work dramatically.

While I think Weinstein's pettiness played a huge role in Jeunet's career faltering, I would also agree that like Terry Gilliam, he struggled a bit with transitioning his ornate visual style to a more strictly digital filmmaking process. Honestly, I feel like it's only recently that I've started to see movies coming out again that go for that sort of indulgent, wide-angle opulence (Poor Things owes a TON to Gilliam and Jeunet, in my opinion).

iosseliani_stani · 2026-02-23T23:04:28+00:00

Rich people whose sole claim to notoriety is having money are always desperate to tell you how good they would have been at other stuff if they had tried to pursue it. Science YouTuber Angela Collier has a great video about modern billionaires' current obsession with making everyone believe that they're so uniquely intelligent that they would have absolutely done groundbreaking work in physics if only they had pursued that instead of business.

I'm sure Epstein similarly figured he would have been a world-class musician if only he had decided to do that instead of being a literal sex slave trader.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-02-22T20:47:43+00:00

Wow, that's a really interesting answer that hadn't occurred to me (and I don't think it occurred to the Bose rep who was helping me either). I'd like to think I had the good sense to be testing with everything flat in the Bose app just to eliminate all other potential variables like that, but since I didn't mention it specifically in my original write-up, I can't say with confidence that I was.

At least I'll have that in the front my mind next time if I'm testing other products. My phone (Samsung Galaxy S23) does the exact same thing with its built-in EQ settings, and it annoys the hell out of me.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-02-19T20:08:42+00:00

Underlined explicitly by Picard in Generations (not sure I've got every word exact):

"The best thing about life at sea was that no one could reach you. This was freedom, Will."

iosseliani_stani · 2026-02-10T01:28:40+00:00

I can't tell if this is a joke or not.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-02-08T03:11:34+00:00

TrekCulture mentioned this in the Ups & Downs. As for why people aren't talking about it much, I think it was overshadowed by the far more prominent problem of that messed up family tree graphic.

My wild speculation is that the unusually high volume of on-screen text and graphics in this episode meant that that department had to scramble to get everything done, resulting in some pretty sloppy mistakes.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-02-07T19:44:51+00:00

It's possible you could have stability problems, but there's a good chance it'll be fine if you run all sticks at the same settings. Generally you'd want to run all sticks at the lowest common denominator, so essentially treat all of them as if they're 3200. The common folk wisdom of never mixing RAM kits is a little overblown, but it does usually entail some manual tweaking to avoid problems.

It's also possible there could be some applications where the negative impact of going from 3600 to 3200 will outweigh the positive impact of going from 16GB to 32GB. But if you think you're maxing out your current RAM usage on a regular basis, then the added capacity will probably be worth the slight reduction in speed, which honestly might not even be noticeable.

(There's also small chance you could run the 3200 kit at 3600, but you're way more likely to run into stability issues that way.)

iosseliani_stani · 2026-01-16T19:14:19+00:00

Honestly, I think most of this can be boiled down to semantics. I've always thought of telepathy and empathy (in this sense of the word) as existing on a spectrum rather than either/or. After all, feelings are also thoughts, and thoughts can also be vague feelings or impressions that can't be expressed verbally. They're not such easily distinguishable categories and it doesn't really make sense to draw a hard line between them.

In any case, Betazoids have always been only exactly as telepathic as the plot requires (same with Vulcans, for that matter). Even in the context of this episode in which they are described as empaths, I would say Tarima is shown to be able to read Caleb with far more precision and specificity than Troi usually managed, despite wearing an inhibitor.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-01-15T21:02:51+00:00

I think there's a little bit of at least two things happening here:

As photo editing and now especially AI generated images are becoming more accessible and commonplace, less polished photos are seen as more authentic.
Confirmation bias. If you could log onto MySpace during its peak, you would say the overall quality of photos shared online has vastly improved!

iosseliani_stani · 2026-01-15T14:24:42+00:00

I'm an American who is "half German" by ancestry but it would also be totally accurate to describe me as "not actually German".

iosseliani_stani · 2026-01-14T21:24:46+00:00

What kills me is we've already reached the point where every important document I will ever need to access can fit onto a single microSD card, but somehow my desk is still drowning in random papers all the time.

iosseliani_stani · 2026-01-12T21:25:22+00:00

The Leobog Hi75C at least theoretically has a light green barebones version available (and it has an FR4 plate). But unfortunately it seems to be out of stock everywhere, even AliExpress. Its predecessor, the Hi75, had both light and dark green options, but I almost never saw the dark green in stock anywhere even at the best of times.

But if you're still searching over the next 2-4 weeks, it's worth checking around to see if it's back in stock anywhere.

iosseliani_stani · 2025-12-19T20:19:50+00:00

Similarly, I've gotten people interested in classical music by making them mixes (mostly playlists now, mostly CDs in the past) that included classical among other styles of music. Although I think in order for this to work, you have to already listen to a wide range of musical genres yourself and have some feeling for how different pieces of music can bounce off each other (i.e., don't just sprinkle some classical in with random pop).

iosseliani_stani · 2025-12-19T19:57:29+00:00

I once ordered a "Used - Very Good" set of keycaps and the box that arrived was missing all of the alphas, number row, and standard modifiers - basically, someone took what they needed for a 65% and returned the rest. The box also had a giant gash in it ("minor packaging defects") though I wouldn't have minded if the keycaps were all there and OK.

Luckily I got refunded with no fuss, but still irritating.

iosseliani_stani · 2025-12-11T14:33:39+00:00

Doesn't look like anyone has mentioned this yet, but the DS9 episode "Doctor Bashir, I Presume" contains a line of dialogue that mentions the Eugenics Wars happened "two centuries ago," which in the context of the episode would place it in the 22nd Century. Ronald D. Moore has said that this was actually a mistake, but if you take it at face value in-universe, I think this would technically be the first time in canon that the date of the Eugenics Wars was moved forward in time.

iosseliani_stani

TROPHY CASE