iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 3h

Look, will any new stargate be good? Of course not - SG1 was a fluke of brilliant casting and a rock solid premise that hit at just the right time to be made at the perfect overlap of high quality and cheap as hell. I wish them luck.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 9h

There have been some bangers since Eaves became the dominant aesthetic of Trek, but almost all of them would be even better if a bit less levels & chunks / a bit more grace in aesthetics, a bit less “fast” / a bit more “unwieldy” in configuration.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 9h

I like quite a bit of his work, but it definitely started with Eaves, whose take on the streamlined textures & aesthetic of Starfleet (which were applied to extremely non-streamlined configurations) was to junky up the textures and aesthetic (and apply those to extremely streamlined configurations).

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 9h

It sucks that every trek design now is “gosh, those designers in the 60s through 90s obviously had no idea what they were doing, certainly not creating a coherent and relatively cohesive visual language–if we just shove some ps2 sorta random shovelware designs in, that’ll vastly improve things!”

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 9h

I simply cannot process how this generic (I know it’s atypical for trek) “sci-fi concept art” design became a real ship in trek. Like, not to shake my fist at the clouds too hard or anything, but it’s all wrong both in premise/structure and detailing/aesthetics. (I like this ship!)

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

The shiny new navy boat that has a perfect recreation of the conning tower from a famous predecessor but the whole ship isn’t waterproof and has no engine?

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I wish you well! (Though I think the pacing is one of the stronger aspects of GEN - Picard’s… everything… being what mostly doesn’t work, and the atrocious lighting, and…)

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I think that’s my point precisely.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Haus of Decline called out some kind of bubblegum pop as easily replaceable with ai, but not music that has soul, and lots of folks jumped in to defend one of the artists mentioned but pointedly not the other. I don’t really have a point there, but FEELING (not being) driven by an algorithm… 🤷‍♀️

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I don’t particularly mean just soulless commercial work. Plenty of art is born of hyperfixation on a style or image or idea and takes a ton of skill and yet… is nothing. An exercise at best. I saw lots of art in the 90s and early 00s that would get the ai accusation now, and… it’s not, but fair.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

There’s always a lot of art that takes immense talent… and still sucks. I mean it doesn’t ai level suck as it still has a human heart and eye behind it, but it’s a lot of nothing.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I do think it’s entirely possible that we are talking at cross-purposes, not talking about the same things. But maybe we are.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I’ve never seen anything that looks or reads like it has soul be accused of being ai. Not yet. This probably all reads like I’m a lot more intense feeling about this than I am lolol I’m very much open to exploring why you think it’s a bad take, and I’m quite happy to be wrong.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Moreover: show me where someone’s been accused of using ai and it’s been… good. The best I’ve seen is people saying a background detail in this or that and it’s… like something that’s fine, not offensive in terms of quality but not good.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

For an individual image, perhaps. But for a series of work or even a page of dialogue? It’s not so much that ai isn’t there as it needs so much direction to even approach not seeming false that someone might as well have done it themselves.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

I don’t really understand any of this. Whenever something is suggested, it sounds somewhere between ‘eh, sure’ & ‘ok, neat’—then it’ll get explained as like… a nice feature… if you like a backdoor into your personal data that’s used by sentient topiaries, and I’m like… is that what mutuals are?

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Make better art. Show them they’re wrong. And better doesn’t mean more polished, of course. It means more satisfying, which means more intentional, which means less emptiness. If it MEANS something to you, it’s so much less likely to trigger those “it might be ai” red flags people feel.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Obviously not all “your art looks like ai / your writing reads like ai” callouts are in good faith or… intelligent, frankly. But if your art/writing smells of ai, maybe focus on the fact that a lot of people think that it’s ai means your art kinda sucks. Being defensive about it is meaningless.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

We make fun, but these are the same brain powers as the people who are running the world. 😭

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I wish I’d known moms like that back then (I knew one hippie mom who shaved her head for her 50th birthday). So many conversations centered around calling Kira a man because ‘no woman would do that to her hair’. Of course she got the proto-Karen in season 7, so those folks felt vindicated? 🤷‍♀️

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Still bonkers that two seasons in a row, Star Trek Picard introduces a new ship that’s clearly a new ship not a refit and calls them refits but also calls them new ships because Matalas has the strangest sense not only of trek’s existing use of the word refit but of the word itself.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

But most of the books I read (or had read to me) were between 15 and 100 years old at that point, and I still cannot fathom almost any child enjoying new stuff. Not that the books are improving with age, it’s just that popular-on-release crap falls away.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

As though we were hipsters at age 10 or whatnot. I didn’t read Holes (great book!) until I was an adult because it being new and “for me” was absolutely repulsive. Even reading Harry Potter, I was way behind the releases because new & popular equaled bad (and I was fucking right!?).

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

How old were the books you read as a child? Any age of childhood. I make no claim on what is typical, but it was rare for me to read anything that wasn’t at least 10 years old, and not just because we were poor. There was a distinct aversion to new stuff, which felt targeted very poorly us.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Experience tells me the only truth here about chasers is drybar.

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Reposted by Queer, Earl Grey, Hot

Vivian Critterwoman ⚧️🖖 @applepup47.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

i always liked how the reused that set components made voyager really feel like a ship that rolled out if the same shipyard around the same time. not the same but visibly made of the same building blocks, it was a great bit of cohesion

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I think about this a lot (too much) and not just about Twitter, like people arguing about a movie that no one is actually making just because someone juiced the IDEA of it, and then sometimes raw attention… works?!

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Reposted by Queer, Earl Grey, Hot

Better Things Are Possible @internethippo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

I don't know how but we have to teach people to be better at detecting bullshit. Instead we have this ersatz skepticism where people are suspicious about the wrong things and find their way to conclusions that are worse than if they just blindly accepted conventional wisdom

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Reposted by Queer, Earl Grey, Hot

caemeron @caemeroncc.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

increasingly I think the point is not in being anti-AI but in holding steadfastly to standards that AI cannot meet, with no forgiveness

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Apparently people are taking this as not sassy? Wtaf?

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Famously the shows most watched on streaming being Friends & The Office—shows where it’s all about character growth to keep ‘em hooked?

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Sorry, that’s probably me missing things as they soar over my head, cleverness being a frequent flier.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It’s not concept art for a “between” though, it’s concept art for a different direction for the original refit. The fact that it in retrospect looks like a sorta between is… what? Kinda nothing? Kinda a footnote?

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Reposted by Queer, Earl Grey, Hot

Momo @heyheymomo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

❌ AI generated slop menus with pictures that make your food look like worms ✅ scribbles on a piece of paper saying how much the soup cost

4 panel comic: Panel 1: A chef with a wooden spoon talks to a brown dog (bruno). He says “I have a new business!” Bruno answers “cool!” Panel 2: he shows his menu. He says “this is my menu”. We can’t quite read what it says yet Panel 3: a zoom in on the menu. It has just a few lines written on it. Soup: 1. Bread: 1. Soup + Bread: 2. He kept it very simple! Panel 4: He shows Bruno a small pencil. He says “I designed it with this”. Bruno approves and goes “nice!”

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Oh, amazing! Thanks for the heads up!

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

When they went to make a midway missing link between the excelsior B and the Galaxy D they emphasized the excelsior and galaxy and not the constitution nil. I mean, yeah, of course?

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Almost all of those have the captain’s chair elevated, it’s just not elevated by itself the same way, so there’s a platform around Kirk and the others notably aren’t standing in the pit when next to him. Distinction without difference perhaps lol - I feel you though and absolutely agree.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Well, the excelsior class didn’t exist when this was conceived, so there was no middle ground to animorph it into yet lol

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It’s been on my back burner pile to model this or some variation of it for way too long.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I have aphantasia. It’s never ever occurred to me (even as an intrusive thought) to use ai to put me in uniform. I’ve drawn myself (badly), worn costumes (bad ones and badly), and had other people draw me (wonderfully) in uniform. 🤷‍♀️

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Reposted by Queer, Earl Grey, Hot

Stephen Bush @stephenkb.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

One thing I find endlessly funny about the rise of AI is that it has revealed that there is a large number of people who believe that the reason they wrote essays at school or university is their teachers were desperately waiting for them to provide a definite answer to “Lear: what’s up with him?”

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Reposted by Queer, Earl Grey, Hot

Dr Dean Burnett @drdeanburnett.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

"By using AI, tasks like essays that used to take hours can be completed in minutes!" Sure, like how if I arrive at the gym and immediately go for a shower, my workout is done in record time. And if I throw my sandwiches straight in the bin, I can finish my lunch in under 10 seconds.

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Queer, Earl Grey, Hot @spaceshipjo.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Trek can’t help chasing the high of the monster maroon, but it’s been exactly zero times since then that the asymmetrical flap has worked even slightly.

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