| ▲ | petilon a day ago |
| Larry Ellison's son had to scale down his media and TV empire ambitions when Oracle stock crashed. That's one thing to celebrate, because we don't want CNN to be controlled by the Ellisons. |
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| ▲ | miohtama a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| Larry is also the reason why all new Star Trek series have been cancelled: https://www.cbr.com/paramount-dismantling-star-trek-9-year-s... |
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| ▲ | SOLAR_FIELDS a day ago | parent | next [-] | | I do love how the software world has the caricature of a comic book villain in Larry Ellison | | |
| ▲ | glaslong 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don’t anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it’ll chop it off, the end. You don’t think "oh, the lawnmower hates me" – lawnmower doesn’t give a shit about you, lawnmower can’t hate you. Don’t anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don’t fall into that trap about Oracle." — Bryan Cantrill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=2308s | |
| ▲ | smegger001 21 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | I always thought of him as if he was angling to be a bond vilian but thats kind of a potayto, potahto thing | | |
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| ▲ | droptablemain a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I assumed the reason was Starfleet Academy was complete slop | |
| ▲ | bigstrat2003 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Well, that's a blessing at least. It was painful watching the butchering of Star Trek over the last decade. | | |
| ▲ | zingar a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Noooo Strange New Worlds was the best thing that ever happened to trek | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 20 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The current season has been rather divisive, to say the least. I mean some of these episodes currently have IMDB ratings in the mid 4's to mid 5's range out of 10: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt12327578/episodes/?season=4 Personally I didn't hate the gimmick episodes, but enjoying them sort of requires no longer taking the show seriously at all. | | |
| ▲ | rickydroll 11 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The gimmicky episodes were highly entertaining to my decidedly non-Trekkie wife. She loved the Star Trek Muppet episode ("Star Trek in Spaaaaaace") and the soap-opera episode. As for taking the show seriously, I don't take any of it seriously. It's a telenovela, or maybe we should say Stellanovela. Most episodes build a fairly cohesive story, then break loose, and those old scientists have fun with the Star Trek universe. It's not like they're acting in a Chekhov play. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | re: taking it seriously, I meant more in terms of whether it is "good art" vs disposable entertainment. On the whole, I felt that TNG and DS9 both eventually found the right balance of drama and humor, often with an intelligent underlying message about aspects of our society and culture. The modern Star Trek shows are sorely lacking in that area! |
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| ▲ | rsynnott 16 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Eh, I mean TNG, which is probably the best-regarded series, had its fair share of duds, and not just in the not-very-good first season. In particular, I am thinking of the episode where Data's cat turned into a lizard. > A transporter malfunction turns most of the crew into puppets while Spock fights to reclaim the ship. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | The difference is the sheer number of gimmick episodes: so far half the episodes this season fall into that category. Did you actually watch that puppet episode you're quoting? Gimmick aside, it had one of the dumbest endings of any Star Trek episode I can think of. | | |
| ▲ | rsynnott 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | Nope; haven’t seen any of this series. The streaming situation for it, at least in this country, is a bit of a mess. But it sounds from the description like a do-over of the cat lizard episode, more or less. | | |
| ▲ | evanelias 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Ehh, maybe that notion times ten. These recent episodes are far goofier and more nonsensical than that TNG episode. (and again, my view on them is far less harsh than many of the reviews I've seen online...) At least the TNG duds attempted some kind of sci fi technobabble explanation for whatever hijinks were occurring. With this season of SNW, we're getting plot devices like "missing resistance leader just happened to look identical to Enterprise's first officer by complete coincidence!" and "spooky derelict ship is haunted, no explanation even attempted!" ... there are worse ones I could reference but they're spoilers. I'm genuinely starting to wonder if an LLM is writing these scripts. |
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| ▲ | monocasa a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Lower Decks is so good too. |
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| ▲ | lotrjohn a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Picard was great! Romulans, Borg, Q, Data!! What more could you ask for?! | | |
| ▲ | malfist a day ago | parent | next [-] | | A plot? | | | |
| ▲ | ThrowawayR2 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I could ask for them not to show graphic torture onscreen, yuck. Decided to skip Picard once I heard about that. | |
| ▲ | UltraSane a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I consider Picard Season 2 the worst season of TV ever made. | |
| ▲ | TiredOfLife 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Being at least average and not shit | | |
| ▲ | ghaff 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | To be honest, I'm not sure to what degree my reaction to increasingly random dips into recent Trek has been around them just not being that good as a whole vs. just being tired of the franchise after many decades at this point. |
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| ▲ | tekla a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Oh thank god. It hurt my soul watching the horror that is the new ST. Starfleet Academy was almost unspeakably terrible | |
| ▲ | jlarocco a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Meh. The last Star Trek worth watching was TOS. | | |
| ▲ | ihsw a day ago | parent [-] | | That's funny way of spelling DS9. | | |
| ▲ | ghaff 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | TOS was what it was. Some episodes were better (and aged better) than others. After a pretty week start, TNG was pretty solid. DS9 was good too far more often than not. While other series had their strong points, I'm not going to go to the mat to defend any of them. | | |
| ▲ | ethbr1 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | No love for VOY? :) I know it's been a long time... | | |
| ▲ | ghaff 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | There were definitely some good episodes and it probably got better over time. I'd probably give it a mild thumbs up overall with reservations. |
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| ▲ | Lammy 21 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I lol'ed in the theater when I watched Top Gun Maverick as a double-feature with the original and the first thing you see is PRODUCED BY DAVID ELLISON — very “ecrof ria eht nioj” |
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| ▲ | martin1975 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| last time I found CNN appealing was in the early 90's...if that tells you anything about it. |
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| ▲ | testdelacc1 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Maybe some in this thread won’t celebrate CNN staying out of the clutches of the Ellisons. But think of it this way. If Ellison’s acquisition of Warner Bros falls through Ellison must pay Warner Bros a $7 Billion breakup fee. That’s on top of the $2.8 Billion they paid Netflix to abandon its pursuit of Warner Bros. So Ellison would have wasted $9.8 Billion and years of his life for absolutely nothing. And I think we can all agree that the world would be better off. |
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| ▲ | FireBeyond a day ago | parent [-] | | And will be still worth a quarter trillion dollars. Years of his life, perhaps, though a large part of that will be banks and lawyers, not him grinding it out. He won't even notice the money being gone, not even close. | | |
| ▲ | awakeasleep a day ago | parent [-] | | I’m worried your cynicism is overwhelming your capacity for rational thought. Years of his life and 5-10% of his net worth. That’s the kind of thing people notice. | | |
| ▲ | FireBeyond a day ago | parent [-] | | It's definitely not 10%, more like 3%. His net worth is currently listed as $248B. If he has to pay out the penalty on both acquisitions, his net worth will still be about $240B. There's nothing articulable about the difference in his life as a result. I will give you the time though, or the motivations (however appalling they are) for his exertion of energy on these. |
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| ▲ | jgalt212 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That's true, but then again, CNN is a mere husk of its former self. Something needs to change, but maybe it's too late for profit-driven news media. |
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| ▲ | xp84 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It’s been more than a decade when CNN was a respected institution. I agree it’s too late for the news media in general. Their incentives are unfortunately all lined up just like social media: pure ragebait is the fully optimized product. The only thing changing from now on is fine tweaks to get it slightly more… ragey. | | |
| ▲ | petilon a day ago | parent [-] | | Bloomberg and Economist seem to be doing OK, so it is possible. | | |
| ▲ | xp84 a day ago | parent [-] | | I'd roughly agree they are, but they have clearly positioned themselves in the opposite way as the mainstream media - the rest compete for ad-supported clicks and views; those two are fully paywalled and at a price that deliberately drives away anyone below say, the 90th percentile by income or wealth. That resembles, to me, how newspapers used to be - except instead of a small fraction of people being willing to pay for quality news, roughly two thirds were (62 million subscribers out of 92 million American households in 1989 [1]). Like Bloomberg today, their incentives were to provide information for serious people and to cultivate a trustworthy reputation, rather than to enrage people into commenting and sharing articles. The decline of newspapers is of course too much of a tangent, but I think it's interesting how the math kind of illustrates why most 'news' has to be trash now. | | |
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| ▲ | abeppu a day ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | But isn't not-for-profit news media also struggling? | | |
| ▲ | saturn8601 a day ago | parent [-] | | From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. The horrendous coverage from the 2024 election may have finally been the last straw for many people. People seem to be focusing more on individual reporters, subscribing directly to good journalists who have gone out on their own. We are also seeing a thing that pleases me ver much: Reporters focusing on the subjects they are experts in and not doing a jack of all trades master of none. Its made me accept that I wont get top tier news in every subject so I have to pick what really matters to me(Tech, Food, entertainment, geopolitics of specific regions of the world etc.). On the low end though its more bleak. TikTok slop, Youtuber "commentators" etc. | | |
| ▲ | dylan604 a day ago | parent [-] | | > From what I can see, online media has finally taken over. Makes me think of Neil Gaiman's American Gods |
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| ▲ | cbsmith a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | I kind of like the whole Paramount acquisition as something that is just going to drag them down. |
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| ▲ | CPLX a day ago | parent | prev [-] |
| CNN is mostly a lost cause, though I do agree with your statement. The real problem with that one, though, is it would utterly destroy the American movie industry, which is a crucial part of our economy and culture. |
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| ▲ | Terr_ a day ago | parent | next [-] | | > it would utterly destroy the American movie industry I don't understand, if Oracle etc. has financial problems, why would movie-making bits be destroyed as opposed to sold to new owners? If the American movie industry got "destroyed", what would that look like, and how would it lead to long-term malaise? Offhand, I can't imagine the same kind of supply-chain/infrastructure rot-problem as, say, the "destruction" of the automotive industry. | | |
| ▲ | CPLX a day ago | parent | next [-] | | It's the merger. That's the problem. Consolidation into one company with a huge amount of market power ruins the market, destroys innovation, and destroys infrastructure and capacity within the vertical. | | |
| ▲ | Terr_ a day ago | parent [-] | | Oh, I see, I thought you were saying that Oracle's financial woes would have a ripple-effect that's negative for everyone else, as opposed to the mergers being a bad thing regardless of Oracle's financial situation. Yeah, America is way overdue for some trust-busting. |
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| ▲ | dcrazy a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Because David Ellison’s explicit plan is to run Warner Bros. Discovery (owners of CNN) and Paramount (owners of CBS) as two divisions within Skydance Media. He committed to keeping a 20-odd film slate at WBD as part of antitrust negotiations with the U.S. and other countries. So he has to keep the studio running while figuring out how to pay off the investors with depreciating Oracle assets. |
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| ▲ | Helloworldboy a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | [dead] |
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