As others have pointed out, Foundation isn’t a particularly faithful adaptation of Asimov’s stories, but there good things in it. It might be more accurately titled Foundation and Empire IMO, because it focuses as much on the Empire side of the story as the Foundation. The first season was lopsided. The Empire plotline was compelling, the Foundation ones were… not. Haven’t watched the second season yet, but apparently it’s more consistent.

For All Mankind is the Star Trek prequel we should have had. Co-created by Ron Moore (Deep Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica), the show has a bunch of Trek alumni working behind the scenes. It features human drama (and sometimes melodrama), geopolitical diplomacy, sweeping cultural change and scientific adventure against the backdrop of a multi generational future history, starting with the first moon landing.

I’m a younger user of lemmy in the sense that I’ve only been a Fediverse user for less than a year. 😇

Starcraft (1 and 2). I suck. Suck in the “had trouble finishing the campaign on Normal, couldn’t get out of Bronze league” sense of suck.

But I love it. It’s my favourite video game, though these days I only watch it rather than play it, for reasons of see above.

I’ve never given the distinction much thought, but as I recall (and it’s been many years since I’ve read the Ender books) in Speaker for the Dead Jane was pretty much an AI, an evolved form of the fantasy game in Ender’s Game. In later books Card may have more explicitly applied his Mormon-influenced concept of a soul that exists prior to, and after, inhabiting a physical form, to the character of Jane. But when I think of Jane, it’s the Jane of Speaker for the Dead, as that’s the book in the series (along with Ender’s Game) that I read most often.

When I was younger I had a crush on Jane from Speaker for the Dead, so I wouldn’t be weirded out by that person, cause I’d probably be that person. 😅

Stormgate and ZeroSpace are looking like the spiritual successors to Starcraft, with the former developed largely by ex-Blizzard staff and the latter by some prominent members of the Starcraft community.

Honestly Dr.manhattan was kinda dumb. “Oh I need to stop humanity from nuking itself” meanwhile I demonstrate easy ability to travel to other planets.

Doctor Manhattan’s ability to save the human race wasn’t the issue. He was basically a god. It was his willingness. He didn’t feel the need to stop humanity doing anything:

A live body and a dead body contain the same number of particles. Structurally, there’s no discernible difference. Life and death are unquantifiable abstracts. Why should I be concerned?

reddit has the ability to hide post vote counts for a certain time to mitigate this. It’s a feature that’s worth bringing across.

(I also think it’s worth capping the number of upvotes and downvotes a post/comment can get - and to do so asymmetrically, eg no more than 10 downvotes and 100 upvotes.)

Adding a !Musicals@kbin.social identifier didn’t work, so removed it from the post.

how I sign up to mastodon instances and whatnot with kbin

As I understand it, you don’t sign up to a mastodon instance with kbin. Rather, kbin has the ability to act as a way of following fediverse users and hashtags in the same way as mastodon does.

In other words, if mastodon is the fediverse’s version of twitter, and lemmy is the fediverse’s version of reddit, then kbin is a combination of the two.

However, while kbin’s lemmy/reddit features are maturing nicely, the mastodon/twitter functions are still pretty embryonic. (Bear in mind that kbin is a young project that for most of its life had only a single developer.)

For example:

• On kbin you can follow fediverse users by clicking on the “Follow” button in their profile (similar to the way you can follow users on mastodon), but I don’t think there’s a way of having their posts appear on a timeline yet.
• Similarly, while you can create a magazine that follows certain hashtags in the “microblog” section of a magazine, you can’t currently do that as part of your kbin personal profile in the way you can choose to follow hashtags on mastodon and have them appear in your feed. (And the propagation of hashtags between kbin and the wider fediverse seems to be haphazard at the moment in any case.)

What I would recommend for now is to create a mastodon account on a mastodon instance of your choice, and treat the two ecoystems as largely independent, until kbin’s feature set matures.

Arts and culture is a very broad topic area. It covers (among other things):

• performing arts (eg plays, musicals, film, TV, radio)
• visual arts (eg painting, drawing, sculpture, crafts)
• literature (eg books, poetry, the various literary genres)
• design (eg fashion, typography, architecture)

Mastodon has several instances focussed on different aspects of arts & culture, eg:

• https://artsculture.media/about
• https://mastodon.art/about
• https://mastodon.design/about

Different lemmy and kbin instances have various arts & culture communities (some are reasonably active, some aren’t). You can use community/magazine search tools to find ones to your liking.

Eg to search for theatre related communities you could use:

• https://lemmyverse.net/communities?query=theatre
• https://kbin.social/magazines?query=theatre&fields=names_descriptions&federation=all&adult=hide
• https://browse.feddit.de/

Note that due to the way the fediverse works, these search aggregators aren’t necessarily comprehensive. So it’s worth spreading your search over several tools.

@kingmongoose7877 Of course Scorsese’s mastery, knowledge and love of movies is matched by few and surpassed by none. But I do find it amusing that the he criticises lowbrow superhero genre movies when every third film he makes has a bunch of Irish or Italian guys telling each other to fuhgeddaboudit, then shooting each other in the head. (Yes, I’m exaggerating, but not by that much.)

My point? There are bad, mediocre and good superhero movies, just as there are bad, mediocre and good gangster movies. And every so often there are great genre movies, like The Godfather, or - for my money - Logan (which I think deserved Oscar nominations for picture, director, adapted screenplay, actor, supporting actor and supporting actress).

And, basically, you just need a lot of movies to be made before a masterpiece is produced. For how many decades were westerns a popular genre? Were directors complaining about the guns’n’horses theme parks in the 1950s? Most westerns that were made over that time have been forgotten, but the great ones like Shane or Unforgiven live on. In fifty years most superheroes will have been forgotten, but a handful will live on.

To address @chickenwing 's post more directly: I remember reading articles a few years ago about how the age of the movie star was dead (Tom Cruise being cited as one of a few exceptions), and that the age of the franchise/brand (Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar) had arrived. If the age of the franchise is dying, what will rise to take its place?