Just giving my opinion, but I did not care for the Orville. I'm a big fan of wonderment and adventure in Star Trek, with a healthy dose of exploration and philosophical consideration. In my experience, Orville spent all of its time on trying to be Star Trek: The Snark Generation and trying to make Seth MacFarlane look like a cool space captain. I think around the third or fourth time MacFarlane had said something incredibly offensive to the person he was meant to be diplomatically engaging with, but since he said it in his quick Family Guy aside voice it was apparently okay, that I got pretty tired of the show. It was way too much of a badly written ego trip for MacFarlane and not nearly enough science fiction fun. I was left feeling like the Orville was what would happen if Brian from Family Guy tried to write Star Trek, that it was more of mockery of science fiction than a positive addition, and I never went back.

In my further opinion, Lower Decks, meanwhile, is knocking it out of the park. I've heard a lot of good things about Strange Worlds as well, though I haven't had opportunity to check it out yet.

EDIT: Yeah, I figured this would happen. Hooray the internet.

The 4chan UAP larper.

A fun read, even if it's as substantial as smoke. The writer does his best to connect the dots of all the recent UAP news and sightings that have been happening. Still, his posts helped drive a fair bit of the engagement surrounding current events. The air of anonymity from places like 4chan really captures the imagination.

When I trawl the net for UFO stuff, what I see more than anything is people hoping for a savior. People hoping that aliens will save us from our economy, from climate change, from religion, from fascism, from war, from nuclear weapons, from disease, from Republicans, from Democrats, from progressives, from regressives, and mostly from ourselves.

I've been speculating that that fear is a driving force for a lot of the current UFO craze. We're in a dangerous time, things are only getting worse, and people are becoming desperate for a superhero to come and save the day.

I think we're more scared that there aren't aliens, sometimes.

Depending on who you ask, they already are >_>

This has been the response to everything that's come out since the Nimitz Incident. Bigger revelations have come out in the last seven years than in the last seventy. We're tired, and we're scared, I think. Aliens are going to need to really shake their cans if they want us to care.

I think you make a good point. Some of the humor is pretty low for a Star Trek medium. It does catch its stride as it goes along.

I firmly disagree, but I'm trying to avoid conversations that hold too much negativity, so I'm afraid I won't engage further. I deleted my comment because honestly, it was a cheap shot.

After being gone from it since Star Trek Enterprise, my wife and I got back in with Star Trek Lower Decks (oddly enough). If you can handle it being animated (and goofy), it is actually a very dearly written love-letter to TNG and some of the most important moments in Star Trek lore. We appreciated that it didn't try to reinvent characters that already exist, and did a good job of bringing on old actors for cameos. They bring on people from TNG, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all the time to reprise their roles.

There's a live-action Star Trek currently running that I can't attest to, but it has a crossover with Lower Decks that means I'm going to give it a try.

What I would actually do with a time machine.

EDIT; I forgot this was the internet when I wrote this comment. Hopefully editing helps remove it more thoroughly.

I wanna be, the very best...

Quality has been dramatically better here than Reddit has been for many years. Finding people actually discussing the post in the comments is rare on Reddit, you have to sift through endless lines of off topic puns and memes being promoted by bots for karma farming. The goal of comments on Reddit is to be funny, not interesting or useful. The fediverse is more like Reddit eight or nine years ago, when they were figuring out their control algorithms, building their own bot network to game their own site (remember the subreddit where the reddit-built bots used to exclusively talk with each other for practice? I wonder what those bots are doing today...), and learning how to control the flow of information on their page while also finally making some things more stable.

I'm really curious if any parts of the fediverse can avoid the same pitfalls that Reddit eagerly jumped into. It's probably doubtful since once the advertisers get here, greed will win. It always does. But maybe.