StillPaisleyCat

Not sure we needed another album from Shatner but you have to admire his indefatigable creativity.

This one will feature Brad Paisley and Joe Jonas.

Looking for news about saving Star Trek Prodigy, I came across this shameless paid promotional piece on MSN from Paramount Home Entertainment.

Murf cupcakes, a galaxy jello version of ‘floor pie’, recipes and decorative suggestions are all here for fête to celery the release of the S1 E11-20 BlueRay.

Wish Paramount+ had been this keen on promoting the show.

For those not subscribed to Master Replicas email notifications of releases of Eaglemoss Star Trek models, this Tuesday October 10th will be the launch of a special ‘signature’ release with plaques signed by Nana Visitor, Adam Probert, & William Shatner.

Here’s the Simon & Schuster listing of ebook deals for this month. $0.99 in the United States.

There’s a heavy focus on TOS Spock focused books, with several classics featured by Diane Diane, AC Crispin and others. There’s also Una McCormack’s excellent Star Trek Picard prequel novel ‘The Last Best Hope.’

Pricing expires on October 29th in the United States.

Other countries - deals are available but not necessarily all the same books. And there may be others on low feature prices!

How to figure out what deals are available where?

Option 1: for UK, Canada, Australia and India, there are links at the bottom of the page that take you to the Simon & Schuster country sites.

1. Go to your country

2. Search for “Star Trek” in the search field

3. Filter by lowest price to highest.

Pro. If you’re on the Simon & Schuster page you’ll be offered a free ebook.

Con. There are sometimes more books available at the lowest prices through Amazon Kindle and Kobo. And in some cases the full US ebook special list is in effect on other countries’ Amazon, but not on the publisher’s own site.

Option 2: go to a major ebook seller for your country

1. Search for “Star Trek” in books

2. Filter by ebooks

3. Filter by either ‘lowest to highest price’ or just by a low maximum price e.g., £ 2 for the UK.

This yields a lot of IDW single issue comics as well as novels, but it’s viable.

I’ve checked for Canada, Amazon Kindle .ca has the full US list plus a few more. David Mack’s excellent Kelvin Universe book ‘More Beautiful than Death’ is at $CDN 0.99, among others.

Enjoy!

This one is well done, and seems worthy of capturing as documentation in the Daystrom Institute.

Those charming two forward-facing eyes were instant indicators that Moopsy is a predator…but how dangerous?

It’s a tubby jumping spider without all those extra eyes and legs.

Many fediverse fans are exasperated that Paramount has (once again) missed the opportunity to take our money with official tie-in merchandise and left us to our own creations, or non-licensed creators.

While it says a lot that fans on a nonmonetizing platform are literally demanding that Paramount get its profit-taking act together, all this Moopsy fan-entitlement is currently being redirected into crafting energy.

So MakeYourOwnMoopsyMonth it is.

First out of the gate is a charming ceramic Moopsy demonstrating appropriate predatory behaviour on a blue crochet duck. Enjoy.

Simon & Schuster had a larger than usual array of ebook deals for September 2023.

October 1st is the last day for this group, a new set (likely fewer books) will come on line Sunday the 2nd.

If you haven’t given Treklit a try, these ebook deals are a great low cost way to get into it.

Missed this report from earlier in the week…Paramount+ will be joining major streamer J:COM with a launch date for Japan of December 1, 2023.

For the many fans who’ve been waiting for a legal way to get new Trek in Japan, this is hopefully great news.

This ScienceOf.org interview with Professor of Genetics/Evolution (& Star Trek biological science advisor) Mohammed Noor on the biology, especially the r-selection reproduction, of the Gorn in SNW is marvellous.

Just the kind of uncomfortable but great biological thinking I was hoping we’d get into here at Daystrom Institute.

e.g. Can we think of the Gorn in viral terms?

Treating Gorn like this, each infected person could infect four more people, so the R0 for Gorn would be 4. Not wildly big, but large enough to do the job. Of course, the hatchlings would also be going after one another, so the analogy’s not perfect.

But if you want to think of the Gorn as intelligent, viral space dinosaurs, that does get the idea across.

It seems that with long hiatuses in new onscreen Trek ahead, genre coverage is starting to profile Trek novels again.

This set of ten weird but readable books isn’t necessarily the trippiest, but it does put the first of the Shatnerverse books at the top.

(Perhaps @ValueSubtracted@startrek.website there’s yet hope for Shatner’s wild imaginings to make it into S&S monthly Star Trek ebook deals promotional rotation.)

Bleeding Cool previews behind the scenes commentary from Hageman Brothers from prerelease of DVD-BlueRay bonus content.

CBS Entertainment is keeping the profile up on Prodigy merchandising. A bright spot amidst Paramount’s erasure of Prodigy in Star Trek Day content.

/ Film is continuing to report and opine on key points in the oral history book "The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From The Next Generation to J. J. Abrams," edited by Mark A. Altman and Edward Gross.

For those of us who haven’t (yet) invested in the book, these extracts and reflections can prompt some interesting discussion.

In this case, it sounds like Nimoy’s hesitation led to a much less action-oriented integration of Spock’s presence. An interesting thought experiment.

Also, it sounds like tapping nostalgia and interlinking shows has been a constant pressure from senior executives at the IP holder. It’s well known that Roddenberry resisted close callbacks to TOS, and was determined for TNG to stand on its own in its own era. Even five seasons into TNG, Paramount senior executives though still weren’t convinced it didn’t need a TOS-connection boost.

Considering the amount of callback mining and IP nostalgia mining in the current era shows, it seems as though Kurtzman’s got a hard road to convince Paramount to give new characters and eras a chance to stand on their own.