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Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

ex-astris-scientia.org

191–200 of 218 posts

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#191

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We have a bunch of those. A local grocery store used them for deliveries a long time ago and I guess they didn't want them back because we probably accumulated a dozen or so. They are surprisingly well built and held up well to being in the sun for 15 years.

I've had a tan one since I was a kid. I know we had it by the late '80s, dunno exactly when my parents got it. It shows no signs of wearing out, at least 35 years and a bunch of moves (plus some hard use—it wasn't just a toy box when I was a kid, but a toy itself! And a table, and a chair...) later. If the new ones are still made like that, I'd love a few more at that price. But I have a feeling the plastic's been CA…

Maybe it will last until the 24th century.

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#192

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The Expanse used a ton of off-the-shelf props; most of them were used cleverly enough that they didn't stand out too badly. My personal favorite was a couple of laptop coolers used as "vents" in a maintenance passage: https://i.redd.it/rn2iac41t8h51.jpg

they used a Thule or Yakima (don't remember) car roof box (something like that) https://www.thule.com/en-us/cargo-carrier/car-top-carrier/th... as a casket :D

Yeah that one was a little bit too obvious IMO. A bit immersion breaking

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#193

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My favorite example is in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds , where one of Captain Pike's hobbies is cooking. Real cooking with fresh ingredients, not replicated food. Pike grew up on a ranch in Montana, where his family used Lodge cast iron pans. Cast iron isn't perfect for cooking - the heat distribution is mediocre - but one thing you can say about it is that it will outlive you . Even if it gets rusty from neglect, y…

I would think induction tech and power delivery would be so good by that era, you could heat a cast iron pan in no time!

now that you mention it, I can't think of anything more futuristic than using magnetic flux to induce current into an iron pan

a sous vide bath of vacuum sealed meat is rather dull in comparison to a good sear

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#194

As I looked through the shots of the chairs in the episodes, I noticed that the old shows had some wild lighting: sometimes like a Halloween set, sometimes like a task light was just set up on a tripod next to the camera, and sometimes like a cube farm. The new shows all seem to go for web developer's / Twitch streamer's dungeon with no overhead lighting, wall-mounted spotlights, and RGB rim lights everywhere.

Arg! I can't find it now but a while back I read an amazing article discussing the set design on the original series; particularly for the alien planets. From what I recall, their overall assessment was that the set designers used strong color design and bold shapes to compensate for their lack of budget. In that respect, while later entries in the series had much "better" sets, TOS had the strongest aesthetic.

The original Star Trek sets made a lot of use of gobos, patterned metal shadow casters placed in front of lights. You can see some uses of them in pictures here:

https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/mudds-gobos.276831/#post-113...

https://startrektour.com/photo-gallery/our-beautifully-recre...

and you can take the above tour and see them in use yourself. They were made of metal because the lights were hot. Some sources for them, if you want to play with your own, are old metal pot holders and small cast iron table tops. They usually welded a rod to them to attach them to the light fixtures using standard lighting rod clamps so they'd be stable. Cast iron is heavy, aluminum pot holders are preferred and they disippate heat better.

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#195

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I am the only Star Trek fan I know who was not a big fan of the dominion war arc. I really liked some of the later season episodes, but the arc itself was a bit of a letdown. OTOH, DS9 is the only Star Trek that my wife will willingly watch with me; she finds the others too campy. As another data-point she likes the dominion war arc as much or more than B5, which was her favorite sci-fi series previously.

It makes a lot of sense to realize that DS9 was direct competition to B5, which was being produced and aired at the same time. That’s why DS9 is so different from other Trek. It was trying to be or beat what Babylon 5 achieved. Even saying that though, I don’t think you can say one is better than the other. I can see why your wife likes them both though.

> It makes a lot of sense to realize that DS9 was direct competition to B5, which was being produced and aired at the same time

I know; they were even aired in the same timeslot (IIRC Wednesdays at 7) where I lived, and I had a prior engagement on Wednesday nights and only one VCR, so I had to pick which one to record. I settled on B5.

I didn't watch all of DS9 until it was on Netflix.

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#196
post #31
post #7

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I cannot fathom how someone has the attention to analyze these shows to note the chairs being used. Frankly, the Stokke Globe Garden is so far in the background of the Lower Decks screen capture that I can't understand how someone picked up on it.

Usually it’s a group of people who do so to receive social credit from each other on a successful entry. Us humans are designed to do all sorts of unpleasant weird shit for social credit.

[dead]

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am the only Star Trek fan I know who was not a big fan of the dominion war arc. I really liked some of the later season episodes, but the arc itself was a bit of a letdown. OTOH, DS9 is the only Star Trek that my wife will willingly watch with me; she finds the others too campy. As another data-point she likes the dominion war arc as much or more than B5, which was her favorite sci-fi series previously.

By Inferno's Light is among my favorites, if only for Andrew Robinson acting through his own actual claustrophobia in the episode. I might also be slightly biased in favor of cardassian plots and actors, if only for Stewart's acting in Chain of Command. The dominion and bjoran plots didn't really resonate with me at all, unfortunately.

Now that episode I loved, but the parts I liked would have worked just fine in a TOS-style episode where the same 4 characters are captured by .

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall B&W TVs still being available as a budget option in the early 80s, though by then most middle class homes had a color TV.

Where I came from, although most families had a colo[u]r primary tv, if there were any secondary tvs (kitchen, bedroom,...) those were b&w up until around 1985.

This is accurate. When I was growing up in the early 80s I loved Star Trek. We had 4 TVs but only one of them was color. That was reserved for my Dad (who hated Star Trek, but loved football). I grew up watching the original series on Black and White... and the lighting was quite perfect for that, even if it was pretty mauve and absurd in color. Also worth noting that the color TVs at the time tended to be very low contrast compared to what we have now. So heightening the shadows and highlights made perfect sense.

As a side note, my mom was an accountant at Paramount who handled residuals for Shatner, et al. She briefly dated Harlan Ellison before marrying my father, which might have explained his aversion to Star Trek and my banishment to the Black and White TVs while watching it. (When I was twelve or thirteen and got really into Ellison's fiction, she got alarmed and told me Harlan was "a creep" and left it there).

The upshot was I got to go onto the TNG set when I was a kid... which was both wildly exciting and sort of disappointing as it wasn't an actual starship. All I wanted was to be Wesley Crusher.

But yeah, we watched TOS in b&w.

[edit] even funnier side note, I used to tape Star Trek TOS on reruns while I was at school so I could watch it later on the color tv. I had figured out how to work the VCR timer by the time I was 11 or so. But there weren't any blank VHS tapes lying around. My dad had a collection of 100 or so tapes of movies from TV, with commercials and everything. Down near the bottom of the stacks were a bunch of tapes labeled "dirty movies 3,4,5" which I thought just meant they were bad recordings. So I was like, I can record over those, they won't notice.

My dad apparently tried to play his porn tapes and found a bunch of star trek videos and came to my bedroom in a rage, but then couldn't explain to me why "dirty movies" didn't mean "bad VHS recordings". Took me awhile to figure out since I'd never actually watched whatever was on the tapes first ;)

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes a lot of sense to realize that DS9 was direct competition to B5, which was being produced and aired at the same time. That’s why DS9 is so different from other Trek. It was trying to be or beat what Babylon 5 achieved. Even saying that though, I don’t think you can say one is better than the other. I can see why your wife likes them both though.

> It makes a lot of sense to realize that DS9 was direct competition to B5, which was being produced and aired at the same time I know; they were even aired in the same timeslot (IIRC Wednesdays at 7) where I lived, and I had a prior engagement on Wednesday nights and only one VCR, so I had to pick which one to record. I settled on B5. I didn't watch all of DS9 until it was on Netflix.

You picked well.

Re: Commercially available chairs in Star Trek

#200
post #67

This is one of my favourite distractions when watching Sci-Fi films set in the future - spotting objects from now. For example: - In Luke's home in Star Wars IV there's a lot of Tupperware - https://projectswordtoys.blogspot.com/2014/02/in-praise-of-t... - In Alien, Ripley drinks from a Tupperware mug - https://twitter.com/EverRotating/status/1156650673972363264

My favorite example is in Star Trek: Strange New Worlds , where one of Captain Pike's hobbies is cooking. Real cooking with fresh ingredients, not replicated food. Pike grew up on a ranch in Montana, where his family used Lodge cast iron pans. Cast iron isn't perfect for cooking - the heat distribution is mediocre - but one thing you can say about it is that it will outlive you . Even if it gets rusty from neglect, y…

My mother-in-law (from Alabama) recently gifted me all _her_ grandmother's cast iron (my wife can't cook). I hope they get passed down for a few more generations!
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