All the best for your hospital stay Ernest. Here's to a speedy recovery.

Hoping the upcoming kbin news is good.

Lots of negativity in this thread, but that seems to be par for the course for any fandom. Personally I'm cautiously optimistic.

Skydance produced/co-produced (often partnering with Paramount) on a number of franchise movies, including Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Jack Reacher, Top Gun, GI Joe, Terminator, The Old Guard and Spy Kids. Some of their productions have been well-received (eg Mission Impossible, Top Gun Maverick) and others less so (Terminator Genysis and Dark Fate, although personally I quite liked Dark Fate). They've also produced smaller, critically acclaimed movies like True Grit, Annihilation and Air; as well as their share of dreck of course, like Geostorm.

What I think is clear though is that Skydance is primarily interested in big franchises, so if they were to acquire Paramount, I think more Star Trek movies would very likely be in the works which, as a fan, I'd be happy about. I know there's an argument that Trek is best suited to TV, but some of the best Star Trek has been big screen Star Trek. And studios are more willing these days to have franchises run across both TV and film (MCU, DC, Star Wars), granted with mixed success.

Re Larry Ellison's involvement - my guess is that he'd be a silent partner, putting some of his personal fortune - rather than Oracle's funds - to help out his son. I believe he did the same thing for his daughter, Megan Ellison's, whose company Annapurna Pictures he helped fun and which went on to produce films like Her, Zero Dark Thirty, Phantom Thread and Books Smart (and the stage musical A Strange Loop). I doubt Larry Ellison will take a hands-on role in the management of Skydance.

You're not the only one who's picked up on this:
https://www.primetimer.com/quickhits/the-west-wings-hartsfields-landing-has-never-made-any-damn-sense

If you watch the show (and I've watched it a lot) you can tell that Aaron Sorkin wasn't writing to a detailed plan. I think a lot of his ongoing storylines grew organically (and were often turned in very late, which ultimately led to him being sacked from the show), which meant he sometimes repeated, or retconned, beats, or made other mistakes.

Hartsfield's Landing was probably named after Hart's Location, another New Hampshire town that has often votes at midnight. I recall reading a story that, because of the weather, of the three towns that usually do vote at midnight only Dixville did so this year.

I think the fact that Anson Mount nailed it as Pike helped. (He followed in the footsteps of Jeffrey Hunter and Bruce Greenwood - all three Pikes have been really good.) Personally, I suspect that the more SNW edges towards being TOS the less I'll enjoy - or, more accurately, the less I'll respect - it.

Franchises have always struggled to reconcile the need to reinvent themselves on the one hand, and the need to retain those elements that attract fans to the franchise on the other. As a long-time Star Trek fan I also want the franchise to push forward and try new things (and in some ways recent shows have done so - eg Lower Decks being Trek's first sitcom), but at the same time many fans just want to see the characters that they know and love, hence the obsession with bringing back - or tying new characters to - legacy characters (ala Strange New Worlds or Picard's third season). I wish they'd kept Kirk to the very last episode of Strange New World, and was even a bit disappointed to see the TOS Enterprise appear at the end of the first season of Discovery.

Agree, but it's not a question of him appointing moderators. It's a question of people stepping up and volunteering to be moderators. There are literally thousands of kbin magazines which are currently abandoned, ie where the moderator of the magazine hasn't been active on kbin.social. Anyone can volunteer to take over ownership of these magazines by clicking a button, but there isn't enough interest in the userbase at the moment.

However, you are correct in that spammers are targeting the bigger magazines like m/fediverse, and because Ernest is owner of these magazines but is active on the site, these magazines don't appear in the abandoned magazines list. I agree that in order to ease the administrative burden on him, Ernest should call for additional moderators for these most active magazines, and even step down as the owner of these when one or more replacements have been found.

The "sort by hot" algorithm was probably designed with a larger user base in mind, but I agree with you. For small communities in particular (and the vast majority of Fediverse communities are still tiny) I think even posts with no upvotes (ie no self-upvotes) should be included in the "sort by hot" view. For larger communities, where the threshold for "new" and "hot" may be set higher, so it doesn't matter so much. (I don't know what the algorithm is, but it might be something like 'hot is defined as getting a minimum of X votes, where X scales with the size or activity intensity of the community'.)