I thought it was so interesting in that Rotten Berry interview where he talks about how he likes to look at his daughters panties when they bend over and how when he was a kid he dreamed of growing up to be a rapist or a thief and how his strongest belief is that the devil has backed him up his entire life.
If true Rotten Berry was hardly unique in Hollywood, you wrote it yourself in your Paradox novels that Hollywood was a cesspool from the beginning or something to that effect. If people then had seen Hollywood for what it was even then the movie industry would of been stillborn.
And even with all the cultural and moral rot of todays America the latest offering of turds ( starfleet academy ) is being rejected by legions of fans.
I read a lot of odd/ancient biography/non-fiction books, and among my favorite "old" books are "Glory of the Pharoahs" by Arthur Weigall (published in 1923, Weigall was the guy who replaced a certain Howard Carter as Chief Inspector of Antiquities of Upper Egypt...at the age of 25...and was an incredible shit-talker about how incredibly stupid most everyone was in that country)....and the various glory days of Hollywood stories from everyone's best friend, British actor David Niven ("The Moon's a Balloon" and "Bring On The Empty Horses").
Even Niven was noting just how broken the whole Hollywood thing was (Niven got his acting start after meeting Clark Gable on a fishing boat that Niven was a deckhand on, Gable was already burned out with Hollywood by this point), with one story in particular he speaks about regarding an extremely popular actress (he didn't name her) that was slowly going batshit as she approached 30, and another story about an aspiring actress or two that he lived in the same apartment building with, he did a shoot somewhere, came back and discovered that the actress/actresses had actually given up on Hollywood after repeatedly failing and then started a brothel in that apartment.
The wildest story for me, anyway, was that Niven played tennis doubles matches with a certain neighbor by the name of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin enjoyed screwing with people during these matches, and what would happen is that if you played with Chaplin, you played by his rules, and on his tennis court. He picked your partner and his partner, you simply showed up and discovered how far Charlie had gone this particular time, because what Chaplin would do is search as far as Europe to find unknown tennis champions (typically collegiate or country-level) and pay that person to be his partner.
Your partner? Whatever 70+ year-old tennis player he could get his hands on.
And Chaplin would never identify who his partner was, that was your problem.
Where this gets weird is during one of these doubles match shellackings, Niven had jumped as hard as he could to try to ball high overhead, and had broken/ruptured a tendon in the process of jumping up, he collapsed when he landed, and Chaplin then did the ancient equivalent of contacting emergency services to get his friend to a hospital as soon as possible.
Niven had surgery done, and apparently returned to the Chaplin estate to talk to Charlie...and then discovered that Chaplin was gone. The front door was cracked open, the house was empty, no furniture, no...nothing, nobody on the property, no vehicles, no note or notes left behind, this was apparently the very day that Charlie Chaplin had fled America and gone to Europe.
The only thing Niven mentioned was that it would have taken too long to pack everything off in the brief time he was in the hospital, so when he had been there to play tennis earlier in the day, everything was probably already gone, and Chaplin was only hanging around to play one last game with Niven before he left America for good (am vaguely recalling that Chaplin came back one more time).
Hell, I don't even want to talk to my son's girlfriends or wife (one of my sons is married) and make direct eye contact. Don't even want to go anywhere near "there".
The only positive thing to come out of this in regards to how shady Rotten Berry was is that he was largely regarded as nothing more than a hilarious joke during the last few years of his life and was pushed farther and farther away from Star Trek movie and TV production.
IIRC, in regards to the first five or six movies, Rotten Berry was apparently leaking plot details (if he could get them, he was increasingly isolated away as each movie came and went), to the point where apparently Wrath of Khan was changed up a bit to have Spock "die" at the beginning, just to throw everyone off because Rotten Berry had already been pissed off that his movie idea wasn't being used (The Enterprise goes back in time and saves Kennedy from assassination, but then they realize that they screwed up, it was literally his idea for at least four or five movies), and he was being more and more ignored.
TNG had to dig itself out of a 1st season hole because of that guy. Nimoy practically wanted Rotten Berry dead because of how greasy he was with the ridiculous merchandising that GR was engaging in (I had a couple of these crappy pieces at one point).
I agree that Gene Roddenberry was a crypto-commie and so was Star Trek (at least the original one, TNG is regular commie). I still maintain that the Federation is a stand-in not for the United States or even the United Nations, but for the Soviet Union. But I don't really accept the idea that militarism and good aesthetics is "right-coding". The Soviet Union was militaristic, industrialistic, it was big into space exploration, and its propaganda involves good looking men and women. Did those things make them "right-wing?" Except for commies who were embarrassed by Stalin's atrocities, no one would serious argue that the USSR was not "left-wing". Personally, I think we're so used to leftists being the neon-haired protest lumpenproletariats that we forget that the left was at one point was capable of attracting normal people.
You’re kinda’ making my argument for me: “right-coding” doesn’t make the subject right-wing. It is used to seduce people across the right-to centrist spectrum into consuming their cultural Marxist agitprop, adopting leftist precepts, AND/OR supporting authoritarian (left-wing) regimes.
I don't think Roddenberry was all that feminist. There was a third season episode where a woman Starfleet officer realized her ambition of command with a device that transposed her mind into Kirk's body and vice versa; she was a terrible commanding officer and collapsed emotionally when challenged. I think that has to be taken as evidence of Roddenberry's actual views.
Art imitates life, then life imitates art. The cycle continues. Your cell phone is a product of life imitating art. Feminists are a product of life imitating art. You might say “yeah, but the art is fake!” but then you'd be ignoring that art imitates life, which is real and then the feedback loop repeats while the details rhyme. Art, with a purpose, is memorable for this reason. Everyone loves their own reflection. Like attracts like, which is also why the algorithm tends to present you with people whom you will resonate with, even slightly. It's all on a gradient. Sort, update and predict.
This left-coded vs right-coded dichotomy is a very acute observation.
That’s why I don’t have much interested in a lot of cultural output - it prioritizes navel gazing and endless internality.
In the stories I like, in the stories I write, characters are revealed through their actions and choices. They have a goal and they work towards it. And one key difference - left-coded is always reactive, while right-coded is proactive. You don’t wait for you to be poor to pursue wealth or winning or whatever - you actively work to improve your life. This automatically raises moral dilemma - which rules will you break? It present a challenge
"Pssst, Uhura, you're wasting your time!" That made me🤣
I think present-day Marxists have strayed so far to the Left that those of us on the so-called "Right" are actually normal. When we refer to ourselves as "right-wing," we're playing to the Marxists' hand--that's one of their labels for those who disagree with them. But I think that is for another article.
I started noticing TNG showing its Marxist stripes when Starfleet characters would disdainfully refer to Ferengi as "capitalists."
Jeez. See, I didn’t watch anything that followed Trek Classic beyond the first 20 minutes or so of the TNG pilot. I didn’t know they came right out and made it so obvious.
Yeah, this is an example of if you look hard enough for something, you’re going to find it. Roddenberry was a utopianist (which is not necessarily the same thing as a commie thought here just as mistaken about history and nature) but Star Trek as it originally was, is not. It’s optimistic, maybe fictionally so, but at its core it is about mankind pioneering into the unknown. TNG lost this but DS9 recovered it.
You get at the heart of why I always disliked the plots of TOS. Fake and gay. The enjoyment was only ever about the triad of characters (Spock, Kirk, Bones) and their interactions.
And I was livid when they destroyed Kirk in the remakes. Literally made him fatherless. Took a hero archetype from my childhood and turned him into a jerk I wanted to punch in the face. Girls need to grow up watching a variety of men with traits worth marrying so they can see the common theme in them and learn what to take and what to leave. Thank God I read enough good books written by old British men to know what a good man looks like, so I married one.
Most Trekkies I ever knew were big time Spock fans. I thought he was cool, but I liked Kirk the best, when I finally got into the show. The character was the kind of man young boys aspire to be. Or should. Or used to.
Of course Homowood had to ruin him. They must destroy or pervert everything good.
Iron Age Unfolding: Click for the T and A stay for the interesting commentary.
Shh! Don’t throw my strategy out there on the street!
I thought it was so interesting in that Rotten Berry interview where he talks about how he likes to look at his daughters panties when they bend over and how when he was a kid he dreamed of growing up to be a rapist or a thief and how his strongest belief is that the devil has backed him up his entire life.
Yikes. He really said that?
If true Rotten Berry was hardly unique in Hollywood, you wrote it yourself in your Paradox novels that Hollywood was a cesspool from the beginning or something to that effect. If people then had seen Hollywood for what it was even then the movie industry would of been stillborn.
And even with all the cultural and moral rot of todays America the latest offering of turds ( starfleet academy ) is being rejected by legions of fans.
Yet it still surprises me how candid some of those perverts are, on the record.
I read a lot of odd/ancient biography/non-fiction books, and among my favorite "old" books are "Glory of the Pharoahs" by Arthur Weigall (published in 1923, Weigall was the guy who replaced a certain Howard Carter as Chief Inspector of Antiquities of Upper Egypt...at the age of 25...and was an incredible shit-talker about how incredibly stupid most everyone was in that country)....and the various glory days of Hollywood stories from everyone's best friend, British actor David Niven ("The Moon's a Balloon" and "Bring On The Empty Horses").
Even Niven was noting just how broken the whole Hollywood thing was (Niven got his acting start after meeting Clark Gable on a fishing boat that Niven was a deckhand on, Gable was already burned out with Hollywood by this point), with one story in particular he speaks about regarding an extremely popular actress (he didn't name her) that was slowly going batshit as she approached 30, and another story about an aspiring actress or two that he lived in the same apartment building with, he did a shoot somewhere, came back and discovered that the actress/actresses had actually given up on Hollywood after repeatedly failing and then started a brothel in that apartment.
The wildest story for me, anyway, was that Niven played tennis doubles matches with a certain neighbor by the name of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin enjoyed screwing with people during these matches, and what would happen is that if you played with Chaplin, you played by his rules, and on his tennis court. He picked your partner and his partner, you simply showed up and discovered how far Charlie had gone this particular time, because what Chaplin would do is search as far as Europe to find unknown tennis champions (typically collegiate or country-level) and pay that person to be his partner.
Your partner? Whatever 70+ year-old tennis player he could get his hands on.
And Chaplin would never identify who his partner was, that was your problem.
Where this gets weird is during one of these doubles match shellackings, Niven had jumped as hard as he could to try to ball high overhead, and had broken/ruptured a tendon in the process of jumping up, he collapsed when he landed, and Chaplin then did the ancient equivalent of contacting emergency services to get his friend to a hospital as soon as possible.
Niven had surgery done, and apparently returned to the Chaplin estate to talk to Charlie...and then discovered that Chaplin was gone. The front door was cracked open, the house was empty, no furniture, no...nothing, nobody on the property, no vehicles, no note or notes left behind, this was apparently the very day that Charlie Chaplin had fled America and gone to Europe.
The only thing Niven mentioned was that it would have taken too long to pack everything off in the brief time he was in the hospital, so when he had been there to play tennis earlier in the day, everything was probably already gone, and Chaplin was only hanging around to play one last game with Niven before he left America for good (am vaguely recalling that Chaplin came back one more time).
I saw the clip of him saying his fondest memories of his daughters were when their skirts came up. The rest of it, I can't verify.
Hell, I don't even want to talk to my son's girlfriends or wife (one of my sons is married) and make direct eye contact. Don't even want to go anywhere near "there".
The only positive thing to come out of this in regards to how shady Rotten Berry was is that he was largely regarded as nothing more than a hilarious joke during the last few years of his life and was pushed farther and farther away from Star Trek movie and TV production.
IIRC, in regards to the first five or six movies, Rotten Berry was apparently leaking plot details (if he could get them, he was increasingly isolated away as each movie came and went), to the point where apparently Wrath of Khan was changed up a bit to have Spock "die" at the beginning, just to throw everyone off because Rotten Berry had already been pissed off that his movie idea wasn't being used (The Enterprise goes back in time and saves Kennedy from assassination, but then they realize that they screwed up, it was literally his idea for at least four or five movies), and he was being more and more ignored.
TNG had to dig itself out of a 1st season hole because of that guy. Nimoy practically wanted Rotten Berry dead because of how greasy he was with the ridiculous merchandising that GR was engaging in (I had a couple of these crappy pieces at one point).
So his big idea was basically a variation of “City on the Edge of Forever.”
Yes. And he apparently wouldn't shut up about it.
Sounds like he must of " beamed down" when he died!
Hey Jim, look for a DM from me soon.
https://gab.com/JHEALYANDY
“Gab failed to send the message” 4 times in a row. I DM’d you here.
sorry it failed
That's horrifying!
One note on Uhura did she know she was wasting her time?
I don’t know for sure but it sure wouldn’t surprise me. Women have an uncanny Spidey Sense about such things. I believe they call it “gaydar.”
I agree that Gene Roddenberry was a crypto-commie and so was Star Trek (at least the original one, TNG is regular commie). I still maintain that the Federation is a stand-in not for the United States or even the United Nations, but for the Soviet Union. But I don't really accept the idea that militarism and good aesthetics is "right-coding". The Soviet Union was militaristic, industrialistic, it was big into space exploration, and its propaganda involves good looking men and women. Did those things make them "right-wing?" Except for commies who were embarrassed by Stalin's atrocities, no one would serious argue that the USSR was not "left-wing". Personally, I think we're so used to leftists being the neon-haired protest lumpenproletariats that we forget that the left was at one point was capable of attracting normal people.
You’re kinda’ making my argument for me: “right-coding” doesn’t make the subject right-wing. It is used to seduce people across the right-to centrist spectrum into consuming their cultural Marxist agitprop, adopting leftist precepts, AND/OR supporting authoritarian (left-wing) regimes.
And still sadly seduces them.
I don't think Roddenberry was all that feminist. There was a third season episode where a woman Starfleet officer realized her ambition of command with a device that transposed her mind into Kirk's body and vice versa; she was a terrible commanding officer and collapsed emotionally when challenged. I think that has to be taken as evidence of Roddenberry's actual views.
Not feminist by today’s standards, anyway.
So he was no fan of the "girlboss"
I think it was more a matter of what he could get away with where the Overton Window was, then.
Art imitates life, then life imitates art. The cycle continues. Your cell phone is a product of life imitating art. Feminists are a product of life imitating art. You might say “yeah, but the art is fake!” but then you'd be ignoring that art imitates life, which is real and then the feedback loop repeats while the details rhyme. Art, with a purpose, is memorable for this reason. Everyone loves their own reflection. Like attracts like, which is also why the algorithm tends to present you with people whom you will resonate with, even slightly. It's all on a gradient. Sort, update and predict.
This left-coded vs right-coded dichotomy is a very acute observation.
That’s why I don’t have much interested in a lot of cultural output - it prioritizes navel gazing and endless internality.
In the stories I like, in the stories I write, characters are revealed through their actions and choices. They have a goal and they work towards it. And one key difference - left-coded is always reactive, while right-coded is proactive. You don’t wait for you to be poor to pursue wealth or winning or whatever - you actively work to improve your life. This automatically raises moral dilemma - which rules will you break? It present a challenge
"Pssst, Uhura, you're wasting your time!" That made me🤣
I think present-day Marxists have strayed so far to the Left that those of us on the so-called "Right" are actually normal. When we refer to ourselves as "right-wing," we're playing to the Marxists' hand--that's one of their labels for those who disagree with them. But I think that is for another article.
I started noticing TNG showing its Marxist stripes when Starfleet characters would disdainfully refer to Ferengi as "capitalists."
Jeez. See, I didn’t watch anything that followed Trek Classic beyond the first 20 minutes or so of the TNG pilot. I didn’t know they came right out and made it so obvious.
It was pretty obvious. I also remember them mentioning “no need for money or personal possessions.”
At that point, I decided Star Wars was the superior franchise—at least until Disney ruined it.
They’re all in the ruining business, now. It’s almost all they’re capable of.
That’s what Marxists do, because they’re incapable of creating anything of their own.
100%
Yeah, this is an example of if you look hard enough for something, you’re going to find it. Roddenberry was a utopianist (which is not necessarily the same thing as a commie thought here just as mistaken about history and nature) but Star Trek as it originally was, is not. It’s optimistic, maybe fictionally so, but at its core it is about mankind pioneering into the unknown. TNG lost this but DS9 recovered it.
You get at the heart of why I always disliked the plots of TOS. Fake and gay. The enjoyment was only ever about the triad of characters (Spock, Kirk, Bones) and their interactions.
And I was livid when they destroyed Kirk in the remakes. Literally made him fatherless. Took a hero archetype from my childhood and turned him into a jerk I wanted to punch in the face. Girls need to grow up watching a variety of men with traits worth marrying so they can see the common theme in them and learn what to take and what to leave. Thank God I read enough good books written by old British men to know what a good man looks like, so I married one.
Most Trekkies I ever knew were big time Spock fans. I thought he was cool, but I liked Kirk the best, when I finally got into the show. The character was the kind of man young boys aspire to be. Or should. Or used to.
Of course Homowood had to ruin him. They must destroy or pervert everything good.
Homowood is dishonred bound so to speak to destroy the good the beautiful and the good