I’ve always strongly disliked Tom, and I don’t really know why.
I love many channels with the same kind of videos, it’s right up my alley, and I should be a fan. But every time I try to watch any of his videos, I stop after a few seconds and think “nah, I can’t stand this guy”.
I’ve forced myself several times throughout the years to watch through whole videos with hope that it’ll pass, but it never does.
Everything else that I don’t like, I can explain why, but not with Tom and his videos.
The closest I can find is that he just seems like such a smug asshole.
I respect him as a creator and know that his videos are good. There’s just something in my brain that strongly reacts to him in a bad way. It so weird. He has covered many topics I’d love to know more about, and I’ve tried to watch those videos and just focus on the information, but I just can’t get past my mental and physical reaction of “stop, get away from this ASAP”.
Yep, same for me. It’s hard to explain. It’s unfair, because it’s so arbitrary, but something about him feels somehow insincere, and it makes me uncomfortable.
Vsauce is like that for me. Ever since he tricked people into believing they had actually mutilated and killed people with a train for an experiment possibly giving them real ptsd…
Vsauce for me as well, I like veritasium, because I feel like the questions being asked/answered are legitimately interesting questions/answers. With Vsauce I feel like the whole thing is just about him constructing unnecessarily “out of the box” answers in order to look smart.
For me it was how he would start his videos with asking people what he thought about something them basically going, I’m so much smarter than you here a video of why you are wrong you. Never included people getting it right because it wouldn’t fit his self centered narrative. I heard he’s stopped doing that but I won’t watch to find out.
For me it’s that he likes to go around asking people physics questions that he knows they will fail to answer correctly, only to smugly explain how they’re wrong.
It’s like those videos where they ask Americans to point to countries on a map so we can laugh at how bad they are at geography… if it was made by Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. Thing is I usually know the answers to the questions so I get a kind of second-hand shame because I would totally feel like an arrogant prick if I did people dirty like that.
For me it’s the way he talks. Like he talks just like the smarmy British presenters and narrators that sound borderline condescending whether that’s their intention or not.
My mate told me that he seems very smug and not very English. I found that quite funny. I don’t particularly dislike Tom but I don’t go out of my way to watch him like others. I still remember his OnlyConnect appearances from way back. He’s not everyone’s cup of tea and that’s fine.
The closest I can find is that he just seems like such a smug asshole.
Check out Tom Scott Plus! He challenges himself a lot on that channel and pushes himself out of his comfort zone! I think it’s a great display of his humility and shows him outside of his usual role as more of a narrator on his main channel.
Some of my favorites from the plus channel are the episodes where he gives his producer a tattoo, overcomes his fear of rollercoasters, and tries to learn wrestling.
It’s interesting how different people interpret attitude in vastly different ways. Because where you (and others I’ve seen in other threads) find him smug and an asshole, I only ever found him to be extremely sincere and excited to learn and educate.
Although, I’d love to know what channels you watch that cover similar topics! Wasting time on YouTube doesn’t feel as unproductive if the videos are educational…
Tom Scott, very wholesome guy who has been making weekly ~10 min videos about all sorts of interesting topics for many years. He is one of the og youtube channels
Shut up, Wesley! We must be circumspect with those who could visit genocide upon US with a thought. Also, don’t bring up how often I challenged Q when he could have done the same or I’ll just tell you to shut up again.
Genocide requires intent. Whereas this alien just had a fleeting moment of anger at the time of his wife being murdered.
Can he really be tried for genocide? It’s hard to say, but I’d say not. We all have dark intrusive thoughts, and in this instance it had disastrous consequences.
It’s all moot anyway. If you have no means or intention to enforce a law, does it really exist?
The heat-of-passion is something to argue to mitigate culpability. Yes, he killed an entire species, and wasn’t exactly justified, but his emotions and passions were inflamed by the aliens murdering his wife making his actions involuntary.
Yeah but we aren’t talking heat-of-the-moment shoving someone into traffic during a bar fight, we’re talking heat-of-the-moment naughty thought during an aerial bombardment from a hostile force where his wife was killed.
In other words, does the word identify the cause, or the effect?
Can he really be tried for genocide? It’s hard to say, but I’d say not.
How so? The facts seem self-evident.
It’s all moot anyway. If you have no means or intention to enforce a law, does it really exist?
You can still classify someone though in such a way, in hopes that in some future time you can enforce the law on them, having being previously judged as a criminal.
I’m so glad they’re getting the attention they deserve. When Q turned me into a turkey sandwich, I was no longer able to work. They helped me get the settlement I deserved from the Federation, who knew that running into Q was a possibility, and did not disclose that risk to me.
On a different note, how is it possible to exist as a sandwich or a microbe. I can kind of see how a Q could exist as a human or dog but anything below that is confusing.
Also I assume that a Q exists outside time and space and is just controlling a puppet they created.
Space OSHA reminds you that any ship that might attract Q should have high visibility DANGEROUS placards prominently displayed before getting underway!
Lucius Fox : Let me get this straight, you think that your client, one of the wealthiest and most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante, who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands, and your plan is to blackmail this person?
“Oh the Husnock? Horrible, simply horrible species. Good riddance. Did you ask me here to give Uxbridge a medal or something? Because he certainly doesn’t deserve it! Why I’ve already genocided three species this morning and didn’t even get a thank you.”
I want to say they’re from the same episode? They were being interviewed about their experience during some event and instead of doing a voiceover that segues into it being acted out they did this creative choice of acting it out and having the one giving a deposition pause to turn to the camera to tell the bit they’re saying in the interview.
I’m not remembering a lot of the details, but this is the type of thing that made me love DS9. The themes were generally the typical Trek fair, but that show had style. They had the balls to film things differently than other Trek shows and make them really interesting. It was so different but still so Star Trek at its core. It made things feel fresh.
That and the way it was set up, being on a space station that didn’t move meant it felt less like a sector/monster of the week. It accomplished a lot of the same by having the new aliens come to them instead of the other way around as is typical, but it felt different I think because they were stationary. It felt more character-focused, and because they were basically hovering just over Bajor it meant there was a whole planet that was able to affect the show consistently as it grew and changed along with the dynamics of the crew/station, while not really being part of the direct scenery.
All these shots are from the episode Rules of Engagement, where Worf blows up the cloaked vessel that had klingon bodies aboard. The klingons insisted they were alive before Worf fired but an investigation shows they weren’t.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Item (c) comes the closest to what Sisko did, but he did it in a way that gave them a chance to get out, so it’s not a perfect match. Forcing conditions for removing a group probably wouldn’t qualify under any of these. That said, it can be a factor in Ethnic Cleansing, but the Maquis aren’t really an ethnic group.
I’ve just started a Voyager run through with my kids. Dare I say S1 of Voyager is a much better introduction to “modern” Trek than the fairly uneven S1 TNG? I think Janeway is underrated as a Star Fleet captain.
I’m rewatching TNG and season 1 was pretty… Off. Most of the characters seemed to be cheap knockoffs of their established personas. The most distinctive for me was Brent Spiner (Data), where, I can’t put my finger on it, but he just seemed off the the data that I know and love.
I chalk it up to him coming off of being a comedic bit actor and he was still finding himself for the more dramatic role of data. He hadn’t really nailed down the robotic methodology of his actions and speech that really makes data stand out. His responses were often quick, to the point of speaking over others, and his actions were fairly fluid and organic, which isn’t Data at all.
It really didn’t take long for him to work his way into the role (and into our hearts), I’m not criticising Brent by any stretch. He was and I’m sure still is, an incredible actor… Judging by his fairly recent role reprising Data on Picard, he really hasn’t lost his touch.
There’s plenty of other things about season one that are odd, but I found Data to be the most notable. Still, worf was a lot more brooding, Picard seemed almost more timid, Riker didn’t have a beard… The only person from season one who I can point to with certainty and say that they didn’t seem off from season 1 (compared to how I know the character), was Dr. Crusher. She was hitting it out of the park from day 1.
No matter the oddity, almost all of it was simply gone by the end of season one. I’m partway into season two now and I wouldn’t be able to differentiate the characters on screen from any other season of the show, or from their movies.
Oh man. It’s the only one where they actually don’t boldly go anywhere. I’ve always had trouble with that and probably actually need therapy because of it. It took me a long time to even accept it as real star trek.
I love character-driven narratives, so DS9 is easily the best Star Trek for me that I’ve seen. I think the only series that I haven’t seen is Lower Decks.
I would claim that Voyager is objectively worse than DS9, though. A big part of it is how many terrible episodes come from each series. With DS9, there are only a few episodes sprinkled here and there that are terrible. With Voyager, it had to be at least 1 out of every 3 episodes that were terrible.
Of course, these two series have completely different standards. Both standards are about whether they deliver an episode that is fulfilling and makes sense.
DS9 is completely serial. A good show has character development and progresses the main plot due to some event or other intrigue that happens. If you don’t like Star Treks where they “boldly stay home”, then all of the Vic Fontaine episodes would be terrible, but Vic was like this perfect tool to try to round out all of the character development at the series end.
On the other hand, a good Voyager episode is a sort of alien of the week. That’s what would make sense, because they were traveling in a straight line home. Yet they nonsensically had all sorts of recurring characters that they came across. Recurring races is fine. In fact, you’d almost expect to have like one or two major races that are the villains per season… but recurring characters? Really??
Voyager could have been the perfection of Roddenberry’s ideal Star Trek. Almost purely episodic. Heroic cast solving problems every episode. They even have the best excuse for taking the ship into the most stupidly dangerous situations. They were desperate for supplies to get home. I don’t know that any Star Trek had such an easy set up. How did they have so many bad episodes??
Janeway didn’t get hate as much as it was criticism of the writers for making her inconsistent. One week it was “Prime directive no matter the consequences”, the next was “Lets do whatever to make drama.”
For all of Roddenberry’s faults, his presence for the early years of TNG kept TNG consistent instead of allowing the writer of the week to change characters for their personal story. By the time he was gone, the formula was set such that writers wouldn’t mess with characters.
Voyager has no singular authority so consistency of character was rare.
Edit: Except for Ensign Kim. He was born an Ensign and died one. Nobody messed with perfection.
You might be right, the inconsistency was well around. But it still was a good show. I always perceived her as a more “indecisive” captain. Or one being able to change her opinions. Whatever. It’s what it is. The best female captain we had so far 😊
I’ve actually come to think of Janeway as someone consistently written to be an inconsistent Captain, rather than 100% inconsistently written. Others are nowhere near as inconsistent as Janeway.
Once I started thinking of her inconsistency as being the result of trying to walk a tightrope of sticking to Starfleet ideals, as well as maintaining order in a demoralised crew in unfamiliar territory where they don’t have the support and full might of the Federation and its allies behind them, Janeway’s inconsistent and contradictory behaviour starts making a lot more sense and feels a lot more organic.
They’re not quite as terrible as their reputation. Yeah, they’ve definitely got some of the worst episodes of Trek ever, but there are good ones in there, too.
If the Federation was in the business of putting higher beings on trial, don’t you think the second they learned Q was human they’d slap him in a courtroom so fast it’d make his head spin?
If these are spoilers you are about 30 years behind.
QTwo that I can remember: Q got temporarily kicked out of the continuum (reference d above), also when Q got banished in the asteroid and Janeway let him out, he became human, then committed suicide.
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