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I dunno about nuance - seems to me the really good Klingon episodes are the ones where they're always seconds away from stabbing someone.  There are episodes of DS9 where Worf is getting along great with another Klingon but you still know someone's getting kebabbed in the next 40 minutes because the wonky-foreheaded nutters can't help themselves, and I like this version of the Klingons because it's so single-mindedly one-note that it avoids the pitfalls of TNG or Voyager trying to paint them as a noble warrior culture and just making them boring.
They're just more fun when they're violent racist space cunts.

Really late reply I realise, but I fucking hate that- almost everything about TNG-onwards Klingons annoys me, and I can't really see the difference with their DS9 incarnation.  TUC showed some actual maturity in how they were written- they were clearly martial and alien, but were capable of civilised conversation without  yammering about honour and glory, didn't solve political disputes with knife fights.  They also showed some diversity in appearance and dress, contra the stultifying uniformity in appearance (long hair, fangs, body armour) and mannerisms of mid-to-late TNG onwards.  Basically I hate them being space vikings transposed in toto to a technological SF setting, regardless of how ill a fit that is.

On a macro scale, the Klingon timeline is consistent, but if you want to be cynical, you can view the problem as being what TNG did - or failed to do - with the the concepts and characters.  TNG was very fond of oversimplifying alien cultures and the nadir was Code Of Honor.

The reason the Empire retreats into the trappings of all the honour and glory bullcrap is because by TNG they're still singing songs about how great their past was when they just went around smashing everyone in the face with a big knife and then stealing all their fruit, much as Britain is now retreating into xenophobia and dreams of past glory.  Their backsliding towards a more isolated and militaristic society - and a more one-note species/culture - is painted explicitly as a Bad Thing, and there's a clear understanding of the consequences of the monoculture that the Empire had become by the time of DS9 that wasn't evident in TNG.
The decline is laid at the feet of Gowron and his retreat into the Klingons' martial past as a sop to traditionalists and hardliners who viewed the Empire as having been "made soft" through diplomacy and cultural contamination by immigrants and their ideologies.  That he later consolidated his own grip on power by appealing to these traditionalists with military actions - often on the flimsiest of justifications - that the Empire didn't need and wasn't prepared for isn't really a surprise, nor is it that he came a cropper because of it and nearly took the Empire down with him.

I am shocked and saddened by this news and wish his family the best.
From the first time I saw his Dredd in a Best of 2000ad Monthly it was the definitive version for me.  On other stories, Steve could elevate even terrible scripts into something memorable.

I just wonder why Joe Schmoe is supposed to care about the old loser from The Force Awakens who doesn't even make it to the end credits.

I hated the The Phantom menace when I first saw it and repeat performances haven't really made me love it much more, but I have come to see that it tries in a way that The Force Awakens never does, and for all its callbacks and references to the OT, it never relies on reflected glory and nostalgia to the extent that TFA does.
With hindsight, there is plenty to see there that Lucas has never been given credit for, and TPM tries new things and brings more into the universe it inhabits than it takes away.
For all its faults, it is a sprawling and sumptuous fantasy whose greatest failing wasn't what was onscreen, it was that its audience could never accept that it wasn't the Star Wars they had in their heads.

As the one person on Earth disappointed in The Force Awakens I don't know why I remain hopeful about this one, but here we are.
I think I might be a Bizarro-Star Wars fan: instead of going around saying "as long as George Lucas isn't involved it will be good" like all the other SW fans, I'm thinking "as long as JJ Abrams is nowhere near it it might actually have some emotional gravy-tass or an identity of its own."

[Black Swan]

I already did - I watched Black Swan.

[Star Trek]

Star Trek (2009) - novelty elevated this turkey far beyond its status, because on almost every level it is an ugly and stupid film, from the convoluted, nonsensical plot which bears up to not even the slightest bit of scrutiny while it unfolds onscreen to the scattershot, overly-busy art design which does away with Trek's iconic visual simplicity of concept and form in favor of swarms of CGI debris whizzing across the screen at all times, to the thuggishly broad strokes with which characters are painted - the only woman in the cast is someone's girlfriend?  Okay.  The only Asian is a martial artist with a ninja sword?  Okay.
By all objective measures, this is an awful film whose comical "busy busy busy" directorial style where everyone is walking fast and shouting dialogue in front of lens flares deserves to be mocked just as much as the trappings of Michael Bay and yet paradoxically is not, despite likely doing more harm to the collective intelligence of modern cinema audiences than Bay's peeing robots ever could, thanks to an aggressively anti-intellectual approach where every motivation stems from the most base of desires, be it lust or revenge.
And yet I still enjoy it.  I may now have to admit that it is actually a pretty bad film by any reasonable standards of evaluation apart from "is this good CGI for the decade in which the film was made?", but I enjoy watching it.

[Suicide Squad]

Suicide Squad - fuckin ell that was terrible.  I was led to believe that it was an entertaining mess, but it's not even that, it's just a bunch of seemingly unconnected ideas about what this kind of film should contain, shot mostly at night and with no story engine, just a bunch of characters thrown at a random disaster of the government's own making "because".
It also arguably doesn't help that these are the absolute worst versions of these characters ever put on a screen, with the deeply irritating Margot Robbie making me never want to lay eyes on anything featuring Harley Quinn ever again.  Will Smith is also hopelessly miscast, and yet paradoxically the only reason you even remotely buy into his character's redemptive arc.
Utter shit.

The Terminator - been years since I watched it and all I remembered were the bloated, pointless sequels, but the high-def remaster of this was ace.  Were Arnie's meat and two veg always visible in previous versions of the movie?  Well they are now.

Deepwater Horizon - not sure what I make of this.  It's pretty dull for the first hour or so and then it turns a human tragedy into disaster porn.  Memorable for Kurt Russell and John Malkovich trying to play regular joes and failing spectacularly.  Every time Russell spoke, it's clearly Kurt Russell not even trying to disguise how awesome he is.  The disaster stuff is well-realised, but it's shot as eye candy rather than as something frightening.

Right wing racists tend to crop up in pretty much every online opinion venue to attempt to police all dissenting opinion, so I wouldn't read much into that in itself. 

Oh dear...

On one hand, it looks hellaciously terrible, but on the other hand... it is not like we are talking about a franchise with a high bar, and YA movies and the CW's bafflingly successful output have proved that kids will watch pretty much any old kind of turgid horseshit.

UKIP leader to stand down.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-37558485

Smart woman.  She realised that there's no point her working hard to push racism into the mainstream when the rest of the country is managing it just fine without her.

The way you whining lefty ninnies lot go on, you'd almost think commies were building a nuclear bomb inside our borders or something - you need to stop panicking and cheer up: we have our country back, the NHS is 350 million pounds a week better off, and no more immigrants will be moving in next door.

My issue was only with the assertion that people would have to be tinfoil hatters to distrust the motivation or accuracy of polling companies.

It's one thing to claim the polls are off or fixed, but they've historically overestimated Labour support.

Yougov's survey of half a million GMB members was through a phone sampling of 58 people who claimed (but were not confirmed) to be members.  Yougov refused to carry out the Sun's infamous "1 in 5 Muslims" poll because the questions supplied by the Sun were weighted and misleading, but this didn't stop Survation doing so.
The means by which polling data is collected is flawed, and the means by which it's occasionally weighted and even dismissed to suit the client's preferred narrative is dishonest and harmful - insufficient polling regulation isn't a lefty conspiracy, it's a genuine concern for a country whose media is concentrated in the hands of five billionaires, especially when polling data is used to support claims like a spike in weekend deaths in the NHS.

The point for the Corbynites is they don't need to worry about Scotland. The SNP would actually be happier to make Corbyn PM than the old Scottish Labour contingent because they know Jezza's hard-left politics would ultimately drive the English doolay.

Scotland may be seen as Labour's "heartland", but the SNP are a provably conservative party and left-wing ideas may just not be popular with the Scotch electorate right now.