Pteryx

So this past weekend, I wrote a long, very angry letter to Paramount over Star Trek: Prodigy's pending cancellation... and more importantly, its being pulled from Paramount+ entirely rather than left available. Notably, this pulling is occurring before the already-practically-complete Season 2 is made available. Worse still, this is supposedly being done for the sake of a tax writeoff... something that has at least sometimes involved the actual destruction of the shows being written off.

Needless to say, the idea that it was even possible that Star Trek: Prodigy could be thrown into a bonfire as a sacrifice to the god of capitalism enraged me — and it would be far from the first corporate move in the past year to do so. This has been a year of destruction of communities, knowledge, and art, and of full-on assault against the ordinary, non-wealthy people who create and use such things by the billionaires and multimillionaires who use the products of others' hard work as poker chips. We all know about the sabotaging of Twitter, the invasive species that are "intelligent" text and image generation algorithms, and the intended take-backsies of the Reddit API and locking of it behind a ridiculously expensive paywall. For an example that hit closer to home for me, I had already been part of the fight against Wizards of the Coast's attempt to change the Open Gaming License; while that had the pleasantly surprising ending of WotC releasing the entire 5.1 SRD under the CC-BY license (rather than the likely-uncopyrightable excerpts they'd proposed releasing that way a week before that) to create a dual-licensing scheme, WotC then proceeded to blow the second chance they'd earned by sending the Pinkerton Detective Agency out to threaten and intimidate someone who'd received a misdelivered box of Magic cards.

If Square Enix or The LEGO Group goes evil on me too, I swear* that I'll find some way to invent an intercontinental guillotine.

* sarcastically, since the sworn action is not literally possible

In any case, in a year of peak corporate greed and billionaire hubris, I do not trust Paramount to do right by Star Trek: Prodigy by selling it to someone else or putting both full seasons out on Blu-Ray, particularly given how other companies have treated movies and TV shows that were written off for tax purposes. As such, the cancellation/pulling/tax writeoff news prompted me to write a very angry letter to Paramount... only to find that their online email form cut it off halfway through my second paragraph of nine. Thankfully, though, someone helpfully provided an appropriate snail mail address, so I printed my letter out on Sunday and sent it this past Monday. Now that it's been in the system long enough that it should hopefully already be postmarked, I am also going to post it here. That way, my communications will not simply be swallowed into a void of denial on Paramount's end, and the dates should confirm that my letter was not just "copied off the Internet".


( The angry letter )