Star Trek: Section 31, Paramount Plus’ first foray into feature-length Star Trek movies, has to do one, and only one, thing to succeed. The Michelle Yeoh-starring Star Trek: Discovery spinoff follows Philippa Georgiou, former emperor from a morally inverse parallel universe, in her work with Starfleet’s infamous Section 31, a centuries-old space CIA that operates without the knowledge or consent of the Federation’s leaders. 

On the whole, I don’t need a lot from Section 31. I am a Star Trek fan who will always allow the series room to fail a little bit. It’s healthy to give your faves leeway to be aggressively mid on occasion. 

But I must draw the line here, no further. Section 31 needs to explain how the very idea of Section 31 doesn’t break the entire concept of Star Trek from top to bottom. 

The spy who walked away from Omelas

First introduced in the later seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and revisited in prequel show Star Trek: Enterprise and the early, prequel seasons of Star Trek: Discovery, Section 31 purports to have been founded and sanctioned by the original Starfleet charter, a nice touch of space-Masonic paranoia. 

What is Section 31? Simply, it’s an off-the-books spy organization that may or may not have gone rogue in its mission to safeguard the existence of the Federation, while also keeping its activities totally secret from the Federation. Whether or not Starfleet higher-ups are unaware of Section 31, or simply look the other way, is a matter of some mystery and also evolution over time. According to Section 31 operatives, however, without their secret assassinations, illegal scientific research, and other black-books operations, the Federation would have fallen centuries ago. (Although we’re exclusively told this by Section 31 agents, a fertile facet of potential internal propaganda for Trek writers to exploit, should they choose.) 

The Federation, we understand, is a utopia. Egalitarian, diverse, cruelty-free, post-scarcity — all the buzzwords. But to paraphrase Captain Kirk in The Final Frontier, what does utopia need with a starship — I mean, an off-the-books CIA program? 

If the existence of your utopia depends on a bunch of secret, no-consequences war crimes, then it’s simply not a utopia. It’s Omelas. The debate over whether or not Section 31 betrays the fundamental ideals of Trek has raged since 1998, when the Deep Space Nine episode “Inquisition” established the concept, and it should! 

Section 31 is not just philosophically bad for Star Trek, but emotionally destructive to the audience, implying that Pike, Kirk, Spock, Picard, Janeway, and the rest owe their triumphant moral and diplomatic victories in some part to an unaccountable group committing atrocities in their name. And in a setting that prides itself on internal consistency, it’s a deceptive genre blend, with operatives often written by the rules of spy fantasy, not hard sci-fi. 

How does Agent Sloane’s ship have untraceable transporter systems he can use to kidnap Dr. Bashir and subject him to a mind-bending holodeck recruitment/coerced confession experience? It doesn’t need explaining; they’re super space spies. 

This is not to say that you can’t depict spycraft and undercover operations within the context of Star Trek. The ironic thing about Deep Space Nine introducing Section 31 to the canon is that the show also contains the most nuanced and devastating take on spycraft in Trek history. 

The irresistible romance of spies in space

There’s never been a Trek series so in love with the romantic fantasy of spycraft as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But it was also equally in love with the dramatic potential of the reality of spycraft: immoral drudgery that destroys the psyches of its practitioners, and mostly creates more problems than it solves in an escalating cycle of state-to-state paranoia. 

Among station doctor Julian Bashir’s most prominent pastimes was pretending to be Non-Copyright-Infringing James Bond on the holodeck. DS9 produced a sweep of episodes in which Bashir’s fascination with the glorified fictional spy is contrasted with his friend-crush (or more?) on the local tailor, Elim Garak, a slippery former expert operative for the Cardassian Empire whose cheerful charisma is matched only by the grimness of his past. Eventually, this quirk of personality is raised as one reason Section 31 made contact with Bashir, and, after his refusal to join up, embroiled him in a number of plots and schemes. 

But Deep Space Nine also committed to showing the Federation at war, not détente with the shifty alien empire du jour, and so committed to grappling much more granularly and dramatically with what circumstances could require upstanding Federation officers to compromise their utopian principles. And the apex of DS9’s take on spycraft and the Federation occurs in an episode that has nothing to do with Section 31 at all. 

‘I will learn to live with it’

“In the Pale Moonlight” is so memorably associated with Avery Brooks’ Captain Sisko that all you have to do to find its iconic ending is Google “captain sisko speech.” It takes the form of a personal log entry that sums up the events of the episode: Via forgery, bribery, murder, and the coverup of all three — that is, via spycraft — Sisko has manipulated the Romulan Empire into joining the Dominion War against the Dominion. For the cost of two lives and his conscience, he may have almost single-handedly saved the Federation from being bloodily conquered by a supremacist imperial state. 

What disgusts him is that he’s not disgusted. The most terrible thing, the most enraging thing, the most unnerving thing the war has done to Captain Sisko so far — and it’s a long way from being over — is this erosion of his morality. In that moment, Sisko is a microcosm for the Federation. 

The tricky thing about depicting an established utopian society at war, especially an existentially necessary war, is that it implies that war itself can be a utopian act. The thing that makes “In the Pale Moonlight” one of the best Trek episodes to ever do it is how deftly and emphatically it says that the Dominion War is an existential threat to the Federation on two fronts: from the empire that wishes to dominate it, and through the act of war itself. 

The Federation is a system of principles, and if it abandons those principles it will cease to exist just as surely as if Dominion rule abolished them. For a forgery, a bribe, two murders, and a coverup, the Federation will survive, but it has destroyed itself to do so, and that is not a victory. 

Conceptually, this speech is the mirror opposite of Section 31, which says that extralegal, immoral acts are necessary for utopia to exist. Instead of undermining the diplomatic and moral victories of Trek’s great heroes, “In the Pale Moonlight” imbues them with a new urgency: This is why Starfleet’s vaunted, anticlimactic, occasionally myopic commitment to diplomacy matters. Because when a utopia sets aside its principles, even in the face of a true and complete existential threat, it ceases to be a utopia. 

All Star Trek: Section 31 really needs to do is clearly and emphatically establish Section 31 as counter to the principles of the Federation. Maybe the smartest thing to do would be to reveal that most of what Section 31 agents think about their organization — that it’s sanctioned by unidentified Federation higher-ups, that it’s been the secret key to the Federation’s survival for centuries, that it’s spooky and untouchable and you’ll never wipe it out completely — is self-perpetuating internal propaganda. 

Because either Section 31 is a betrayal of everything the Federation stands for, or the Federation isn’t utopian, there’s just no getting around it. If we are to think of Star Trek as anything more than a hollow and gilt-edged military fantasy, Starfleet’s victories can’t rest on a sanctioned and unaccountable black ops department. 

If Star Trek: Section 31 just wants to have its non-copyright-infringing James Bond fun with Michelle Yeoh, it’ll probably be very fun! It’s Michelle Yeoh! But will I be watching a Star Trek movie? I’m curious to find out. 

Star Trek: Section 31 premieres on Paramount Plus on Jan. 24. 

Truck advertising has always had a bit of an obsession with the general concept of “toughness.” Ruggedness and the ability to do difficult and demanding jobs has always been a factor is good work vehicle design, but really the concept has become something more about a certain kind of visual look and emotional tone, an idea of “toughness” more than anything else. Most carmakers take themselves pretty seriously about all of this, though for a while, in the 1960s and 1970s, it looks like Dodge was secure enough to have some fun with the idea.

I say this because they hired Don Knotts as their spokesperson.

In case you’re unfamiliar with the work of Don Knotts, he specialized in playing a sort of deeply nervous, nebbishy kind of comic character, but, significantly, also one that had grand illusions of his own power and let any tiny amount of authority go immediately to his head.

In this context, he was likely best known for playing deputy Barney Fife on the long-running North Carolina-based small town cop-comedy, The Andy Griffith Show. I could embed some clips from the show here, but I think it’d be more fun to show you this video of Peaches’ song Fuck the Pain Away, which, wonderfully bafflingly, was made with old Andy Griffith clips:

If that was too raunchy, then you can cleanse your brain-palate by watching this quite long trailer for a movie where Don Knotts played a nervous guy who could turn into a fish, and then as a fish helped to hunt down Nazi U-Boats, called The Incredible Mr.Limpet:

Okay, let’s get back to Dodge. The point here is that Don Knotts was hardly an icon of toughness or the sort of ruggedness that most truckmakers would seek out to represent their trucks. Which is why it’s so fun that Dodge chose him to do ads like this:

This ad acknowledges that Knotts is a bit out of place here, but Dodge later made a much longer promo film with Knotts that really lets Knotts shine with his self-conscious bravado and misplaced confidence:

This film is also full of plenty of mid-century creepy horny misogyny and Knotts plays that up pretty much any time a woman comes within three feet of him. There is a woman who is Dodge’s factory technical representative, at least, though she ends up taking on a strange, almost maternal role at the end of the film.

Also, we do get to hear Don Knotts recite a line from William Earnest Henley’s Invictus, and quote Alexander Pope.

Knotts was also specifically used as the mascot/spokesperson of a special edition for the 1969 Sweptline pickup, the “Dude Sport Trim Package,” which was basically a decal kit.

The Dude is interesting because it was one of the earlier attempts to make a pickup truck appealing as a more general-use daily driver than just a utility vehicle. The stripes and “sport trim package” made this sort of a muscle car with a massive trunk, at least in some vague way. That was sort of the intent, at least.

Only about 2,000 Dudes were actually made, so they’re quite uncommon today.

I’m trying to think of who would be an equivalent spokesperson today if RAM decided they wanted to do something similar. Timothée Chalamet? The guy who played Steve Urkel? Richard Ayoade? It’s not an easy call.

The post Don Knotts Once Was Dodge’s Truck Spokesperson And It Was Bonkers: Cold Start appeared first on The Autopian.

Ken Levine recently sat down with GamesIndustry.biz for a year-end discussion about storytelling in video games, during which he shared a lot of his ambitions for Judas, his first post-BioShock project in development at his new-ish studio.

Ghost Story Games was established in 2017 following Levine’s restructuring of Irrational Games, through which he’d spent over a decade making a name for himself as one of the industry’s leading creative directors. All but 15 members of Irrational’s staff were let go a month before the release of the final BioShock Infinite expansion in 2014 as Levine sought to “start a smaller, more entrepreneurial endeavor” focused on “narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable.”

Many questioned Levine’s decision to burn everything down to essentially keep making games like BioShock, and criticism only increased as the studio’s first project took years to even be named publicly. The team kept its head down until Judas was finally revealed at The Game Awards in 2022.

“It’s very easy to show a player a story,” Levine told GamesIndustry.biz. “The harder part is to get them to participate in it and react to how they participate. I don’t think there’s one way to make games, but personally, as a narrative games maker, I’ve never been a big fan of cutscenes because they’re not interactive. One of the reasons Judas is taking so long is trying to figure out how we get the game to be substantially more responsive to player decisions. That’s a really hard problem.”

What we’ve seen of Judas so far bears many of the hallmarks one would expect of a Levine-led project: social commentary, a failed society left to languish in a hostile environment, and first-person shooter mechanics backed by flashy superpowers. After its debut, folks again asked why Irrational Games had to die and its large staff had to be set adrift only for Levine to develop another BioShock in everything but name. During his conversation with GamesIndustry.biz, the creative director did his best to set the two properties apart.

“BioShock and BioShock Infinite, if you look at them from a development standpoint – and this may be a bit alienating to some readers – but they’re basically a corridor. A very, very long corridor with a bunch of trigger points that make story elements happen. Judas is made very, very differently and that makes it much more hopefully reflective of players agency, but also much, much harder to make.”

The crux of storytelling in Judas, Levine explained, is in the way it recognizes player actions and responds to them accordingly.

“Even just characters observing a long range of player action and commenting on it,” Levine said. “‘Hey, you saw this and you did that and then you did this and that was interesting because that caused that’ – we’re doing that kinda stuff right now. And it’s really just observing the players and then writing the types of lines that could react to various types of things. It’s a huge amount of work because you have to think of all the things a player can do and then write in-character responses for different characters to those actions in a way that feels organic.”

Fortunately, it doesn’t sound like Ghost Story Games is interesting in filling gaps in the writing process with so-called artificial intelligence. Levine called attention to AI’s terrible understanding of persistence — “You look at Sora, the ChatGPT video generator, you see a woman walking down the street and the street scene is beautiful, but if she were to turn around and walk backwards, it wouldn’t remember where she has been” — as a major downside to its creative potential. The studio is also avoiding the use of generative models for concept art due to the legal issues that may arise from AI’s liberal use of other people’s protected work.

Judas is tentatively scheduled to arrive on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC sometime before March 31, 2025.

Cooking sims run the gamut of intensity, but if Diner Dash is at the sweating-bullets end of the spectrum, Galaxy Burger is at the other end. This space-themed burger flipping game, developed by Galactic Workshop, is dripping with the weird — astronaut cats, delivery bots, aliens, and elvish humans are your customers across the various planets in our galaxy, rendered in 16-bit art.

With each burger joint you open up, you encounter new customers drawn in various art styles — you’ll meet plenty of chibi Robo-Kitties on Venus, while the Earthlings who reside both on Earth and on the moon are Rick and Morty-esque. Some customers are shy, but, importantly, all customers are chill and relatively easy to please. These burger joints are like a pizza shop in a college town run by slow-moving, yet ultimately effective, stoners. There’s no rush, so as the player, you can really home in on lining that burger up perfectly with the bun, or nailing your ketchup art.

Galaxy Burger defaults to a mode where you earn wages and tips for correctly making orders for one day at a time. You know how many customers you’ll see that day from the start of the round, and you can take as long as you want in real time to complete it. In short, it’s all the satisfaction of a Diner Dash or Cooking Mama game, with none of the stress. The money does function as a motivating reward, though — you can use it to unlock new planets (I’ve unlocked up to Earth so far) and buy coupons for more tips and faster cook times, among other buffs that last for one day each.

Online co-op, endless mode, and time-sensitive mode — where customers judge you on order accuracy and speed — make Galaxy Burger feel like a full game despite the simple premise. I look forward to the possibility of updates that might bring more variety in dialogue with customers, or a challenge mode to play in between the relaxing default-mode rounds. But as it stands now, it’s got a loose grip on my attention, and I like that it’s designed to be respectful of my time. It’s become a mainstay in my rotation of games I play while also half-watching an episode of television I’ve already seen and having a conversation with my husband. Oh, is that just me? OK…

Six Republican state representatives Wednesday objected to the certification of Colorado’s November election, alleging without evidence that last year’s leak of voting system passwords compromised the integrity of the results.

Reps. Ken DeGraaf and Scott Bottoms, both of Colorado Springs, led the push to question the election results in an echo of the Republican election denial movement that began in 2020.

They also called for an investigation into Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold, a Democrat who is widely expected to run for governor.

Democrats blasted the protest vote as an “unwarranted and unprecedented” attempt to undermine the results of a fair election in Colorado.

Voting system passwords were mistakenly posted to the Colorado Secretary of State’s website for months last year before being taken down.

State election officials said they subsequently changed all of the passwords and analyzed logs to ensure the systems hadn’t been tampered with. Nonetheless, the incident fueled further skepticism of U.S. elections — particularly on the political right, where disinformation has been spread widely in recent years.

In November, the Denver District Attorney’s Office launched an investigation into the leak. Prosecutors found no evidence that a crime was committed and declined to pursue charges against anyone involved in what was determined to be an accident.

A third-party investigation into the password leak commissioned by the state also found no evidence of malice. The probe recommended changes to security procedures and pointed out lapses in the Colorado Secretary of State’s procedures. 

The passwords were changed once the breach became known in late October. There is no evidence anyone used the leaked passwords to access any voting equipment without permission.

Even the Republicans who refused to certify the 2024 election results on Wednesday acknowledged they didn’t have any evidence that the password breach led to wrongdoing.

“I have no proof that any of those passwords were used to do anything, nobody else has proof of that,” Bottoms said in a speech on the House floor Wednesday. “But I think it would be naïve to assume that one person did not change at least one vote.”

In Colorado, election results are first certified at the county level, then by the Secretary of State’s Office. The legislature then forms a Committee on Credentials to confirm the Secretary of State’s report.

“Opposition to this motion is quite frankly dangerous to our democracy. We’ve seen what happened when Congress went down this path four years ago and elected officials refused to certify results,” said Rep. Andrew Boesenecker, a Democrat from Fort Collins, alluding to the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump.

“We cannot, we should not go down that road in the state of Colorado,” he said.

Reps. Brandi Bradley, Stephanie Luck, Larry Don Suckla and Ron Weinberg joined DeGraaf and Bottoms in voting against confirming the results. Each won reelection in November under the very results they refused to certify.

Every House Democrat and most of the 22 Republicans in the House voted to confirm the results, while no one in the state Senate objected to the election results.

Colorado Sun reporter Jesse Paul contributed to this report.

The US Justice Department today announced it filed an antitrust lawsuit against "six of the nation's largest landlords for participating in algorithmic pricing schemes that harmed renters."

One of the landlords, Cortland Management, agreed to a settlement "that requires it to cooperate with the government, stop using its competitors' sensitive data to set rents and stop using the same algorithm as its competitors without a corporate monitor," the DOJ said. The pending settlement requires Cortland to "cooperate fully and truthfully... in any civil investigation or civil litigation the United States brings or has brought" on this subject matter.

The US previously sued RealPage, a software maker accused of helping landlords collectively set prices by giving them access to competitors' nonpublic pricing and occupancy information. The original version of the lawsuit described actions by landlords but did not name any as defendants.

The Justice Department filed an amended complaint today in order to add the landlords as defendants. The landlord defendants are Greystar, LivCor, Camden, Cushman, Willow Bridge, and Cortland, which collectively "operate more than 1.3 million units in 43 states and the District of Columbia," the DOJ said.

"The amended complaint alleges that the six landlords actively participated in a scheme to set their rents using each other's competitively sensitive information through common pricing algorithms," the DOJ said.

The phrase "price fixing" came up in discussions between landlords, the amended complaint said:

For example, in Minnesota, property managers from Cushman & Wakefield, Greystar, and other landlords regularly discussed competitively sensitive topics, including their future pricing. When a property manager from Greystar remarked that another property manager had declined to fully participate due to "price fixing laws," the Cushman & Wakefield property manager replied to Greystar, "Hmm... Price fixing laws huh? That's a new one! Well, I'm happy to keep sharing so ask away. Hoping we can kick these concessions soon or at least only have you guys be the only ones with big concessions! It's so frustrating to have to offer so much."

FBI raided Cortland office

Cortland manages over 80,000 rental units in 13 states. The FBI raided its Atlanta office in May 2024 as part of a criminal investigation.

"Cortland is pleased to announce the US Department of Justice filed a proposed settlement that would resolve the Antitrust Division's civil investigation into Cortland related to antitrust violations in the multifamily housing industry," Cortland said in a statement provided to Ars today.

Cortland's statement said that last month, "the Antitrust Division informed Cortland that it had closed its criminal investigation into pricing practices in the multifamily industry. As a result, Cortland and its employees are no longer subject to the criminal investigation that motivated the Department of Justice's May 2024 search at Cortland's headquarters in Atlanta."

The settlement, if approved in federal court, would prohibit Cortland from accessing or using external nonpublic data from RealPage or other sources. Cortland said in its statement that it has developed its own software for managing revenue.

"We believe we were only able to achieve this result because Cortland has invested years and significant internal resources into developing a proprietary revenue management software tool that does not rely on data from external, non-public sources," Cortland said.

RealPage fights lawsuit

Rental companies have previously denied using software to collectively set prices in response to class action lawsuits. In December 2022, the National Multifamily Housing Council trade group said that "the highly fragmented nature of the rental apartment industry fosters competitive pricing, not anticompetitive behavior. No single owner or operator can 'set' rents for an entire market because other owners can always price over or under based on numerous circumstances. We believe rents in every market are dictated by the dynamics of that local market—the supply of housing, the demand for housing, economic conditions and more."

RealPage filed a motion to dismiss the US lawsuit in early December. The company has said its software "benefits both housing providers and residents," and "makes price recommendations in all directions—up, down, or no change—to align with property-specific objectives of the housing providers using the software." Landlords don't have to follow the recommendations, the company says.

The Justice Department says that landlords did more than use RealPage in the alleged pricing scheme. "Along with using RealPage's anticompetitive pricing algorithms, these landlords coordinated through a variety of means," such as "directly communicating with competitors' senior managers about rents, occupancy, and other competitively sensitive topics," the DOJ said.

There were "call arounds" in which "property managers called or emailed competitors to share, and sometimes discuss, competitively sensitive information about rents, occupancy, pricing strategies and discounts," the DOJ said.

Landlords discussed their use of RealPage software with each other, the DOJ said. "For instance, landlords discussed via user groups how to modify the software's pricing methodology, as well as their own pricing strategies," the DOJ said. "In one example, LivCor and Willow Bridge executives participated in a user group discussion of plans for renewal increases, concessions and acceptance rates of RealPage rent recommendations."

DOJ: Firms discussed “auto-accept” settings

The DOJ lawsuit says RealPage pushes clients to use "auto-accept settings" that automatically approve pricing recommendations. The DOJ said today that property rental firms discussed how they use those settings.

"As an example, at the request of Willow Bridge's director of revenue management, Greystar's director of revenue management supplied its standard auto-accept parameters for RealPage's software, including the daily and weekly limits and the days of the week for which Greystar used 'auto-accept,'" the DOJ said.

Greystar issued a statement saying it is "disappointed that the DOJ added us and other operators to their lawsuit against RealPage," and that it will "vigorously" defend itself in court. "Greystar has and will conduct its business with the utmost integrity. At no time did Greystar engage in any anti-competitive practices," the company said.

The Justice Department is joined in the case by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oregon, Tennessee, and Washington. The case is in US District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina.

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