Matt Smith 🎙️

You've been fantastic. nightlightguy.bsky.social

@BrunswickVoice It was around 11:45am. I don’t believe anyone was seriously hurt. I was there shortly after the accident and the car was empty.

We’ll have a fuller story on our website when more details are confirmed later today.

The Upfield railway line has been closed after a train hit a car at the Victoria Street level crossing in #Brunswick this afternoon. .@metrotrains is advising of lengthy delays as all trains b/t Nth Melb & Coburg were replaced by buses after the collision at about 12.30pm.

@rtalbot @HustleBitch_ Massive Junior Gorg vibes!

🚨 COFFEE DATE GOES SIDEWAYS IN UNDER 3 MINUTES - “I’M GONNA BE SINGLE FOREVER.” A man says he met a girl from a dating app for a quick coffee. Chemistry was there. Laughing. Easy banter. Three minutes in, she casually says: “Oh by the way… my family is here.” He turns around - her mom, dad, and brother are sitting directly behind him, watching the entire date. The mom pulls up a chair and starts asking about his job. The dad asks where he’s from, where he’s going in life, and questions his church. The brother doesn’t say a word. Just watches. Then the mom drops: “If this works out, Christmas is usually at our house.” Minutes later, they all stand up and leave together. She leaves with them. He stays behind, finishing his coffee alone. What do you think they realized almost instantly?

Emperors of Rome is now an inpdepenent podcast and looking for listener support on Patreon. Thanks to everyone who's listened to the show over the years! To find out more, check out here: patreon.com/romepodcast

@BradRTorgersen This is why Twitter should have character limits.

"You have to like it, or you're not a real Star Trek fan!" they explained. Yeah . . . no. NOPE. TNG survived for two reasons. First, they gradually removed Roddenberry's hands from the levers of control. Second, the scripts got consistently better through S2, and by S3 the cast had settled into their parts, and the stories were solid. S3-S5 ended up being terrific. And while S6 and especially S7 had a few wobbly ones, the scripts were there. DS9? Similar trajectory. Things were kinda wobbly right up until the Jem'Hadar menaced Sisko and Co. on a Gamma Quadrant away mission. At which point the series (and the characters) locked on target and didn't flinch. Some of the best writing the franchise had ever seen occurred between DS9 S2 and DS9 S6. Excellent scripts. And the part that doesn't get talked about enough? Both TNG and DS9 worked hard to stay faithful to the future history as shown in TOS and the Shatner films. There was precious little deliberate retconning, overwriting, or ignoring. In fact, the opposite was often true. Each series bowed deeply and tipped its hat to the past, even going so far as to give us gems like "Relics" where Scotty himself returns, and "Trials and Tribble-ations," where DS9 cast pay a well-crafted and deceptively seamless visit to one of TOS's most famed episodes. The only modern Trek to do anything like that is probably Lower Decks. But as a friend of mine pointed out Lower Decks is like a Rick and Morty animation comedy that off-duty Next Generation crew would kick back and watch; laughing at how Starfleet life is done up for yuks. SNW? Apocryphal. Re-writing the canon. STD and SFA? Also apocryphal. Literal alterna-history within the future history. And badly written, with poor characters which are often deliberately obnoxious. Worse perhaps even than Wesley Crusher. And that's really saying something. No Trekkie is obliged to like and consume ANYTHING the studios shove at us. We derided the fifth Shatner film for being bad, because it *was* bad. A very mediocre script, shot on a mediocre budget, with mediocre directing. So disliked in fact that Paramount brought Nicholas Meyer back to do Undiscovered Country so that the Kirk cast of yore could go out on a W, not an embarrassing L. TNG Insurrection? TNG Nemesis? Poor outings. Scripted more like TV two-parters that never made the cut, and were fairly shoved at the audience because we will pay to see anything with Star Trek written on it. Again, the answer is: NO. Just, no. A series or film is either quality, and respects the lore, or it doesn't. And there's precious little that's deliberately disrespected the lore that I'd call quality. And I am certainly not going to waste my time paying for streaming services just to watch series by people who've already proven in prior outings they have no clue what they are doing. And proudly flip off us older Trekkies. I will happily re-watch my DVDs of TOS, TNG, and DS9, thank you. Hell, I might even invest in sets of VOY and ENT, just to round it out. I will never invest in any DVD, Blu-Ray, nor 4K, of anything with Kurtzman's hands on it. And I gave away my DVD of 2009 JJ Trek. After the abysmalness of Into Darkness and Beyond. The second attempting to re-tread the Khan plot, and the third just . . . being dumb. Really dumb. You only get to lay so many bad eggs before nobody comes to your hen house anymore. Doesn't matter how much loyalty remains for prior incarnations.

@CacactaCarta We’ve been thinking about doing the Civil Wars next year.

@nightlightguy, reminds me of the great Emperors of Rome podcast episodes you did on the Gallic Wars!

@JoshMalina Picking up a typo on a 6 year old tweet. Bored much, Maligno?

Jed Bartlet.

@sbogucki12 @wmarybeard I left hosting duties in the capable hands of Rhiannon for this interview!

Just started the new Emperors of Rome pod and no familiar voice of @nightlightguy. But the guest is the author of SPQR which I recently finished, @wmarybeard

There's a new Emperors of Rome podcast up.

@hardy_john63374 @RomePodcast @DrRhiannonEvans Ok. Well thanks for listening anyway.

In this Emperors of Rome podcast @DrRhiannonEvans and @nightlightguy look at the ancient Roman festival of T̶u̶m̶n̶u̶s̶ Faunus, Faunalia Rustica. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/epi…

@DrCraig_B @res_australes @ConversationEDU Oh come on. Ostia is only six hours from Rome. Easy to get a shark there!

I have a piece just out in @ConversationEDU on the historical realities of Gladiator II's naumachiae (naval battle reenactments) and other Roman water spectacles and its connection with our work in Cyprus. No sharks... theconversation.com/gladiator-ii-f…

In the new Emperors of Rome podcast, @DrCDavenport takes us through the reign of Carus - the emperor with the distinction of being struck by lightening. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/epi…

How important was voting to the Romans? In the new When in Rome podcast, @DrRhiannonEvans takes us through the Saepta Julia, designed by Julius Caesar as a place where Romans could meet, debate, and vote. podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/sae…

@TheWildHogg Hilarious!

@nightlightguy Farewell Historia Augusta. Your lies and exaggerations have no place on the modern world

There's a new Emperors of Rome podcast up.

@SpiritKagemusha Two more episodes in the current run. We won’t make it quite to the tetrarchy.

@nightlightguy I can see Diocletian on the horizon. Will there be a stop gap or are we going straight to the Tetrarchy?

@stuv1k I haven’t updated the app in years. 😁

@RKeyes214610798 Podcasts take a lot of work.

@nightlightguy @DrRhiannonEvans @TheRealKMcKidd Why are you stopping?! Keep it going, just do episodes at your leisure. Would love to hear from the other actors and actresses.

The final (ever?) Raising Standards podcast with me and @DrRhiannonEvans is now up. It’s a special interview with @TheRealKMcKidd and James Purefoy. pca.st/episode/82896b…