Category Archives: Star Trek

Rant, Review, Star Trek

We Meet Again

Leave a comment

After my last I wound up being swept into the vast world of the Witcher and never got around to actually play Fate/. And I gotta say I’m still brilliantly yellow that *some ports* got all the dlc *for free* after we all went and bought the *limited edition*.

I could go off on a tangent for a million pages why *certain companies* current practices dlc are absolutely disgusting and designed just to milk just that bit more money out of people, and I can’t believe why people buy into them, but I feel lucky in Fate/’s case that the dlc seems mostly to be additional content like outfits and junk, unlike some others where the actual end of the game is hidden behind an “expansion.”

Anyway, after the Witcher, my beloved cat died suddenly of cancer we all thought she had been bouncing back from after her treatment. Not more than a month later, I finally, finally got a surgery appointment myself. Which is great! Because I’ve been waiting two years for a surgery that many people get the second they’re diagnosed with the exact same problem. What’s not so great? The massive cut in my side is just as annoying as the issue I had surgery for. And it’s taken forever to heal. And it could totally have been done with less invasive means! So now I’m stuck with a huge, bloated, painful red scar on my side. Yay.

That was my year in a nutshell.

As for what I’ve been playing recently… I’m not sure I get it. Akalabeth seems to be purely dungeon crawling, occasionally surfacing to buy the massive amounts of food you need to not instantly starve. Gog help you if you encounter a thief because it can steal the axe right out of your hands.  For 1979 I wasn’t expecting an epic, but maybe just a little direction other than “go kill all the trolls in the dungeon.” Very different experience than Might and Magic 2 that way. I think I’m going to skip a couple of the other early Ultimas.

Maybe it’s just me and early video games. Many of them I found impossible to play- in the 80s. I remember trying to play Frogger and the damn thing zipped by in two seconds flat, making it impossible to guide the frog across the road, just because I was trying it on an early 1990 Windows machine. All that memory! It made things so fast. But that’s what happens when you design a game to be as fast as possible by using up every scrap of memory it can. There was no real solution for that back then, other than using a slower computer or something that used up the extra. Of course, these days you can just fiddle with settings in DosBox. Lately, I’m finding Might and Magic 1 impossible because of the interface and the fact it’s way more difficult to tell where exactly you are than MM2. Crappy controls, interfaces, barely there physics on platformers- why do I play retro again?

Other games I’m playing right now are Shadowrun, and just trying to clear out some of my backlog. Who knows, I might start making headway with HumbleBundle falling to the dark forces of IGN.

Other things are, oh boy I have a lot to say about Star Trek Travesty I mean Discovery. The story of how the humans of Middle Earth went to war with space faring orcs!!!1! Add in tons of DRAMAAAZZZ ala Star Gate Universe and really obnoxious characters and really bad dialogue and it makes Enterprise look halfway decent, even with the huge “XINDI XINDI XINDI XINDI XINDI!!!” arc in the middle. Man, I got really tired of hearing Bakula saying Xindi, Park’s wibbling and Blalock’s lips, and it still did a better job of being a Trek than… this.

Star Trek was always about ‘things will be better, look at this better future we can make together, look at the discoveries and things we could be doing’ and it came in the middle of the Cold War. I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but TV has become super dark, 2edgy4u, depressing, and dramaoverclocked in the last, oh, 17 years. I was looking forward to the new Trek as another beacon, and all I got was more conflict, Klingons that make Worf, B’Elanna and K’leyr unviable (and, well, icky) in the new universe, and ridiculously placed Alice quotes and Beatles songs.

Although that part is a bit hilarious because I was browsing a forum post somewhere last week that discussed the various songs and movies shown in the Trek series and someone went “Public Domain. That’s why everyone loves Mozart and Shakespeare, and hates Beatles and movies.” And then later that night suddenly Beatles song.

The one good thing about Discovery? They obviously have the budget to do good visuals. It’s just too bad the camera work is utter crap so you can’t see it more than a second, barely getting focused on it, before it flips to something else. Flip. Flip. Flip. Flip flip. Flip flip flip flipflipflopflipflipflipfilplfiplfiplfkjlakj.

Star Trek

Temba, His Arms Wide

Leave a comment

Back to interesting things today. I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek TNG lately, while working on my modding skills. Mostly just for background noise, somewhat because there’s few programs I can stand reruns, a little because it’s written better than a lot of the reality tv and the obligatory cop-forensic-medical show these days.

Star Trek is a household name in my family. My parents and grandparents watched it, and even my cats seem to enjoy it. Star Trek TNG started airing when I was only 3, and I remember being Traumatized for Life when Admiral Quinn and his aide barfed out mind-controlling parasites. Still, watching reruns makes me feel… nostalgic, even comforted. The times I spent watching when it first aired with my dad or grandpa come back to me, and it’s like they’re still here in the living world.

It’s a world full of possibilities, where there was nothing that couldn’t happen, where people had open minds and hearts and the extent of knowledge was only limited by imagination. Of course, the experience is different now that I am an adult. The nostalgia is tinted by experience. I can see the subtle hints of the past, the reminders that humans may not be as advanced as they may wish to be, or appear to be. Especially grating when they refer to humans of this and the previous century as “savage barbarians.”  Deanna Troi in particular exemplifies this, but it still can be blink-and-you-miss it. I used to like Deanna, but ever since I started watching it again she’s starting to grate on me. One of the more damning of primitive humans, and yet she isn’t always the sweet, helpful counselor she’s protrayed as. Her interactions with Barclay (well, the entire crew’s interactions with Barclay) implied that despite all their lipping, they weren’t as fast to practice what they preached in accepting the differences of people. She also expresses frustration quite often, as in the scene where the captain calls her to view the “first stable wormhole” and isn’t honest with her feelings. There’s just a lot of little things like that, that make me think she’s somewhat a hypocrite. I don’t know why she bothers me so much, though. Many of the characters also have these types of faults. Perhaps because she now symbolizes what I feel they could have done better with the series to me.

I prefer viewing the world of today with a greater sense of optimism, that yes, there are bad people in the world, and they have affected our future greatly, but no more than what was seen on the show. There are so many people I know, or have heard of, that have an honest, true sense of honor, who do strive to make the world a better place, who start movements. Humans have shown ingenuity in all generations, going back to things that seem simple to us, but when you think about it, are so unique or clever you wonder how they thought it up if it wasn’t by accident. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t see some sort of interesting or amazing thing and go “How lucky we are, to be human. How lucky, and how cursed.”