• 6 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 1st, 2023

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  • Great episode, great finale, really strong first season. I had issues with some episodes trying to do too much in too little time, but for the last two episodes the writers focused on one story and did a damn good job tying up the season arc. Can’t wait to see where the show goes next season.

    The one criticism I have of the finale, and literally everywhere else it comes up in new era Trek is: Stop moving the camera so fucking much! It’s unnecessary and really takes me out of it when the camera is wiggling back and forth, or spinning around in an arc, or acting like an unstable drone during the trial portion (particularly at the end). I want to drink in what’s going on, not be trying to puzzle out WTF I’m looking at, especially when stream compression turns a lot of motion into blurry pixels.

    A little shaky cam when things are intense or exploding, sure, but overall I wish it was shot in a more conventional style.


  • Imo’s in St. Louis is my favorite overall. Thin, crispy crust, square cut, Provel as the base cheese. It scratches an itch that all other pizzas don’t. I’d eat it 7 days a week if I could, hot or cold.

    I’ve had pizzas with superior ingredients, made in fancy ovens, served with wine instead of cold beer, but if I could get any pizza right now, it’d be Imo’s black olive or veggie pizza.





  • I don’t think the convergence to x86/ARM is really lack of innovation, it’s more recognizing that being on a separate architecture doesn’t really help you. The innovation is now in form factor (e.g. the Switch), peripherals (e.g. VR or alt controllers) or software (e.g. streaming). Now, having an x86 just means your base platform is cheap and you don’t need a lot of custom work, although these platforms still get integration attention. Also makes ports much simpler.

    The PS3 is actually a great example of the industry learning this lesson. The Cell architecture was really hard to leverage. It took years for any games/engines to use the Cell SPUs right.

    As for Linux though, PS3 Linux was effectively just PowerPC Linux which was already fully supported years before in every major server distro. The Cell PPUs (main, boot cores) were pretty much off the shelf PowerPC. Similar to the Wii/WiiU.

    Source: work in semiconductors, the Cell was one of my first platforms out of school.











  • I don’t have any issue with seeing young adults growing and dealing with trauma. This episode has a lot of pieces working together in the overall storyline, I just don’t think it was that compelling within the episode.

    The drama class half of the episode didn’t really go off. Maybe because I only know the play from what the episode told me about it, but I think it’s more like the actual growth part got cut off. We spend time with drunk Tarima (yawn) and then short cut the cadets actually performing the play with each other. That would have been the climax of that story, them getting into character, relating to it, working through it and reaching some sort of understanding or catharsis but that scene gets hand waved. Probably needed a full 45 minutes to do right too.

    Or the Sam story, which was closer to the mark but still failed to create tension or consequences and ended up getting resolved neatly with a happy ending. Give Sam half an episode to be dead, for people to be sad, and the Doctor half an episode to reflect on it, resolving to do better before tying it up with a bow and it could have been great.

    I love that the show isn’t constantly balls to the wall action and we’re getting a lot of character focus but the story juggling bit this episode in the ass and it isn’t the first to be trying to do too much and fumble the execution.


  • Yeah, I think this one didn’t come together as well as it could have. Should have focused on the Sam story more and done more to make it feel like she was in real danger. When she was dead I involuntarily yelled “yeah right!”. Lo and behold a minute later it’s resolved happily. The drama class and Caleb/Tarima story could have more easily been cut short without losing anything.

    Probably one of the worst eps, but I’m happy to say that’s actually a pretty high bar for this show so far and this is more meh than truly bad (here I’m flashing back to like 20 different Discovery episodes where the episode ended and I was tearing my hair out over how stupid they were - that’s the real trauma here)

    Also happy to speculate that, with two episodes left, the pendulum seems likely to swing back to excitement next week and I’m here for it.