Ministar

*********** SPOILER OF SEASON 1 OF SNW **********

Couple of days ago I finished the 1st season of Strange New Worlds.

Disclaimer: I did not see or read any reviews on it, and avoided all trailers. From the new trek, I watched only Discovery. All being said are my opinions only, I do not expect you to agree, but any discussion is more than welcomed.

I will separate this review in three parts. The positives, the negatives and finally a hope for the future.

Positives

By far, the biggest positive is the return of a more episodic format. Where each episode has its own story, a problem to be solved. No season long arcs.

This allows to "dedicate" each episode to a different character and develop that character. So naturally, the characters are interesting, fairly likeable. To me, the most interesting character is Pike. I think the actor did a great job, and his struggle of knowing his own death is very well done in my opinion. Additionally, Spock has been explored quite a bit and I actually like the direction they are going with him. Exploring the boundary between Vulcan logic and Human emotion is obviously a difficult task for him and a very enjojable experience for us.

Some episodes gave us something to think about, a moral question which often does not have a clear answer. In episode 6 (Lift Us Where Suffering Cannot Reach), we see a world celebrating a child which will suffer for life in order for the civilization to survive. A dialog between Pike and Alora at the end was probably peak of the season for me. "Tell me there are no poor children who starve and work in order for your civilization to work. The only difference between us is that we dont look away." (paraphrasing) No matter your stance on the morals of this, its a cool point to stop and think, and that is what ST is all about. Similar moral problem is presented in episode The Elysium Kingdom (ep 8), where Doc has to give away his daughter if he wants her to live. A decision not easy to make for any parent.

The Gorn. I honestly love what they did with the gorn. They made this mysterious, evil, terrifying villain. I like that they are "teasing" us with them, not giving us a lot to keep this sense of fear and unease. I was not a big fan of the "alien" episode, I thought that could have been done a bit better, but it was still a decent episode.

Negatives

As any show, or anything in life really, it has its negatives.

10 episodes in a season is too short. This short of a format seems to forced the writers to solve some "problems" they presented early on. Such as Pike knowing his end date, or Una being an Ilyrian or La'an having trauma from the Gorn. They decided to solve or resolve all these problems which could have been explored much further. This way, it felt rushed and the payoff was kind of meh. For comparison, things like Bashir's genetic modifications, or T'Pol's addiction to trillium-D were plot lines that were stretched out, allowed to mature and felt significant when resolved. La'an and her Gorn trauma seemed more like only hate, and not a PTSD as i thought it would happen. She seems more calm than any other person facing the Gorn, when she really should not.

The aesthetic of the show, while big improvement to Discovery, still does not seem like it belongs in a Star Trek show. Everything is too shiny and lights looks more like neon lights than normal natural lighting. Why is the future so shiny and full of lens flares? There is no way they have a cleaning person who is polishing the floors every day. This leads to some weird scenes, where the bridge, altough half destroyed, still looks new and good, just because its so damn shiny. You dont have a feeling that half of the bridge or ship is destroyed.

Killing of Hemmer was completley unnecesseray. I asumme they want to bring in Scotty to replace him. But he was a great character, who was non-human (Andorian) which we dont see often. He was a really cool character that did not get what he deserved. The reason behind most of those kind of decisions is that they are trying to hard to pay homage to TOS.

Personally, i have had enough with paying homage to older shows, i want something completely new. Literally, best ST shows are the ones which brought something completely new. TNG brought a completly new era, DS9 was the first to gives a station as a setting. VOY practically seperated us from the federation. New character, new settings, new stories. While here we have, old character, old setting, old stories. While I think the new Kirk is really cool and I like the character, give him a rest. Introduce a new character that we will love. I really hope this does not go to some kind of a TOS reboot.

Final thought and future hopes

I know i wrote a bigger section for negatives than positives. But I really do think this is a great show, a show I was hoping to have when they announced Discovery. I look forward to watching Season 2. I hope they continue this episodic format, and I hope they dont reboot TOS. And please, for the love of god, stop polishing the floor.

Any comments, thoughts and discussion are welcomed. That is the point of this, after all.

P.S. If you think I overlooked something and want my opinion on it, just ask :)

Hello,

when I am in game, and press Shift+Tab, the Steam overlay does not want to open (literally nothing happens). I have the overlay and the shortcut configured in the steam settings.

Any ideas if this can be fixed, or is it just wayland problem that i have to wait out?

SPOILERS OF SEASON 4 OF DISCOVERY

I have recently finished watching season 4 of Discovery and havent read any reviews or opinions on it before or after watching. Here I want to share my views.

Basically, I am very frustrated. Not because I think its complete trash, but because I think they had a very cool concept which they screwed up.

I separate, what I think are the main issues, in these two points:

• Non-stop apocalypse ready to happen
• Spore drive killing character development

I will cover both now in more depth.

Non-Stop apocalypse ready to happen

So in this season we are introduced with the idea of rebuilding. Rebuilding a great Federation, to return it to its glory and make the quadrant and galaxy prosper again. Soon we are introduced to this anomaly, DMA, which destroys an entire world and is basically unstoppable and is coming for other worlds as well. This, then, turns out to be artifical and creators are these very cool aliens at the edge of the galaxy. The task is to meet them and convince them to shut it down.

Honestly, I am tired of this thrope that every problem has to be a world-ending, galaxy-ending, universe-ending problem. Everything is so huge, everytime its either we succede or we all die. There is no more room for simple problems, "every day" problems. By far, the best episodes are episodes where "small" problems are solved. Like the episode where Zora's consciousness was explored or in previous season where Saru beat his fear and so on. They work much better because audience can understand them much more, connect to them more easily than "entire universe will be dead". At a risk of sounding like a hater, this is why TNG is so damn good. It is a bunch of small stories than are easy to grasp and connect to. You dont need a world-ending problem to make a good plot.

Spore drive killing character development

I think this is a unexpected consequence of the spore drive. A lot of character development in old shows was happening during the their travel to the destination. That was the time dedicated for character development, it was logical, it was simple, it worked. Now, with spore drive you dont have time for that. You are instantly in the combat or a problem.

How they do character development then? They do it in the middle of the mission. So there is a time sensitive thing we need to do, we have a few minutes to get the fuck out, lets talk about our emotions. I am all for talking about emotions, but damn, you are trained military personnel. You do your job first, then talk about your emotions. Its like firefighters would go into a burning building and pause to have a chat about their childhood. You go in, you do the job and you talk after the mission is over. Basically, the moments they choose for character development are extremely illogical and unnatural for trained military personnel.

My ideas on how to fix it

First, for the character development. Just give more screen time before and after the mission to this, not in the middle of the mission.

For the plot. I loved the idea of the future and rebuilding the federation. And i even like the idea of this aliens, which look super cool. But I would love to see more diplomatic episodes, where this federation rebuilding would actually been shown. Give us 1 episode of heavy diplomacy so we can appreciate what goes into rebuilding it. It surely is not as simple as "Join us, please. Ok we agree".

Also these aliens could have been prime example of "new civilazation" and trying to bring them into the federation. Overcoming vast differences between the species, accpeting those differences and finding the common ground.

Basically, more diplomacy less apocalypse.

Do you agree, or do you think i am wrong? Please, I welcome the discussion on this.

So, I have been mostly self thaught programmer (C++), as its a big part of my job (not a regular developer). But so far I have been using a simple text editor like Geany to code and I compile stuff either in terminal (linux) or produce my own make file.

I am starting to wonder if I should switch to a full IDE, as I am on linux, I was thinking of trying KDevelop. But I am simply not sure if its worth, do I even need it?

I have never used an IDE, it seems kind of complicated for the start with "projects" and I havent really found any good introductions to how this workflow is supposed to work.

Do you think using and IDE is something everyone should use? Or do you think a text editor with producing your own make files should be enough?