warreni

Pedophiles have standards?  Who knew...

Nah, he just greased himself up before he went, so the guy lost his grip. . . .

I've watched, TOS, TAS, and DS9 this year... I give TOS, and TAS a pass on a lot of missteps... To me the worst episode was DS9: Valiant (S6 E22) Just such a stupid concept.

There are many, many examples of worse episodes than "Valiant" in TNG and VOY. Heck, there are worse episodes of DS9 than that one, IMO. 

I don't think Threshold is any worse than TNG: Genesis.

 

EDIT: Apparently Genesis is a popular episode... I always hated it.

 

To reword... Threshold just seemed like Voyager's Genesis episode.  Like Voyager's Ex Post Facto and TNG's A Matter of Perspective.  The episodes where Paris is framed for murder and Riker is framed for murder.

Yes, "Genesis" was horrendous. Like many popular science fiction shows, TNG displayed an appalling lack of understanding of the nature of biological evolution (in much the same way that the Doctor was speaking gobbledygook from a biological standpoint when discussing developing a cure for the alien bacteria in "Praxeus" last week). 

I really don’t think the setting had anything to do with the more involved overarching stories, the writers had clearly been trying to go that direction since the second or third season of TNG and the new series just allowed them to take that a step further.


Good luck. I’m not a big Star Trek fan, but I’ve watched all the pre-Discovery stuff and Voyager is a big step down from TNG and DS9. And let me give you some friendly advice: skip Enterprise. It’s barely acknowledged in any later material, adds nothing interesting to the lore, and is easily one of the worst TV shows I’ve forced myself to sit through. And I watch a LOT of really shitty TV.

Nah, I’m just waiting until I’m in SE Asia later this year. When I was there back in 2018, Discovery was on Netflix, and I imagine CBS will keep that relationship going in the region rather than trying to go international.

Probably not much help to anyone else, though.

From what I saw on the "What We Left Behind" documentary, Paramount hated the idea of story arcs, and it wasn't as ubiquitous a phenomenon then as it is now. They were more interested in the show being like the other Star Trek shows, where you could miss an episode or two and jump back in without having "caught up." Part of the reason that's less of a big deal now is that people can stream entire series of shows in the 2020s, but at the time it was a radical move. You can't really drop in and out of the last two seasons of DS9. 

Also, all of you are crazy. "Far Beyond the Stars" is the best DS9 episode. 

All of the shows had to grow into themselves, TOS being the possible exception because the characters and the chemistry among the actors seemed baked-in on that show. TNG had a terrible first couple of seasons, with far too many terrible effects, too much hammy overacting, and way too many plots recycled from the original series. DS9 started off okay, but it got a lot better (and they definitely should have let Avery Brooks shave his head from the word "go"). Voyager had its moments, but it was always the worst of the series (except for the animated series, which no one remembers). Enterprise is weirdly underrated. Bakula made a pretty decent captain and the supporting cast were quite good too. Also, the new Andorians were great. There were definite moments where it seemed the pre-TOS timeline meant that the technology didn't quite make sense. Discovery suffers from similar issues--it looks like (I'm about halfway through the second series) we're going to get an explanation for why future generations didn't make use of the miraculous, galaxy-spanning "spore drive" before the series ends, but it feels weird that the showrunners can't just work within the confines of how we understand technology to work in whatever century they're choosing to set the fiction within. 

Ludicrous.  GPU market is crap because of Nvidia pushing bleeding edge nonsense that offers marginal performance upgrades while AMD lags behind.

So while I'm not disagreeing with your main point, I suspect that the market "is crap" for the same reason it has been for sometime--Bitcoin douchebags. 

8K will be a demo for the major lifespan of any gaming GPU launching this year. There is plenty of room for improved performance at current mainstream resolutions. The big RAM eaters are scene size/complexity and textures. The more that can live and be processed fulltime on the GPU the better the overall performance. Pulling in data from the system to the GPU is a big waste of cycles while the card is waiting to get the data. Likewise, a CPU heavy game can be penalized if it needs to frequently shift stuff between its RAM and the card's RAM. So you want the card to be doing its own thing while receiving brief messages from the CPU telling it what has changed rather than big data transfers.

 

It may seem like an absurd amount of RAM but compare the best looking recent game to a fifteen year movie. The requirements of trying to replicate that in real time are still way up there.

Once again, I'm not going to dispute anything you've said here, but, uh, I think your second paragraph undercuts your first one--how many games (and how many gamers) are really trying to see their games look like movies? (In fairness to the gaming industry, if we're talking strictly CGI, I've seen movies made in the last 2-3 years with CGI that looks worse than most of the AAA games of the last few years.) "Cinematic" games seem to be moving back in the direction of FMV rather than attempting to  move forward to the notion of realistic-looking computer-generated human models that are voiced by actual humans, because it's a technology that is fully mature (in my view) now, where it was not 20 years ago. Personally, if I look at a game like The Witcher 3, Mafia III, or Diablo III--really any game with the number 3 in the title--I think, "Hey, there's nothing wrong with the way that looks." Maybe photorealistic graphics are an objective of the future, but I just don't see that many folks clamoring for it today. Honestly, I'm with Mooby--who really needs ray-tracing? I have yet to see a single feature on any card at or around $1,000 that made me think, "Yep, that makes it worth it." 

EDIT: On a side note, playing the crap out of Spider-Man. Still enjoying it. In the middle of the Turf Wars DLC. 

Yo momma is a non-Euclidean sphere!!

Your point being, what, exactly?