(derail) And thank the heavens for it, too. Going through the old silver books for laughs and inspiration and reading some of the feat and class prereqs now is actively making me wince. Back then, it felt like anything cool needed to be planned for from chargen on, while these days with FantasyCraft we're more in "Huh, I never knew I was already halfway there, I can pick that up the level after next" territory. I'm so not missing the 1.0 unarmed feat chains - Hard Master took, what, eleven freaking feats to reach? Good riddance. (/derail)

It's not all rainbows and unicorn stew (mmm, mmm, best use for a unicorn by far...). Dumping those requirement nuked a whole segment of prestige-now-expert class design where you could offer feat chains ahead of the normal Career Level access as a tasty 2 or 3 part ability. Its now quite tricky to offer specific feats - if the player really wanted them, they probably already had them long before the class would give them out. Its undoubtedly a win in the long run, but there have been days were it kicked the legs out from under classes I was putting together in my head.

Watched Wrath of Khan last night. Was amazing how much I'd forgotten, and how many small beats have been ported over (you'd better get down here, and make it quick).

Spock's howling KHAAAAN is actually louder and longer - Kirk's just had echoing reverb .

As to Carrol Marcus having a different accent... seriously? You're gonna latch on to THAT? We see her at age 25ish with an English accent, and at 50-something without, and people can't rub two brain cells together hard enough to imagine a person might gain or lose an accent over 30 years? That's not nit picking, that's obsessive compulsive disorder coupled with a mild case of early onset brain death.

Going for the third time this evening. Gonna really revel in the little details. I do love me some big budget future-scapes. The massive building shadowing the mid-western horizon in the first New Trek were a big part of the draw for me, and this built-over London and San Francisco are similarly gorgeous to me. I'd buy the disk just for that, really.

(similarly, I've loved picking apart the cityscapes in Arrow - I know where quite of the few buildings are from that they've digitally transplanted to create Starling City )

Fear. Sacrifice. Contact: The Europa Report

Watching that I realized the face-first into the suck/unknown romance of space exploration is in a coma if not clinically dead. My suspenders of disbelief pretty much snapped the instant I had the impression they had mailed grossly energy-expensive humans out there before bombing the living hell out of the moon with drones. I'll rent it for a buck when the time comes to see if they mentioned having scouted the area by remote first, but I'm not holding out much hope. I can see how you could get to that stage without having the participants one and all look like bloody morons, I'm just not convinced this film did the groundwork.

At least I'll have applications for the realization in my own work. I think there's still plenty of opportunity for gripping drama without throwing yourself bodily into an unknown body of alien water...

Ok, irony mode:

They hate second hand gaming. I get that I even largely approve/agree with them. I buy the games I keep the games forever - my games do not go back into circulation, and I find the cynical treatment of the used market so close to being a scam I don't buy stuff used more than 1 time out of 20 and even then that's only because I can't find it new, not to save the 3 dollars off the new price. I am basically the perfect customer... so why as the person who has THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS sunk into game libraries do they simultaneously expect me to just pitch it in a dumpster because they can' be arsed to do backwards compatibility? They REWARD THE EXACT BEHAVIOR they hate. People who sold everything back into the merry-go-round used market are the ONLY people who care naught for backwards compatibility.

&(*&^## it. I think I'm buying another PS3 for longevity and ignoring them all. The tablet market can eat these stupid media boxes masquerading as game platforms and then implode in due course for lack of anything like a precise control scheme and I'll swing round when bellbottoms are back in.

I'm kinda glad I haven't gotten invested in any Xbox only titles, because that interview convinced me the new one is toxic. Asked just about point blank "have you screwed us over" "Uh, I don't know." and ask "hey, have you enabled a bunch of multi-media drivel that doesn't mean a goddamn thing to my gaming experiences?" Yes, we envision ourselves as the leader in pointless drivel. Let me tell you more..."

Being able to automatically extract and fling into the ether a 6 second vine of my 77th attempt at a level where I finally got it perfect is really the LAST thing on my mind at that point. Anyone I really, really cared about seeing it was IN THE ROOM (or playing along with me at the time) or able to listen to and enjoy the story over some good pasta later that week.

The PS4 didn't do much better of a job. I feel like I've finally hit true generation gap. I feel like I understand these new functions technically, but I'm finding myself actively declining to 'get' them socially.

Without commenting on the class, I have to say I'd be interested to see a Legendary Rootwalker master class .

While I get the retailer's love getting a game back for pennies on the dollar and the reselling it for near pure profit, but I have to wonder... I've never personally been into buying a game for 6-8% off used. Most of the time I find the so called used prices insulting, especially when the disk has obviously been mauled or when the original case and/or manual is missing. The previous owner couldn't even manage to not lose the case and you want to discount it a whole $4? WTF?

If I don't feel like paying full pop I generally just wait a year for the price to go down 65% or so. There's been such a massive stream of promising titles that I'm backlogged a year or more anyway.

While humorous, it basically misses the cat and mouse going on entirely.

Khan sneaks his crew (Marcus' key bargaining chips) into torpedoes that are supposed to be long range assassination tools.

Marcus takes them - at face value - and stashes the out of khan's reach thinking section 31 has some lovely new sniper goodness.

Khan freaks. He thinks Marcus knows (he doesn't) and he decides in true Phoenix Clan fashion to make a gigantic crater where his enemies used to be to get revenge. He blows up his old labs and then attends the Starfleet Shooting Gallery of Brass. But, just on the off chance that Marcus is only half the dick Khan thinks he is, he still goes with the Plan A which he seemingly was running before his rampage - to escapes to a place where Marcus will have to use his imagined sniper-torpedoes to get at Khan, possibly luring them back out of whatever hole Marcus stashed them in if he doesn't know they have a distinctly different type of "live payload" than promised.

Marcus freaks. Marcus, not knowing what he's really got, hands off the presumed assassin-torps to a pissed off and easily manipulated unbalanced Kirk. There's just no way he'd hand over the key bargaining chips if he KNEW WHAT THEY WERE. In Marcus' best future Kirk's supposed to overkill khan in a big way and simultaneously bury the evidence of the torpedo project (planning to kill the Enterprise even if it succeeds, assuming the Klingons don't do it for him). Keep in mind, Carrol Marcus, who has full access to her dad's files doesn't know what's in the torps... again pointing to neither does dad, beyond what's on the false label.

Khan hangs on Qo'Nos a bit and then finds out his Plan A actually worked- Marcus didn't crack the shells on the torps and now they're back in play. He hitches a ride with Kirk where he can keep an eye on the prize.

Markus shows up to play cleaner after an op gone deliberately bad, only to find it went even worse than planned, and he still never asks for his torpedoes back because he's still oblivious to their crunchy icy centers.

Violence ensues.

It holds up pretty well, really, it's just based on Marcus being clueless (supported by behavior) and Khan being temporarily clueless - which he outright states at one point. "I thought they were all dead."

Kirk stealing an alien holy relic to get all the aliens looking at his rapidly retreating heels instead of the volcano and a certain shuttlecraft diving into it was stated pretty clearly, and largely fits with the Kirk MO (piss the other guy off so bad they make mistakes).

Its strung together with some lens flare and fairly mighty dialogue, its a bit dodgy at times, but on the whole the plot is not something I'm unhappy with. Some of the action scenes I'd have left on the cutting room floor - the only purpose of the shifting gravity catwalk scene other than to hurt my soul was to give Checkov one singular moment of usefulness in a movie where he's mostly a doorstop.

Oh, and Augments supposedly lived about twice as long as normal humans, so advanced regenerative ability =/= immortality. I wish that Kirk had been in more of a coma/prolonged organ failure hell suitable to radiation poisoning so mild that didn't manage to raise a single blister on that prettyboy face . Freezing was a good touch, but even with that sooner would have been better.

Yeah, the Narada sort of actively opposed direct examination/dismantling/reverse engineering. You can scan it, maybe even shoot at it and analyze the resulting debris (if you don't mind losing every ship in it's line of sight at the time) but it seems boarding it after it recovered its artificial wits was... unsafe.

The V'ger stuff was dumb enough to ignore, but the ship itself seems to have been fairly well hemmed in as a plot device. Though certainly the Klingons aren't anything like behind in the technological jumpstart & arms race it triggered.

I just started writing up armor for Farthest Star. Trying to price it has been illuminating .

That was fairly appealing. I'm not a huge fan of FPS these days, but that might have sold me on the effort to see the scenarios play out first hand.

And yeah, doggy!

So we're up another 9,000 registered users since last I checked about two months ago I'd guess (doubling the previous count).

That's just mind boggling to me.

Love that the Federation has readily available thugs.

Not thugs. Cupcakes. Even Kirk has his cupcake... ...who is listed as such in the credits.

So need a Cupcake class now. Or at least a Cupcake specialty.

Interesting. The Memory Alpha entries show the Vengeance was absolutely a Section 31 vessel rather than a Starfleet ship, and Admiral Markus either the head of 31 or a highly placed asset. Well, that kind of explains the resources being thrown around. I'll have to look at the uniforms again.

Random thought: was considering putting together a species for Khan and was chuckling at how well Ogre fit on many fronts. Still planning, but haven't executed yet. Certainly enjoyed the ways in which his superhuman nature was revealed.

Random though 2: The Narada is a mining ship. What the hell do you mine in a replicator civilization? I think there's probably quite a bit more than latinum that can't be reproduced (dilithium comes to mind). While even farther from canon than normal, the Shatner-verse has a bit where the baddies ransack Pickard's Enterprise, cutting loose and stealing a number of components. It turns out the bad guys have what looks like a normal ship dry dock that is actually an enormous replicator that can produce the majority of a space ship - the raiding party was stealing the parts that couldn't be replicated.
 
The murk of the Federation economy is exactly why I find the clandestine construction of the U.S.S. Vengeance so interesting. The U.S.S. in its name suggests that somewhere, somehow it is formally on the books. Just like there's a model of it sitting at the end of the row of models in Admiral Marcus' office. The Enterprise was shown taking years to assemble, yet the Vengeance was designed and built since the Narada Incident (roughly only a year prior?). I'm thinking there were breakthroughs in manufacturing even more important than the breakthroughs in weaponry and transporter science on display. The idea of trivialized labor costs is central to my sci-fi project, so a situation where the critical step in acquiring an advanced warship is laying hold of some design acumen appeals to me. And it matches up with why Marcus wanted Khan defrosted.

Seeing it a second time, I'm a bit surprised how much it relies on it's twists. It wasn't nearly as glorious on the second pass.

The U.S.S. Vengeance remains a gorgeous ship. After the attack on Earth by the Narada, I can see how building dreadnoughts or other purpose-built warships moved way up the list of priorities. That this one's built in secret says some wildly interesting things about Star Fleet. When I first saw it in previews I suspected that is was a covertly constructed vessel - possibly by Section 31. Seems I was pretty close.

...For a society without money, the Admiral certainly seems to have managed to divert a lot of resources...