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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • For me the Prodigy and Lower Decks theme songs are among the best in the franchise because they’re versatile. You can have a slow, tender violin motif from the LD theme such as when Tendi was telling Mariner that the Beta shifters were her family at the end of season 2. A slightly different part gets a brassy remix as the swelling Crisis Point theme music for the Cerritos.

    Not all Trek melodies do this. Voyager’s got a lovely melody that feels appropriate for a grand trip homeward, but they tried using it at some big plot moments and it just felt wrong. Disco and TNG have the opposite problem where their themes are CONSTANT INTENSITY, so you don’t often see them used in softer moments. (The latter is very weird to me considering we have heard softer variations of the theme, maybe I just can’t think of any such uses in the series offhand).





  • In fairness, Adira does have a weird moment where they seem reticent about switching pronouns. But I’ll defend Disco’s representation because I think it’s just written with a different lens of how to treat queerness. The themes feel more modern, and more willing to explore what queerness is rather than treating it as something to be tolerated.

    I’ll never forget my first watchthrough of Season 3 where Stamets refers to Adira as his child. I was floored because I’d mentally joked that Staments shoulda adopted them by now, but here the narrative was coming out and saying it. The writers dove deeper into themes like found family rather than retreading old ground. It’s heavy-handed at times, but it feels like queerness written for queer people.









  • As far as I’m aware they never explain the rules of Stratagema. I feel pretty comfortable saying it seems like a terrible esport to spectate. You’ve got

    • Incredibly quick games (Data’s first game with Kolrami ends in less than thirty seconds), so there’s little to no time to appreciate whatever finer strategies are going on
    • crap graphics-- style is very bland and more importantly user unfriendly–as far as I can tell there are four colors, navy/blank, some sort of territorial highlighting colors (blue and yellow), and a red that appears to be units/agents of both players, which are not visually distinct except for small markers (seriously, why?).
    • probably crap controls-- I get you have to move multiple things simultaneously, but you’d think they’d make something more intuitive for whatever 3-D controls this game needs. With the benefit of modern video game hindsight I think something like a mini keyboard in one hand would be a lot more believable for whatever quick selection and movements are needed by this game.

    Basically, take a minimalist strategy game like Go and an RTS game and stick them together in a way that uses the strengths of neither. That’s Stratagema. Don’t play this game, it’s dumb.

    (Minor edit, after thinking this over a little it’s possible the red pieces are neutral objectives. I don’t think that correlates as well with the finger movements, but whatever. That’d just make Stratagema 3d Liquid War with mario kart powerups tacked on)