u/slylock215

I watched it with a few friends and we were trying to parse what was actually going on throughout the entire episode, only to realize it was as dumb as we were being led to believe.

What a fucking mess.

The entire Una part is so insultingly fucking ridiculous I don't know how anyone can defend this trash.

So she kind of looks like this collaborator who we find out is a rebel leader and the first person she stumbles into is THE PERSON WHO KILLED HER who doesn't say shit?

Let's set the rest of the hairbrained plot aside, the resistances terrible plan, the mystery box shit on the Enterprise, the writers having no idea what a Klingon is, Kor, so what the actual fuck is this? These writers are so fucking lazy it's unbelievable because this is the keystone of the entire episode.

Una HAPPENS to land on a planet where a woman HAPPENS to look exactly like her, who HAPPENS to have disappeared just recently enough for Una to replace her, and who HAPPENS to occupy the exact intersection of the Klingon occupation and resistance necessary for Una to become the protagonist of their conflict. And the one guy who knows immediately that Una cannot possibly be this woman HAPPENS to keep that information to himself until the writers are ready for the reveal.

No, just no, A coincidence can start your story.

It becomes increasingly dangerous when coincidences are required to keep the story functioning..

This show is written by nepo babies that have never been told "no" in their entire life. That's the only conclusion I can draw from how terrible these scripts are and how they KEEP GETTING MADE.

Writing this out reminded me of Matt Stone and Trey Parker: "If the words 'and then' belong in between those [story] beats, you're fucked. You've got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you've written down is the word 'therefore' or 'but'"

Instead of a single moment of this episode being "Una gets to the planet and is mistaken for someone else and therefore [goes with the flow] but she encounters the person who killed her"

It's: "Una gets to the planet AND THEN is mistaken AND THEN turns out to be...AND THEN also turns out to be AND THEN finds the body AND THEN the guy admits AND THEN completes the rebel mission AND THEN goes home safe"

Matt and Trey are teaching this to a college class and they introduce the concept as "I'm sure you kids already learned/know this".

Trash, complete irredeemable trash. Good riddance to this show, this entire 10+ years of shows, Kurtzman and his entire gang, and any of this fake-trek. I hope Kurtzman never works in Hollywood again.

I think this is the essence of what we do here in Philly. I think it was Ramsay or some other celeb chef who touts something like, "don't go crazy on the number of ingredients, just get quality for what you use"

Got them again because they had a coupon on GrubHub.

Clearly a Liscios seeded roll, so great bread. Check.

Claudio's sharp prov that they crumble up so it properly distributes across the roll.

fennel salami, genoa salami, and cap

Good house pickled peppers, choice of roasted reds, but I got double cheese because that was an option and I know how good claudios sharp prov is.

They make some kind of pepperoncini aoili that I could drink with a straw.

Hell, the sandwiches actually look exactly like they do in their pictures.

I actually called in to confirm it was Liscios and talked to the manager for a second who was appropriately named Gnocci (or something like that). Dude was super nice and clearly REALLY passionate about the sandwiches they make which shows in the finished product itself.

Fuck Jersey or NYC, they ain't got shit on our hoagies.

Also, if you like a place write them a review. It really does help a shit ton especially in this AI era reviews mean even more than they used to. Hell, if you REALLY love the place then review them on multiple platforms, that helps even more!

So sometimes I'll put on a flerf debate video to fall asleep to. There's a kind of white noise in it considering they all say exactly the same thing and Dr. Blitz just has a nice dulcet tone.

Anyway, I've had a few conversations with flerfs in discords and other such places so sometimes I like to think of my own random counters and I think this is a solid one.

You're standing in front of a bridge and someone walks up, scribbles some equations or shapes on a piece of paper and says, "according to my math, this bridge cannot support its own weight. It must have collapsed"

You point at the bridge and say, "it's right fucking there"

This is the flat earth argument in a nutshell since they simply misunderstand everything they claim as evidence (first rule of flerf)

"The second law of thermodynamics says that we need a container" - There's that bridge again

"There should be 20919058039425 miles of hidden height there if the Earth was a globe" There's that bridge again

"Planes would have to constantly be pointing their nose starkly downward if the Earth wasn't flat" The bridge is still standing

I think this especially works when they bring up some eclectic factoid or subjects they think they know about like anticrepuscular rays or special relativity. "Well, while I don't know enough about this subject to tell you where you've gone wrong, since we have pictures of the Earth from space showing that it's a globe I am confident that you're wrong." Once again, there's that bridge.

A nonsense thought shouted into the wind.

Season 4 Episode 1 "Vallis Marineris" perfectly encapsulates why I think Strange New Worlds is poorly written, and that's me being generous

It has all the ingredients of a classic Star Trek episode and then refuses to engage with them in the way Star Trek always has.

Look at the premise:

A once in a lifetime level 10 interstellar squall

A distress signal.

They get sucked in and send to an unknown destination.

An alien civilization.

A temporal paradox.

Those aren't some revolutionary ideas. They're the building blocks of dozens of great Star Trek episodes. This should have been a straightforward mystery where a crew of scientists, engineers, and explorers work together to understand the unknown.

Instead, the anomaly stops mattering almost as soon as they fly into it, hell even while they're inside it barely seems to matter

When Pike asks, "Where are we?", the bridge should erupt into scientific investigation. That's what Starfleet does. They're not just soldiers with phasers, they're scientists, and I truly feel like this episode encapsulates how much they've taken the science out of science fiction in NuTrek. They should be comparing stellar observations, planetary scans, orbital mechanics, sensor data, anything they can to determine where they are and what happened.

The crew doesn't solve the mystery through scientific curiosity. The script withholds the answers until it's ready to tell us them TWICE.

That's the fundamental problem.

The mystery survives, not because the crew lacks evidence, but because the episode simply delays the obvious deductions. With only a contemporary understanding of astronomy and with the instruments they have on hand even WITH an extra planet it's likely that a 21st century astronomer would have figured out they were in the Sol system. Then by examining the stars they could conclude they are in a different time period. Hell, there is an awful line by Rebecca Romijn that's something like, "I can't read the stars". Bullshit.

That pattern continues through the entire episode.

The anomaly becomes a vehicle to get to dinosaur encounters.

The alien civilization exists mostly to deliver a planet destroying 'splosion.

The solution to getting home is insulting. The planet blows up with the antimatter bomb and Spock just says, "Oh man we should fly into that, it's got like so much energy and that energy will definitely get us right back to where we started for sure I think"

Once inside the 'splosion with like so much energy to go through time perfectly to where they started, no one speaks a word. This is a nit pick that bothers the hell out of me. The show is more interested in showing anime reaction shots and having the crew mug for the camera than they are having a bridge crew function like one. Shields at 25%, we're getting bombarded by whatever waves, our subspace field is failing, since it's an anti matter explosion maybe we need to use the deflector dish to add X to the mix to get us safely through, anything.

Anything that the best of the best would communicate. Starfleet graduates, best of the best, Starfleet officers, best of them, bridge crew of the flagship of the federation, best of all the rest. 90's Trek gets referred to as 'competency porn', this is an incompetency orgy.

Nobody really investigates the anomaly that started the episode. Nobody meaningfully investigates the phenomenon that gets them home. Those events just happen because the plot needs them to happen.

The episode keeps choosing spectacle over exploration.

And that's what bothers me the most.

This isn't about technobabble. Star Trek has always had technobabble. The point of the technobabble wasn't that it was real science, it was that it represented characters actively trying to understand the universe. Here, even the science we understand today, basic astronomy, observation, deduction takes a back seat to action and reveals.

The second time they look directly into the camera and read the script to us is at the end where Pike and the admiral are sitting in his quarters and just exposit what happened. "Oh, the 'splosion that got us home was also the one that got us there. How do we know this? Fuck you, that's why"

That's why I think "Vallis Marineris" is such a failure as a Star Trek episode.

Not because it has that idiotic raptor punch.

Not because it has vapid action and dialogue.

But because it has everything it needs to be a classic Star Trek mystery and seems almost completely uninterested in being one.

For me, that's become the defining problem with this era of Star Trek. It still has the iconography. It still has the ships, uniforms, phasers, anomalies, and treknobabble.

But it too often feels like the curiosity is gone. The writers are completely uninterested in the science part of science fiction.

https://preview.redd.it/b9wpwhg4jghh1.png?width=796&format=png&auto=webp&s=edab4037dc14a871e64b7cfbd024cfa474e6d09c

I saw some silly poll about 'best chex pieces' or whatever and somehow it unlocked a core memory of this actually amazing cereal box game Chex Quest. I remember it being such a perfect Doom clone that I'm wondering if it actually was licensed from id or maybe in the same way that David Brevik keeps making Diablo style ARPGs maybe one of their team members jumped ship. Or they just straight up ripped it off lol.

Thanks!

Let me start off by saying if they're 4 player coop then that's even better, but my one buddy and I do really enjoy just beating up a 2 player coop game.

He bought us Absolum, wow that game was fun and nice and tough (until we got buff)

I then bought us Cluckmech Oasis: Super fun roguelite tower defense game that we're almost to the last difficulty for

Our other friend bought us Temtem Swarm which was great. Classic roguelite but actually was for 4 players......WHEN IT WASN'T CRASHING.

Orcs must die had our whole crew for a minute.

We also play some bigger titles like overwatch and forza but that's not really what we're looking for. Those <$25 games which are mostly <$10 that we can just play for a week or two, beat, and then move on.

We've been friends for decades so it's hard to go through all the games we've played together but these were a smattering of the most recent

Coop roguelites are great, and we were especially happy with Cluckmech because it was a tower defense too which are also amazing.

Finally, the best thing about whatever your recommendations are we'll probably get to most of them eventually.

\*\*\*NOTE: Fuck Barony.

Let me start off by saying if they're 4 player coop then that's even better, but my one buddy and I do really enjoy just beating up a 2 player coop game.

He bought us Absolum, wow that game was fun and nice and tough (until we got buff)

I then bought us Cluckmech Oasis: Super fun roguelite tower defense game that we're almost to the last difficulty for

Our other friend bought us Temtem Swarm which was great. Classic roguelite but actually was for 4 players......WHEN IT WASN'T CRASHING.

Orcs must die had our whole crew for a minute.

We also play some bigger titles like overwatch and forza but that's not really what we're looking for. Those <$25 games which are mostly <$10 that we can just play for a week or two, beat, and then move on.

We've been friends for decades so it's hard to go through all the games we've played together but these were a smattering of the most recent

Coop roguelites are great, and we were especially happy with Cluckmech because it was a tower defense too which are also amazing.

Finally, the best thing about whatever your recommendations are we'll probably get to most of them eventually.

\*\*\*NOTE: Fuck Barony.

So I have an approximately 10'x10' patch of grass in front of my rowhome and it's gotten a little too overgrown for my little weedwacker to take care of.

All I can find are lawn services that want me to commit to some minimum amount of times to come out but I just need someone to come out and wack it down.

Does anyone have a recommendation of a landscaper in the city? As the title states, I'm in South Philly.

Thanks!

This isn't about how great Emei is, they're fucking amazing and that's non debatable.

I'm also super hype about the second location they're opening in South Philly, couldn't be happier for them.

I've tried a multitude of things on their menu but I'm wondering if anyone has any recommendations of items that may be normally overlooked.

My go-to from them:

That absolute god tier Chongqing Spicy Chicken, that may be a 'last meal' item for me it's so good. Seriously, anyone reading who hasn't ordered this....Do it. It's a life changing Chinese food experience.

Their chilled spicy noodles also blow my socks off, as well as their dan dan and cold sesame noodles.

Mapo Tofu amazing.

Their duck is to die for, and all of their dumplings are just perfect.

If anyone doesn't get eggplant with garlic from chinese joints, you're missing out.

ohhhuggggsjgirejgoaigij (Homer Simpson noises) those double fried spicy beef skewers.

Anyway, their menu is quite large so I wanted to see what other people love from Emei because at this point I'm in for trying everything they have.

*Note for anyone who hasn't had Emei. Their prices seem a bit high but they do not mess around with portions, you pay for the quality and the quantity.

Edit: Love all of you for your recommendations. There is seriously no better Chinese food in the city.

Edit 2: Well I did get the Chongqing fish today and it was fucking amazing.....HOWEVER.

However, it's $8 more and I feel like you get less protein than the chicken so I'll likely stick with that.

IMO saying one is better than the other is like comparing two diamonds.

Also got the curry lamb and it was fire too.

Hi Switch help community.

So my switch 2 is my first console in a long.....long time and I have some traveling to do this weekend and I am curious about what the best way is to make sure I can play in the airport and on the flight assuming that I don't have internet access.

I own the new Star Fox and have the cartridge for it as well, is there anything I need to do to make sure it's available to play offline?

Additionally, what about the classic console game, can they be played without internet?

What other suggestions do people have for offline play?

Thanks!

*Note: I did make sure to buy a carrying case and protective case

I hope that it's all right that I'm posting a non-sardine canned seafood. I thought that I had seen other people post them before.

Grew up on simple canned sardines in olive oil, mashed up mixed with some raw white onion on toast with cream cheese, heaven.

Then (many years ago) I found simple smoked bumblebee oysters and they became a permanent fixture of my charcuterie. However, I never really looked much further.

Stumbled into these relatively much more expensive ones but they're phenomenal. The habanero ones blew me away, but they're $10+ per tin.

Any recommendations for canned smoked oysters that are somewhere in between the $2 can and the $10-$20 and above can? I'm open to any and all flavors or just plain smoked.

Thanks!