Monday, May 10, 2010

Wherein I salute the RedLetterMedia Guy.

I'd like to take a moment and just show my deep admiration and respect for the Redlettermedia guy, the one behind the pizza rolls and youtube reviews.

It's nice to find another guy out there like myself who dislikes First Contact. I keep talking to Trek fans who opine that it's up there with TWOK, and I just get confused and wonder why. Nicholas Meyer's masterpiece, TWOK is one of my favorite films of all time, while First Contact... First Contact isn't even the Borg's finest moment in TNG. He pointed out a bunch of crappy stuff in FC that I didn't even notice.

One I was kinda hoping he would have was the excessive use of red laser pointers. Ya know what I mean, on all the fucking Borg heads. Like, in Best of Both Worlds, it was pretty much just Locutus who had it, so it was actually kinda cool and interesting when he talked into the camera and it shone intermittently. It was a nice cinematic touch, the light of the red laser flickering over the camera image. But then they put em on all the Borg in FC and it just ended up looking cheap and kinda silly. Carried over to the Voyager episodes too.

I'm actually just kinda surprised and pleased to find a voice like his on youtube, which is so full of just... videos that are funny because of their randomness. Ya know, stuff that's funny, but in a retarded sense. Really kinda lazy stuff. But I find kind of a kindred soul in those reviews. It's just like conversations I would have with my intelligent friends, about silly shit in Star Trek or some other scifi thing we're both interested in, but in video form and with really good editing. It's also the first time in a long while I've actually laughed out loud at something online multiple times, instead of a chuckle or a smile. Which is what most people do when they see something and type "lol."

One of the things that he points out in his First Contact review is the uncanny ability of the ship's computer to take a very simple and vague command like "Mid 22nd century attire" and somehow deliver exactly what the cast members need, without any further parameters. This reminded me of the absolute worst example of this phenomenon, which took place in a TNG episode called "Schisms." This episode was about interdimensional muckety mucks entering our universe and abducting Enterprise crewmembers for some weird experiments, like replacing a dude's bodily fluids with polymers or some shit.

Anyways, a few of em all gather together and decide to share their experiences so they can recollect what horrors happened to them. They go into the holodeck and ask the computer to construct stuff they remember from their abductions. This is where the shit goes crazy. They ask for stuff like metal tables or chairs, and the computer somehow knows exactly what size and model to give them. Or, they'll give out vague parameters like "table, medium height." Like... WTF? How the hell does the computer know what the fuck a medium height for a table is? Or if Riker tells it to make a "large table"... what qualifies as large? Four feet by eight? Six by six? It's just so damn silly... I was laughing all throughout this scene.

Just think how easy game development must be in the future, where all you have to do to design a holodeck level is to ask for a vague sort of environment. "Computer, trees... medium height!" "Computer, enemies, large, with guns... big guns, made out of metal of some kind."

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