JJSBlog

I'm not sure how much of Discovery you saw last night, so I won't start up on that yet. However, yesterday before Discovery I messed around a bit with CBS All Access, and... I think they need to work harder.

First, their trial period sucks. I'm already in for now because I'm a big Star Trek nut, but in general they're going to be competing with services like Netflix and Prime. Whereas Netflix gives people a month to check out the services, CBS gives a week--for the version with commercials. The trial for the commercial-free option is all of two damn days.

Second, their lineup of originals kind of sucks. I know Netflix didn't come into creation with the strong lineup of original stuff they've got now, but we've known about Discovery being a pusher for All Access for nearly two years now; I thought there'd be a little more meat on the bones at this point. As far as I can see there are two proper shows (The Good Fight, Discovery) and two secondary shows (After Trek, some Big Brother thing).

Third, for something called CBS All Access, it seems to fail to give all access to CBS. Browsing the shows they show an episode count right away so it's easy to see which shows are in full and which are far from. I think Big Bang Theory had less than 10 episodes available, The Late Show seemed to have about a month's worth of shows (though The Late Late Show had many more), and Elementary only had clips.

Fourth, and considering how much they're trying to push this to Star Trek fans... I don't think it has the HD version of TNG? I wanted to put my connection to the test--what kind of quality would it default to, what kind of buffering ensued from trying too high, things like that. So I used All Good Things as my first test, and it looked surprisingly blurry even at max quality. I was at first worried even their max quality was just shit, but trying out some of the Discovery promos those came out fine. Also trying a TOS episode now, that seems to be the HD version. Trying another TNG episode now, it looks pretty bad. Like DVD version + mediocre recompression for streaming.

Being CBS, it makes sense that it has a TV focus. But having a Movies section with just 24 movies makes it seem smaller than if there was no movie section at all.

Steven Moffat's time as showrunner of Doctor Who is nearly up, and many seem totally jazzed about it. But his work really clicks with me. In the earlier series of the show his was the first name I began to associate with standout episodes, so when he was announced as the successor to Russell T. Davies it was like a wish being granted. His tenure hasn't been perfect, but I'd boil down the major reasons I dig his version of the show to these points.

1. I like Time Travel

With two capital Ts. I appreciate stories that really take advantage of it, moreso than just using it to set the story in an arbitrary time and place. He was pretty good at stretching what could be done in a single episode with his episodes in the Davies days like Blink and Girl in the Fireplace, but as showrunner he was both able to make this happen on many of the biggest episodes (premieres, finales) as well as having nonlinear elements that spread across a whole series or even multiple. The Doctor from the end of series 5 popping into an earlier series 5 episode. The events of the end of series 7 being a cause for events at the end of series 5. I eat this shit up.

2. I like Moffat monsters

For better and worse we're probably never going to get away from Daleks and Cybermen, but it's great to see new types of foes with new twists. Statues that can only move when not being looked at. Creatures you forget you ever saw when they leave your sight. Making fear of the dark legitimate with living shadows that can eat your flesh. Something that can hide so well... the episode can't even come to a conclusion about whether it exists.

3. I like that he goes Big

Some of this is chance. Him being around for the 50th anniversary gave him an excuse to write something Major, in this case a story that revealed an unknown Doctor and in small part brought all the past ones back. Thanks to that unknown Doctor, he put himself in the position of being the one to write around that mysterious regeneration limit. Beyond that we see him doing things like letting the Doctor get stuck on a planet for hundreds of years in a single episode (without reversing it), or get stuck in a loop that takes billions of years to work through. Destroying and recreating the friggin' universe! He's also more willing to play with the various regenerations than any showrunner I'm familiar with, like having a phone call from Eleven in Twelve's first episode. That he's pulling back the First Doctor for his last Christmas special just seems par for the course.

ALL THAT SAID, he's had six full series and then some to make his mark on the franchise and some of his hallmarks have become pretty repetitive, so it probably is time for some fresh blood. It just probably won't be blood that tickles all of my specific fancies so well.

So I wanted to continue working on the system of different asteroids for different sizes. My thought is I'll have an array (or series of parallel arrays) which will have information like minimum mass, maximum mass, sprite used, name of object. Then given a certain mass it can pick only from valid options. Both a minimum and maximum are because I figure it's more interesting if there's some overlap between types of objects, rather than a flat cutoff. Or it could even be possible to have rare objects that only exist in a very narrow range. Whatever. But before doing this I needed to see how arrays work in GameMaker, and it seems... kind of stupid. More a pain to use than in other languages I've dealt with.

Thing 1: Initializing arrays. In some languages, you can just give a specific size for an array. In other languages, it doesn't set limits, and you can even use words as keys for the array rather than just a series of integers. In GML, you need to initialize every spot in the array similar to declaring a variable, before the program is allowed to do anything with it. Like for Zenzenzen purposes if I wanted to keep track of the last 10 asteroids I merged with for whatever reason, I'd first have to do some sort of loop and set lastmerged[i]=0 as a default value or whatever.

Thing 2: Initializing the data in arrays. In PHP which I've used the most in recent years, if I want to set up an array with multiple values it can be as simple as $Names = array("Josh", "Zach", "Austin", "Luke"). In GML that isn't done. I'd need to have a line for name[0] = "Josh"; and another for every other value. It seems like unless you're dealing with a very small set of data it will be the sensible thing to set up a file with the data (or a string which can be made to be treated like a file) and read that into an array with a loop.