Anyways, I saw TPM 9 times in the first 48 hours.

My friends thought I was nuts for seeing it six times during its first and dollar-theater runs. There was so much interesting stuff to unpack…

…except the plot or acting (barring Ian McDiarmid and Liam Neeson).

I tried so hard, but poor Jake Lloyd was never given anything to work with, and Natalie Portman and Samuel L Jackson and any other actors who were hoping for some competent direction were hung out to dry too. Some of the worst line readings I’ve ever heard from professional actors.

Then there was JarJar… and watto… and the neimoidians… oh, and the utter lack of a compelling story…

Like you, though, I convinced myself that the bones were good, and then also that they were just getting warmed up and episode two would be a banger. Spoiler alert: it was not, though it had a few isolated moments as well.

It was so much worse than that. People had been waiting 16 years to see a proper cinematic continuation of Star Wars. There were some pulp novels, a couple of very weak kids cartoons, a pretty decent tabletop RPG with source materials, a few video games, and that was about it. For a franchise that was still iconic and incredibly popular despite lying fallow like that.

We got a more distilled version of George’s vision, and hoo-boy it just simply wasn’t very good. I still saw that movie six fuckin’ times (the last three at the dollar theater), but while there was plenty to digest and feed my nerdery, the story and acting just never got better.

Surely they were just getting warmed up though, and episode two would be better…

JJ Abrams, but yes. I will give TPM credit for production design and world building and for a few of the veteran actors’ performances.

TFA gave us a cast of characters you could do something with, and apart from sounding a bit too much like a Joss Whedon movie, performances that were at least not delivered by cardboard cutouts. I didn’t completely mind the plot being a rehash, but the contortions they went through to make the state of the galaxy exactly fit a rehash doomed the entire trilogy.

Waited in a three-hour-ish line for The Phantom Menace. 100 minutes of “I’m sure it will get better” followed by the Naboo duel tricking my fanboy brain into thinking it was a good movie.

Mechanical keyboards, though about forty percent of them at this point are ones I feel comfortable saying I “made,” which is to say I did something significantly more involved than assembling a barebones kit. Still, they’re accumulating a bit and sometimes I build one just to try some small layout tweak or technique I haven’t done before.

I also have a fountain pen collection, but I haven’t added much to it recently. It’s not a bad gift vector for loved ones though, and it turns out that my Montblanc really is nice, though not by such a margin that I was ever going to pay for it myself.

In general, the production design here is on-point, but I have a weird feeling that about 80% of the movie will be on Earth. Maybe I’m just jaded by being a little kid when the Lundgren movie came out, but given that history I’m surprised they went with a concept involving Earth at all.

ND Stevenson’s She-Ra is by far the best stuff done in this broader franchise, but the Kevin Smith He-Man wasn’t bad either. Neither of them spends a moment on Earth.

“we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it”

When used in a fitting situation, that’s one I’ve always really liked.

If they do not have a a trio of synchronized crocodiles (alligators may be acceptable depending on setting), I will burn the theater down. I do not care what premise they claim to be doing.

A few years ago, I used my meager seniority award at work ($100 for ten years! Yay…?) to get a Monoprice Select Mini 3D printer. That set off a journey that has been a lot of fun. I’m using a Sovol SV08 now, but the Mini was a great gateway printer at that time.

This feels like the sort of blurry case that litigation is actually well suited for. It’s clear there was something beyond an inspiration board, yet the end result is also a blue alien. Evaluate the law, establish a value for the design, and make your case. In typical James Cameron fashion, there’s a sense of “I mean well, so I can’t possibly be an insufferable jackass!”

Didn’t Prodigy show one in a cargo bay making a shuttlecraft? My memory is a bit hazy.

He is, he’s just doing it himself.

All I want is that top comments under posts are something insightful and related to the post, and not just the same one liner boring jokes that keep getting upvoted for some reason.

I’ll defend these, at least a little bit. Yeah, it’s obnoxious to get bland and repetitive slop to wade through, but there can be a fine line between that and some community-building in-jokes and shitposting, and I admit I am an absolute sucker for pun threads and especially “No that’s ABC, You’re thinking of XYZ” exchanges. Banter with familiar rhythms isn’t necessarily toxic.

If you have to eat that, you lose anyway.

According to the reddit OP, it’s the Vande Bharat Express in India. The ports look like the typical travel adapter ports that can handle several different plug types, but the UK plug sort of asserts itself visually, LOL.

Looks more likely to be a sticker or fridge magnet that they slapped on a project enclosure. This one looks to be almost identical, and it seems like they used their headsets for a virtual wind tunnel and for navigating Antarctic submersibles.

That is one hell of a Petrova line.

Oh yay, Trump actually figured out how to make Iran’s government worse! What a winner he is!

Doors and corners, kid.