wjrii @ wjrii @kbin.social

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514

Joined

2 yr. ago

Gmail was also both "federated" and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn't all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.

Discord in particular exists to make me feel old and to hide useful information that should be in a searchable forum. Matrix sounds like that, but open source and federated.

I occasionally dabble in genealogical research. OP's meme is baby stuff, and I don't even know the field. I feel you, anonymous internet stranger. You would enjoy handwritten census records entered by a barely literate person with shaky 19th century cursive, microfilmed in the 60s, scanned in the 90s, and "transcribed" by a Mormon granny who's never left Utah County in her entire life.

Reminds me of coppices in Europe, though not sure if that's what we're looking at here.

It's an instance of its own. https://startrek.website

Also George Lucas, Nationalizing private enterprise is bad, m'kay?

The man tries to be on the side of the angels, god bless 'im, but while it's clear politics were one more source to draw from in world building, he was not making any particularly coherent political argument, even in the PT; it all just more or less jibes with the worldview of a left-leaning Californian boomer.

Well... this one is a bit on the nose given Jennifer Lien's post ST history.

I have to try hard to remember that my own perceptions as one of the last of the OT kids (saw ROTJ in theaters as a young child) are informative, but not definitive. Everybody enjoys what they enjoy, but the particular areas where the PT was lacking, combined with the insane buildup in the fallow period from 83-99, left me trying to will TPM to be better than it was, and just feeling beat down by the next two.

TFA made a particular point to address the specific shortcomings in the PT, and I give it a lot of credit for that, but it made a lot of brand new mistakes. Mistakes I think TLJ was doing a wonderful job of fixing, until they overcorrected and made TROS, which pissed off literally everybody and left it tied for last in my order despite it being bad (to me) in a very different way than AOTC.

The thing that speaks best of TROS is that it wraps the whole era up in what amounts to a single terrible year for the New Republic.

TFA was a lark, and it was infinitely more watchable than any prequel, but TLJ was less than it could have been precisely because JJ did nothing interesting. In that sense, TFA was a movie wasted on being a palette cleanser. TLJ reset the board with a more compelling supreme leader, a Jedi that was ready to move forward instead of living in the past, a potential new relationship with the Force, and supporting heroes that were ready to be more than they'd been created as. It explored what the Luke that JJ hinted at in TFA would have to be, and made him a snarkier version of Dagobah Yoda before letting him begin fixing the problems that Jediness created.

It was not perfect. The slow speed chase was a terrible framing device that left enough nerd-questions that it became distracting, even for me. Canto Bight did drag despite being shorter than people think. Finn's arc was too narrow a bump from his TFA arc, though it was handled with more grace. Leia Poppins was fine conceptually (she was out there less than a minute, just force pulled something, and it all sent her into a coma), but it looked a little goonie and unfortunately left people feeling unsatisfied after Carrie Fisher's death. Holdo plot was thematically excellent but executed a little too "gotcha" style in having us root for Poe's harebrained scheme for too long. Rose was not really a character meant to develop, but rather an embodiment of the spirit of the Resistance, but that made her a little less likeable than she could have been. The your-mom joke was cringey, and something less in-your-face would have served the narrative purpose.

Still, I found its flaws pretty skin deep, and I really appreciated what it was trying to do. I was very annoyed that TROS took so many pains to actively and explicitly shit on it. If they were improv students, Rian would be kind of exasperating, but thoughtful and still squarely in the realm of "Yes, And...." JJ in TROS was more like, well, somebody else.

LOL, though that does raise the question of what a Star Wars movie would need to do to be worse than the Holiday Special. I'd say TPM would have to include literally an hour of Jar Jar saying "poodoo" ("Dooku?") to be worse.

A huge part of enjoying a movie for me is simply being able to sit through it without wanting to puncture my eardrums. Apart from a couple of truly lovely sequences, thinking specifically of McDiarmid in the literal "space opera" and the dialogue-less Order 66 tone poem, ROTS has almost all the same issues with direction, writing, and and acting that AOTC does. The performances are stilted, the dialogue needed more than one additional draft, and different takes should have been filmed and/or used.

Every explanation I've heard from fans or even GL just rings hollow; the OT had some groaners, but by and large the cast and crew kept the floor higher, and contemporary reviews of ANH from '77 are not nearly as hard on the acting as you may have heard. Everyone was coming out of New Hollywood and a very naturalistic style, and while no one was getting nominated for performances, there was give and take that worked out better. On that front, the ST has parts that don't hold up upon reflection, but other than a little too much Marvel zingerness, it's just much nicer to sit through even when it makes little sense.

As for TLJ, it has some issues with pacing and a fairly big one with the framing device of the slow-speed chase, but by and large I loved 90% of what it was doing, especially in light of the soft-reboot mindset and thin world-building that JJ left Rian Johnson with. Luke abandoned the galaxy in shame after Kylo blew everything up and cannot be found: there are literally only two options: He's hiding while searching for something, or he's hiding because he thinks he's a problem. Rian picked one, and picked one that was more interesting to explore, character-wise. I can appreciate it. Maybe it's always a mistake to revisit iconic characters after decades away, but "Jake Skywalker" struck me as a perfectly plausible backslide for the Luke we saw in TESB specifically, but also the OT generally. His ability to shake it off and embrace his own legacy and make a personal sacrifice to save his friends and ideals absolutely worked for me. I am a foolish and grizzled veteran of the stupid /r/starwars TLJ threads, so I could go on and on about Snoke and Rose and all of it, but suffice it to say I am one of those TLJ weirdos. Flawed as it is, it's better than anything since the OT.

Finally, the ROTS novel. If this and this and this are your cup of tea, then you do you, but I actively dislike Stover's style.

ESBANHROTJTLJTFATPMROTS(AOTC=TROS)

Fight me.

So, the frames are printed on the Voxelab and the steppers are playing on the MPSM?

Still pretty cool, but I admit my expectation was that the gcode would somehow play the tune but somehow result in the single print from the thumbnail. Unrealistic I suppose.

Bye.

Seems it's about 3 meters.

Ahh, the Bezos plan.

OP, there's a factual error in the headline. The cop on the call is a union leader who showed up afterwards. We don't know, at least not from this story, how the officer who hit the woman reacted.

Edit: Best I could find.

I feel like, if it's not already a thing and I'm just out of the loop due to being old and whatnot, that this is a very promising meme template.

Fair to point out, and prompted me to listen to the video. Having done so, the tone in the minute or so leading up to the comments does not strike my ear as backing up the officer's claim. It's not openly mocking like the comments, but it's absolutely thin-blue-line bullshit, minimizing the possibility of culpability by his colleague, and spinning the facts right from the get-go. I can almost buy that there is an element of wonder that this is the world they live in, but it felt a lot more like happy relief that they have the privilege of their position, rather than the sarcastic gallows humor you might expect from someone who finds the situation depressing.

Without adding any details, the last three jump 30, 5, and 1. The thirty makes the world-building they wanted to do more sensible, and underlines that this is the start of something pretty different and final, but contrary to @nxfsi, I think it was handled fairly well.