They ran out of snacks. No one knows why. However, everyone knows that the gasoline is sold pretty close to cost, and the snacks are the real moneymaker.

Over the years, I’ve come to understand a lot about what people didn’t like about The Last Jedi. There are pacing issues and some of the setups strain credulity even within the gossamer veneer of Sci-Fi that’s wrapped around Star Wars. A lot of it is sort of nitpicking that would be forgiven if Luke had stormed down a hallway slicing people up in Act 3, but I get it. Ultimately, they just couldn’t buy what Rian was selling, but I did.

If you can roll with Luke being capable of backsliding just a bit and being flawed (and FFS, this is a fan base that rolled with letting him freakin’ join the Empire multiple times in their precious EU), then I think TLJ was actually trying to do something thematically and narratively interesting with a franchise that was stuck in the past. I thought it set up a really solid final chapter, though I too thought that with the lack of a time jump, maybe we could do 9 movies plus a capper. Critical to all of it is accepting that Snoke was a red herring, and that poor Ben Solo, conflicted and prescient as he was, was a tragic figure too deeply broken to be saved.

Also, sort of tangential here but just because I want to talk about it, the “tone poem” of Rose’s sister in the bomber is some straight up beautiful filmmaking that channeled George Lucas at his best, and while I didn’t grok it all until a few minutes later, it’s intentionally juxtaposed against Poe’s your-mom joke before the battle and lame excuses after. Now, the joke was still a bit too broad and Marvel-y for my taste, but I think it was a smaller miss than the haters declare.

Here you go. Check the Behind the Scenes section. Sounds like it wasn’t going to be explicit in the movie, but heavily implied.

The whole editing and pacing reminds me a lot of Rise of Skywalker, the entire movie felt like they crammed 2 or even 3 movies into one.

I’m an unapologetic The Last Jedi fan, so fair warning, but this is a huge part of the issue with The Rise of Skywalker. It was such a knee-jerk, panicky reaction to the mixed reception of TLJ that it materially made TROS worse than it needed to be. You can walk back some of the more divisive stuff in TLJ in a way that’s much more graceful and isn’t lampshading it with stupid shit like, “Come with us Rose! I can’t because Leia gave me homework!” or having Force Ghost Luke literally catch and return the Youngling-Slayer lightsaber. Even if you want to go a different direction, it needed to be “Yes, and…” rather than simply undoing TLJ. It left no one satisfied and wasted run-time.

Beyond that, I agree, there was just too much, with the redemption of Kylo Ren (assuming you needed to go that direction… I don’t agree) being enough to fill out an entire movie if done with care, and then the rebuilding the resistance and invading Exegol being plenty for another.

One of the true unforced errors of the Disney era, particularly the ST itself. I get that they didn’t want to be “MCU, Space Opera Division,” so they wanted to get a little auteur thing going on and let JJ et al do their own thing, but Lucas et al created literally dozens of aliens and for the most part none of them were in the ST, even in background roles. It made it feel disconnected. “The universe is too small” has also been a fair criticism, but (1) you don’t fix that all at once, and (2) they didn’t really do that anyway, just made all the aliens into pufferfish or catfish.

If we’re ever gonna get Hondo, this is probably it. Knowing Lucasfilm, it’ll probably be as a five-second end-of-season stinger though.

I agree the trailer looks fun. Goonies in space, plus a Jedi.

There’s just been a certain cheap and rushed quality to recent Star Wars outings, both in writing and actual production values, that has made them a lot less enjoyable than they could be. I actually kinda liked the Acolyte and hope in particular that we see Manny Jacinto again, but I can’t deny it was mostly just “kinda okay” and definitely seemed to squander its budget on cheap fake beards and fat toy lightsabers.

A breezy, fun story could handle that campy vibe a little better than ponderous end-of-galaxy stories, though. We need an infusion of charisma, too. I dunno. As always, I’m cautiously optimistic.

Yeah, that’s the part that doesn’t work. Even if they needed to cram the exposition in between the world-changing call to action and the hero’s refusal, you have to tie them together and give then some stakes: “Before I decide anything, you need to tell me WTF she’s talking about” or the like. But then you need more dialogue and it changes the tone of the scene.

It tracks better to have us drop in on the almost completed exposition conversation/rest and recovery after the sand people attack, before jumping into the next crisis.

I’m not much of a coder, but even if they’re doing something procedural, it can and should still have a blacklist.

So like, it wasn’t just hiding in the game’s dictionary, but someone or some pre-coded algorithm selected it to feature?

What the hell are they talking about? She’s been part of Star Wars for years!

You know what? Sue them ALL for false advertising!!! I bet this thing can’t even travel underwater.

Agreed, and I guess Star Trek would be the gold standard here, though many TV series would get a movie that received broad release, even if it wasn’t expected to be an absolute blockbuster. It doesn’t happen quite so much anymore, so, like, it’s an older code, sir, but it checks out.

By the same token, there’s a long tradition of successful shows eventually “getting a movie,” with varying degrees of success of course. They may bungle it, but it’s not like it’s an unprecedented challenge for screenwriters.

Much of what I’ve heard is comparing this to The Goonies, its peers, and its descendants. I feel like starting it off in an Earth-like suburb is a very conscious nod to that, and to remind the audience that we’re supposed to see the wonder inherent in what can’t help but be a very familiar setting for most viewers.

Doesn’t mean the show will be good or bad, but in-universe, a planet containing at least one district with well-manicured plant life and large single-family housing is plausible, and as a bit of filmmaking, I get the intentionality. I also assume we’ll be in more Star-Wars-y environs by episode three or so.

It’s not literally a scam, in that I’ve ordered things and they’ve arrived (in a timely fashion, actually), but the “free” stuff is pretty close to being one. The free credits or whatever are so over the top as to be eye rolling, so while they probably are officially a scam, I just couldn’t get too worked up.

Overall, it’s basically a tiny bit cheaper than AE, a tiny bit faster, but with more limited selection and they make the annoying gamification on AE look like the height of restraint and class. I found my personal line for trading time and tracking for cheap prices, and it’s between AE and Temu.

One tangential weird thing is that I’ve seen Shein, the fast fashion brand, has gone full “marketplace” and is now selling a lot of Temu like stuff that has absolutely nothing to do with clothes.

I’d be all for that, and I’m on several. That scene has so many people on Discord though, which is disheartening because Discord is awful.

He suggested that the company might experiment with paywalled subreddits as it looks to monetize new features. “I think the existing, altruistic, free version of Reddit will continue to exist and grow and thrive just the way it has,” Huffman said. “But now we will unlock the door for new use cases, new types of subreddits that can be built that may have exclusive content or private areas, things of that nature.”

Frankly, it sounds like he wants to take on OnlyFans, or more prosaically, Patreon? I guess? I suppose as a platform to host paid interactions with people who think they have unique content and interesting takes, Reddit’s as good as any, but the upside seems limited here.

So I still hang out on reddit a bit, mostly for mechanical keyboards and sports stuff, and they are very clearly letting old.reddit, and therefore RES along with it, die on the vine. You have to pop over to new reddit to do certain administrative things, and you (or at least I) can only upload a single picture on a post, and you have to use the new interface to upload a gallery. Clicking on images now often takes you to a weird new-interface landing page instead of the image itself or a page with the old interface. I think they’re going to erode the functionality until people give up and then say, “whelp… nobody was using it! Time to pull the plug!”

At which point I’m probably done. Then, Dystopia is almost the last iOS app standing but I don’t think they’re updating it much, so I’m probably out if/when they go too.

I’ve sort of accepted as a middle aged man with middle aged friends and senior citizen relatives that being tracked across mainstream social media is a thing that will be in my life, so it’s not even ideological, really. Reddit is just a lot less pleasant to use on the new interfaces, with the new monetization mindset, and doesn’t have the “killer app” of my actual friends and family, so it needs to be a pleasant experience and community, and not feel like I’m navigating a bot-farm ad-soaked beatdown every time I use it.

Not particularly helpful for you, but this seemed like the thread to chime in that in general with pizza, it’s always MUCH better to go big. Pi*r², folks. A single 14" Dominos is already pretty much identical to two 10" mediums, and that’s only if you like to eat the crust. Always do your math by dollars per area, not diameter.