I actually kinda like Rogue One but the main thing I remember about the movie is that when they properly introduce the blind monk character, Chirrut Îmwe, it’s in the middle of a fight and he shows up to knock out stormtroopers with his walking stick. And at first it’s sort of cool, but then it goes on forever, and it starts to feel silly, and you can feel the cracks in the choreography because you start to think “surely one of these guys would just shoot him in the back” and then the character is just there and basically doesn’t do or say anything of significance until his death scene. Sort of the problem of the entire movie in microcosm. Lots of interesting ideas for characters that don’t get much to do or say. Even the best fleshed out character, Jyn, feels contradictory and ultimately thinly characterized.

As I always say, the novelization is much better.

Hey I don’t know how aware you are of this but they just put out a biopic about your life, mostly about you joining the rebellion. It was pretty good, they got Diego Luna to play you and everything. Maybe a little prettier than the real thing, eh? Anyway, while watching I kept waiting for you to directly address the audience and specify that you are the exact same type of communist that I am, but you never did. Why was that cut from the film, do you think?

They’ll never invent trains. You just can’t enshittify a train to the necessary level of profitability for these monsters.

I love AOTC, on paper. A hard-boiled detective story; Star-crossed lovers; A political thriller; All set across the epic backdrop of space in an age where a once great government is coming to its end. What’s not to love?

In practice though if ROTS is a screw-up child, and TPM is like a kid who you thought was going to be president but then ended up as a working mid-tier stand-up comic like just enough to make a living but not enough to “make it”, then AOTC is a kid who grew up to be a serial killer.

Also I’m pretty sure the novelization is by R.A. Salvatore. I’ve not read it but I have read some of his other novels and the man’s not a miracle worker like Stover.

I love the version of AOTC that lives in my head, but every seven years or so when I convince myself to do a rewatch I find I just can’t enjoy it. Some really great ideas, but the execution of them is something else. I really think that with the right script doctor, some judicious editing, and maybe a second director who is just in charge of the actors, it could have been something really great. But what we’re left with is tough to love. But I respect you for doing what I can not.

Clearly it’s too late now, but I think the answer is to just jump into watching A New Hope.

Also I can’t believe we learn some of Luthen’s backstory. I just assumed he was someone a bit like Mon Mothma, using his real name and the real identity he had during the time of the Republic as an antiquities dealer as a cover for his rebel activities. Much more interesting to learn that he was an NCO with a penchant for artifacts who got fed up one day and made a choice of where to stand, just like the people he recruits. Interesting that it seems no one, not even Kleya, will ever know Luthen’s real name or who he really was before he rebelled.

Incredible that Tony Gilroy came along and just made the best thing Star Wars has put out since 1980. Why would he do that?

My personal enjoyment of the operatic tragedy that is Revenge of the Sith might edge out Andor, slightly, but loving ROTS is what I imagine it must feel like to have a kid who’s a real screw-up. You love them and you see all the best parts of them, but you can’t deny the mistakes they’ve made. But unlike ROTS I don’t needs to qualify my enjoyment of Andor. It’s not like twenty years from now I’m going to say “oh I like Andor but have you read the novelization? It completely realizes what that show was trying to do,” like I do now with both ROTS and Rogue One.

I think next paycheck I’m going to splurge and buy a lot of the old X-wing novel series if I can find one that’s not too high.

What an incredible face Genevieve O’Reilly pulled there, and what a good show. Can’t believe the spin-off streaming TV show for the only serviceable Star Wars movie Disney put out has becoming one of my GOATs.

Thinking about buying a lot of all the de-canonized X-wing novels just to get a fix. Even considering buying Alexander Freed’s sequel-era trilogy (Alphabet Squadron) because he wrote a good book about rebel grunts in the age of the empire (Twilight Company, which is actually a spin-off of the terrible fucking battlefront game Disney put out) and he also did the novelization for Rogue One, which I thought was quite good, better than the film. But my disdain for the sequel era stops me, for now.

The last bootleg feed I knew of for Trueanon (jumble.top I believe) seems to be down. A sad day when I can’t get podcast slop for free but there’s no world in which I am paying $5 a month for Trueanon, a podcast. Easy come easy go.

Talked to the guy at work who loves WH40K and he said “You know that show made me switch from rooting for the Rebels to rooting for the Empire. Because you see in Andor they don’t have it that bad.”

And I said “haha yeah” because what can you even say to a statement so baldly wrongheaded.

I am formally demanding that the site admins change both the domain name and the associated site branding of this website to hexarmadillo

Disney must really be paying for a marketing blitz for their new marvel movie, because my twitter timeline is full of it.

I don’t watch marvel movies, I don’t much like them, I don’t interact with posts about them. If I do, it’s usually accounts I follow making fun of whatever the latest Marvel slop is. The recent Captain America movie they did, Deadpool & Wolverine, Doctor Strange, etc. I really only see posts mocking these films. When a marvel movie is (comparatively) well-received I really don’t see much about it. I heard the latest Guardians of the Galaxy movie was well liked, I didn’t see a single post about that film. The last time I can remember there being serious activity on my TL is either when everyone was making fun of the Scarlet Witch show or when everyone was making fun of Eternals.

But this new Thunderbolts movie, I swear every other post is about it. Not from accounts I follow, either. Not making fun of the movie, but excitedly buying into its marketing gimmicks. Every post is Taskermaster this, New Avengers that, Florence Pugh is slayying in this one queen. I hate it. I’m not interacting with this posts, I demand they go away.

One more sign I should stop using social media, but do I ever learn?

Someday I’ll check to see if I’ve actually got the right mega before clicking post.

Removed by mod

Just watched Louis Theroux’s new doc about Israeli settlers. I felt like his life was in danger every time he talked to one of them. They are all armed, deranged lunatics.

I’m listening to the audiobook for Fairy Tale by Stephen King. It’s not bad so far, but it has been funny because it’s from the POV of a 16 year old boy in 2013, but it’s fairly clear it’s written by the then ~75 year old King. The only references to pop culture so far have been Cujo, the original Psycho, and a nonspecific mention that the main character’s favorite music is classic rock/heavy metal.

The Cujo reference was pretty astounding because a character references it offhand as a pop culture totem, a thing everyone knows. It didn’t feel like a sly wink-wink-nod-nod “I wrote that” from King, it was totally natural.

And while it’s not impossible that a 17 year old in 2013 could have seen the 1960 film Psycho, it still definitely feels like a very old man writing about his own youth, or maybe the times when his now-middle-aged sons were young. For the first ten minutes or so I just assumed this story was set in the late '50s like the first half of IT. It wasn’t until the narrator mentioned Amazon that I realized it was supposed to be more current.

I’m sure plenty of 17 year olds in 2013 happened to share Stephen King’s love of baseball, but there’s been no reference to YouTube, or whatever TV was popular among teens that year, or celebrities, or video games. At the very least this guy should have an opinion of Justin Bieber. There’s no way the only things a 17 year old in 2013 likes are Psycho, baseball, and classic rock.

Edit: I’ve been watching a gameplay stream and I was wrong about the UI, they’ve kept much of it the same. I swear it looked worse in announcement video I watched before.

I’ve been looking into the Oblivion remaster for the last hour. As a huge fan of the original I have to say it looks pretty promising so far. The only thing I’ve seen that strikes me as immediately disappointing is the changes to the UI. Just the visual presentation, I mean. I liked that everything in the original looked like a scroll and it had whatever neat font they used. Now it’s in line with Skyrim’s boring UI design which looks like the touchscreen of a new vehicle. Much less character.

Gonna watch some gameplay from a third party and if I like what I see then I’ll, uh, look into what the best options are for obtaining this game I already own.

Seeing Alex Garland’s Civil War content on my Twitter timeline again and I just want to state my position on that movie. One, I think the director claiming the film is “apolitical” is downright cowardly. The movie ends with a black woman soldier shooting the President, who is clearly supposed to be Donald Trump, in the head. “Oh, the movie is actually condemning both sides for this imaginary violence” I don’t think it is. Portions of the movie are condemning explicitly white supremacist violence. But it seemed to me to fetishize the violence of the liberal alliance armed forces (which I remember was a union of Texas and California). The movie revels is the long drawn out sequence of the lib forces taking the White House, delights in the moment the woman shoots the President in the head. It pretends to condemn it “oh, he was an unarmed prisoner of war. He should’ve stood trial before the nation,” but you can tell the movie doesn’t really mean it.

Two, I’ve always felt the movie was a shallow Twitter-brained view of US politics/the lines US society would divide down in the event of a Second American Civil War. And the movie frames itself as this critique of adrenaline junkie jaded War Journalists, but I felt even this was ultimately insincere.

All that said, a pretty good watch. I mean, a shallow movie, but the tension and pacing, the dread and fear throughout the film is really great. And I remember liking the score and stuff too.

whitehouse .com appears to be an election betting site now. Grim days.