Jolt Country

Just got home from seeing the last film of the Skywalker saga. Not gonna lie; the bearded stranger sitting next to me and I were both wiping tears away toward the end of the film.

I've seen reviews that said it was great and reviews that said it was horrible. I think there were parts of it that were great and parts that were horrible. I'm about to go start reading reviews.

I saw the original Star Wars (I hate calling it "A New Hope") about a month after it came out in 1977. I was almost four years old. Since then, I've seen every other Star Wars film opening day -- that's episodes 1-3, 5-9, plus Solo and Rogue One. The saw the early ones with my dad, and the most recent ones with my kids.

The circle is now complete.

I feel like the "online critics" - a profession that is already pretty worthless - can't be trusted much on this one.

I am still coming down off a Star Wars high so it will take me 1-2 days to fully process everything from a logical (as opposed to emotional) perspective.

On the negative side, I'll say this. Some people and situations are introduced that are tough to buy into. Like, and this isn't a spoiler unless you've avoided watching any of the trailers (at which point you should stop reading at this point) but part of the film takes place in the old remains of the Death Star. It's a cool scene, definitely eerie. Problem is, this is a screen shot from the end of Return of the Jedi, the last time we saw the Death Star.



So there's definitely some things you just have to buy into if you want to enjoy the film.

Yeah, Jar-Jar being awful is about the only thing everyone agrees on with Phantom Menace. Most reviews aren’t even worth reading.

It took me forever to get around to seeing Last Jedi in digital but maybe I can catch this new one in the next couple of weeks.

It is neat we’re in the “old school Star Wars club”. I saw Return of the Jedi in the theater at the same age you saw episode IV :)

Hahaha that Death Star nuke! How the hell would there be anything left?! Then again Flack, didn’t you assume the Death Star was finished when it was internally exploded from the center in Episode IV?

Yes -- well, that Death Star was blown to bits. They were building a newer, larger one in Return of the Jedi, which seemed to also get blown to bits. If there's one thing we've learned in 42 years, it's that bad guys are not good at secure construction.

Now the guys (things) building these Death Stars...they are the same guys that didn't make the AT-STs Ewok proof?

Did aanyone ever see the movie Clerks where Randall is discussing all the innocent people killed when the Death Star blew up.

The empire can't have had enough skilled tradespeople to do all the construction. They would have to hire contractors and construction companies, tens or hundreds of thousands of innocents whose only crime was accepting work on a huge iucrative government contract.

Or like being hired to replace the roof of the home of a crime lord, iIf he gets whackled on the day you get hired to replace his roof, it's unfair if the assasin kills you, too.

The empire didn't care that much and the Rebels conceded that some collateral deaths were inevitable.

ICJ, please pay Tdarcos for a list of hot takes on Kevin Smith films, sorted from his favorite to least favorite.

Tdarcos wrote: Sat Dec 21, 2019 11:18 pm The empire can't have had enough skilled tradespeople to do all the construction. They would have to hire contractors and construction companies, tens or hundreds of thousands of innocents whose only crime was accepting work on a huge iucrative government contract.

It was over a million.

Wait, there were a lot of droids, weren't there?

From Wikipedia: "The first Death Star is depicted in various sources of having a crew of 265,675, as well as 52,276 gunners, 607,360 troops, 30,984 stormtroopers, 42,782 ship support staff, and 180,216 pilots and support crew."

There is no official count of how many droids were on it, but... yeah. There were a lot of those, too.

Just to get full reddit geek here, we're talking about something that destroyed entire planets so who cares about who died on the thing.

Obi Wan wrote:I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

Yeah, those guys had what was coming to them and in terms of droids, well, something the internet has me is that if a bad person writes software or makes hardware, everything they have EVER TOUCHED is bad.

Ice Cream Jonsey wrote: Sun Dec 22, 2019 5:43 pm Yeah, those guys had what was coming to them and in terms of droids, well, something the internet has me is that if a bad person writes software or makes hardware, everything they have EVER TOUCHED is bad.

Steve Jobs, right?

Not specifically. I wouldn't want to work for him and I'd like to think that if someone addressed me at work the way that he frequently addressed people who worked for him I would simply leave. The Irishman has a good scene where that happens. DeNiro is getting yelled and and just leaves and gets his coat because he is quitting.

I have given Apple's stuff plenty of second and third chances. I think what finally swore me off iPhones and iPads was the expense versus the intentional degradation of service after a couple years. I bought my (now) wife an iPad2 the first Christmas I knew her and it was not cheap. $599? It was great. For two years. And they make it so it can't run the old stuff. Everyone knew they were degrading the phones and then it was proven. (All because they won't let you replace the battery, which forces people to buy new phones. Even that wasn't enough for them, they had to make the existing phones worse.) That catches up with everyone at various levels - for me, I'm done. Other people make other choices.

I guess in my post I was thinking more about a guy named Brandon Eich who contributed money toward Prop 8 in California. He was not on the side of gay people. He - who I think is referred to as the creator of JavaScript - had the internet screaming at him so much that he left (voluntarily or not, I dunno) the board for Mozilla.

But there's lots of examples.

It is why we can no longer enjoy Jimmy John's sandwiches. Which are delicious.

I have not viewed this program.