DaveSumm

In fairness, I guess Majors has been told he may end up playing dozens of different Kangs so he needs to create space for it. I enjoyed it too, although I still think the show needs to buckle down and explain what the stakes are and focus. You’ll notice the Worlds Fair stuff was all a branched timeline, implying this isn’t how Timely originally got so smart. But I assume the kid is ‘our’ Kang, that he’s always born in the 19th century. Hard to see how he would ever go on to become any Conqueror / He Who Remains without TVA intervention. I’m really hoping we don’t get the same idea we have with Lokis, that someone who clearly has different genes and a different name is just “a Kang” for some reason.

You’ll get no ‘justification’ from me, or for half the shit Thames does. But it’s the “therefore, privatisation bad” part of the logic I just never see evidence for. From Wikipedia: So what is it we should do with Welsh Water exactly?

I’m pages away from finishing Lost Metal, then I’ll start the secret projects. It’s bonkers that I started reading the Cosmere just before Lost Metal was out, and he’s released 5 more books in the time it took me to read.

Should’ve stuck around for more than 10 minutes, there were plenty of character moments. I was really glad to see others wonder if they missed an episode, I had no clue why they were hunting X5, or why they need to find Sylvie so desperately. It took me a while to realise X5 was the same guy from the first episode. The season is short on exposition but I think I read it as follows; the TVA always used to clip timelines before they had a chance to establish themselves as full Branched Universes. They thought this was to preserve the sacred timeline, but actually it was Kang preventing other Kangs. But now, the TVA all know that it was a ruse and have split into factions; Renslayer is off doing something we don’t know yet, that other women figured that bombing all of them was the best plan (clipping back to the sacred timeline, except this time it’s tragic because these are branch timelines and therefore everyone in them dies instead of being merged back). I actually don’t think I understand what Loki and Möbius’s feelings are here? They definitely wanted to stop the bombings, but also definitely want to stop Kang…? So what’s their strategy? I’m also having to adhoc some logic about the flow of things; possibly TVA time is tied to Kang, so now that he’s ‘dead’, even though that’s the end of time, they share the same linear flow of time that Kang does so he’s also not overseeing things anymore? Or something.

I’ve seen a lot of people welcome this as good news but I can’t really tell. Either it was heading to be on par with the other fairly weak shows we’ve had, and they wisely shook things up. Or, it was quite good but a bit bold, and they Marveled it and bled it dry of any distinguishing creativity and it’ll turn out fairly weak. Hopefully they just get as much of the Netflix team back and make season 4. If this turns out as good as Daredevil’s weakest season, it’d be my favourite D+ show.

Yea really enjoyed that. I hope this season starts to pull together some threads so we can start building to Kang Dynasty / Secret Wars. FYI there’s a post credit scene.

That was a pretty mental speech. I can only assume they’re trying to court the working class vote, and trying to sell the idea that two of their boogeymen (the Rich and the Woke) are actually the same? What? I was genuinely confused that I’d missed a section when she started talking about people who advocate for human rights “in their ivory towers”. I don’t associate woke with rich in the slightest.

That’s true, I just see UK water used a lot to ‘prove’ that it must be a bad idea when the stats don’t really support that. ‘Saving money’ isn’t a good general goal for governments either. I think privatisation should be considered very carefully in all instances, but for me it’s more complicated than a blanket ‘bad or ‘good’.

See tweet 11. See tweet 17. Anyway, I don’t wanna keep going to bat for this stuff, but to bring it sort of back to the thread: in this case I really don’t believe that privatisation is the root problem here. The government is entirely welcome to set whatever standards it wants for water companies, but if they were footing the bill then that’s a huge disincentive for them to raise those standards. Water quality, both drinking and waste, has unequivocally improved since privatisation.

Shared in the UK thread a while ago but I’ll share it again: https://x.com/loftussteve/status/1659637753158545414?s=46&t=OTLdG0wwYT1_7Eb_nXeJlw (Why some tweets embed and some do not, only God / Ran knows)

So this is how the last thread dies … with more PT bashing. Which I, for one, am all for. Please continue.

Anyone else hate this line? It thinks it’s a lot more clever than it is. All a bit r/im14andthisisdeep. (Also it’s liberty fyi).

I’ve just barely heard of GB News let alone anyone on it.

I’m happy to justify my negative take with these films because there is so precious little positive about them. They are, overall, terrible. Jar Jar specifically, I think I agree with the Cosmonaut review I posted some threads back, I think Phantom Menace would be worse without him. He’s annoying, borderline racist, there to sell toys, but FUCK the movie would just be so lifeless and dull without him. At least he’s trying to emote something. Not like every other cast member who just flatly tells some other characters where the plot’s going to go next.

Kinda I guess. As mentioned before, he did more work with Anakin in CW than Lucas did in three films. I think Mando Season 1 was excellent, the best Star Wars content since Empire. But I kinda agree the more plot it has the more bogged down it’s gotten. I certainly would’ve been interested to see his version of the ST, though I still haven’t heard a convincing story idea that anyone’s ST needs to exist at all.

But once again, we already knew this. We knew he was a friend and pupil of Obi-Wan’s, who fought in the clone wars, and then turned to the dark side. The grand total of his arc seems to be “he’s a whiny prick who then suddenly killed some kids”. Filoni was the one who actually bothered to include an arc, showing Anakin develop sympathies for more totalitarian politics, and actually trying to smooth over the two characters of Anakin and Vader. I mean maaaybe? I’m struggling to think of any critical details that Filoni really used as a jumping off point. They’re a bunch of stoics who sit around in a circle, there’s way less detail than we wanted to see. Again no, he was always going to figure in anyone’s version of the prequels. He’s the Emperor to whom Vader swears allegiance, he’s critical to Anakin’s story. OK, but it’s not like the entire series hinges on that. It ends up there, of course. Anyway the original point I was answering was that Lucas did something special that JJ/Disney didn’t, when really all he did was ask Filoni to make a series. Hence, a series exists. It could’ve existed regardless of who made the prequels, and would almost certainly be better for it.

Let’s not give prequel-era Lucas too much credit though, what does the Clone Wars series ultimately rely on? There’s a clone war going on, and there’s these guys called Anakin and Obi-Wan and Yoda fighting in it. I could’ve told you that in 1977. Filoni made a decent series, but I don’t see what ‘space’ Lucas provided other than what was already there.

With him writing? Or directing? Fuck no. Let’s not forget that the whole reason Abrams was hired was because they wanted a safe pair of hands to get things back on track as the prequels were, quite famously at this point, utter utter dogshit. Come to think of it, wouldn’t all this have been better if they’d never called it Episode 7? All it really was was a gimmick to get people excited. The sequels are a fresh trilogy in the same universe, and whenever they feel obligated to actually act as sequels to Episodes 1-6, they’re all the poorer for it.

I maintain that there was simply nothing left on the table for JJ to do with Ep 9 that would tie it together as an actual saga, other than bringing Palpatine back. Regardless of where you land on Last Jedi, for me its worst crime is that it forgot to be part of the saga, it wanted to be its own movie and not a sequel to either TFA or anything that came before it. Genuine question to those who hated Palps coming back; what would you have done with Ep 9 that would’ve been a fitting conclusion to the 8 films before it?

Lucas himself says he can’t be redeemed, I’m not sure Anakin deserved a force ghost. Or maybe if his ghost had been off separate from Yoda and Obi Wan, back in the trees somewhere, looking on but not accepted back into the fold, it might’ve been more poignant.

Wait Season 2 has started? I haven’t seen a single piece of marketing for it … huh.

Let’s not forget this is a man who reveres the prequels, the granddaddy of all the static, monotone, wooden deliveries.

My headcanon was always that lightsabers would be a useless weapon in the hands of anyone other than Jedi, because blasters are a thing. Like bringing a sword to a gunfight, unless you can get to close quarters then you’ve lost. But Jedi have the reflexes / precognition to deflect blaster fire, so it works for them. Which gets me thinking if anyone ever made a shield out of lightsaber energy…? That just sat around you deflecting the fire for you. I know those little drone things had shields in Phantom Menace, but I assume that wasn’t as good as lightsaber energy.

So Sabine is an 18, Anakin was a 458 in AotC, but then his powers doubled so he was 916 in RotS. Carry on.

Midichlorians are indeed a thing, but do we have a scale? Or any numbers attached to it at all? I don’t see why one disproves the other, Sabine could have a count of 18 and Anakin 902. The basic theory still works. (But also midichlorians are fucking stupid, the way Yoda talks about the force in Empire is pretty much the last thing I wanted to have an XP system attached to it.)