Toth

Because the shield generator dishes are on the planet, behind the shield. And the shield is near impenetrable to ships.

Agreed. I actually don't think the shield actually went down, it was just that the gate got destroyed and that ended up freeing the signal. Doing some research, apparently planetary shields don't have one single shield generator, but instead a whole set of them covering all parts of the planet in a honeycomb pattern. So the gate station had nothing to do with the shields except being a well defended opening chokepoint (also the wiki quotes the novelization saying that the shield was in fact still completely intact everywhere but the gate station when the Death Star fired at it). Though I am wondering whether Rogue One made planetary shields blocking messages up for the sake of having the plot happen. There is no indication that any other kind of shield can block signals and usually signal jamming is the issue. Would be somewhat awkward if a planet under attack raising its shield causes an immediate communications blackout. I'm now remembering the Thrawn trilogy, there was the Siege of Coruscant when Thrawn peppered its orbit with hundreds of cloaked asteroids which threatened to drop on the planet or randomly shred ships in orbit, forcing the New Republic to keep the planetary shield up continuously until they figured out a way to remove them. I can't recall there was a communication blackout, only that they were stuck on the planet while Thrawn was free to go to town on the neighborhood. Mmh... reading the wiki some more, there was some talk about Melshi's squad disabling a jammer on the ground and hooking the Rogue One shuttle into the Scarif base to use its communication array for Bodhi to talk with Raddus in orbit, so imperial signals DID get out even after the gate station was on lockdown. Seriously, if they hadn't talked about the shield and instead about active jamming from the gate station, this wouldn't be such a forced set of circumstances.

Okay, that seems like... an unlikely coincidence. Earlier I read this article about the props made for Andor season 1 because of its explanation of the background of Andor's blaster: https://www.starwars.com/news/andor-props The thing with Andor's blaster that I always loved was that it's the Bryer pistol... the exact same gun used by Kyle Katarn as his base weapon! Which is just perfect given the parallels of Katarn originally being the character getting the Death Star plans in the EU. However, this article doesn't mention him at all, instead saying they just grabbed a cool looking gun from Battlefront 2. Huh?!? A remarkably fortunate pick if there really was no further thought behind that. Or is that just Disney censoring the reference to something not made by them? Given Jyn Erso/Jan Ors in Rogue One... I somewhat doubt that it wasn't intentional.

Yeah, my therapist tried to describe it as my inner child panicking before the event and coming up with all kinds of reasons for why going could get horribly wrong and then afterwards my inner critic slamming me for being a foolish coward. I went and checked the location for real this time afterwards, but since it doesn't seem to be an officially scheduled events on their home page... well, I guess the opportunity is gone. Of course, I thank you and wish you the strength to shut up your inner critic right back! Absolutely understandable desire. And one that pains me a lot myself, which is why I can't really give too good advice, since I'm bad at following it myself. Though I have to point out that (unfortunately) one integral element of getting people to notice you is confidence. You can be an utter scumbag, but as long as you can sell yourself, people apparently don't mind. So no, you don't need to force yourself to "love yourself", but you still have to be careful not to let your mental health sap your confidence. For me personally, a healthy amount of fear of how short life is can get me going for quite a long way. Yes, I'm writing here usually after hours and hours of wasting away procrastinating because I'm too tense and stressing myself out about things I can't change, but at other times reminding myself that I have goals to work towards and experiences yet to make can right me up and keep me in the ring.

First point to note: Shields in space in Star Wars are usually invisible and only become visible when touching atmosphere. That's why the planetary shield wrapped around Death Star II was also invisible. In Rogue One only the force field at the gate station had a visible glow, outside of that there was only planetary atmosphere shown. Whether the shield was down or not, I'm fairly certain part of the point of the Death Star is that it can punch through planetary shields. If there are no shields, planetary bombardment had always been an option (even though, if we take the visuals from Rebels at face value, Star Destroyers suck ass in the bombardment role). But if there is a shield, an invading fleet has to expect a very lengthy siege. And since most of the densely populated Core worlds that could resist the Empire in some form had planetary shields, that leaves the Death Star as the go-to hammer for every nail. Of course, it can still be debated whether such a shot by the Death Star in its lowest setting still has enough punch, but I don't think it matters much.

Fair. But... um... nepotism! XD I suppose Leia and Biggs vouched for him.

Some stragglers certainly, but on the other hand I suspect the bottleneck for the Rebels is ships rather than pilots. Also, given that the Empire now knows about Yavin, I doubt they would have recalled anyone for the ceremony. That would have been a stupid thing to do. I suspect after the ceremony they instantly turned around and started packing.

Having just watched it earlier: Bail does say he's leaving for Alderaan to prepare for open conflict with the Empire in the exact same scene he tells Mon Mothma that he's sending Leia to Tatooine for Kenobi. Mon Mothma even suggests he should rather go for Kenobi himself, but he says he trusts Leia with his life, then walks into the hangar and addresses Antilles the way Werthead quoted. They made fairly sure to telegraph everyone's movement in that scene. Though why Leia is then with Admiral Raddus is unclear. It seems that the Mon Calamari cruiser was initially heading for Tattooine (which seems rather overkill for the clandestine pickup of Kenobi, I'm sure the Hutts would raised more than one eyebrow about that), but then Yavin gets the call from Rogue One that they have infiltrated the base and Mon Mothma gets told that Raddus is eager to drop everything and go with the fleet to Scarif. Leia just getting dragged along seems awkward, I agree with that. Though on the other hand Rogue One solved the issue of why Yavin was only defended by two squadrons: The Alliance just lost the majority of their space assets in that battle and are still licking their wounds after all. With the breakneck pace of Rogue One, it puts the Rebel Alliance into a much, much more desperate position than it initially seemed in the original movie. Luke had no idea any of that happened, but from Yavin's perspective it must have been about three days of pure hell.

So you mean everyone had to get killed so to keep it in line that Leia was the Empire's best bet to get the location of the Rebel headquarters? That makes somewhat sense, yes. In any case, after the spectacle of Rogue One and the hype around Andor I'm sitting back and wondering... I'm still translating and rewriting an old Star Wars AU story that had been my most popular German fanfiction before switching to writing solely in English. I have also been plotting a lot about a string of sequels in a world where there is no second Death Star, the Rebel Alliance got badly beaten after Hoth, Luke is dead, but the Empire still fractures and devolves into civil war after Vader kills the Emperor. With a focus so much on the inner workings of the Empire and how its corruption can't be reformed, instead it getting torn apart by the ambitions of the Moffs (and somewhat further fueled by a few well placed Yuuzhan Vong agents), I'm thinking acknowledging Andor and bringing in some of its characters would work rather well. And give it an even more serious tone. It's just that I had intended to make it a huge tribute to the old EU, incorporating Soontir Fel, Juno Eclipse, Mara Jade, Thrawn and... Kyle Katarn as POV characters next to Leia, Mon Mothma and Vader. I'm now thinking about the implications of writing a world where Kyle Katarn and Cassian Andor can exist at the same time and wonder whether I can twist the events of Andor and Rogue One to have some more characters survive and carry over. Having Lonni still around at the ISB during the time of what would have been Endor could give a nice view into its future state... I also need an extremist Rebel cell Leia and Han have to put up with that is willing to make an alliance of convenience with a separatist Moff to sabotage peace talks. Since I don't see Saw being up to something like that, I wonder if could borrow such a blank slate as Kreegyr from season 1.

Am just rewatching it as well. I think Leia is okay because she's in it so briefly, but Tarkin's scene is so long you can't help but think this is a videogame cutscene. Given how stiff Luke looked in his first Mandalorian entrance, it seems they had been working at the edge of what was possible for them at the time. Which is still slightly weird, you'd think Disney would have had a headstart at deepfaking actors, given how they did this already in Tron Legacy in 2010 and it didn't look much worse. Cassian is okay, I think. In the movie he's of course a much flatter character than in Andor. I guess the movie still does stress his ruthlessness in a way Andor somewhat took the edge of. Still an awesome movie and definitely the best of the Disney era. In regards to Luthen... again, I have seen only bits and pieces of season 2, but I have to agree with Rippounet. This really sounds like they should have stressed more a Luthen failing to execute his failsafe plan instead of a Luthen just having no plan at all. The last episodes seem to have a few issues in any case. One thing that really bugs me, pun intended, is Andor telling Mon Mothma that he's getting her to Yavin... while still in the elevator of the senate building! The one places where the bugs should have bugs on them! If he had at least been shown fiddling with a jammer during the scene if they needed the dialogue to happen right there for the pacing's sake, I could understand it, but as it is it just looked horrifically dumb for him to infodump on her so freely without a care. Odd, given he was the one who screwed up himself for dicking around so much: Though I have to wonder, why the insistence that everyone died? Might be they got executed later anyway, but I'm certain some surrendered and were brought away for interrogation. Which is pretty much exactly what happened with the Tantive crew after all. Not to mention, Vader (who seemed to have been oblivious that the data chip contained the plans, otherwise he had plenty of opportunities to snatch it with the Force) was absolutely certain that the Rebels got the plans in Episode 4, which he could have probably only gathered by "asking" the crew or checking the ship's logs. It didn't sound like he was guessing.

Fuck off. You can google what I referred to, it's nothing I made up. I was talking about how people used to regard women as inherently, biologically more lustful, in response to you stating that men are. To point out how silly it is to just say that as if it was fact while disregarding the cultural lens. That the reality was and is more complex, with patriarchy, lauded virtues and limited rights of women was not something I intended to write an essay about when I should be working right now. Don't you think yourself smart? Can't you make some research on your own?

It's funny that you use this as an example when in Ancient Rome the stereotype was exactly the other way around, with women supposedly only thinking about sex while men are too busy thinking about philosophy and politics. Christianity beat that out of us and now we are snapping back due to the omnipresence of sexualized stuff targeted at men. But yeah, I guess this is pointless, you have already decided you are convinced that this is the way it should be and always has been and I don't think there is anything I can say otherwise. It's just weird as a guy who hates aggression, feels miserable in hyper-competitive environments and essentially skipped puberty that this is apparently because I'm somehow biologically not manly enough and not because of the circumstances of my childhood that I can easily point towards. At the end of the day, what counts is giving children good role-models that aren't crass assholes that want to warp their perception of reality for profit.

This sentence here is the core of the misunderstanding. You keep going back to your assumption that Toxic Masculinity means masculine behavior being labelled toxic, when everyone keeps telling you that it means toxic behavior labelled masculine. It reminds me of an argument I had with a "Man's Right Activist" years ago who kept going on screeching rants about feminists and when confronted with feminist terms for things that harm men, went on to counter that the words mean something else (and hostile to men) instead of engaging with the issues men have in our society. And he also kept going back to "biology" as the get out of jail free card. The thing is, just as you think your personal experience supports the biology angle, I think my experience supports very much the society angle for human behavior. I'm a teacher after all. In the last decade I interacted with hundreds of kids and they all had completely different backgrounds and personalities which make lumping them all together by gender a fool's errant. While I think biology has some merit to be kept in mind when it comes to stuff like muscle mass or situational impulsivity, it's still just a small fraction and still highly individual compared to just how insanely important environmental factors are. Parenting and peers make or break the character. And with that come the expectations we, more or less unconsciously, put upon ourselves at what constitutes behavior. There is no evolutionary pressure to like fire trucks or being afraid of the color pink, but there is certainly an evolutionary pressure to conform to your group and seek its approval, given the kind of social animals that we are. And when I see parents allow their boys to be utter assholes because "boys will be boys", while being comfortable telling their girls to "behave properly", then I've seen enough to know why those boys are growing up with no shame or impulse control whatsoever.

On DVD? Where? I have only ever seen the BluRay.

I'm sorry, I have no energy. I tried to at least stalk out the location, but stupidly, despite having the address and the route, I couldn't find it in 15 minutes of going the road up and down and then gave up because of the heavy wind and rain and me not being in the mood to get drenched and sick. I also hadn't thought of an excuse to use for my mother, given that she would have had something to say about me staying out this late. My therapist even wrote me a reminder earlier today and I replied explaining what was on my mind the whole day and yesterday. She apologized for causing me so much turmoil and suggested not going and finding something else that is less intimidating. I'm useless. I've been sitting in bed with the cat now for half an hour and will at least try and get at least some work done if I'm already bailing on an opportunity. I guess I have been in a crappy state regardless. My chronic inflammation in my finger has been acting up in the last two weeks and my eye infection that the doctor keeps telling me should be going away any day now for half a year already has gotten really bad after getting a bunch of pollen into it. I also had some weird encounters in the train that tug on my mood. A pair of dudebros comparing the bodies of their girlfriends in as creepy a manner as possible, making me wonder how guys like this are karmically allowed to be successful in relationships. A mother playing with her son and engaging a stranger in conversation about him in a way I felt super intrusive and making me uncomfortable. Two women looking around and at me in exasperation when trying to figure out what insult the ticket inspector used when roughly handling a foreign looking dude, with me wanting to give the reply of what I heard, but somehow not daring to open my mouth and speak up, thinking I have no business speaking with strangers. And then a woman picking up a battered bee on the ground after I walked away thinking I don't want to be around when someone steps on it, making me think about my cowardice for not getting the same idea. I've been very touchy and self-conscious the entire week.

Well shit, I'm useless. My avoidant tendencies are going into overdrive again. I think I've mentioned somewhere that I've started going to therapy about two months ago. So far, results are... limited. I guess the recounting my biography part was just overly stretched out and detailed, so I wasted lots of sessions for it. At one point I had a bit of a revelation when I recounted my shame about failed social interactions in primary school when she asked where my parents were and noted that apparently being left alone and expected to deal flawlessly with other people at age 8 isn't exactly normal. I found that baffling that she thought guiding your kid along in this age is normal and that my parents were absent, but I guess it is an explanation for why I'm so helpless then. In any case, in regards to my social anxiety she suggested going to... a boardgame meetuo at a self-help center tomorrow evening. And I'm just overwhelmed and wasted the last hours mulling over it. I haven't gone out to a boardgame meetup in more than half a year and in that time frame was out interacting with people ouside of work only once. And in these last months... admittedly, I have been somewhat fine with it, even though me going to a park last week for the first time in about the same timeframe ended up with me feeling overwhelmed, isolated and lonely, calling quits after half an hour. And now, after this, I look at this weird meetup. All I have is an address dead center in a grey apartment complex I have never been at, to meet with people I don't know and who all likely come with their own issues. I know she wants to help me and I went there for that help because of my crippling loneliness and lack of real life social contacts, but the ordinary boardgame meetups never helped and this one just seems far more intimidating. I... really don't want to go. But then what am I even trying to do?

Much success!

I just want to add, because oddly nobody brought it up as far as I can tell: The 8°s won't kill us, but the causes of why there is a temperature drop certainly will. If the sun is blotted out by a radioactive plume of ashes, then agriculture will be almost impossible for the next years and humanity can't feed itself anymore.

Tony Gilroy on Seth Meyers: He seems to be quite a funny person.

I think it's because everything has become a western MMO world or somesuch. Back when I was a kid and watching Slayers, the decision to have an Anime set in what was essentially D&D seemed rather unique, nowadays it seems dime a dozen.

I also kind of remember the Oblivion enemies to be more on the damage sponge-y side, in addition to the bow being rather bad. So reliably stealth-killing enemies without alerting other was rarely anything that would even come up.

Ich bin auch deutsch. Ich hab nur kein gutes englisches Wort für "Mitläufer" gefunden, denn das ist, was ich mit "sympathizer" meinte und was Syril am Ende des Tages ist. Und was von der Show versucht wird aufzubrechen. Und ja, AfD-Wähler sind für mich genauso politisch naive Incels, die einem Club von Betrügern folgen, die Macht nur zur persönlichen Bereicherung suchen. I feel like you have a very specific view of what you want this specific type of character to be written as, and since Syril wasn't, there is very little I can tell you to relieve your disappointment. As the others said... it's just that this is the angle they went with and for that, Syril is a very concise character. You can answer pretty much all your questions at HoI with his mother issues and his desire to prove himself useful and competent. The desk job he despised because it was an environment where he was nothing special, and most of all a place where he couldn't prove his merit, given how it was already nepotism that got him in there. Also note how aggressive Syril was when dealing with Cassian's mother. He did have a tendency to go on a power trip when in a position of power. That still doesn't diffuse his strong values, it just reinforces how badly those get twisted through his black and white thinking. All criminals and aides of criminals need to be punished, no questions asked. He is Inspector Javert, through and through. I actually agree that Dedra appears a bit shallow in comparison. We know she's willing to do evil because of her own ambition and... that's about it, really. Even in the season 2 clips I saw, she is single mindedly focused on the career angle of everything she does. Though while she is in need of more fleshing out of her background, the general gist seems to be another addition to the theme that the number of true believers in the system is actually rather low, the system is for the most part carried by people who view the Empire as a convenient vehicle to realize their very personal desires. In a way, that makes sense when you look at how the right in the political left-right dichotomy of egality vs. individualism is portrayed. Someone who perceives themselves on the right thinks that all people have different values and should get rewarded for their merits, all the lazy low-value rabble be damned. So the far-right logically should be a club of selfish egocentrics serving the supposed greater good of their country through their excellence, personified through their leader at the top, who is the most valuable person there could possibly ever be. And in the context of Star Wars, I feel like this is enough of a statement to make, given how diffuse the ideology of the Empire always was. Beyond "Order is good, Jedi were traitors", we have very little actual policy to work with. It is most often human supremacist, enslaving aliens, but Palpy's personal secretary is still an alien somehow. And the human supremacy angle is sometimes explained with the separatists being mostly alien, but their leader Dooku was a human, we've seen plenty human separatist worlds in the Clone Wars and the arguments made for separatism had never an anti-human angle. It's quite funny how the New Republic in the EU novels I'm reading right now have more of an explicitly anti-human sentiment due to the resentment towards the Empire. On the same page, sometimes it's also sexist, with Dedra herself facing some of that. But throughout the Disney canon this has been mostly excised, because for some reason Disney execs think that villains being sexist is not timely anymore and so now the Empire is pronouncedly egalitarian for some reason. In any case, ultimately the Empire always only stood for whatever the hell Palpatine needed to say to gain political favor with enough of the right people to stay in power, never anything Palpatine actually believed in himself. It's of course due to the toy-driven all ages nature of the franchise, ultimately, but in the end it's also still its own kind of theme that the Empire has no distinct core policies, selfishness is its only ideology.

Well, I have heard pretty much all gay men in my vicinity at some point complain that the cliché about gay men being very promiscuous holds too true for their liking, so... I suppose it could be you are just in the process of making the same observation.

I think that's kind of the exact idea. He's not supposed to be an actual fascist, but a sympathizer. Most people don't see themselves as fascists, even those carrying the system, that's fascist systems need to lie so much. So the message is directed at sympathizers, to tell them that they are nothing for the system they are supporting and need to wake up before it is as late as it is for Syril. And yes, Syril ultimately is an incel with lots of issues and frustration. But doesn't the same go for the average far-right supporters? Yes, the effect of propaganda and twisted narratives wasn't as much highlighted in Syril's background as it could have, instead focusing on his very personal motivations, but I think this helps draw him as a proactive character who is making a conscious choice to fight for the Empire, rather than just a fool with wrong information. Even then, Syril still is a fool living in his own reality, but one of his own making. He didn't need the propaganda for that. I think it's important that Syril was proactive in his decision making and with a set of values that make him sympathetic. It's very important for audience members who sympathize with fascism to watch the story through his eyes and hopefully get the message, rather than thinking that they couldn't be in Syril's situation because they have all the information, unlike him.