Ahsoka has been pretty solid, but it’s going to suck next week when it inevitably ends on the cliffhanger of Thrawn arriving back to our home galaxy and we have to wait who knows how long for more…

WiThOuT dOiNg

That’s just plain uninformed.

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Just to list a few things…

The journal app seems pretty useless in its current state honestly.

The on device learning for journaling suggestions is cool, but there are so many essential features missing.

There’s no search, no export, no edit history, no calendar view, no iPad/Mac apps…

Overall I think Ashoka teeters on the border between good and just okay.

A lot of the pieces are there for an excellent story. All of the core characters are interesting and the acting is solid, but some of the story beats just feel off.

Part of it is definitely the pacing. Not many threads were resolved this season, and many were left as cliffhangers. This might work out in the long term but on its own this season just ends up feeling incomplete.

There’s three areas where I think the show could have been a lot better:

1. Thrawn - I liked the portrayal of Thrawn, but his scale felt too small. Thrawn is at his best in large scale conflicts. I want to see him conquering planets and cleverly breaking supply lines, not sending a squad of useless stormtroopers against main characters who have impenetrable plot armor. Hopefully he is better utilized in his next appearances.

2. Sabine - I’m pretty ambivalent to the idea of Sabine being a Jedi. I just feel like it is totally unnecessary; I already liked her character, and I think there’s a lot of unique things they could have done with her character, but now it feels like she has been relegated to retreading the same “I can’t teach them they are too old/dangerous” story we have already seen with Luke/Anakin/Rey.

3. Ashoka - Weirdly Ashoka felt a little underdeveloped in her own show. She had her mini arc of dealing with her feelings about Anakin/Vader, which was definitely a highlight of the season. But otherwise, like Sabine, it feels like she was relegated to retreading standard Star Wars Jedi training issues. With her and Sabine now being stranded in the other galaxy I wish the show had better established a purpose for them and their future storyline with Baylan/Shin

I’m pretty excited to see unfiltered reviews of this thing. It will be really interesting to see what apps get released and how people actually end up using it.

My favorites:

• Proton Pass
  • Pros: Aliases, Proton integration
  • Cons: No passkeys (yet), native desktop apps in beta
• 1Password
  • Pros: SHH agent integration!
  • Cons: Least open
• Bitwarden
  • Pros: Most open, self hosting option
  • Cons: least polished user experience

Hopefully they move the sports content in the news app over to this one. Don’t use the news app a ton but it bothers me that sports gets the center tab when I’m not at all a sports person.

As a book reader I’d argue the problem is they aren’t following the books closely enough :/ The plot from the flashbacks has been very different from the books.

The pacing has been atrocious, we’re now 4 episodes into season 3 and still retreading and resetting back to where we were at the end of last season…

This is nice but I don’t love that it completely overrides the calendar color. Makes it difficult to tell what event is from what calendar.

I wonder if this is them getting the “we’re using Google” out of the way before a larger announcement of what they’ve been working on

Sounds like Google is helping fine tune a model and Apple will be hosting it. Apple’s Private Cloud Compute has a pretty robust privacy and security architecture, so hopefully this will be the capability of Gemini without Google’s prying eyes

Definitely early to judge, but as someone who saw potential in season 1 but thought it had some big problems nothing so far is changing my outlook on the show as a whole.

A couple things that struck me:

• The Gaal/Salvor plot continues to lack direction. I have no idea why they had to contrive the plot to bring them together or what they are going to be doing this season. And that is in spite of the fact that the writers clearly tried to explain it in the scene where they were looking at the predicted timeline diverging, which felt really generic to me. They haven’t done a great job of giving these giant stakes personal impacts for the characters.
• Really not a fan of the faceless enemies threatening empire, or the whole genetic degeneration. I think it would have been a lot more interesting if the main focus was the idea of the Cleons changing in spite of their identical genetics. I did like the color blindness plot last season, just not how it ended up being due to the wider genetic manipulation scheme. The Empire plot line was at its best when the focus was on politics and the human and philosophical nature of the genetic dynasty.
• The Queen plot already feels rushed. I don’t understand how Dusk and Demerzel would have even let it progress this far, it feels like something they would have quickly nipped in the bud. I feel like we skipped a step in seeing the Queen’s faction growing in power and Empire feeling threatened by it.

Again, I think it’s too early to judge. This series has such a strong foundation (ha) in the politics and philosophy of a collapsing empire and ideas like the genetic dynasty and scientific prophecy. I really hope the series is able to center its focus on those aspects this season rather than the generic sci-fi elements that started showing up last season.

SteamOS natively supports WireGuard - so you can generate a WireGuard configuration for ProtonVPN on the web and configure it in system settings > network > connections > add new connection.

WireGuard also definitely works!