What's on display is, thankfully, a set of replicas, but if you want some additional Vesuvius nightmare fuel, look up the boathouses of Herculaneum. The recent Tom Hiddleston "documentary" was an odd thing, but it did do a pretty good job dramatizing and humanizing that day. I reckon it will become a staple of high school and freshman college classes that touch on Ancient Rome.

Even in Star Wars, the one he claims to like more, he sort of broke the fuzzy-time that Hyperspace travel seemed to take.

They were never explicit about travel times (and fair enough, Star Wars is what it is), but clearly in ANH they had time to come down from the adrenaline-dump of escaping the Imperials at Tattooine and settle in, such that Chewy was playing board games with the passengers and Ben thought it was going to be leisurely enough to kick off history lessons and lightsaber drills. Everything about that screams hours-long flight at an absolute minimum, and to my mind more like a few days on a tramp steamer. JJ turned it into "HERP DERP INSTANT LOLZ! The implied passage of time is BORRRRRING!"

George undoubtedly said that. However, the idea that there was ever a single master vision that was fiddled with around the edges is kinda his own mythmaking bullshittery, plus wishful/rueful thinking from fans. Any time he was interviewed, that man just proclaimed what whatever he'd been noodling on in the last week, influenced by whatever was going on in his personal life, was always the plan from day one.

Certain core elements seem to persist, but shit like "how many movies," or "who's the central core to the narrative" or "exactly WTF are Whills" can go in 180 degree directions depending on the era in which he is discussing them. The analogy I've made for George is that all of Star Wars was his American-Graffiti-style garage hot rod. He fixes it up and mods it and rolls it out to show off and race every once in a while, but fundamentally it's his. He can change whatever the hell he likes, and it's your problem if you got attached to the red paint job from 10 years ago. This is what I think people are instinctively getting at when they say George doesn't understand his own creation.

ROTJ was the first movie I recall having seen in a theatre; I loved it, and I still have a very soft spot for it. I can slough off criticisms of Ewoks without completely disagreeing that they were the beginning of the end and a backslide from ESB. I think I'm on the other side of the same cohort as Simon Pegg. He would have been 7 when ANH (aka just Star Wars) came out, and would only have been 13 when ROTJ came out. Unless you got into your teen ennui and "cooler than thou" mindset a bit early, 13 is still young enough to take it in with no judgment. Add another 16 years of livin', and George pushing things even a bit farther, and yeah, JarJar is not getting the same leeway.

I'm taking solace in the fact that this is drawing resources from other races and might contribute to some wins elsewhere. I am predicting a Cruz-over-Beto margin for Senate and a few more points than that in the Governor's race. Not exactly hot takes, I know, but I've been burned so many ties in the last twenty years.

I will absolutely be voting, though. It's also always important to remember that even in "blowout" national elections, there are still 4 blue voters here for every 5 red. That's a lot of people who don't deserve to have their home get worse and worse.

The episode has its moments, but it’s very much worse than the Noir one, and for better or worse…

::: spoiler Tap for spoiler It turns out it was all Spock’s anxiety dream :::

Yeah, people (including me at the time of APIpocalypse) thought a lift and shift of many communities from reddit made sense, when what we needed was general communities that would eventually poop out niche ones when their posts started to become distracting in the general community's feed.

Just as an aside, it's funny to watch TOS and hear Spock alternating between US Customary and Metric seemingly every other episode. It's like he's just fucking with them but no one has the confidence to say anything to the genius science alien.

Sounds like you just lack the confidence to say anything to the genius science alien. 🤣

Young Kirk was referred to as “a stack of books with legs”

I've no doubt that this is true, but man-oh-man does that feel like something Roddenberry wrote down that Bill Shatner laughed at and threw in the trash.

Picard picked fights with Nausicans in his rebellious stage

Fair enough as well, you've sold me. I do wonder if that part of Picard's backstory was a wink-and-nod to how much different mature Picard was, compared to the popular perception of Shatner's Kirk.

That would track with what we've seen about how she works. She's always portrayed as determined and resourceful, to the point of breaking social norms by either subverting expectations about her age, class, and gender, or else leaning so hard into them that it circles back around into being unexpected.

Interesting choice on Kirk and Picard, but maybe I'm just basic, LOL.

If such a thing were to exist, it would probably be missing Rube, upend the lore that allowed for suspension of disbelief, be maudlin and manipulative to the point of distraction, and just generally be very poorly done.

You know, if it existed, lol.

It also has a film set after the two seasons.

No, it does not. You will see things that say it exists, but take my word for it that it doesn't and move on with your life. Much like how you will see internet gags that M Night Syamalan did a live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender movie, you will see things that imply the Dead Like Me movie was made. Ignore them.

Strange New Worlds: The noir episode was pretty good Trek, but the setting was a gimmick that brought nothing extra. Fine as long as the script is decent, and this one was, but they're not a fun little bonus anymore, just kind of tiring.

Ted Lasso: Should have left well enough alone. The conceit of s3 is fine, but so far the execution has been lacking, full of flanderized hijinks and distracting levels of fan service that seem done mostly to remind us that this used to be a better show. Each episode is slightly better than the one before, but we're starting from a very clunky and underwhelming place.

Ninth Jedi: I'm just over halfway through. Pretty good, a more "meat and potatoes" reworking of Star Wars themes than I expected, but the style holds up and I'm curious to see how they tie it all together.

I've made a bunch of completely custom mechanical keyboards with my 3D prinnter and laser engraver, a few with PCBs that hold a Microcontroller dev board like a Pi Pico or Arduino, but for more of them, I hand-wired the switches directly to the microcontroller. My biggest and smallest.

The Prisoner.

I watched the first episode, and it was really quite good and very ahead of its time. I was thinking just yesterday I should dive back in on e2.

Now you can also add the brief (for now) coda of Star City deaths!

::: spoiler spoiler

If La’an can still see the ghost, does that mean she is still infected? Or is the ghost the only entity that isn’t a hallucination?

I'd say, "Maybe?" That just seems like a horror trope, right? To dial the unease back up a little after the traditional catharsis? It's honestly part of my issue with doing a different theme in most of the episodes. ST writers have never been as obsessed with consistent lore as the fans, but things like this go to the heart of what your audience wants from your show. :::

This one is even better than Tolkien's response to a German publisher in 1938, asking for proof of his ancestry, which may or may not have been sent, but tellingly there was no official translation of The Hobbit into German until 1957.

Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearing whatsoever on the merits of my work or its sustainability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.

Don't fuck with posh and emotionally repressed Oxbridge motherfuckers when they realize they are finally on the right side of history. 🤣