Mutton chops for dinner to celebrate! Not sure they sell mutton at the Publix. Will lamb substitute? A nice spicy red wine and my first at home viewing of The Martian. Consider it celebrated.

It makes you wonder what’s better - prolific writers that release one (or more) books ever year and writers that string you along, going years between entries. I started reading Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles at about the same time I discovered Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson - late 2007, early 2008. I read…

So after much pondering, here’s my theory: Rey is the granddaughter of Padme and Anakin. She is NOT the daugther of Leia and Han. First, I don’t think either would willingly give up their child to exile, even if it were necessary to protect her from the dark side of the force. Second, Han showed no realy emotional…

So - did Renn awaken the force in Rey when he went into her mind or did her touching Luke’s lightsaber awken it? It seems clear she had no knowledge or understanding of the force prior to either of these events and then suddenly has force powers and even knows how to use them. It seems to point to the fact that Rey…

Thursday night via a sponsored Microsoft event. Friday morning with friends. Friday night with kids. And I have tickets to see it on a true 70mm IMAX screen on Sunday. That should hold me until it hits the dollar cinema.

Maybe this has been brought up - but Luke’s lightsaber. Yes, it was blue, but the hilt was not the hilt that Obi-Wan gave to Luke and looked more like the one he constructed before Jedi. I’m not sure, at this point, how finding the original lightsaber that fell into Bespin’s atmosphere, would even play into the plot.…

Holy crap - did I just f*ck Piper? And did I get a perk for doing it? Was just trying to get some sleep and let a radiation storm pass and bam, she wakes up next to me and I get some kind of “f*cked your companion” perk.

What do you make of this tweet? Sounds an awful lot like Lucas’s “These films are like poems” crap, where the ends of every stanza rhymes or something. Too many attempts to recreate scenes and sequences from the originals is troubling. It lends itself to a spectacular first reaction (similar to what we’re seeing with…

Sometime ago I was assisting a friend in a remodel of a 1960’s era home he purchased. We pulled out faded orange shag carpet crica 1970’s to reveal beautiful hardwood floors to which my friend exclaimed, “Wow, what in the hell were they thinking?” I couldn’t help but think that at some point in the 70’s people…

Even before the iconic opening shot, even before the crawl, Lucas makes a rather profound statement in the context of where science fiction cinema was by the late 1970’s. SciFi was in a dark place by the time Star Wars came around. Films like Silent Runnings, Planet of the Apes, A Boy and His Dog, and Logan’s Run were…

I’ve always been fascinated by the trash monster in A New Hope. Are all garbage compactors equipped with one of these one eyed, aquitic beasts or do they just show up like rats on a ship? Most of the garbage seemed to be pieces of metal framing or building material but since there was also a incredible smell,…

A cantina scene? So are we or we not going back to Tatooine? How many Tatoonie-esque scenes have we seen so far that are not Tatooine but Jakku? Yeah, there’s only one sun but maybe it the angle of the shot or something. This feels an awful lot like the “is he Kahn or is he not Kahn” crap from Into Darkness though I…

I had a friend growing up who’s uncle was on one of the early Apollo missions that didn’t land on the moon, just went there and came back. Can’t recall his name, could probably look it up. But, being around 12 when I met him at a barbecue, I of course asked him about going to the bathroom in space and heard a similar…

Brooks admitted that Sword of Shannara was what he called a “tribute” to Lord of the Rings and was very much made to mirror that story and its characters. You are right, Alannon is described as large, dark and brooding. His size is noted often as he stands a good foot or so taller than everyone else. Still, it’s hard…

Really digging the fact that they chose not to make Alannon the clone of Gandalf that Brooks intended him to be in the Sword of Shannara. I was fully expecting the grey beard, bushy eyebrows, robes, staff, even the pointy hat. Also noticing that both this series and the expanse are making the most of the…

I've read this before. Maybe an early draft of the original film. Starts in the country, Deck retires a replicant eating stew in a farmhouse.

If you’re going for truly speculative then the Sonic Screwdriver is the ultimate template. First, it is quite obvious that the future will involve more and more multi-tasking from our gadgets and tools. There will conceivably come a day when all of our needs, from good jazz to the need to down some post-apocopalypse…

Is that admiral Ackbar? It’s another trap!

Is that Luke?