That explanation doesn’t work for the Dragonlance setting though. The planet of Krynn is a completely fictional secondary-world setting. It’s not even one of those half-fantasy, half-historical mashup settings like in Katherine Kurtz’ Deryni books, Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, or most of Guy Gavriel…

Yeah. Or he was the hero of a different movie.

Also, there is not a simple X-Y axis between super-competent and incompetent. Most people are good at some things and bad at others.

If you ever wanted to read a novel with premature ejaculation (in the service of iconoclasm to boot)...

(Though Jack’s not really incompetent, just completely out of his depth.)

Also Steven Brust’s Vlad Taltos. But I suspect Vlad takes a few cues from Spenser...

Step Up 2 Tha Sith

I usually dislike how the Skywalker family drama always manages to be the centre of Star Wars stories. This movie actually managed the opposite for me: the family drama was actually really good and compelling and the pointless retread of the Death Star for the third time just detracted from it.

For decades, the tourism industry of one of Canada’s provinces has been bolstered by Japanese fans of a hundred-year-old Canadian novel.

In partial defense of Dany’s claim, her lineage might be the only reason she has those WMDs in the first place. Those dragon eggs didn’t hatch for anyone else.

Perfect time of year for a come-from-nowhere hit to release:

Idealism is often far more compelling than cynicism, and most of Westeros’ leaders are really cynical. Dany’s the only real power-broker left who isn’t.

He’d been shot in the gut by a weapon that blasted Stormtroopers clear across the room, while he just got a sucking belly wound out of it.

Rey’s been streetfighting to survive her whole life, and most weapons aren’t so different from each other that it’s rocket science picking up a slightly different one (there are broad similarities between weapons even from vastly different cultures, because biomechanically humans work the same everywhere). She also…

The real message is, “whatever they tell you, the people at the top don’t actually care about you.”

2nd. There were only the two.

And they killed off the best characters! So they could work in pre-Highlander Adrian Paul!

Love that album. I’d do “Thunderchild” for karaoke!