1.) Beyond a few scans of scribbled notes and recollections from cast members/colleagues that have come out in interviews, not really. The most concrete thing I've ever seen was a clip of Mark Hamill saying Lucas wanted him to be in Episode IX sometime around 2011. This was in the 80s. By the time the prequels were…

I was talking with some friends at a bar the other night about what anthology movie we would make if Lucasfilm gave us the keys, and we zeroed in on that line in ROTJ where C-3PO says it's against his programming to impersonate a deity. We realized something must have gone horribly wrong at some point for them to…

I think you've got some autocorrect issues here.

To my mind the stakes are a lot lower on these spinoffs, so I won't really bothered if it isn't completely spot-on perfect. My hope for this is basically that it ends up being the big screen equivalent of a really good EU novel or comic, with all the flawed weirdness that entails.

Slowly chipping away at Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby. I've tried and failed to squeeze it in before Christmas twice before, so this time I'm not worrying about giving myself an artificial deadline.

I was already probably going to see this six times like I did with The Force Awakens. This makes me want to make it twelve.

I do the same if it's a series or author I'' already a fan of, but I've got such s massive amount of old stuff I still need to get to on my shelf that I just can't conceive of keeping up with new releases in general.

Almost everything I read wasn't from 2016. Are there actually people who mainly read stuff as it comes out? That sounds crazy to me.

Ah, I really only meant the orange bitters anyway. I tend do 2 1/2 oz gin to 1/2 vermouth. Didn't know Old Tom was an oddity, I'll have to check it out. I've been a whiskey guy for most of my drinking career and I've only just started cultivating a taste for gin in the last year or so, so I've got some catching up to…

That's just how I've been making martinis ever since I read The 12 Bottle Bar. Didn't realize it had its own name.

Has anyone actually looked at the screenplay? I mean, I haven't either, but it seems to me that might be the thing to do right about now.

Curious: what do people think of the Imperial plans that were stolen? TIE fighters with shields would definitely be a problem (although the designs look pretty cool). Any Star Wars stories out there that explored this concept?

I think it might have been Patton Oswalt who said that Trump's election is good for comedy writers in the same way a bus accident is good for an emergency room.

I can't begin to articulate how badly I need that Ralph McQuarrie book.

Can we use the Satan remark to get the evangelicals against him?

Total agreement on the anchovies. Give me a tin of those with a sleeve of saltines and I'm a happy lil' guy.

I thought the LOTR films hadn't held up because I only owned the extended versions for many years, but I recently snagged the theatrical cuts from a bargain bin and watched them again in the span of a weekend and my opinion of them was much improved.

Considering doing a podcast where I, who has not read a complete Harry Potter book in sixteen years and got no farther in the movies than I did in the books, read through the series in tandem with a diehard fan and discuss every hundred pages or so. Would people listen to this?

Order of the Phoenix is the book that killed my interest in Harry Potter. I remember struggling to find something to grab onto for the first hundred plus pages before saying "fuck it" and picking up something else. I told myself I'd get back to it eventually, but I never did.

I lost interest in reading the Potter books after the fourth one because I got into Tolkien in a big way and I just didn't have the energy to stay invested, and I stopped seeing the movies after the fourth one because having skipped the later books, I didn't much care where the movies were going. For a long time I…