As long as they found some way to fit Jaxxon in.

It does sort of fit in with the overall Star Wars aesthetic where most of the nonhumans are people in Halloween masks or extras painted blue or purple.

Yeah, but that’s less a question of how long it takes to get around as just bad filmmaking on Abrams’ part. The space battles in his movies are a chaotic mess — for one, they take place mostly over planetary surfaces, which is dumb — whereas the ones in the Lucas movies are extremely well-choreograped. You always know…

I dunno, hyperspace travel times were never well-defined in any of the pre-Disney movies either. In ANH, the Falcon travels from Tatooine to the Alderaan System pretty quickly, just long enough for Luke to get some Zatochi in. In TESB, Luke seems to get from Dagobah to Bespin in maybe a matter of hours. The Falcon…

And Secret Invasion cost something like $212 million, and it looks less impressive, on average, than an early episode of Agents of SHIELD. I’m sure the leads’ salaries took up a decent chunk of the budget, but it’s hard to see where the rest of the money went.

I wonder if they were also mad about the flying tire being in the trailer for Twister but not the finished movie, and this was the final straw.

Which is why I’m baffled by the fact that there has never been a proper Seven Samurai Star Wars movie.

The evidence for automation eliminating jobs is mixed. In many cases it simply creates a new class of worker who gets paid more than the employees who were replaced, which can offset the savings from automation. In many cases it does not revolutionize the job it was supposed to replace. Automated checkout has been…

I think they’re fixed now, at least on desktop browsers.

Mandalorian started out as a Star Wars version of Lone Wolf & Cub, so it was only a matter of time before they got around to a Zatoichi reference.

From what I understand, a lot of medium-budget movies are just shot with “flat” lighting that can be tweaked in post. This is especially true if you compare the recent Halloween sequels with the sort of movies John Carpenter was making with Dean Cundey forty years ago.

God yeah, most movies made for streaming look awful. Red Notice looked like Johnson and Reynolds were greenscreened into environments from a Hitman game. If you’d told me they’d filmed their parts separately and were composited together in post, I would’ve believed you. Even B-movies from the ‘80shave better lighting…

I’ve seen .pdfs floating around the net. There’s one being hosted by the Internet Archive.

It would not surprise me if at least one streamer tries to do an AI-generated show if the strikes go on. Because they absolutely believe in magic beans. 

This is what’s going to decimate streaming. If no one’s watching your $200 million prestige shows, then what’s the money for? 

I think Herbert wasn’t so much “deliberately vague” as he hadn’t quite figured out his history yet. A technocratic bureaucracy is obviously going to use technology against people who are opposed to it. Dune was written during the peak of the Civil Rights movement and Herbert may have been thinking of something as…

This assumes that Herbert had planned everything from the very beginning, which is likely not the case. Most of what you describe here is introduced in God Emperor and not referred to in the previous books, except in perhaps the most nebulous terms. It seems more like a case of Herbert writing more books and…

I don’t know a whole lot about the history of the Dune series, but I remember reading somewhere that Children was definitely, really, supposed to be the end of the saga. Then one of the elder statesmen of the genre got a massive advance for one of his books, and that kicked off the ‘80s trend of Golden Age SF authors…

Kinja is kinjaing today. I asked James if he was aware of the problem on Xwitter, and he answered with an emphatic “yes.”

The Matrix doesn’t really get credit for being a sci-fi Ur-Text, I think, because most people tend to ignore the sequels. But I think it has more in common with Herbert than William Gibson, even though the first movie is superficially cyberpunk.