majestic

As ridiculous as that may sound, season one has the longest run of decent episodes of the series. Overall it was still terrible, but it's the clearly the season with the best value so far. Season two makes Battlestar Galactica's final half of season three and season four look positively glorious and the current one is... uhm... yeah. It's occasionally okay. Somewhere between the first and second, but incredibly uneven.

Danes always sound funny. Like people speaking Dutch. 's not a jab at people or anything. Just as someone who understands both German and English the two languages have something inherently funny to them. Also Danes speaking German generally have adorkable accents. <insert jokes about German sounding aggressive here>

It's so painfully obvious when you watch this tripe back to back with DS9. DS9 has its fair share of problems and episodes where you can facepalm to your hearts content, people acting out of character every now and then, not to mention ludicrous episodes like Move Along Home or Let He Who Is Without Sin... (which ranks very highly amongst the worst pieces of TV ever, not just 'Trek) and a whole host of plot holes and people forgiving each other really quickly (Garak mostly, or that episode where O'Brien goes directly against Bashir's orders and lets suffering Jem'Hadar die) but the interactions between the characters are so great that it barely matters. Now imagine doing an episode like Hard Time with someone from the Discovery crew. You'd sit there at the end and when Michael (because who else could be off to save someone) goes to whatever character is trying to off themselves you'd start yelling DO IT, DO IT, DO IT! at the screen.

So... bear with me. Everything that wasn't made by Lucas was originally considered expanded universe - EU for short. It was a sort of extended canon or pretty much regarded as canon as long as the works and story layout was cleared with contacts at Lucas Arts. Lucas Arts nowadays has the Lucasfilm Story Group for exactly that (so ever since 2012) but always had people to help coordinate with the publishers (most notably of those Del Rey and Bantam, but both are part of Random House anyway). As Zoraptor noted already a good deal of the old EU had continuity problems. Many of which were created by Lucas himself, because while Lucas Arts more or less expected licensed works to be beholden to a coordinated story outline he himself didn't bother with the prequels. That's why Heir to the Empire was written from a perspective that assumed the clones were the aggressors of the Clone Wars, not separatists. When Disney bough the rights to Star Wars, they threw out the entire EU by renaming it to Legends (imagine Legends as the Kevin timeline of Star Wars, or vice versa if you want the new canon to be Kelvin ) and created a new canon that at the time only consisted of the prequels, the original trilogy and the Clone Wars tv show. Everything released from Disney from then on is also canon, i.e. Rebels, the new trilogy, Rogue One and Solo, as well as any novels, comics and whatnot coordinated by the Lucasfilm Story Group. That means there's a good deal of books now that explain - or try to, at least - whatever the hell Jar Jar Abrams was smoking when he came up with the New Republic as a single star system with no military, the First Order instead of the Imperial Remant (or simply the Empire as they continued to call themselves). I'd also call the Starkiller base a silly idea but it's hyperspace laser isn't all that different from the EU's Centerpoint Station that literally was able to make suns go supernova or blast planets and ships with giant laser beams across the known galaxy in an instant. Okay at least Centerpoint Station didn't suck up the mass of an entire star into a planet. Sure a lot of sci-fi writers and, quite frankly, most people have no idea of the dimensions invovled in space and that's mostly okay, but Jar Jar is REALLY REALLY REALLY REALLY bad with that. Cue Spock seeing Vulcan sucked up into a pinhead sized black hole. Le sigh. Content creators liberally help themselves and borrow from Legends all the time. Tython now exists in both legends and canon, as does Ilum for instance. In fact... Starkiller base WAS Ilum. The same Ilum from SWTOR. Obviously some form of Darth Bane must be canon too, because the Rule of Two is. So it is more confusing than ever and the stories told are worse than ever before because they need to work with what Kathleen Kennedy, Jar Jar Abrams and Captain Looper came up with. Plus the one thing they keep doing and the thing that bothers me most about the sequel trilogy is changing the way hyperspace jumps work. I hate that with a passion. Gah! TL;DR: Disney threw out the old EU and renamed it to Legends. Canon in Star Wars terms is everything that came out post-Disney (except the 2013 novel Crucible the final EU/Legends entry), Clone Wars, the prequel and the original trilogy. Star Wars: The Old Republic is in a sort of hybrid mode that is techinically Expanded Universe but also canon-y for the sake of Bioware being allowed to write new content for it.

Mando's next destination for instance is also already mentioned in a canon comic book. I don't read these, nor have I read of the any new canon books so far. You don't really need a degree though, just the time and inclincation to see if there's a "Canon" entry for any given thing on Wookieepedia. There are enough Star Wars enthusiats around to keep that pretty up to date and accurate. The movies, Clone Wars and Rebels are considered canon. Was the reset really about making Star Wars lore simpler? I always thought Disney made that just because they otherwise would have to set the new trilogy inside the old EU canon - so with the given timeframe somewhere around the Yuuzhan Vong invasion (or significantly worse, the Dark Nest trilogy), and they'd have to kill Chewie off*, which is worse for toy sales than killing off Han - and with Harrison Ford not giving a rat's butt any longer it would be somewhat difficult to get him to properly act his moping around for a couple of books scenes. All issues aside I can also get why you wouldn't want to make a post-Empire era Star Wars movie in the old EU. Those books at some point really took a dark turn. Lovecraftian Force Horrors incinerating half the surface of Coruscant, Yuuzhan Vong loading refugees into ships to crash into planetary shields to collapse them, the Jedi Order getting desperate enough to send a bunch of teenagers on a suicide mission that killed Han's younger son and even more civil war... * Have to being a somewhat strong term, one could easily retcon Chewie's death. The supremely dark disposition of the franchise near the end there, less so.

I've heard that Bloodborne becomes a good deal easier once you learn how to parry instead of trying to Dark Souls the combat by dodge rolling all the time. I wouldn't know, having never played Bloodborne but people with a DS history had the same issue in Sekiro.

There's some more information on the Kickstarter page.

Nah, it's all good. We're just the same bunch of old white cis men who also caused the new Ghost Busters so much trouble because we can't git with the times, 'n all. At least she looked better than the poor Twi'Leks last season. I've seen better Twi'Leks than that from amateur cosplayers. I'm not sure what you mean to be honest. Can you be somewhat specific? Because most of the things that appear have some sort of canon counterpart (except for the Dark Troopers so far and the wet noodle HK-series here, but even HK droids have shown up in the new canon as well). It's possible I missed something and I wouldn't put it past Dave Filloni to do that, so I'm geniuinely curious.

This is still the best Picard song: Make it so!

I've seen that video of Traust before. What's up with the weird bondage ritual?

Oh, yes, because her mother explained to her that this is just going to be about politics and then set her up for this heartfelt speech that convinced the Vulcan president while the Romulans were immediately on board based on pure logic and science and the political "convenience" of no longer carrying the burden of potentially messing up the galaxy or the entire universe maybe. I mean, what range had The Burn exactly? That was the part that would have made perfect sense if they had addressed it in a similar way the Trill symbiote commission was shown to withhold knowledge from the general public to not cause societal unrest in DS9. The set up was not bad, the execution was. The Vululans should have told Michael that they know that they weren't the cause of the burn but that the political quagmire they're in forces them to let everyone else believe in their guilt. Which would have made the president's decision to unilaterally (probably, right?) part with the secret knowledge and risk its exposure to the public all the more poignant. Or Michael could have rightly argued that the truth will come out eventually anyway now that she has proof of the burn's origin, and it not being Ni'Var or SB-19. Cold "logic" would dictate that they start preparing for that eventuality. This being Discovery though we'll probably never see Ni'Var again, let alone any problems from the inevitable finding of the burn's point of origin. Well on the other hand, given that every planet is so far away from each other in this version of the galaxy that you can't even scan from Earth to Saturn perhaps that knowledge will take centuries to arrive at Vulululand?

Well at least Proto-Wesley is Discovery's first officer now, just to remind us that Neo-Wesley isn't going to out-wesley Proto-Wesley too soon. Or, in other words, just like with everything else they did on the show so far they did not think this through. At some point in time they came up with the idea of having Michael* go against orders again - because she's always right, of course, and always the best choice to go on the away mission regardless of the mission profile - so they needed her to be replaced as first officer only to notice that they actually don't have anyone that could become first officer on the existing crew roster. So instead of assigning a suitable candidate from Starfleet (remember the time when Riker made Commander Shelby his first officer because promotion from within the ranks of the Enterprise was unsuitable at the time?) they give it to the only other semi-developed character they have that can be taken out of her current position without being missed too much. Stamets can't, still being the only one that can use the Spore drive. Georgiou obviously can't (and wouldn't, at any rate), the only thing Detmer is outside of being there is the pilot, then there's the black guy on the bridge where I don't even know what his post is (in any other show he'd be the token black guy) and... oh, wait, perpetually angry engineering lady and Neo-Wesley Six with her Head-Baltar, both of which are absolute nutjobs that should be in the loony bin, not on a starship. The only other character they could have used as replacement first officer was written out a few episodes ago. *Also for those that didn't watch, in this episode Michael was assigned to a diplomatic mission to Vulcan Ni'Var where she challenged the Science Academy to Kali-Ma-Shakti-de, the Vulcan science version of a dance battle. She single-handedly out-sciences everyone present and her sweet dance moves impress the president of Ni'Var so much that they share secret research data with her that is considered a, uhm, societal taboo on Ni'Var. Because in the one hundred and twenty odd years since The Burn, nobody on Ni'Var managed to see what Michael did in a couple of Discovery episodes - that the Vulcans did indeed not cause the burn. Oh, yeah, that science experiment that the Vulcans thought caused the burn was to find an alternative to dilithium based warp drives. Okay so I complained about that dilithium isn't used for warp drives per se already, so let's not repeat that. However, so far every longer running Star Trek show has come up with numerous warp drive alternatives. Voyager alone brought scientific data on half a dozen projects home, of which the Quantum Slipstream was apparently adapted anyway, which makes no sense at all. Other things? Oh yes, the coaxial warp drive, Borg transwarp technology (how about that for a project, Seven of Nine, instead of becoming a cynical lone ranger?), TNG's warp catapults or soliton wave, Lt. Paris' infinity warp evolution chamber and these weird little subspace vortices from Voyager. A thousand years of progress and the Federation can't solve peak oil? Did the Koch brothers fund political campaigns against dilithium alternatives?

People with supressed or otherwise reduced immune response, pre-existing conditions or current / prior infections... also everyone who doesn't want to be microchipped by Bill Gates. I mean, c'mon, do you REALLY want to be vaccinated when the biggest proponent of vaccines is in favor of a drastic population reduction?

I'm pretty sure the height difference is from the retractable roller skates in Darth Vader's boots: Not sure if an obituary thread is appropirate for the funny, but anyway...

Bibi's flight to Saudia Arabia seems to have been a signal to Biden as well. Also hilarious how all of a sudden Isreal removed Saudi Arabia from the corona travel restriction list immediately after he went there. On the bright side, Isreal is maybe looking at the fourth general election in a row. Where's the popcorn at?

Well, what do you know. I figured it out. Turns out I actually really know the guy from... like 25 years and what looks like 150 pounds ago. Wouldn't have recognized him, but yeah, mom immediately knew who I was talking about.

Ensign Tilly is going to be the new First Officer on Discovery. 's all I have to say about this one. Oh, wait, I guess it's sort of confirmed that Discovery is playing in the same timeline as Star Trek Picard. Because the Romulan Qapla' Oonah thingie is back. Or still there, more like.

I just had a run-in with a friend of my neighbor. Greeted me, asked me how I am, long time no see and all that. Baffled as I was I played along, said I'm fine considering the circumstances and bid him farewell. Of course I have no idea who the hell that guy was. He noticed too because that's what he said to the neighbor once I closed the door. Neighbor also wondered how he would know me, but the two left and I could no longer follow the conversation from behind the door. I also call the neighbor just neighbor because I have no idea what his name is. My parents used to be prominent public figures before retiring, being involved in municipal politics so I'm used to being greeted by people I don't know asking me to convey their best wishes and greetings to mom and dad, but that was different. If I had to guess I'd say he mistook me for my brother. He's more widely known and was a member of our (volunteer) firefighters before moving to another city, and even if I can't for the life of me see it because he looks completely NOT like me there's supposedly some family resemblance. Gotta ask the neighbor next time I see him. Or my parents. Maybe they know.

Just to post something contrarian or potentially unliked... that tweet isn't entirely right in my opinion but why would JMS be objective here, I'm not even sure I am. The actors were fine in their roles, but except for Andreas Katsulas, who conveyed such a tremendous range of emotion through a face covered far and large by a prosthetic, and the endearing Stephen Furst I wouldn't actually call them at all remarkable. I liked Andrea Thompson for what little she was on the show, but even there I'm not certain I'm mixing my enjoyment of the character with her ability as an actress (plus she's leaps and bounds ahead of Patricia Tallmann, so that contrast once Talia Winters was writen out really hits you hard). Or in other words, Babylon 5 had remarkable casting and a set of remarkable characters, not a remarkable cast per se. I mean, just in which world would anyone argue that Bruce Boxleitner or Mira Furlan are great actors? One of the episodes just before the end of the Vorlon-Shadow conflict even had a scene where a guest starring Bryon Cranston made it painfully obvious just how terrible the two sometimes (always?) were. It worked on the strength of the writing and plotting of the show in the first four seasons. I offer the the rushed ending of season four and the fiasco of season five as proof. Oh, and this is by no means a dig on Babylon 5. I loved the show. I find I enjoy it less with every time I rewatch it, so I stopped doing that, but this really is because once the mystery's stripped away and the pretty painting peels off there's some rust shining through. Was still a remarkable show and a boon to all of television, paving the way for serialized sci-fi drama.

You know what Bruce? It is unreasonably cruel. I'm a bit of a hyprocrite because that doesn't stop me from going to Hungary every now and then to buy goose liver spread where the, let's be fully cynical here, production of the liver isn't done under any better circumstances, but unlike having a problem with meat on moral grounds in general (which is a ridiculous stance to have for an omnivorous species in my opinion), having a problem with Foie Gras on moral grounds is absolutely justified.

It's just weird coming from a Xi and Putin fanboy like you.

Started a new game of Drakensang, I figured it's going to be worth the 3 bucks. Can't say that I ever was a fan of Das Schwarze Auge but perhaps I'll overcome my inertia and invest the time needed to learn - and appreciate? - a different RPG system. I find the lack of grimdark and cynicism in the game world very refreshing. The writing's hilarious so far (at least in the original German).

Vienna has vineyards within its city limits, so you should be good. If you can get past all the travel restrictions, curfews, lockdowns and the common tourist traps, that is. The first few of those should go hopefully go away soon but the traps... yeah, I guess they'll remain.