One of The Brickmuppet's Crack team of Science Babes reacts to what ambled into Toyama Harbor on Christmas Eve.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:45 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 63 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:55 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 17 words, total size 1 kb.

OK.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:33 PM | Comments (12) | Add Comment
Post contains 261 words, total size 5 kb.

1 That seems to be the universal review, actually.  The Red Letter Media guys said just about the same thing.  It's better than the prequels, and seems better than it is just because of that.

Posted by: Ben at Tue Dec 29 09:57:03 2015 (DRaH+)

2

Ubu Roi didn't like it, either.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tue Dec 29 10:32:53 2015 (+rSRq)

3 I read a spoiler about the film and have one comment: Unless we actually see Han's dead body, I won't believe it. Someone shot him and then he fell off a cliff, right? So it's assumed he's dead, but we can't be sure.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Tue Dec 29 11:04:30 2015 (+rSRq)

4 Stabbed through the chest with a light-saber, thrown off a cliff, had the whole room he was in blown up, then the planet imploded. Burned, fell over, then sank into the swamp. I just finished John C. Wright's piece on this, and he has some pretty good insights as well.

Posted by: Mauser at Tue Dec 29 12:58:35 2015 (5Ktpu)

5 My review isn't quite as harsh, but I certainly did feel that the first two-thirds or so of the movie was amazing, and then last segment was thrown together to add some meat beyond "the lead characters meet, escape danger, and travel to meet the brave resistance."  This is one way in which the original was superior, it had the pacing to do all that, all the stuff on the death star, and then get in the final space fight, without it seeming rushed.  This one didn't manage that.  I was also kind of upset by the battle planning session that might as well have been: "Oh look, another superweapon.  This could be serious, but hey, we all know how this works.  We send in the heroes to do daring things, then a couple squadrons of X-Wings to finish it off, and everyone is home in time for beer.  Any questions?  No? Ok, lets go."
Regarding "We can't be sure": Besides the obvious bits mentioned above, that he took an obvious fatal wound, died convincingly enough for his force wielding son to be sure he was dead, and then was thrown into the abyss on a planet that blew up shortly thereafter, we also had the cut to Leia sensing his death.

Posted by: David at Tue Dec 29 16:40:58 2015 (+TPAa)

6 Re: Steven's spoiler

Beyond all that, we have the meta:  Ford has been trying to get Han killed off since the first movie.  It was in the script for Star Wars for a while, and then was in the script for Empire until Lucas talked him into returning for the final movie.

Posted by: Ben at Tue Dec 29 17:56:39 2015 (S4UJw)

7 I kept thinking "Darth Snape." But although the physical resemblance is uncanny, Snape at his most emo was a lot more formidable person.

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Tue Dec 29 21:00:16 2015 (ZJVQ5)

8 Overall, I did like the movie. But I think it helped that my expectations were not high, and my inner seven-year-old was firmly in the driver's seat.

Battle Beyond the Stars! Fun movie!

Posted by: Suburbanbanshee at Tue Dec 29 21:03:20 2015 (ZJVQ5)

9 For all you people griping about Kylo Ren--and I'm thinking especially of Ubu Roi's review here--the New Jedi Order did basically the same thing:  Han and Leia had three kids:  a mixed-sex pair of fraternal twins, and a second son named Anakin, who died in the opening of the NJO series.  Along with Chewie, btw.  Later, the older son became a Sith Lord and actually for a while was Emperor, although he used a different title, because it wasn't technically an empire.
Well, I say basically, but that's a bit of a stretch.  But eventually one of Han and Leia's kids became evil,  IIRC before that they had also semi-split up (but after Chewie died, she left politics and became Han's copilot), and again IIRC at the end of the NJO, their daughter killed her brother.  I saw Han's death coming just before he walked out onto the bridge, but it didn't feel overly cheap to me; instead it reminded me, for example, of the Wheel of Time books, where early on, Rand lets himself get skewered for a reason I no longer remember.  In this case, I think they were aiming for...I'm not quite sure how to explain it, but a destiny thing, a reverse of Luke's returning Anakin to the Light side, but didn't do a very good job of it.  I objected more to the execution than the concept.  That aside I agree with what seems to be a popular sentiment that the last third or so fell apart a bit.

Posted by: RickC at Tue Dec 29 23:15:23 2015 (FvJAK)

10 RickC - One of my problems with the expanded universe, and one of the main reasons I gave up on it early on, is because Jedi turned to the Dark Side if they had a bad day.  I know a lot of the stories were constantly retconned and overwritten, but I think Luke went evil 3 or 5 times before he was 60 in the expanded universe.

Posted by: Ben at Tue Dec 29 23:24:23 2015 (DRaH+)

11 Ben--that's not unreasonable.  I just wanted to point out, though, that some things that shocked people, well, it's not as if they were made up from whole cloth, and there are EU parallels.
I apparently missed most of the crappy EU books.

Posted by: RickC at Wed Dec 30 00:00:52 2015 (FvJAK)

12 I liked the film quite a lot, but I do not see how it's better than prequels. I never had a visceral reaction to Jar-Jar. So he's handed the Galaxy to Palpatine by calling for vote on emergency powers. What's the big deal? Marco Rubio did the same, as did John McCain. Acting of Adam Driver was better than Hayden Christinsen's, perhaps, but the difference was marginal. It's in the same vein, IMHO.

I have one surefire prediction though (no need for spoiler, right?): considering how PC this movie is, you may bet on someone turning up transgendered in Episode IX. They already have a token Black and a feminist bait. Next step, obviously for Darth Emo to come out as a woman and turn to Light Side in the process. Remember, you heard it here first.

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Fri Jan 1 18:12:27 2016 (XOPVE)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

One of The Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes is all suited up and ready to go after observing the successful landing of the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 02:39 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 145 words, total size 2 kb.

Two of The Brickmuppet's Crack Team of Science Babes bring us news from two different planetoids. 

Art by Six

First up, we have what is actually a tad more than week old news from the Main Belt. It seems that scientists going over the data from the Dawn Probe have reached a consensus for their cover story regarding the glowy bits on Ceres. They claim is that it not an alien city nor a steadily charging space laser preparing to wreak havoc upon the Earth, but rather a really big salt lick. 

Image via

The effect is enhanced by thin clouds of water vapor outgassing in the salty areas that give a refractory effect that one would not normally get on a nigh airless body. It could be that Ceres has cometary properties and is orbiting right on the cusp of its critical distance from the sun. 

Farther afield (quite a bit farther actually) another of our proficient and pulchritudinous planetologists brings us these spectacular videos from the New Horizons flyby of Pluto. These were only recently processed due to the combination of a necessarily slow data transmission rate and the vast amounts of information that New Horizons gathered on its brief pass. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:33 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 208 words, total size 3 kb.

Rooster Teeth has been remiss in getting the next episode of RWBY out after that gut wrenching cliffhanger they foisted on us two weeks ago.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:53 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 62 words, total size 1 kb.

...just what making it to this day means to those of us employed in the North American transportation network quite as well as Onsoku Tassha.

It's over.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:05 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 32 words, total size 1 kb.

...that I can't even spell occoured, ocour....that word for "happened" correctly. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:07 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 71 words, total size 1 kb.

Brick and mortar stores are suffering mightily from online competition and manufacturing jobs are increasingly moving overseas. Now it appears that satire is on the ropes due to sensitive palates.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:04 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 205 words, total size 3 kb.

Earlier this morning, a series of work related calamities prompted a moment of introspection during which I asked "Dear GOD...What the HELL else can go wrong?"

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:47 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 80 words, total size 1 kb.

I've been up since 10:45 last night; and I have to get up tonight at a similar time...to facilitate activities broadly comparable to this...

 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:37 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 25 words, total size 1 kb.

Or at least his blog is. We (and others) had reported earlier on the disappearance of Ubu Roi's blog, but Mahou Meido Meganekko (bridgebunnies.com) is back up and running.

"Yay!"

There is still no word from Ubu directly but effort needed to be expended to get the site up again so this is a good sign...though it probably involved a major annoyance for him. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 03:50 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 76 words, total size 1 kb.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:15 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 11 words, total size 1 kb.

So....Let me see if I've got this straight. Those in the (hopefully) benevolent conspiracy to protect the populace from the eldritch truth think that Pyrrha might, conceivably be able to perhaps save the world (or at least prevent the power of a minor god from being bestowed upon a villain). However, this mere chance applies only if nothing goes wrong and she doesn't become a vegetable or die. It gets better. Even given the most optimistic outcome, (since it involves getting a demigod's SOUL stuffed into her body) it will probably result in her becoming a completely different person/being/entity. They've given her 'till the end of the tournament to decide.



Yang was caught on camera committing something of an atrocity. A serious cultural faux pas from the look of the reaction....she's innocent of course...if she's being gaslighted and criminally insane if she's not.



The camera is easily explainable given the fact that the villains have hacked ptetty much everything. But how did they gaslight the whole stadium audience?

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 04:26 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 74 words, total size 2 kb.

Bridgebunnies.com has been offline for a week now. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:15 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 60 words, total size 1 kb.

...till, posting returns to normal. Here is a compensatory Yuletide dreadnought.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:42 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 19 words, total size 1 kb.

Moe Lane brings our attention to an intriguing development. It seems that the head of the ruthless Sinola drug cartel in Mexico has sent a letter to the head of ISIS. Here's an excerpt.

Moe Lane takes the understandable "Pass the popcorn!" position on this development. We here at Brickmuppet Blog however, have seen the video in the previous post and thus are bitter old cranks. What jumps out at us is the fact that the band of bastards having trouble with ISIS is....in Mexico. 

UPDATE: Nope.

HT-WD

Speaking of ISIS, via RFERL here is an overview of where their oil is going. 

Nearby there is this interesting tidbit of information.

 U.S. officials tell me they are seeing significant numbers of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps troops retreat from the Syrian combat zone in recent weeks, following the deaths and wounding of some of top officers in a campaign to retake Idlib Province and other areas lost this year to opposition forces supported by the West and Gulf Arab States. As a result, the Russian-initiated offensive that was launched in September seems to be losing an important ally. 

Russia, however, seems to be doubling down. If it means peeling Syria away from Iran, it would seem an acceptable trade-off to let Russia retain their base and make Syria a fully Russian client, rather than a Mediterranean staging area for Iran and Hezbollah. Russia, after all , is not trying to bring about the apocalypse.

A Majority of Americans are no Longer Middle Class. 

The implications for this are troubling to say the least. A nation of aristocrats and paupers is not likely to be stable or free. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 06:08 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 433 words, total size 6 kb.

...that we, as a society, are on a cultural death-spiral, spinning faster and faster as we are swept by a maelstrom of decadence, ever closer to a civilizational event horizon that will deposit those it does not drown in the cesspit of a dark age. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:40 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 88 words, total size 1 kb.

As atonement for the limited posting, here is some more seasonally themed cheesecake.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:26 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 22 words, total size 1 kb.

An interesting story from the Miami Herald details the obstacles facing current efforts to identify the remains of the unidentified dead of U.S.S. Oklahoma which was sunk by 9 torpedoes 74 years ago today. 

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 39 words, total size 1 kb.