John Evans, president of Buffalo’s police union, when speaking to Maki Becker at The Buffalo News:
"Our position is these officers were simply following orders from Deputy Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia to clear the square," Evans said.
Tank Man
In April 1989, a student protest calling for freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and democratic reforms started in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. At its height, it’s estimated that 1 million people were participating in the protest.
The protests continued for over a month. Then, on June 1st, the Chinese government labeled them terrorists. On June 3rd, the People’s Liberation Army invaded Beijing.
On this date, thirty-one years ago, in an iconic act of non-violent protest, a single man stopped a convoy of tanks by simply standing in their way.
Photo by Jeff Widener of the Associated Press.
Looking at the protests in China in 1989 and at the protests in America today, we need to remember the words of one Donald Trump:
“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength.”
Freedom of Speech and Freedom of the Press are enshrined in our Constitution. Democracy — “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people” — is at the very core of the American identity. The people at Tiananmen Square were protesting in the hope that those same ideals could take hold in China, and the man currently occupying the White House (or, more accurately, hiding in the White House) commended the Chinese government for using ‘strength’ to end the protests.
This year, there is no ‘protest vote.’ There is no ‘both sides do it.’
You are either for America or you’re for Trump. There is no middle ground.
I Don’t Want To Shoot You, Brother
As we watch we horror how police across America have behaved during the George Floyd protests, I’ve seen many on social media from military veterans who served in Afghanistan or Iraq about the rules of engagement. With that in mind, I think it’s important to revisit a ProPublica story from 2018 about the firing of a police officer after he responded to a domestic disturbance call and it resulted in the death of a 23-year-old black man. The officer was retired Marine who had served in Afghanistan, and this excerpt from his lawsuit alleging unlawful termination is why you should read it:
“The Weirton Police Department terminated Mr. Mader’s employment because he chose not to use deadly force to shoot and kill an African-American man who was suicidal.”
You need to read the full piece from beginning to end.
Jim Mattis Denounces President Trump, Describes Him as a Threat to the Constitution
Jim Mattis — retired Marine General and Trump’s first Secretary of Defense — in The Atlantic:
Instructions given by the military departments to our troops before the Normandy invasion reminded soldiers that "The Nazi slogan for destroying us…was ‘Divide and Conquer.’ Our American answer is ‘In Union there is Strength.’” We must summon that unity to surmount this crisis—confident that we are better than our politics.
Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.
I would not consider myself a Jim Mattis fan, but this needs to be read by all.
How to Make this Moment the Turning Point for Real Change
Barack Obama:
So the bottom line is this: if we want to bring about real change, then the choice isn’t between protest and politics. We have to do both. We have to mobilize to raise awareness, and we have to organize and cast our ballots to make sure that we elect candidates who will act on reform.
Abyssinia, Hackintosh
After two years of service, my Hackintosh has been retired. Well, the Mac half has. The Windows half is still in the middle of in the middle of Jedi: Fallen Order.
The story, for those unfamiliar (aka everybody): two years ago, the iMac that took me through film school and my first years in Los Angeles finally kicked the bucket. While I have no doubt that I killed it through a combination of multicam video editing, YouTube, and Overwatch, it doesn't change the fact that my iMac was how I looked for work, wrote my stuff, and edited the then-still-alive Blue Post Podcast.
I nabbed the first appointment I could get at a nearby Apple Store and had them take a peek inside. By the time they finished their tests, they determined that the logic board (Applespeak for motherboard) had failed. The cost to repair my six-year-old machine: $800 (almost).
So there I was, mostly broke, unemployed, and still in need of a computer. These were also the dog days of Apple's updates for the Mac, so machines on the low-end weren't great — the Mac mini of the time was basically an expensive paperweight with an HDMI port — and a full-on replacement was more than I could rationally spend on a new computer. After all, I still needed money for groceries.
While my roommate was at work, he would let me borrow his laptop so I could research my options. Since Los Angeles is a land of entertainment professionals who swear by the Mac, I discovered a few local retailers who sold used devices. I could get an iMac that was only a few years older than the dead one on my desk. For $800.
Unless I sacrificed video editing and limited my video games to text-based adventures, I was going to spend $800 on an old machine¹. And buying an old computer that I would need to replace soon thereafer felt like literally throwing money away. And then I remembered hackintoshing.
Months earlier, while still gainfully employed, I had started planning to build my own gaming computer. Bootcamp on my iMac was fine, but the graphics card was getting old. And while my iMac could run circles around the average PC when I bought it, the fact I couldn't upgrade my graphics card put games like Grand Theft Auto V or The Witcher 3 out of reach². Having a dedicated gaming machine that I could update over time would alleviate that problem, and would enable me to spend less money on a replacement for my iMac³.
I realized that with a bit of tweaking (and a few sacrifices around the CPU, memory, and hard drive), my planned gaming system could work as a hackintosh, and it would only cost me — wait for it! — $800.
I thought about it for a few days. There are some functions of MacOS that won’t work on a hackintosh, and spending $800 to build a new machine that should run MacOS is a tad riskier than buying an old machine that will run MacOS. But my financial sense won out. I had been planning to build a gaming computer and on replacing my iMac with a new one at some point in the future. As much as it may have seemed foolish in the short term, in the long term I would end up spending less money overall — buying an old machine would have also cost me hundreds, and wouldn’t change either long term goal. By building the machine, I would be spending money I was going to spend anyway, only earlier than intended and during a period of strained personal finances.
I loved it. I loved building my computer. I loved tinkering with my computer. I can’t wait until I can build another computer⁴.
I will never use a hackintosh as my primary system ever again.
Yes, the Hackintosh was sometimes fun to tinker with⁵ — especially when I was in-between jobs and had the time — this past year was like watching the slow gradual death of my love affair with my machine. After so many Final Cut crashes and Nvidia driver glitches, I knew that the death of the Hackintosh was inevitable. It's untenable to have work come to a standstill because your machine is, well, hacked. It was simply a matter of having the money on hand to buy a new iMac.
Which I did back in December.
As much as I enjoyed building my own computer.there is something rather pleasant about buying a computer, only having to worry about changing a few options — if any — and knowing that the machine will work⁶.
I could've bought a piece-of-shit Windows machine, but unemployment was miserable enough on its own.
Yes, my machine could run the games, but even with my shitty eyesight, 20fps at low settings isn't playable.
While Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere will take advantage of a graphics card, since video editing has ended up being more hobby than career, spending the hundreds of dollars Apple would charge to upgrade the graphics card wouldn't be worth it if the computer wasn't being used for gaming.
My current thought is to update the graphics card every 3rd generation, and to build a new computer every six years. With the slowdown in CPU innovation we saw this past decade (looking at you, Intel), I could probably use this system for more than six years. But, if part of the fun is building the machine, why not build a new one if I can afford it?
I won’t say that I’ll never build another hackintosh (hello, media server!), but one will never again be my primary machine.
To provide even more context in how replacing the Hackintosh with an iMac made my work easier: The Geekbench scores between the two machines were close. The Hackintosh won both graphics and single-core, and the iMac won multicore. You’d think that’d mean I’d see little improvement, but Final Cut imports and exports of Hashtag General broadcasts went from being measured in hours to minutes. The advantage of running MacOS on a machine built to run it makes a difference.
2019: A Reading Year-In-Review
The past few years, I have been working on reading more books. I read all the time while growing up, but my reading habits suffered after graduating college. I still reading constantly, but Reddit and short news pieces aren’t the same as sitting down with a book. A few years back, when I was in-between jobs and had too much free-time on my hands, I started to taking advantage of the library. In 2019, I took advantage of my commute on the almost adequate LA Metro to read even more. Teenaged Logan would still win, but present-day Logan might give him a run for his money¹. Here are the books I read in 2019 (in alphabetical order by title/series):
The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency, Book 2), by John Scalzi
Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson
The Firebird Trilogy, by Claudia Gray:
A Thousand Pieces of You
Ten Thousand Skies Above You
A Million Worlds with You
Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson:
The Final Empire
The Well of Ascension
The Hero of Ages
The Alloy of Law
Shadows of Self
The Bands of Mourning
Secret History
Star Wars:
A Crash of Fate, by Zoraida Cordova
Alphabet Squadron, by Alexander Freed
Galaxy’s Edge: Black Spire, by Delilah S. Dawson
Last Shot, by Daniel José Older
Master and Apprentice, by Claudia Grey
Queen’s Shadow, by E.K. Johnston
Rebel Rising, Beth Revis
Resistance Reborn, by Rebecca Roanhorse
Thrawn: Treason, by Timothy Zahn
Thrawn: Alliances, by Timothy Zahn
The Stormlight Archive, by Brandon Sanderson:
The Way of Kings
Words of Radience
Oathbringer
Tiamat’s Wrath (The Expanse, Book 8), by James S.A. Corey
Warbreaker, by Brandon Sanderson
The Witcher, by Andrzej Sapkowski:
Sword of Destiny
The Last Wish
Blood of Elves
Time of Contempt
A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K LeGuin
Unless you want to give increased weight to the fact that teenaged-Logan would be reading 1984 or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, not another Star Wars novel.
Let’s Play a Guessing Game: “The Rise of Skywalker” Edition
With a new Star Wars film releasing today, now’s the time to continue my ‘tradition’ of predicting what will happen in the movie¹. With The Force Awakens, I all but nailed it. The Last Jedi, not so much. But as I said on Twitter back in January: “The Last Jedi upended all my theorymongering. I have no idea what’s going to happen in Episode IX. And that’s absolutely exciting.” And that still hold true. Unlike the other two films, I don’t have any predictions for what I think will happen in The Rise of Skywalker. I have plenty of ideas about what may happen. So, this time, instead of predictions, here are a few moments from the films — and a few from the books — that should offer some insight into what I’m thinking.
Spoilers (maybe?) for The Rise of Skywalker below:
— Return of the Jedi
We wiped out a planet for you, she thought. The least you can do is tell us why.
Tell us how to survive.
Tell us how to preserve your Empire.
— Alphabet Squadron
by Alexander Freed
— The Mandalorian, “Chapter 3: The Sin”
— The Last Jedi
— Return of the Jedi
— Revenge of the Sith
— Revenge of the Sith
— Revenge of the Sith
— The Empire Strikes Back
— A New Hope
— A Certain Point of View, “Master & Apprentice”
by Claudia Gray
— A Certain Point of View, “Master & Apprentice”
by Claudia Gray
— Return of the Jedi
— The Last Jedi
Okay, so I actually have two ‘predictions.’ Neither one should be credited to some brilliant insight on my part — both are all-but-confirmed by the tie-in novel Resistance Reborn:
Wedge Antilles will appear, but won’t play a central role in the story.
Finn-Poe is a thing.
Yes, I know there are spoilers from a major leak. No, I haven’t read them. In fact, I’ve only seen the final trailer once and none of the TV ads. So there.
Apple's Mac Pro Pro Problem
Over the past few years, you wouldn’t needto go far to find pro-level users upset at Apple over the dearth of high-end Mac hardware from 2013ish until nowish.
Things are getting better. The iMac Pros are beasts, the rumors about the next MacBook Pro update are promising, and the soon-to-be released Mac Pro is more computer than the average person will ever use or need. But while Apple’s recent efforts have all-but overcome the weaknesses in their line-up, a recent article that happened across my desk has raised some red flags.
In the Visual Effects Roundtable over at postPerspective, the following question was asked of almost¹ every industry professional: “How will real-time ray tracing play a role in your workflow?”
Currently, the only graphics cards with realtime raytracing tech are made by Nvidia.
Apple doesn't use Nvidia cards. Apple doesn't support Nvidia cards. Apple won't even sign drivers that Nvidia made on their own². Turns out that the ole' Apple-Nvidia blood fued is still alive and kickin’ at Apple Park.
Admittedly, I have some skin in the game — my Hackintosh uses a Nvidia graphics card, and the lack of driver support in both Mojave and Catalina have negatively impacted my editing workflow as I am no longer able to run to most up-to-date version of Final Cut Pro X. While getting official Nvidia support would be a boon to me, that's beside the point. Why make one of the most powerful desktops on the market if it is unable to use the most advanced graphics cards? For a VFX house looking at investing in new technology, if they are even thinking about real-time ray tracing, all Apple devices are immediately out of contention. The lack of Nvidia cards will undermine the Pro in Mac Pro.
Notably, they didn’t ask the AMD representative this question.
While nothing is technically stopping Nvidia from writing and releasing their own drivers, because Apple won't sign them the OS will be unable to verify the integrity or legitimacy of the file. Understandably, Nvidia is leery of releasing them this way.
MoviePass: Fallout
Just when you think MoviePass is dead and gone, The Ringer publishes an interview with MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe and Executive Vice President Khalid Itum, where they detail their struggle to keep MoviePass afloat. At one point Itum remarked that the weekend Mission Impossible: Fallout came out was when they realized “…that we can’t necessarily provide the service we had been providing..."
You don't say.
My argument, from the beginning, was that MoviePass was an interesting idea, but one that was poorly thought out and poorly implemented. The fact that they didn't realize this until almost one year after announcing their "Unlimited Movies for $9.95 Plan" is, sadly, unsurprising.
“Over 80 percent of subscribers were great customers,” says Lowe—“great,” in this case, meaning rule-abiding and low-frequency. “We were roughly breaking even on that group.”
Like gyms at the start of every new year, MoviePass was banking on generating revenue from people signing up for the service and then never using it. But given the cost of the monthly subscription and the average cost of a movie ticket in the United States, I’m surprised that they were breaking even on 80% of their consumer base. The teensiest amount of research would have warned them about frequent moviegoers. They account for 48% of ticket sales in the domestic market and not only would they be the most interested in a theater subscription service, they would be the ones who would benefit the most from it. Or, to borrow Lowe’s own parlance: not great customers.
I, for one, fell into that ‘not so great’ category of customer. Then again – and I’ll admit this is entirely anecdotal — I ran into many people in LA who signed up for the service, and immediately began to see movies on a weekly basis. At $9.95 a month, MoviePass was cheaper than a matinee ticket at most area theaters, and you could go (almost) as much as you wanted. As analyst Michael Pachter noted when interviewed for the article:
“Nobody was dumb enough to sign up for MoviePass and not use it.” When I ask Pachter what MoviePass’s biggest mistake was in 2018, he doesn’t hold back: “Their biggest mistake was launching.”
But not only did they not think through how their customers would use the service, they apparently didn’t think through how they should approach the exhibitors.
MoviePass fashioned itself as a disruptor, and thus, behaved disruptively. It demanded that exhibitors share profits with it on concessions; it demanded exhibitors provide discounts on tickets; boasting its marketing heft and ability to push users toward specific movies, it demanded deals from distributors.
...
What they failed to anticipate, for some reason, was the way the industry—both exhibitors and distributors—responded to this behavior. “The cinema business is quite a small business actually,” says David Hancock, the director of research and analysis for cinema and home entertainment at IHS Markit. “It’s a relatively restricted number of people in there, and they know each other relatively well. You often get outsiders coming in, not understanding the business, and [they] say, ‘We’re going to impose this on you guys.’ Each time this happens, the business closes ranks. [And] the way MoviePass came in, they were just asking to be isolated.”
As I wrote way back when: “[the exhibitors hesitance] doesn't mean that the exhibition industry isn't prime for some disruption, just that MoviePass needs to prove that it's the way to do it.” And evidently they did. But pissing off the distributors and exhibitors while doing it isn’t exactly the path to success. The history of MoviePass can be described as a a seemingly unending series of poor executions around a decent idea. And, as a user, that was evident from the beginning.
There is a UI design philosophy that Apple codified back in the 1980s on the Mac —one that is still used today on both macOS and iOS. You probably haven’t noticed it, but pay attention the next time you are prompted to choose ‘Yes’, ’Okay’, or ‘Confirm’. There’s a really good chance — as in 99% or higher — that those options will be on the bottom right of the dialogue screen. This means, assuming that the program adheres to the design philosophy that is suppossed to be implemented universally across the system, you shouldn’t need to read the options. You would instinctively know where it is: The bottom right.
When I first signed up form MoviePass, I kept running into an error where I would input my MoviePass card number into the system, and it would cancel out. I did this multiple times before finally realizing my error: The ‘Confirm’ button was on the left, not the standard right.
When I complained to my friends, they laughed and — fairly — pointed out that it was my fault for not reading the dialogue box. But that was beside the point. In a properly designed app, I wouldn’t need to read it.
MoviePass: Poorly thought out and poorly implemented, through and through.
Under Construction
For the record: I fully support building a wall.
A wall is a tried and true method of restricting the flow of people. But I think we need to take a lesson from history to make sure that this wall is impervious.
There is an old infantry tactic where they’d ‘form square’ — which is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. The infantrymen would stand and form a hollow square with lines of soldiers facing out in each direction. This would enable them to withstand a cavalry attack on all sides. Our wall must do the same and ‘form square’.
Then, on each corner of the wall, we should put a guard outpost. In each outpost, armed guards will make sure that no one gets over the wall.
Once the wall is complete, we need to build a secure facility within. Windows in this facility will utilize artistically designed steel slats, or bars, to ensure that no one can breach the security of this facility, while still enabling the tenants to see outside.
And inside this facility we can place Donald Trump and all the key members of his totally legit businesses and his Collusion-Free Campaign (™ Vladimir Putin 2016) to ensure that they stay safe!
Expanded Thoughts: The Miseducation of Cameron Post
After I saw the film, I did what I always do: I pulled up the film's page on IMDb (I'm a sucker for the trivia page). The first thing I noticed was the film's rating: 6.8/10.
I don't necessarily disagree with the rating—If I had to give it a numeric rating, it'd be slightly higher1—but this review, "Could Have Done More" by allenwhybray caught my eye:
"Cameron starts humming "What's Going On" and within minutes is standing on the table singing it loud and proud. There's an inherent energy in that scene that often feels missing from the rest of the picture. Also, the people in this story are flesh-and-blood examples of a tragic emotional Stockholm Syndrome that should not be. I just wish the story did more with them."
As I read their review, I found myself agreeing with allenwhybray. I wanted there to be more energy in the film. But the more I thought about it, the more I understood why the filmmakers would choose not to.
When Cameron is caught in a lesbian tryst, she gets sent away for conversion therapy. In the aforementioned singing scene, it ends with the camp therapist giving Cameron mail privileges—with the subversive goal of having Cameron read a letter from her former lover, where she blames Cameron for "taking advantage of her". In one scene, the character Mark, angrily reacting to the news that his father won't let him come home—he is still "too feminine"—ends with Mark literally being kept down on the ground by the camp therapist's foot, while she tells Mark that she will only let him up when he calms down.
Any time a character has an outburst of emotion, or acts as their true self, they are punished. The film reflects the reality the characters were living in.
You can read my short review of this film and others over at 50words.reviews.
1. The inherent nitpicking that comes with a numeric score is exactly why I use an expanded up-down system at 50 Words or Less.
Get On Home
The fighting’s over
The battle’s done
You get on home, Son.
We don’t know
who won or lost
But we do know
what the fighting cost
You get on home, Son.
Your country can ask
No more of you
But when you leave
Who knows what to do
You get on home, Son.
If you work at MoviePass, you know your company's future is in question when Vanity Fair runs the headline "Enjoy MoviePass While You Can, Folks". Only a few days ago, Business Insider reported that MoviePass lost $40 million in May alone, and that it would need to raise up to $1.2 billion in additional funding. While they’ve taken actions to bring down their costs— such as blacking out new releases, allowing subscribers to only see a movie once, and will soon start charging you a fee to see a movie during 'peak hours'— conventional wisdom is that MoviePass will fail; it’s just a question of when.
But despite all this, tomorrow AMC Theatres is launching “Stubs A-List”, a new teir of their existing membership program centered on a MoviePass-esque subscription plan for $19.95 a month. With this program, AMC now joins Cinemark in offering a subscription service, which leaves Regal as the only major American theater chain without one. But why would they do this? You’d think given all the financial woes facing MoviePass, my own pessimistic appraisal of MoviePass would lead to an equally pessimistic appraisal of AMC’s A-List program. But, I think there’s more at play here than many realize:
- They know more than we do — As the largest theater chain in the United States, AMC has a huge advantage, even over MoviePass, of determining the impact a subscription ticket service can have.
All MoviePass cards are actually a MasterCard. Through backend trickery—and a requirement for customers to verify the purchase—these cards can only be used to purchase tickets at approved theaters. After MoviePass launched its $9.95 subscription plan, if AMC saw a significant increase in tickets being purchased using a MasterCard, and a similar increase in attendance, it would be a safe guess to attribute that growth to MoviePass. But they can even take this further. Because MoviePass can only be used for tickets, if MasterCard usage didn’t increase at the concessions stand, but, like attendance, there was a notable increase in concessions sales, those sales could also be attributed to MoviePass users. With that data, AMC could easily determine if launching their own service would be profitable. In other words: AMC has done the math. Some other foolish company paid tens of millions of dollars to prove the concept. - Customer Lock In - With MoviePass, you can use it (almost) everywhere. If AMC noted an increase in attendance, it would follow that this increase wasn’t limited to any one theater or chain. I’m sure someone inside AMC corporate just sees that as potential lost sales. It's just a matter of convincing consumers that A-List is a better deal than MoviePass.
- The Middle Man - MoviePass is little more than a middle man. MoviePass pays the full price of the ticket, and they hope that in the future their losses will be offset, either through advertising partnerships with the studios or by receiving a cut of the ticket and concessions sales from the theater. In the already thin margin business of film exhibition, giving another vendor a cut of the sales isn’t appealing. This is greatest weakness of MoviePass's business plan—without these partnerships, they have no hope for profitability. And if you are AMC, why would you cut a deal with the middle man? You could launch your own program, and any (potential) increase in revenue would be yours to keep.
The TL;DR — While MoviePass is doomed to fail, there is a chance that AMC’s program will actually succeed.
Had it happened elsewhere in the world, the response would be unanimous. We would decry the perpetrators, call them criminals, and demand action.
It is disturbing that such an atrocity is occurring on our southern border, and alarming that some would speak up to defend it.
Our history as a nation isn’t perfect. We’ve struggled to uphold one of our founding principals that all are created equal, and we sometimes have lapsed in providing due process of law. We’ve told ourselves that these troubles lie in our past, but here they are, a terror in the present.
He may proclaim love for the flag, but Trump’s continued actions betray the ideas, hopes, and dreams of the republic for which it stands.
Dear Lucasfilm: Can we please keep Star Wars Christmas?
I have been accused, quite possibly fairly, of being a grinch. It's not that I don't like the holiday season, I just get grinchy when Christmas music gets played outside the acceptable confines of Black Friday through about 10pm Christmas Day.
For the past decade, Christmas has diminished in its importance for my family. My parents have yet to recover from the cataclysm that was "The Recession". My father is now too old, too experienced, and therefor too damned expensive, that getting work is still a struggle. And since America criminally undervalues education, my mother's income as a teacher isn't enough for them to survive. Christmas has become a tragic symbol of our struggle to try to get the family together, if only once a year.
Between Christmases without the parents, celebrations occuring on different days due to work schedules, and a long standing moratorium on giving presents, my joy for the day itself has slowly eroded away—by my late teens my favorite part of Christmas was the watching someone as they would open that awesome gift they didn't know they wanted. But now, the only reason Christmas was the time of year we'd get together was the fact that it was the only time my dad could get away from whatever office he was working at and my mom, my sister, and I would be off from school. It could've been April for all we cared. The Christmas season stopped being special.
And then The Force Awakens happened.
For the past two years, having had Star Wars for Christmas, it's given me something to look forward to. While my parents aren't the biggest fans, yet Star Wars is something that my sister and I have shared since we were kids. Star Wars at Christmas time offered me the joy of something new to share with her, and with my friends. I love "Star Wars Christmas".
But time and again, Lucasfilm keeps trying to shoehorn Star Wars back into May. I mean, I get it. Star Wars is the film that gave us the idea of the summer blockbuster. Up until The Force Awakens, every film had been released in May. There's tradition there. But having all the films release in December is letting us build a new one. And I want to keep this one.
So please, dear Lucasfilm/Disney/Santa, can we please keep Star Wars Christmas?
Let's Play A Guessing Game: The Last Jedi Edition
Back in 2015 I made a few predictions about the story and plot of The Force Awakens, and I ended up getting some right.
Unlike The Force Awakens, where I was watching and reading everything Lucasfilm put out in order to try and figure out as much as I could, with The Last Jedi, I've been actively avoiding trailers and errata in order to go in spoiler free. With that in mind, this time I only have three predictions, and only one concerns the plot:
We won't get a solid answer concerning Rey's background. Some mysteries need a third movie. When The Force Awakens first came out, I was certain that she was a secret Skywalker. But the more I've thought about it, the less certain I've become. I think she's connected to the Skywalker's, but that could mean anything from being Luke's daughter or the theorized Kenobi love child. While I expect us to get hints to her parent's identity in this film, I don't think we'll get solid answers until the next one. [Watch as I'm wrong and Luke says "Rey, I am your father." in this movie.]
Somebody loses an hand. It's tradition. In the second movie of a Star Wars trilogy, someone gets a hand chopped off by a lightsaber. If I was going to make a guess for bonus points, I'd say it's KyloBen. Because the last two times, it was the Skywalker who loses the hand. {Again, if Rey loses a hand...]
Princess Leia's Theme will close out the end credits. A worthwhile tribute to the late Carrie Fisher.
As for the box office side of things, as I wrote awhile back, the average Star Wars saga film will open to $207 million, and would gross $705 million total in the domestic box office. I think The Last Jedi will perform slightly higher, and will open closer to $215 million, with a total gross of $730 million.
What the Hell Happened to Logan?
Long story short, it involves getting sick, family coming to visit, and a computer dying. So a lot of stuff has happened, so let's just dig right in to the last month's worth of news.
Rian Johnson to direct a new, standalone Star Wars trilogy
This was inevitable. Star Wars needs to exist without having the Skywalker's at the center.
Normally, news like this would've been announced after The Last Jedi had come out to rave reviews and a stellar box office start. The fact that Lucasfilm announced it months before the release speaks volumes about the working relationship that Johnson built up with Kathleen Kennedy, the head of Lucasfilm, but also the caliber of film that he put together. I know it help throw my own hype for The Last Jedi into overdrive.
Amazon working on a Lord of the Rings TV series
If anyone at Amazon ever reads this: Hire Me.
I seriously have most of the books you'd need for research sitting on a bookshelf.
While I am excited by the prospects of a Lord of the Rings television series, early details on the project describe it as a Fellowship of the Ring prequel series. This could mean a lot of things—from The Silmarillion and The Hobbit, t0 simply expanding upon the appendices in The Return of the King. This definitely can be handled right, but I'm cautious. Are they not going to make The Lord of the Rings? Is this supposed to be an anthology series? I can't wait until we can get more details. But, again: Hire me.
EA shits the bed
The Battlefront II microtransaction fiasco got so much attention, that a Reddit post by EA got over half-a-million downvotes, it made headlines in the mainstream press, and even lead to some governments investigating whether or not loot boxes are a form of gambling. The negative press got so bad that Disney stepped in and told EA to right the ship.
Frustration has been building up in the gaming community for a while over microtransactions, DLC, and "pay-to-win" schemes intended to make publishers and developers more money—and EA is often at the core of many of these complaints. While most can and will forgive cosmetic microtransactions, Battlefront II's would actually impact gameplay and were a complete mess. The fact that iconic heroes like Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker were locked behind a 40+ hour grind and/or a paywall, lead to all the complaints being dialed up to eleven. The negative press got so bad that EA removed to ability to purchase items in-game only hours prior to the game's official launch. But all this didn't stop the many cries of "Boycott!"
The Disney-Fox Merger
Expected to be announced tomorrow, but rumors have been swirling around for awhile that Disney is going to buy 21st Century Fox from News Corp. Murdoch keeps news and sports—his bread and butter—Disney gets everything else. This news has fans everywhere salivating. Will we see Wolverine in The Avengers? Will the Fox Fanfare play in front of Star Wars films again? How many merger jokes will be in Deadpool 2?
While fanboys and fangirls everywhere have much to be excited about, having one less major studio around is troubling. A shrinking Hollywood might be good for Wall Street, but not really for the people trying to make a living creating the content we consume.
And Finally:
Doug Jones wins in Alabama. Parliament throws a wrench into Teresa May's Brexit plans. It's almost like December rolled around and 2017 went "Oh shit! I should probably work on cleaning up some of that mess that 2016 left."
Oil
Back in January 2016, I visited a friend stationed in Hawaii. This was due more to luck of timing rather than actual planning. The Force Awakens had loosened its grip on the universe, and I had no side jobs lined up, so I was able to take the time off work on a whim. This of course had the side effect of having no itinerary other than "see Oahu".
My friend serves in the Navy, and a side perk of Navy dress uniform is free addmitance to the U.S.S. Missouri, so that moved Pearl Harbor to the top position in my non-existant plan. But the first stop that day was the Arizona.
As you get close to the U.S.S. Arizona memorial, the air reeks of oil. It gets up in your nose and overwhielms any other smell. No salt-tinged sea breeze, just oil.
To call the Arizona a memorial is almost a disservice. It is a tomb. You wander in a dazed silence knowing that the bodies of one thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven men—killed in an instant as an explosion ripped through the hull—lay buried beneath the waves. But the smell of oil lingers, more permanant than the stench of death itself.
My friend took my picture, so I'd have something to show and share. I didn't really want him to. This isn't a memory or a place you visit and plaster all over Facebook. I've never shared the photo. I don't need it to remember. I have the smell.