Literally the game I am tinkering with in my spare time, although not the same stats, just the same inspiration. Itâs about monsters and making your home with your people.
The pacing and tonal flaws were killer. (lolsob) (actually I did not sob but space dads made my husband weep like a baby).
Things I enjoyed: SPACE DADS OMG SPACE DADS. Okay so Donnie Yen is amazeballs, obviously, but I seriously enjoyed the glimpse at Force-as-a-faith. I loved that he was not JEDI JEDI JEDI but still, well, at one with the Force. That was done nicely, and efficiently. I loved the relationship between Baze and Chirrut, it was solid and beautiful. I wish they had gone all in on Gay Space Dads, but I also have a deep and unabiding love for platonic lifemates so I was satisfied. Sad, but satisfied.Â
Bodhi, the broken mangled pilot. I loved how low key his absolute shatteredness was after Saw got through with him. Losing everything but the pilot-ness, and slowly grabbing it all back amid the maelstrom of horror.Â
Saw, cyborg, Forrest Whittaker my angel, that one hurt. Proto-Vader, struggling to hold something to him as his body falls apart. Being able to finally relax, once he has seen rebellion get its hooks in his daughter. That also hurt.
(Also go see Ghost Dog for more Forrest Whittaker causing your heart to break)
Things I am a bit âaroo?â on, like a bewildered labrador: Actual Space Not-Nazi Dad - I get it, itâs Mads, and that was kind of epic, butÂ
wat
I just didnât get the feelsbomb, and it was awkward, and relied a lot on Cinematic Timing for emotional depth.Â
Cassian, the spy rebellion cypher. Diego Luna is BRILLIANT and this is a great role, and he is a broken broken man in the bowels of a broken society and a rebellion still using the broken tools and weighted system.Â
Again, just not getting the feelsbomb.
Jyn. I like ladies in action movies! I like emotionally compromised and broken ladies! I like badass ladies who climb shit a lot. Donât think I didnât notice the mirrored imagery of climbing up to her dadâs death, and climbing up to the rebellionâs life, but that doesnât actually make for character growth. Neither does lots of crying.
Also, Empireâs data backups and library system, wtf. W. T. F. No wonder everyone hates you, all the librarians and archivists in the world cried out in horror realising you only keep hardcopy backups in one place that a trigger happy narcissist can destroy.
Things I am all grumpy-faced at: oh FFS people. Tone is a THING okay.
I get it, there are lots of little funny lols in all the Star Wars films so far. Even the one where the planets die. Where Luke gets his hand chopped off my dear ole Vader-dad. But those movies were about hope and triumph from the beginning. Rogue One, less so.Â
So when we have all these lines, delivered like jokes, but arenât really? It is jarring in an unpleasant way. Gallows humour is a thing, I understand it, but when Chirrut says âI donât need luck.â and Baze replies âBecause you have me!â it sounds like a joke.
Everybody laugh, itâs a joke! We know they die at the end! LAUGH!
Gallows humour, in a movie where we know everyone dies, where our lead characters are shown doing fairly awful things, has to be handled better than that. Otherwise we are laughing AT them, not with them. Tonally it was a jarring shitfight, between splitting the audience from their own reactions, to the belated attempts at romance.
Which leads me to pacing. Okay, so we get everything set up and it seems good. Except, those scenes at the end? Oh god, they went forever. Like, waiting for Jyn to awkwardly blink, or scratch her nose, as they wait for the damn apocalypse.Â
Now, Diego Luna could probably create chemistry with ANYONE but they were reaching, real hard, and the end scenes made it worse. Those close talking, vaguely threatening scenes that hollywood likes to use instead of emotional connection did not make enough space for spending seven minutes in hell, waiting for the cloud to reach them, as they ran for a beach? Okay.
Then the end scene, with Vader and the LOOMING SCARY I TURNED MY SYSTEMS OFF AND FEED ON YOUR FEAR oh shit that door isnât closed but itâs okay, that guy only needs to slip a small card through, Iâll throw these dudes around for a bit OH NO WHO WOULD HAVE THOUGHT HE COULD SLIP THE CARD THROUGH A GAP LIKE THAT...I guess Iâll head back to the ship and choke a few stormtroopers then.
And Vader, gesturing like a fucking first-year drama student EMOTING. AT. YOU. was excruciating.Â
The less said about CGI the better.
Now, as much as I loved Whittaker as Saw, those scenes were fucked up. As was the whole opening section.Â
Mostly though, the way the movie keeps screaming âHOPE!!!!!â at you while beating itâs characters was...ugly. Baze and Chirrut die, but not in each others arms. Bodhi dies in a ship, jammed in the cargo hold. K2 dies plinking on a data module, but at least he got a blaster. Cassian and Jyn die, awkwardly mashed together like two dolls in the hands of a kid high on Disney. Even their deaths screamed hope at the audience, while giving the characters nothing.Â
I understand this as a creative choice, but it requires a much more deft hand in the editing suite, and on the writing, than Rogue One had. And I daresay it might be close to impossible in a Star Wars film to do it too, given the paths already set.
The Department of Awesome Automata seldom gets an opportunity to show off, but today theyâre pulling out all the stops with this breathtaking Silver Swan automaton. Housed at the Bowes Museum in North East England, this exquisite 18th century clockwork bird was designed by designed and built by John Joseph Merlin along with London inventor James Cox.
The life-size swan automaton swims in a stream made of moving glass rods along with small silver fish. When itâs clockwork is wound up, a music box plays as the swan turns its head from side to side, preening her silver feathers, eventually spotting a fish in the water and then bending down to catch it.
In effort to preserve this extraordinary creation, the Silver Swan is only operated once each day. But we can watch it as many times as we like thanks to this video:
For some reason, I feel that @copperbadge must be made aware of The Department of Awesome Automata - in the unlikely event he does not already know, that is :D
When you learn about the team who created this IT GETS BETTER
James Cox, jewelry-empire runner, artist, and enterpreneur, had such a career that the Silver Swan was not the most spectacular creation to come from his workshops - that honor goes to the ten-foot tall automated Peacock Clock. His role in British trade to China drove him bankrupt twice.
John Joseph Merlin, the automata engineer, studied fine mechanisms in Paris for six years before moving to London. He made a splash there with one of his inventions, roller skates:
âOne of his ingenious novelties was a pair of skaites contrived to run on wheels. Supplied with these and a violin, he mixed in the motley group of one of Mrs Cowleyâs masquerades at Carlisle House; when not having provided the means of retarding his velocity, or commanding its direction, he impelled himself against a mirror of more than five hundred pounds value, dashed it to atoms, broke his instrument to pieces and wounded himself most severelyâ
As you do.
After a long and strange career making clocks, inventing more oddities, and improving musical instruments Merlin opened a museum of his automata, Merlinâs Mechanical Museum. One day he was pleased to give an extended tour to a thirteen year old named Charles Babbage. This visit was part of Babbageâs inspiration to create an early computer. In Babbageâs later life he purchased two of the automata he had admired at the museum.
I didnât read the final two Harry Potter books until 2014, on a flight to Aarhus (36 hour transit from home, to be clear).
I knew the plots - I am a compulsive consumer of spoilers - but after HP5 I just couldnât go on. And I had never really worked out why, just assumed it was âHarry is a whiny teenage boy and I have had enough of thatâ.
But, then I got to talking with my favourite Hamster as we watch all the films (havenât seen those either) and as usual, he is rather good at digging through the comforting platitudes to the truthy bones.
It turns out, reading an excessively realist view of abuse, trauma, powerlessness, and aggression is a super bad idea for a recent rape victim. I can remember throwing Jane Eyre aside that year too, literally pitching it across the room at the wall and crying.Â
I was still in denial at that point, and I couldnât work out what the problem was. To mangle a quote from Lois McMaster Bujold, I was stumbling around in the dark and wondering why I was hurt.Â
Which is to say, I am glad for the friends I have made, for the distance 15 years has given me, and that books will always wait.Â
Once you get over how amazing and cute this is (itâll take a while) whatâs really interesting is that the artistâs gallery tends to feature a lot of more generic sexy lady armor pieces that arenât anywhere near as striking.
Almost as though making âsexyâ a mandatory design element for womenâs armor gets in the way a lot.
In case there was still anyone other there who genuinely believes that practical plate armor is too restrictive to allow a regular person to move around and hence had to be restricted to only the mightiest of men:Â
The obstacle run of glory has been completed.
Unsurprisingly it turns out armor of all eras is designed to allow for a wide variety of movement by a wide variety of people provided they have the training and conditioning. Â Similar to that of modern soldiers and fire fighters.
The notion that women need lighter armor due to encumbrance only makes sense if one actually believes the ridiculous dimorphism sadly common in so many productions.
I wonder what the role of atheist is in fantasy worlds like Exalted where the gods are physically present in the natural world and constant throughout history. Perhaps more of a Celestial abolitionist, who believes the gods or the Celestial Bureaucracy should not exist, that the role they serve is obsolete or unneeded, that the Bureaucracy is corrupt beyond saving and should be unmade? Someone who weighs not whether the gods exist but whether they should or should continue to as they are?
To me it seems like an inherently meta-gaming construction BUT to me an athiest in Creation would be effectively considering the spiritual component of the gods and their effects as something mechanical. So âyeah, you can totally make your anima flare and do magic, but thatâs because Essence is a power source that your so called âgodâ takes from peopleâ.Â
So an athiest would be the one talking about midichlorians basically.
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