That’s a fair take, but for me it just went past the point of willing suspension of disbelief, and I don’t find that meta-narrative compelling. It may well be a reason for me to re-evaluate it though, to decide if I think it’s poorly done versus something where what they wanted to do simply didn’t connect with me.

I recently finished Blue-Eyed Samurai, and Mizu’s increasingly powerful plot armor comes very close to ruining the whole show.

Anyways, I saw TPM 9 times in the first 48 hours.

My friends thought I was nuts for seeing it six times during its first and dollar-theater runs. There was so much interesting stuff to unpack…

…except the plot or acting (barring Ian McDiarmid and Liam Neeson).

part of a deal to resolve President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.

Yup. The sitting president was suing an agency of his own executive branch, folks. A lawsuit he filed – checks notes – four months ago. They’re barely even trying at this point.

I tried so hard, but poor Jake Lloyd was never given anything to work with, and Natalie Portman and Samuel L Jackson and any other actors who were hoping for some competent direction were hung out to dry too. Some of the worst line readings I’ve ever heard from professional actors.

Then there was JarJar… and watto… and the neimoidians… oh, and the utter lack of a compelling story…

Like you, though, I convinced myself that the bones were good, and then also that they were just getting warmed up and episode two would be a banger. Spoiler alert: it was not, though it had a few isolated moments as well.

It was so much worse than that. People had been waiting 16 years to see a proper cinematic continuation of Star Wars. There were some pulp novels, a couple of very weak kids cartoons, a pretty decent tabletop RPG with source materials, a few video games, and that was about it. For a franchise that was still iconic and incredibly popular despite lying fallow like that.

We got a more distilled version of George’s vision, and hoo-boy it just simply wasn’t very good. I still saw that movie six fuckin’ times (the last three at the dollar theater), but while there was plenty to digest and feed my nerdery, the story and acting just never got better.

Surely they were just getting warmed up though, and episode two would be better…

JJ Abrams, but yes. I will give TPM credit for production design and world building and for a few of the veteran actors’ performances.

TFA gave us a cast of characters you could do something with, and apart from sounding a bit too much like a Joss Whedon movie, performances that were at least not delivered by cardboard cutouts. I didn’t completely mind the plot being a rehash, but the contortions they went through to make the state of the galaxy exactly fit a rehash doomed the entire trilogy.

Waited in a three-hour-ish line for The Phantom Menace. 100 minutes of “I’m sure it will get better” followed by the Naboo duel tricking my fanboy brain into thinking it was a good movie.

Not to mention state and local governments. One of the dirty little secrets of our economy is that undocumented workers have a significant direct and indirect tax burden, but other than schools (which are for literal children, lest we forget) they’re excluded from almost all benefits that require any sort of, well, documents.

So you’ve got a permanent underclass who are paying into the system but literally aren’t allowed to reap all the benefits. Now, on the one hand, I kind of get how that’s a devil’s bargain they were willing to make to get to the US from countries with more immediate issues, but to argue that they’re a drain on the country and need to be hunted down post-haste, and not treated as the human beings they are, that’s just evil on so many levels, but one of them is that it upends the economic deal America tacitly made with them by accepting their labor. They literally pay a huge tax to be in the country at all. Even the business owners used to understand that. I assume most of them still do, but none of them will pick this hill to die on.

This is definitely the right community, LOL. I am absolutely a dogs>cats person, but this junior-high school-paper article has me questioning 20 years of a catless house.

It doesn’t help that immediately after the gospels are Paul’s angry, regressive, and authoritarian letters to all the congregations he was trying to dominate, followed by the late-first century anti-Roman millenarian fever dream of Revelations.

Mechanical keyboards, though about forty percent of them at this point are ones I feel comfortable saying I “made,” which is to say I did something significantly more involved than assembling a barebones kit. Still, they’re accumulating a bit and sometimes I build one just to try some small layout tweak or technique I haven’t done before.

I also have a fountain pen collection, but I haven’t added much to it recently. It’s not a bad gift vector for loved ones though, and it turns out that my Montblanc really is nice, though not by such a margin that I was ever going to pay for it myself.

So many rainbow explosions…

In the meantime, OnShape is cross platform cause it’s all in browser and I don’t care about my designs being public. I actually post them all free anyway.

The biggest issue with their license is that they went so hard on protecting themselves hosting it, that they basically give everyone BUT the creator the right to monetize a public design. It’s an offensively sloppy ToU, or at least it was the last time I checked it.

Some of it will depend on what your goals and OS are. OnShape is pretty good, and being in-browser it’s inherently cross-platform. BUT… their free tier has the single worst licensing setup imaginable: your designs are public, you can’t make a single cent off them, BUT any paying customer (and arguably any other user at all) can. They also jump straight from free to enterprise pricing.

Fusion you know. Licensewise, the free version gives you a small grace zone to make a couple of bucks without issues, and you can at elast keep your designs to yourself.

SolidWorks has an extremely heavy and unfriendly web interface, but their in-browser parametric 3D CAD is better than it used to be, and you can get a maker plan for $25-$50 a year that gives you a little wiggle room to sell a few trinkets and not get blasted if someone or something rats you out to Dassault. If you’re on Windows, you’ll also be able to install proper SolidWorks (though files will be watermarked to limit them to a hobbyist/maker install.

Solid Edge is a bit clunkier than (real) SolidWorks or Fusion, is windows only, and there’s also a doughnut hole for limited commercial use, but it’s the full software and it’s free as in beer.

Since they cleared up the worst of the toponaming issue, FreeCAD is way better than it used to be. I still feel like the moment you have to do anything more than draw/extrude/fillet, then all the clunkiness comes back, though. It’s a brilliant project in its way, but it remains a mixed bag, shall we say.

I paid for a permanent license for my version of Alibre Design, and that’s what I generally use. It’s somewhere between SolidEdge and Solidworks in user-friendliness, and more than powerful enough for my keyboards and random widgets. I also do like the simplicity of owning my license and therefore fully controlling my designs, but it wasn’t cheap, probably two years’ worth of monthly payments on the Shapr3D usable tier or the fancy Fusion tier, so I will probably keep plugging along for a while yet. They have a more basic product (Atom) that’s missing some fairly useful features, but is still parametric and is rather cheap. It’s also all Windows only, though I keep hearing the next version will play nice with Wine/Proton. For now, my investment with Alibre is pretty much THE reason I occasionally boot back into Windows.

TinkerCAD (opwned by Autodesk like Fusion is) is great for certain things, and the “make shape, set solid or hole” workflow is much more intuitive for the abject beginner, but if you’re on Fusion you’re already past the need for it, i’d think.

There are other players (Rhino, Plasticity, DesignSpark, SolveSpace, among others), but Fusion, Shapr3D (for single parts only, no assemblies),OnShape, SolidEdge, FreeCAD, Alibre, and Solidworks pretty much cover mechanical CAD that’s (1) full-featured, (2) 3D, (3) got parametric history and (4) available with usable free or maker versions.

Shows what you know! In most parts of the US, there is no train!

I agree, but ol’ Don is, if nothing else, a curator of interesting writing prompts.

“we’ll burn that bridge when we get to it”

When used in a fitting situation, that’s one I’ve always really liked.

Smart. It’s a lot easier with the entire internet and plenty of time.

And hey, the venomous ones are just doin’ their thing too.

I mean, don’t fuck with any snakes, and a lot is dependent on when and where you encounter it, but if you’re in the US I think that’s more likely a Milksnake. Of course, if it is then that makes this post even just a touch more dull. 🤣