Totally agreeing with you there. The thing that made the original Star Wars Trilogy so spectacular was not the special effects, but the story. Sure, the special effects were incredible for the time (and are still pretty damned impressive these 30 years later), but a lot of movies using "state of the art" special effects failed to achieve anything near that status and acclaim of any of the original Trilogy films (think Tron). But now it's worse than ever. These days, with the advent of relatively inexpensive CGI effects, directors and producers can focus more on creating dazzling eye candy without paying much attention to the quality of the script. I'm starting to sound somewhat curmudgeonly now, aren't I?

I work as a technology specialist for distance learning in a community college, and when instructors want to put their courses online, a good number of them will simply ask us to convert their PPT presentations to a web-ready format, and they'll do a voice-over which consists of little more than a reading of the slides. Then, they'll post an announcement at the beginning of each week saying, "Read Chapter x, watch the PPT, and take the quiz" and think they're done. This happens with some of our finest instructors. What they fail to understand is that a PowerPoint does not a lesson make. While it was once an innovative tool which could be used to enhance a presentation, PowerPoint has turned into a crutch for those who are too lazy to explore new alternatives. Of course, in education, we also find that many of the instructors are Luddites who are reluctant to use PowerPoint in the first place. But once they start using it, it's a real hard sell to get them to use any alternatives.

Why would we let facts get in the way of paranoia?