Come on, don't do that. This narrative that somehow the new stuff is retroactively ruining your childhood, that it's specifically designed as an insult to your fandom... That's toxic.

Last Jedi is a good example of that. Some people complain that Luke isn't a Marty Stu anymore, he's not just waiting to be unleashed and go defeat the First Order with a laser sword. That would have been a terrible movie. How unsatisfying would it be that all the Rebels needed to do was find the guy who saved them last time, so he could do the same thing again. It would also prove again that the only people who matter are Skywalkers, everyone else is just waiting for them to resolve their issues.

The whole point was that everyone in the Rebellion matters, they all contribute, and The Force isn't just something that a few privileged people can use to shape events on a galactic scale. Rey is revealed to be nobody special at all, just someone who has the opportunity to do something meaningful. Then they blew all that up by writing a movie that was supposedly based on "fan feedback", and it was the worst one of the lot. Undid all the interesting ideas from TLJ.

Probably one of the worst examples of fans ruining a franchise. It's never really recovered. Andor was only good because it ignored all that stuff, didn't have any Force stuff in it, just ordinary people trying to make a difference, and not because it's the right thing, but because the Empire hurt them and the people they care about.

That list just proves the point. Finn isn't trying to beat her, he's trying to diffuse the situation. She can't fly the Millennium Falcon better than Han, in fact the first thing she does is crash it into the ground. At no point does she ever demonstrate particularly good piloting skills, unlike Luke who goes from shooting womp rats to taking down a heavily fortifies Death Star in about a week.

I can't be bothered to go through every point, and I'm not disputing some bad writing decisions, but she is in no way a Mary Sue. She is no way the equal of Kylo Ren either, who dominates in his fight with her in the first movie. She never beat Luke in a 1-on-1 fight either, that simply never happens in the movies.

Thrawn is just a bad idea. Yet another guy who is destined for something, born special. A generic Empire baddie with no interesting traits or character arc.

Contrast with, say, Gul Dukat from Star Trek Deep Space Nine. Both are Space Fascists, but unlike Dukat, Thrawn isn't likeable and only views his actions as necessary, not morally right. His interactions with the heroes are only as an opponent, a simple villain who they must defeat. His personality is paper thin.

DS9 is some of the best Trek ever made, because it put the writers in charge and didn't try to be popular or pander to what fans wanted. Voyager did, and it ended up being mediocre for the most part. But it had fan service. I'm half expecting Disney to cast Sydney Sweeney and bring back metal bikinis.

They are quieter, yes. Nuclear subs aren't all that stealthy because the reactor is constantly making noise. They are designed to stay submerged for long periods of time, not engage other subs at ranges where the noise gives them a disadvantage. The hope is that they can't be found in the vast ocean, or at least not consistently enough to negate the threat of nuclear retaliation.

Battery electric propulsion can't be beat for stealth.

It would be good if I could have it auto cancel above a certain price.

They do all sorts of misleading stuff to make you think you are getting a bargain.

"Lowest price in the last 30 days", and they limit API users to a year's worth of price data. Typically when I see a message like that, I assume it was cheaper 31 days ago.

"Limited time deals" are rarely limited time, and usually mean that it is available somewhere else for the same price anyway.

"Subscribe and save" just means "save compared to the price at time of re-ordering", not that it will lock in a lower price. You still have to check every month.

I don't think most of it is planned, and that goes for Europe as well. Governments have some control, such as making rules around balcony solar or minimum allowances for rooftop solar to be connected to the grid, but for the most part it's been people installing it because of some personal decision they made (it's a great investment). The grid has been forced to change faster than the operator would have liked it to in many places, which is a good thing.

They didn't really have any choice with the extended universe, because a) it's mostly shit, and I mean like really, really, fan fic level shit, and b) even most of the older fans haven't read it and wouldn't know what the hell was going on.

When they have tried to bring elements of it in, like Thrawn, it's become immediately apparent what a terrible idea that was. If you look at the only good bits of the new shows and movies, they have been the ones that were not just toy commercials or fan service. Rogue One, Andor, Last Jedi, a few bits of Mandalorian.

The problem they have is that they need to find a new audience, but the older fanbase has become extremely toxic. Look at your comments about Rey being a "Mary Sue", despite the fact that she is very clearly the opposite of that in the first movie. They can't win, and the more you do it, the less interest they have in trying. Mando and Grougu are one of the few things that has brought in new, less toxic fans for them, which is why they are milking it.

Critic reviews suggest it's not a bad movie at all, but I'll wait for it to come on streaming. Not really interested in going to the cinema these days.

There have been some duds from Disney, like most of The Mandalorian after season 1, Book of Boba Fett, Ahsoka... Giving the fans what they claim to want is usually a recipe for disaster, and it shows with those. But also the fans for SW (and at least half the Trek fans) are extremely toxic and tend to ruin anything that is actually good. Andor seems to be an exception, but Acolyte was actually a decent idea, and Last Jedi was probably the only hope the franchise had of moving forward.

It's like Meyer said around the time he did Wrath of Khan. The fans don't know what they want until you give it to them. On paper that movie should have sucked - Very little fan service, a sequel to a TV show episode, beloved characters make mistakes or die, Kirk has a son out of nowhere, it's a submarine thriller in space... But it works really, really well. If it was released today, the internet would get wind of Kirk needing glasses, and spend the year leading up to release panning it as the worse thing ever, an insult to their intelligence, not understanding Trek at all, and generally trying to destroy it in every way possible.

I've used it for reverse engineering and was surprised how well it did. I decompiled some old Amiga game code back into assembler, but without any debug info so it was a complete mess. I started with Ghidra, but ran out of steam with it, so just threw the decompiled assembler at Gemini and asked it what the format of some files was. It figured it out and got the correct answer, bar a couple of minor issues.

Next time work asks me to do something with an ancient codebase I didn't create, I might well try getting AI to document it. It's a shortcut to get started.

It's a setback for Artemis though. It will probably take a year to rebuild that launch facility, maybe more.

Naval reactors will never be viable for civilian use. Too expensive, proliferation of the highly enriched fuel is an issue, and unless you build them offshore they won't have the same cooling options. And we don't actually know how good the Navy's safety record is really.

It's a lot like smoking. Once your brain gets addicted, it's very hard to quit. Then nicotine patches were invented, and vaping, and it got easier.

It's kind of insane that none of this stuff has been banned. But that's how we do things - cannabis is illegal in many places, but addictive tobacco products and foods engineered to destroy your health are fine.

There are obvious differences.

1. People's memories are not perfect, they forget things. Computers don't forget.

2. If things got really bad, you could move to another town and start over. Not so when all the towns are connected to the same database.

3. Facial recognition is not very reliable, and the reliability gets worse as skin tones darken.

IIRC Kennedy originally wanted to do something spectacular to show the world how advanced the US was, and things like desalinating water were considered. But he also wanted to improve relations with the USSR, and when he proposed going to the moon he then started putting forward the idea of a joint mission.

It was still in the early stages when he was assassinated, so the mission profile hadn't been decided upon and most people were expecting there to be a moon orbit rendezvous between a crew capsule and lander launched separately. So the thought was that the US and USSR could send their own crew capsules, and then both board a joint lander, and go down together. Presumably they would have had to figure out how to have an astronaut and cosmonaut step onto the surface at the same time.

So it was a dick measuring contest, but there was also the possibility of it fostering cooperation. Shame it didn't happen until Apollo/Soyuz.