I like the idea of supporting creators to whatever extent I can. As an anime nerd I know that Blu-ray sales are the main metric whether a show gets another season or not. That and merchandise sales but I don't really have space to set up merch and I don't like buying it just to put it in a corner of a closet. Plus buying blu-rays gets me high quality video on a pressed disc that will more than likely outlive me.

I have no illusions though about how the people who make anime get treated. I know only a tiny fraction of the money I spend ever makes it into their pockets and more often than not they are run out of business repeatedly by rapacious corporations. So at the same time I don't really begrudge anyone who doesn't want to buy into that literally.

I think the correct solution is to buy the official release to support the creators but also change how you vote so that workers stop getting exploited. Worker exploitation is a political problem after all not an economic one.

Of course I have to live in the world the way it is now not the way I wanted to be so again if you're not buying blu-rays I don't be grudge you in the slightest. Although it's an anime fan like I said without the blue ray sales and the merch sales you're not going to get more of that show you like... And it really is the Blu-ray sales the drive the next season even more so than the merch a lot of times.

All caps yelling and name calling tells me all I need to know about you.

Dell can't match Apple because Win 11 wants 16 GB RAM to boot to desktop and 32 to be useable.

MicroSlop designed the os before the AI boom. They can't fix that without giving up their spyware and they're not gonna do that.

Mind you Apple really need 16 GB but that's still half Windows

It might be a wonderful film. But relating to what I said, I'm not going to see it.

The critic/fans I follow. were liking Mandalorian 1 Didn't like the book of Boba Fett, and were mixed on Ahsoka, a number said it was walking, walking, walking, and thought Rosario Dawson as Ahsoka was okay except that the fight scenes seemed too choreographed and slow. I know a lot of Fans were looking forward to Ahsoka were looking forward to that adaptation, since there wouldn't be sex or race swapping, Which when a person knows the story, it would be admittedly annoying to have, say Stephen Colbert cast as Ahsoka.

If fans ruin any thing that is actually good, perhaps the SW and Trek universes should go away. And don't forget Tolkien's army of fans, some who have dedicated their academic lives to the study of his writings. Some people say the Tolkien scholar who quit on the Amazon LOTR prequel, saying that they were not respecting the material was toxic.

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.

I've noted in here that I could have written a good SW version of "The Acolyte" using the premise of lesbian space witches. What was provided was pretty dull stuff.

I will note that you apparently believe that fans of SW and ST want to have something they loved torn down and destroyed. I think that is odd.

Wrath of Kahn has some things that a lot of modern movies don't have. A good story line, the main characters are aging, but that process is incorporated into the story line, not put there to "subvert expectations". By the time WoK came out, a lot of the 60's fans were going through a bit go aging on their own. It had a conflict, a historical one to boot, as the aging enemies fought one another, Kahn with his incredible intelligence, Kirk with his experience.

And here is something most people overlook. Lighting and sound. Even back in the original ST, they understood lighting. In some of the new stuff, they appear to be stuck in dramatic mode.

Audio - this is a problem with movies in general today. Sound effects way too intense. Foley artists appear to rule the studio. And the dynamic range thing, they are intent at having a conversation almost at the threshold of hearing, followed by an incredibly loud sound. I cannot watch movies with sound in the evening after my wife has gone to bed. I have to put on closed captioning.

I'm impressed that you figured out something is wrong but you don't know what to do about it do you?

Honestly I can practically smell the fear on you.

Anyway if you look at the elections and supposed red States there are still one by microscopic margins well within the margin of error. Meanwhile we all damn well know what voter suppression is because we all got taught about the civil Rights movement. Not so sure about kids these days but us old farts could not escape it and it's one of the reasons the racists are so upset. They know that at any moment the center and the left could just do something about voter suppression and they become irrelevant again.

And we're not talking about businesses owned by rich people we're talking about businesses owned by billionaires. I don't think you quite understand what it means to be a billionaire. They aren't Rich anymore they are powerful beyond belief. They are God Kings. That's what happens when you let people hoard that much wealth. It stops being wealth and becomes power. And if you were paying attention last election, and I can tell you right now that you weren't, you would have noticed that they fully exercise that power for the first time in a long time.

Remember it's a big club and you ain't in it.

Why exactly would someone "report" Drinkypoo?

He annoys some people. So do I. So does Armored Dragon, and ahem, you post ain't sunshine and puppy dogs. No one is doing anything that would get them kicked or even a stern talking to.

Relax a little, maybe enjoy an adult beverage or herb of your liking. Thoughts and prayers!

Sonavabeotch, you owe me a new keyboard, man! My soda went all over it when I read that.

+5 for making me snort! 8^)

I think that the core problem is that Disney is a terrible fit for Star Wars in any form.

Star Wars was Space Cowboy Epic,

Disney excels at making Disney Princesses.

Both are legitimate, but it is really difficult to make a space cowboy movie when your talent is princesses.

You are correct, Youtube doesn't have teh present day constraints Disney does.

As for allowing a Youtuber get involved, maybe. After all they put Harvey Weinstein's secretary with no experience direct "The Acolyte" flop, so if a Youtuber with the proper political beliefs who is willing to take on the fans surfaces, they might just hire them.

Yup, you summed up the problem. The movies Disney put out in recent years were not good movies, and the fan base became alienated. They wrote off the movies and didn't watch or pay attention

So Disney can put out a decent Star Wars movie or show, and many just won't watch it.

In this case, my analysis is that trying to have a mute puppet who seems to mostly reach for things carry the movie couldn't get enough traction. So people willing to take a look on the first weekend saw it, went "Okay", and that was it.

Once upon a time, the fans would go see individual movies many times, and purchase all the swag. One critic I don't watch often has his walls filled with earlier action figures, models and other paraphernalia. All of that added to the bottom line, and Disney intentionally threw it away with it's new arc.

Yeah, but there is good art and bad art. Unions - well, we must remember that once you have a union, you have two bosses, the Work boss and the union boss. So your concerns about the art of making games is well founded. And Unions are as much about lining their own pockets as enforcing fairness. That's the funny thing about those who claim that Unions are some sort of commie or socialist outfits - they are every bit as money hungry as the rest of us. They are not saviors of the downtrodden workers.

My point in all this is this is not a good time for programmers to organize. AI can and will take some jobs, even if the final sprucing up is handled by a few really good programmers. And if programmers refuse to return to the workplace, they better be the best in the world, people who hold the company by the short hairs, who can leave quickly and go to another place willing to pay money that is appropriate for their best in the world abilities.

It's extremely difficult to manipulate and voter suppress when the voters can just throw something on the ballot and pass a law. They will try to manipulate that process by either making it very very difficult to get something on the ballot or by changing the wording on the ballot measures to confuse people. I remember a bunch of states did those cigarette bands and they were all sorts of weird wordings and rulings and tricks and shenanigans to try and prevent them.

One of my favorite TV commercials of all time is a bunch of old people sitting around talking about something scary. They never once say what the scary thing is just that they're very very scared. At the very end it ends with a impassioned plea to vote no on propositions such and such, which was really just net metering AKA paying people for the solar energy they produce in excess. If I remember correctly the proposition passed.

To be fair though that only worked because the concept of net metering is a little esoteric. But something is blunt and obvious as how crappy data centers are now everyone knows we don't want them and it's just a question of whether or not we are still enough of a functioning democracy to stop them.

Billionaire corruption and voter suppression is how it became GOP controlled. There are no red states. There are some States where people are allowed to vote in some States where people aren't.

In the last election they were over 3 million illegal challenges to signatures and registrations. Every single one of them requires someone to drive down to the courthouse on a weekday during business hours and prove that they are who they say they are even though there is virtually no fraud except from Republicans occasionally casting their dead wife's ballot.

Meanwhile blue leaning swing states have multi-hour wait times to vote some as much as 7 hours.

Finally 90% of the media is owned by billionaires. Google the phrase sane washing.

Donald Trump said it himself, this is the last time you need to vote. Very soon they won't care what you think or say or do. And when you try to turn the violence they will just use drones to kill you

So a common way to make your resume stand out as a programmer is to contribute to open source projects. It's one of the ways open source projects get contributors in the first place. The problem here is you've got people doing AI slop trying to get their names on lists so they can apply for jobs.

So for years and years there was a shortage of technology workers and we didn't need a union to bargain for higher wages. We got Big heads because of that. What's more because people are so incredibly stupid around computers we tend to get really really big heads. That makes us want to avoid collective bargaining because we want to see ourselves as amazing rugged individuals who don't need no help.

So you have a combination of a period of time that has long past when we genuinely didn't need unions and the arrogance that comes from having a skill that for some reason the public at large has a tough time with.

To be fair video game programmers and artists are much higher up on the totem pole than code monkeys and project managers but they also suffer from the problem of being artists and artists really just want to do their art. They're pretty unhealthily obsessed with it.

Decades and decades of outsourcing