calculators are disappearing. even without what cvsoft mentioned, our userbase and the number of people doing calculator-related things in general has fallen dramatically and will continue to.

however, there are still people around here (also, hop in irc; it's a bit more active). just means that, if you want something to happen, you might have to do it yourself./

How would that be any better?

mmm, more useful than all of this would probably be an activity indicator on the oirc tab for a given channel, so omnom users can actually tell which channels are being spoken in without having to switch tabs. that way, somebody speaking in one of the less often used channels is more likely to be noticed by somebody and they wouldn't be as useless / unnecessary.

i wrote out a proper response, but firefox is stupid and makes Ctrl-W "close a tab" rather than "delete a word", so...

<...lots of words here...>

i didn't go into it expecting to dislike it; i wasn't a fan, so i wasn't expecting anything, other than maybe a fun time-waster like the other films. if i wanted to get nit-picky about "logical flaws" and things, there are plenty of things i could have started ranting about (a spheroidal planet that somehow has a giant hole in one side that never closes up and a giant gun barrel sticking out of it that has to be something like 1 to 2 thousand kilometres tall). like you said, though, it's a fantasy-y fambly-y film, just like the others were, so whatever. i was only getting annoyed at the things that actively hindered the plot.

they started off with a couple of characters who had the potential to be very interesting, but, rather than spending time developing their stories and helping the audience get to know and care for them, they toss it all in as little blurbs of dialogue in order to push on to the mindless "fly back and forth between places, with no time in between and stopping at each only long enough to shoot at things and get shot at, and maybe describe the shooting and being shot at that will happen at the next destination". "perilous situations" are only interesting if the audience has a reason to actually care about the people in peril; instead we get planets exploding before we're even told what's on them, ships and people being shot down left and right without our knowing who any of them are, and a half-arsed fan service roll call with old characters getting their 5 minutes each to put on a caricature of their former selves.

and you and i even seem to have ended up with different impressions of action girl's back story. what i got from the little we saw was that she was abandoned by her parents (given the location and what she does for a living, most likely as an indentured servant type of deal). they told her they'd be back for her in order to calm her down at the time, and she uses that as her reason to continue existing, despite realising at some point that it can't really be true. i can't say for certain which of us is right, but this wouldn't be an issue at all if we were given more than a few blurbs and a messy flashback of a crying girl and a ship flying away.

as for the dude, that's probably the biggest opportunity they've ever missed, having a chance to show that storm troopers aren't just robots in masks; that they're people too. it would have made all the troopers being shot down later on actually mean something.


my "nit-picking" of the later things was all because they were contributing to the galaxy in this film feeling tiny and simplistic. planets right next to each other, no time spent travelling between them at all, shooting lasers to different star systems in about a minute, being able to track a ship anywhere it goes in the galaxy (yes, this was stated flat out as being the case. dude and mr ford have a conversation that's something like "'we need to get a different ship. they can track us anywhere we go in the falcon' 'they can do that?' 'course they can. how do you think chewie and i found the falcon so fast?'"), the fact that we only ever see very small bits, one or two sets, for any given planet (jakkwhatever is the camp where sith guy landed, the camp where action girl lives, and the one star destroyer she scavenges in and flies through later; whatever planet that maz lady was on was a single bar; the gun planet is a small forest area that makes people feel claustrophobic and a hut that controls the 'heat oscillating' or whatever; and... i can't think of any others. were there any?. compare this to the explorations of planets we had in the other films), and all the characters are chosen for their "identity politics" rolls rather than their, well, characters.

i know that was kind of messy (it was much more organised before!), but maybe you can see what i was trying to say maybe

isn't it that one the protagonists are in a glasses club and try to invent some fancy x-ray pair of glasses that backfires on them each time?

mmm. the first episode makes it seem like it's going to be annoying, but it ends up being brilliant.

made this picture for some reason after finishing it

sauron + melkor OTP

also, tengwar is fun!

wow, i never realised how ugly that sidebar looks when icons are collapsed

@Sorunome what's the purpose of this? i love the tab completion, but still

Just some ideas from my old hard drive

dragon warrior monsters! =D