I am a big believer in being restrained and selective for fan-servicey retcons, but having it be a sore spot did make the ANH exchange more amusing:

When I left you, I was but a learner. Now I am the master.

Only a master of evil, Darth.

Sick burn, bruh. 😡🤺🦵🦵🔥

I think we definitely want the same thing, at least.

I’m just backing up the (now absent, LOL) person you originally replied to. I think you can – and in Marvel’s case maybe you should, since they are no longer drawing on zeitgeisty, recognizable versions of their comics characters – think about what you want the story to mean at least as early as you do the events that happen in it. King is a talented writer, no two ways about it, but I don’t think you necessarily doom a script to be bad by starting with something like, “I want to tell a story about dealing with the conflict between who we wish we were and what life made us into.”

I reckon that for King, setting events into motion and figuring out the right traits to get characters through them (or to their natural stopping place), or what themes give those particular events meaning, that works for him. If they want to have him write the next Avengers movie, I’d be all for it, LOL. I just don’t think his approach is the only way to go about it.

Maybe the themes in a Marvel movie will be more universal and rather broadly drawn, but to avoid overstaying their welcome with a rote and repetitive “peril-catharis” cycle, the action needs to be in service to something compelling. Otherwise, it just sort of sputters to the finish line because ultimately we’ve seen the stories before. To the extent he’s not just talking out of his ass, King’s describing a workflow, not a philosophy.

Beyond anything else, this is also what infected the Star Wars franchise, except there it was even worse because so much of the connective tissue was relegated to novels and comics. At least with Marvel you can keep up just via TV and movies.

Dumped into a new series of films that rehashes the first? Explain it in a bunch of mediocre books! Sequel that thinks that setup was boring (and tbf, it was)? Build up to it in a crappy comic! Petulant manchild takes the worst possible lessons from the first two? Set it up in a video game, lift the plot from old comics, and then tell your animation wunderkind that his entire live-action career will now be to “fix it.”

Disney owns the lion’s share of the blame for both franchises malaise, but fan culture enabled it by obsessing over everything, not insisting on tight storytelling (the number of online people who believe that no deleted scene is too awkward to be edited back in is… disconcerting), and whizzing their pants in glee with every easter egg or end-credits stinger. Honorable mention to Peter Jackson with the LOTR extended editions and ROTK’s eleventy-billion endings that (LOL) still somehow omitted the Scouring of the Shire.

How to write okayish page-turners that are far from the only valid way to approach literature?

I poked around a few other articles. A few are identical. Most are slight variations. Few are as different as these two. My guess would be that the original submission from the author or initial editor locks in a headline for the tab/title bar, but then the CMS lets them edit what appears in the main body of the webpage.

I am glad to see us respect our link-aggregation heritage of ignoring the article and starting heated discussions based on what we infer from the headline. 😂

It also seems that the headline currently on the article is different and switches out clickbait tactics from misleading omission to absurd pearl-clutching: “Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people’s hearing problems?” If you combine them, you get something closer to actual content of the article.

Yes. It was a stupid thing the old EU did to retcon what was much more naturally (and at least one marked-up copy of the script says so) a shady smuggler trying to get one over on what he presumed were a couple of rubes. The old EU was infamous for taking every line completely seriously, turning every idle turn of phrase into a galaxy-wide convention, and ascribing galactic importance to every extra or creature that anyone noticed.

The fact that Solo doubled down on it was a mistake.

I had a “Diamond Mako,” aka a Psion Revo Plus. Neat device, but I just wasn’t “on the go” enough to really need it. It was slightly smaller than the 5, IIRC, and it definitely wasn’t as good for typing as even a Netbook (another good candidate for a “writerDeck” btw), but it was very slick, and the word processor in particular I remember being very good. IIRC it had NiCAD or NiMH AAA batteries hard-wired into it.

Strolls nervously through room with RX 580…

1. I have no intentions of seeing this.

2. Unironic “Hooray” for cinema tuned to regional tastes!

No, it’s about an art heist.

Who knows what state the script was in at that point, and that particular scene would be fine. It’s got some catchphrases, some punny flirting, some “I know that you know that I know…” spy talk, and some plot gobbledygook. It’s like a Bond canvas and the last thing to add is the actor’s take on the part.

I can also kind of see why he didn’t get the role. Not quite nailing the Brosnan cheek or the Craig surliness, and the particular type of in-between feels a bit flat. I know a lot of screen tests are meant to be low-key, but I didn’t get a lot from the clip. I reckon he’d pull off a much better take now, judging by UNCLE and Witcher, and he fits the age audiences have come to expect anyway. Probably also best to grab a haircut and shave (other work permitting) before screen-testing for James Bond, as the look is a huge part of it.

If you’re ready to take the plunge into mechanical, Keychrons are a solid way to get one that is not absurd if all you want is “one nice keyboard,” but usually has enough customizability to be satisfying if you fall down that particular rabbit hole. For a bog standard board, any of your listed options are fine, as are most of the options on pcpartpicker.com, and even dumb ol’ Walmart will have a couple of logitechs and some rebranded thing stuff no worse than your average pack-in desktop keyboard, and potentially even a couple of mildly satisfying low-end mech boards, once you turn off the godwaful RGB.

If you shop the actual electronics at Amazon, I’d recommend “sold by Amazon” or at a minimum fulfilled by them. If you do Prime, limit to Prime listings. Your includion of BestBuy implies you’re in the US, in which case I might avoid vendors that ship from China, at least until the tariff situation stabilizes.

which they co-opted from the Revolutionary war, where (allegedly, much harder to source), the revolutionaries also flew the Union Jack inverted.

If they did, I assume a half dozen vexillology enthusiasts with good eyesight got very concerned.

Yes, mostly, and that context is critically important, but the “line goes up” crowd will not be happy and will probably do something to change it. Possibly something okay-to-good, but probably not.

Wasn’t gaming basically aynonymous with gambling at that time though?

Yes, in large part, and certainly to the way that the introduction to a book of that era would have been presented to the censors; there would often be a wink and a nod, though: “what a horrible thing to be doing! Now, so you can be completely sure how not to get caught up up in it, here are the complete rules to every game we can think of.” This book is almost entirely consumed with games that were most often used for gambling, though stakes can be set at any level and played for fun at any time.

I think gaming as a recreation without gambling didnt really come about until the 1940s - 1950s, right? Commonly, of course.

I’m sure there’s an element of truth in that certain direct modern lineages of trends in non-gambling gaming are sort of post-WW2 phenomena, but overall I don’t think that’s fair. Even just in the narrow sense, Monopoly was released in 1935, and other American board games date back much farther, which at east one scholar referring to the 1880s to the 1920s as a “Golden Age” for board games in the US. Also, certain games, like chess, have always had cultural associations beyond gambling. Children’s board games have also been common forever. Additionally, TTRPGs and Wargames trace back not to gambling, but to military planning and education.

EDIT: Also of important note, in 1638 the Puritans in the US state of Massachusetts (colonial at the time) enacted a law that made gambling illegal. It outlawed ownership of everything gaming related from dice to cards, and citizens were not allowed to even play in their own home.

True enough, but there’s an important context that they banned all forms of “idleness,” and gaming got wrapped up in that.

The simple answer is, and I shit you not, they look it up and try their best.

If everything else about the question at hand and the parties to the litigation makes sense for a particular court, they’re more than willing to interpret foreign law with the right amount of notice and limits to the scope of the inquiry. Some of the procedural hijinks you may see in this case could involve trying to remove it to courts in those countries though.

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Nothing came up for me, until I tightened in on just the print. Leaving the frame selected threw Google off the trail.