-
18 votes
-
Oregairu Season 3 Official Announcement
5 votes -
SpaceX goes all-in on steel Starship, scraps expensive carbon fiber BFR tooling
3 votes -
Child stars of YouTube hit 'Fantastic Adventures' allegedly abused by adopted mother
7 votes -
The internet is not your friend: MySpace and the loss of memories
6 votes -
Misophonia: When life's noises drive you mad
11 votes -
Do you think a collapse is coming?
Can be any kind, social, political, environmental, economic etc etc. I'm thinking more on a worldwide scale rather than just one local area, the topic's been on my mind recently.
29 votes -
Leonard Cohen - You Want It Darker (KARIYAN & Dorian Mast Retouch) (2019)
3 votes -
SpaceX's Starship prototype vehicle may "hop" for the first time this week
15 votes -
Cockpit voice recorder of doomed Lion Air 737 MAX depicts pilots' frantic search for fix
9 votes -
Open Source Doesn’t Make Money Because It Isn’t Designed To Make Money
13 votes -
Coheed and Cambria - Wake Up (2005)
5 votes -
What do you think will be the next big innovation to smart phones?
Recently, the ability to fold has came along, what do you think the next big innovation will be?
30 votes -
Coding for the Parallel Sega Saturn DSP
5 votes -
Making grass flow like water
7 votes -
Kickstarter’s staff is unionizing
14 votes -
What exactly is Amazon? This is the question that has consumed me for the last ten years.
7 votes -
User Groups?
I was just wondering if there would ever be user editable groups (like subreddits) If so, I would like to suggest a few features: 1: Public/Private. Users could choose whether or not to require an...
I was just wondering if there would ever be user editable groups (like subreddits) If so, I would like to suggest a few features:
1: Public/Private. Users could choose whether or not to require an invite to access the group.
2: Stickies: The creator of the group and specified individuals should be able to create posts that are always at the top, such as a rules page.
3: Other controls: #Posts/user/hour. Enable or disable voting. Allow or disallow images/videos etc.4 votes -
One way to spot a partisan gerrymander
8 votes -
Maxence Cyrin - Where is my mind (The Pixies Piano cover)
4 votes -
The Pretty Reckless - Make Me Wanna Die (2010)
4 votes -
I regret not seeing Solo in theaters
Spoilers for Solo follow - you have been warned. So a year after it's release and months after it went up on netflix, I finally got around to watching Solo. For context: for most of my childhood,...
Spoilers for Solo follow - you have been warned.
So a year after it's release and months after it went up on netflix, I finally got around to watching Solo.
For context: for most of my childhood, I was a huge Star Wars buff. I played Star Wars: Galaxies growing up, I was in the massive crowd that saw The Force Awakens opening night, I spent the better part of 2 years as part of a prerelease community for Star Wars: The Old Republic. There was a time where I could name nearly every planet of consequence in the canon and knew most of the expanded universe's timeline.
But the new trilogy has been... well, nothing. I found it to be a mediocre, hole-filled mess most of the time, too busy being Disney's Star Wars^tm politically correct safe-kid to actually be good movies on their own. Rogue One was an enjoyable exception, but still not particularly amazing... but the point I'm driving at is, the last couple of years, I've pretty thoroughly come down from the Star Wars high.
When Solo came out, I assumed it would be more of the same - panned by critics, it was presumably going to be another politically correct, lackluster, rehashed or nonsense story, this time using Han Solo's name as a marketing tactic. No desire to see a childhood hero Anakin Skywalker'd, I skipped it, and didn't even care to watch it when it popped up on Netflix.
Tonight, out of pure boredom, I decided to give it a watch and was surprised to learn that I couldn't have been more wrong. Which is to say, I enjoyed the crap out of it!
It had romance! Snappy writing! Memorable, enjoyable, non-trope characters (mostly!) Although it had some of the same flaws as Rogue One (namely that it started to drag on), it also had something that Star Wars hasn't truly seen since the original trilogy: heart and soul.
More importantly, it did something that no movie in the franchise has done since the original trilogy, and actually engaged me with the story. And this is where the spoilers come in.
First, credit where it's due: although the story tended to go on and on, at no point did I feel like any of it was unnecessary - it just felt like it was too constrained by being a single movie.
I was invested in seeing an actual romance in the story (since apparently ONLY Han Solo can do that), which saw a satisfying, and rather complex resolution. The dirty, street-level setting and story was an awesome break from the epic, world-shaking conflicts that the movies have clung to until this point (or whatever the hell The Last Jedi was). It was powered by characters, and I appreciated that.
To top it off, the reveal of Maul at the end of the movie was totally intriguing, and (IMO) beats any other reveal in the series hands-down. I was a fan of his appearances in the cartoons, and seeing him on the villain's throne in a movie, I think, would've made for a much spicier and more intriguing story than whatever/wherever/whoever Snoke was. From getting his ass kicked by the Emperor for the plot, to getting beat down by ol' Ben (for the plot), the guy's a damn competent villain that still hasn't had a real shot.
Don't get me wrong, it had its flaws: as mentioned, it was REALLY long, and I don't mean to imply that every character was perfect, or that the plot wasn't totally ridiculous in places. But the story was good enough, and the movie enjoyable enough, that I could overlook it, and that's more than I could say about the movies that caused me to not see it in the first place...
Which, to my final point, is the greatest disappointment: with the cancellation of all the non-trilogy entries in the series, it's safe to assume that Disney's learned all the wrong lessons from Solo.
Rather than attributing it's A- performance to the point that people just haven't much enjoyed their epics, remembered what happened the last time someone tried to do an origin story in the series, or were feeling Star Wars fatigue, and didn't go to see it as a result, they'll blame the format, the story, the stakes, the setting, the characters - all the things that made the movie worth watching at all.
So, with Episode 9 coming out sometime this year and us presumably going to see a mediocre conclusion to what has at this point been a completely mediocre and forgettable trilogy (with lightsabers!), all I can say is, Solo sadly will stand out in my mind as the only movie in this era that carries on the legacy of the originals. I'm disappointed, more by circumstance than anything. I think, had Solo come out 5 years ago, it would've been hailed as the proper return to the franchise that it deserved to be, far more than any of the other franchise entries have succeeded in doing since.
What'd you think of Solo, Tildes? Am I stark raving mad?
18 votes -
US detects huge meteor explosion
8 votes -
My Father’s Stack of Books
7 votes -
New Zealand prime minister on mosque shooter: “You will never hear me mention his name”
12 votes -
The Lighting Budget of Thomas Jefferson
5 votes -
The fertility doctor’s secret children - Donald Cline used his own sperm to inseminate over fifty of his patients without their knowledge
9 votes -
What have you been listening to this week?
What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as...
What have you been listening to this week? You don't need to do a 6000 word review if you don't want to, but please write something! If you've just picked up some music, please update on that as well, we'd love to see your hauls :)
Feel free to give recs or discuss anything about each others' listening habits.
You can make a chart if you use last.fm:
http://www.tapmusic.net/lastfm/
Remember that linking directly to your image will update with your future listening, make sure to reupload to somewhere like imgur if you'd like it to remain what you have at the time of posting.
14 votes -
Engineers still studying problem with InSight heat flow probe
6 votes -
Group suggestion: ~socialmedia
Hereby I suggest that there be a dedicated Tildes group for social media–related topics. Current State The (recent) number of topics tagged social media exceeds the number of topics in several...
Hereby I suggest that there be a dedicated Tildes group for social media–related topics.
Current State
The (recent) number of topics tagged
social media
exceeds the number of topics in several existing groups:
https://tildes.net/?tag=social_media
In addition, there are more topics without thesocial media
tag but with tags related to individual social media, e.g.,
https://tildes.net/?tag=reddit
https://tildes.net/?tag=facebook
https://tildes.net/?tag=twitterThese topics are quite scattered across the site (many of them are in ~tech, and some were moved to ~tech from places like ~talk and ~misc).
Why Not Just ~tech?
The topics are often focused on non-technical aspects of social media, and the mentioned moves from more general groups might suggest that social media are perceived as a general rather than a purely techn(olog)ical phenomenon. In addition, ~tech is already the biggest Tildes group.
Special Relevance
Tildes is itself a social medium site, and many of the above topics are thus specifically relevant for Tildes. For this reason, I suggest ~socialmedia as a top-level group rather than a subgroup (of ~tech, apparently).
6 votes -
Death of the calorie
19 votes -
Captain Marvel has made $760 million worldwide. $1 billion is in its sights.
18 votes -
After thirty years in power, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev is resigning
7 votes -
"What the hell is going on?" A thoughtful and thorough overview of the rising entropy in society by David Perell
20 votes -
What causes rare rainbow arcs?
3 votes -
Here is where HPC is headed, according to developers and computer scientists in top supercomputing centers
4 votes -
Riding a BMX bike again!
5 votes -
Abandoned
17 votes -
How parents are robbing their children of adulthood
18 votes -
Coyote fur is a booming fashion trend. But is it ethical?
4 votes -
Vivian Cherry: A lifetime photographing New York's streets – in pictures
3 votes -
How secure and private is Firefox?
I was browsing r/privacy today and I came across this guy going on about how Mozilla was just pretending to be privacy focused. Here's his comment. Now I don't really know what to think of this,...
I was browsing r/privacy today and I came across this guy going on about how Mozilla was just pretending to be privacy focused. Here's his comment. Now I don't really know what to think of this, and frankly, I'm getting really exhausted of hearing about how all the things I'm using aren't actually trustworthy. So can so someone put my mind to rest? Does this guy's claims have any truth to them? Thanks.
20 votes -
How did/do you fund your graduate education?
If you're doing a master's or a PhD, how do you pay for it? Or if you will be doing in near future, how do you plan to pay for it?
7 votes -
Why your newsfeed sucks
5 votes -
Native File System API
6 votes -
Nvidia announces Jetson Nano Dev Kit and board: X1 for $99
5 votes -
Tildes mobile app
I wasn’t able to find a discussion on this, though I’m sure there has been, and for that, I apologize. Is there any kind of timeframe on the release of a mobile app for tildes? I would guess that...
I wasn’t able to find a discussion on this, though I’m sure there has been, and for that, I apologize.
Is there any kind of timeframe on the release of a mobile app for tildes?
I would guess that on Reddit most of their traffic comes from people accessing the site on their phones at this point, but I could be wrong. In any case, it certainly is a large portion of the users that access the site in this way.
With that in mind, it would be nice to be able to access tildes from a mobile app to do away with the clunkiness that comes with using the site through a mobile browser. I don’t mean to sound like it’s terrible. The site functions well enough through a mobile browser, but it would certainly have me using tildes a lot more if the convenience of a mobile app was available.
I’m sure the developers are very busy, and I don’t want to sound demanding, I’m just curious.
And once again, I apologize if this has been discussed recently.
21 votes -
America's Cup breakthrough as US make flying start towards Auckland 2021
6 votes -
Remembering Atta Elayyan, CS:S pro and victim of Christchurch Shooting
9 votes -
Inside YouTube’s struggles to shut down video of the New Zealand shooting
11 votes