The prequels were bad in a completely different way than the sequels. They’re poorly written and directed, but the core ideas are good and recontextualize the original movies in a way that makes thematic sense and arguably improves them.

The Original Trilogy stands on its own without any other context. It’s the story of one man’s rise from humble beginnings to becoming the hero who takes down a corrupt Empire and acts as a beacon of hope for the galaxy.

The Prequels change that, with the six movies now becoming the story of the rise, fall, and redemption of Anakin Skywalker. They also show how Luke lacks the flaws of the old Jedi Order while avoiding the traps that ensnared and corrupted his father, giving hope that he and his friends can build a better and more resilient system.

With the Sequels added, what story does the overall series tell? That Skywalkers have good intentions but inevitably fuck things up, only to redeem themselves through suicide? That it doesn’t matter if Good triumphs over Evil because the heroes will end up lower than where they started, the status quo maintained, and the same villains will pop back up again for the next generation to deal with anyway? They’re a narrative mess that adds negative value to the existing saga.

The memory surplus wouldn’t be immediate after the bubble pops; at least not for regular people. What they’re currently producing isn’t one-to-one compatible with desktop PCs - most of the secondhand stuff from decommissioned AI datacenters wouldn’t be usable outside of servers, and it’d take a while for the newly freed fabs to start churning out consumer-grade memory again, factories to install it on consumer chips, and for it to make its way to the market (mass shipping is much slower than people think). That delay would hit producers hard, possibly gumming up the works even further. Modern economics is not at all equipped for supply chain failures.

There’s a reason people are panicking about this bubble, and that’s not even going into the far more devastating stock market crash likely to happen when it pops. It’s a nightmare in both economic and technological terms, but a small group of people stand to make a ton of money from it so they’ve gutted the regulatory agencies that would have prevented things from getting this bad, or at least softened the blow.

The moment emulation began embracing mod support, it became peak gaming. You can now play your favorite old games with randomizers to mix things up, higher resolution models and textures to make them look more modern, patches to disable obnoxious elements (goodbye, low health alarms and lengthy animations for basic world actions), and even add entirely new content (this was extremely difficult in the past, but modern decompilation projects have made better tooling possible as a side effect).

There are even projects combining games so you need to swap between them to progress, so you can be playing Super Metroid and find a key item for your playthrough of A Link to the Past where a missile upgrade used to sit and vice versa.

Tony Hawk ain’t got nothing on this.

It’s a shame the series died. It managed all of this in an open-world city with hundreds of NPCs and vehicles while designed to run on an underpowered console with only 512 MB of RAM. Who knows what insanity would have been possible on modern machines?

Mercer is canonically multiple tons of biomass compressed into the shape of a regular human, and the game absolutely sells that. You leave craters in the ground when you sprint, crush hoods and windshields when parkouring over traffic, can knock attack choppers out of the sky by jump kicking them, and one of your best moves against tanks is to run up a nearby building and body-slam down onto said tank, crushing it in a single blow.

I can’t think of a single other game that does power fantasy better, and Prototype manages it even though Mercer is actually incredibly fragile and can die in seconds when you get into a bad spot.

I’m less upset about him selling those rights (after all, four billion dollars is four billion dollars) and more about who he sold them to. Yeah, Disney is one of the few studios with the resources and talent to rival Industrial Light and Magic, but their higher-ups are infamously meddlesome bureaucrats* who chase fads and hammer down anything thought-provoking or controversial so they can release a bland product that sells to everyone.

Say what you want about Lucas (and believe me, there’s plenty to say about him), at least he somewhat cared about his universe. Disney only cared how much they could exploit it for profit, to the degree that Lucas’s toy and merchandise-driven designs seem quaint in comparison.

* Autocorrect wanted that to say butchers, which also fits.

Not gonna lie, I might be the one person to actually like midichlorians. Though that’s because it was yet another poorly-defined plot element where your imagination could come up with a better explanation than whatever dross Lucas would have turned them into (ugh, look up the Whills - one of his plans for the sequels was basically Fantastic Voyage).

I spent days thinking up theories to explain midichlorians after The Phantom Menace released, which was probably more enjoyment than I got out of the film itself.

Per Lucas

His answers change from interview to interview, so oddly enough the creator of Star Wars isn’t a reliable source on canon.

Until Rise of Skywalker, but we don’t talk about that mess.

Prototype devs: What if basic character movement sprayed blood everywhere?

Wait until you hear about the other network of underground tubes that can kill you and cause explosions underneath the whole city.

Thank you. The proper wording in the comic bothered me on a fundamental level.

Sadly not as good as the original.

I remember a story going around during his first term where an ex-employee talked about the difficulty of getting Trump to sign off on deals his underlings had negotiated for him. He had a habit of reneging at the last second for petty reasons (sound familiar?), so they’d developed a trick to get him to cooperate.

The trick was that the Trump employees would come to an agreement with the other party as normal, but when bringing the deal to Trump they’d state terms that were much more favorable to the other party and let Trump ‘negotiate’ it down to what was already agreed on.

They did this because even if a deal greatly favored Trump, he was liable to torpedo the entire thing if he didn’t feel like he personally ‘won’ negotiations. The charade let him think he was responsible for squeezing more money out of the other party, and with his ego sated he would happily sign whatever was agreed upon.

They’re certainly useful for building up the infrastructure for future oppression without the rest of the country freaking out, though. It’s all so painfully obvious and mostly being done in the open, but apparently most Americans slept through their history classes.

This is going to be yet another case where mass graves are found nearby decades after it’s shut down and people pretend to be shocked.

The second image in your post seems broken.

Thanks, ants.

Thants.

Wasps are bros as much as spiders are.

Just not bros to spiders. What parasitoid wasps do to spiders/other victims is nearly as nightmarish as what spiders do to their prey. Definitely a match made in hell.