- Go on, ask me anything.
- This future of publishing ad — which I’m seeing re-posted everywhere — is clever. And sure, the whole “death of publishing” thing is all in how you look at it. But, at the same time — and watch the video before you read this — I found it a little too gimmicky. Maybe it’s the length, since it is a little too long to be a truly effective advertisement, or maybe it’s that they kind of had to cheat to make the trick of it work. It is clever, though, I won’t argue with that.
- This isn’t new, but c’mon, how can you resist a headline like Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included? [via]
- Manahatta: same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
- And finally, John Seavey on George Lucas’ biggest mistake:
But all that gets lost in the sheer awesomeness of the Jedi. The signal-to-noise ratio is too high–Yoda is a cool Wise Old Master with all the good bits in Episode Five, Qui-Gon Jinn is played by Liam Neeson and Mace Windu is Samuel Freaking Jackson, and the lightsaber is the coolest weapon in the history of film. Everyone takes Yoda’s words at face value–even the authorized sequels, which show Luke trying to re-establish the Jedi in the image of the old order. Everyone assumes that Luke narrowly won his struggle with the Dark Side at the end, but in fact, he did exactly what people do every day. He got upset, he channeled his anger constructively, and then he calmed down. Only the Manichean nutbags who run the Jedi and the Sith think that this is some kind of near-impossible achievement. The Jedi aren’t the heroes of the film, Luke is, for realizing that there’s something more than the false duality that trapped and ultimately destroyed his father.
That’s the message of the Star Wars films, and it’s a shame that Lucas made it so hard for people to notice.
That Star Wars comment kind of interested me, because the Star Wars RPG I’m currently playing in seems to have largely turned into an exploration of this very thing. What’s really ironic is that I’m not a huge SW fan, myself, and never liked the simplistic binary morality of the Jedi, but, hey, you’ve got to accept the rules of the universe, so I put together a character who was kind of morally bland… and who is now the only one in the group who doesn’t see this perfectly-obvious-to-me point. 🙂