I’ll admit to assuming he must be kind of a cool nerd for naming some of his SpaceX things after Culture ships (from Iain M. Banks’ novels), but now I feel sullied by association from having enjoyed the same books.

They’ll be something terrible in it I’m sure. Some awful reddit theory (a character we’ve already met is Cass’s sister, B2 becomes K2) or some cringey bit of fan-service. Disney have had too long to find a way to meddle with it (I don’t even think the post-credits scene in S1 was the writers idea, and suspect it was thrown together when the show was airing to pacify the people who need everything explained and want everything in SW to be reference to itself (even when such things call the timeline into question))

The ‘anti-woke’ stuff is so frustrating. As soon as some youtube grifter labels something as ‘woke’ and their followers start review bombing, it frames all subsequent criticism of a thing: Mainstream outlets are wary of the association, so are kinder to a show that it deserves (which then brings their credibility into question for some people); Star Wars nerds who like anything in the universe start dismissing valid criticism because they assume it’s been made in bad faith (because ‘anti-woke’ sorts don’t always make themselves so obvious and do highjack legitimate concerns); and anyone trying to genuinely point out faults has to preface everything with where they’re coming from (which can get tedious if nothing else).

Anyway: I don’t have particularly strong opinions about the show but what I disliked about it was that it reminded me of ‘Secret Invasion’ and what I saw of ‘Echo’: it suggests that Disney don’t want to do the traditional ‘Andor’ style of making television, and instead keep with the process of: write + shoot + re-write + reshoot … This rarely works, and ends up with a show that has inconsistent characters (‘Yord’ changes personality about 5 times), inconsistent quality (since sets used for reshoots are typically smaller and less dressed), and inconsistent tone (people liked episode 5, but I’d argue that neck-snaps are too violent compared to the vibe of other episodes, which often seemed aimed at young children).

Also, there needs to be a moratorium of any characters saying they have a ‘bad feeling about this’ (if anyone says anything like this is S2 of Andor I’ll be devasted)

That ‘… and you killed Kelnacca’ line sounded a bit crowbarred in to me. Not sure if they even used the same actor for it.

I’m not convinced by the Darth Bortles theory (it’s a fun idea, I just don’t think the physiques match). More likely for the master to be one of the witches. They should have it be Abigail Thorn, just to watch the internet explode.

If something is supposed to be cringe, it’s up to the creators to find a way to indicate that to the audience, otherwise it’s taken at face value. Syrill Karn’s speech to Mosk’s troops in Andor is a good example of how to do that.

As for any ‘anti-woke’ sentiment - I’m sure there’s some, but most of the criticism seems to come from people who just straight-forwardly aren’t enjoying the show as much as you. I hope you continue to enjoy it.

I’m guessing that The Acolyte has suffered the same fate as Marvel’s Secret Invasion - in production for an overly-long duration, full of re-writes and re-shoots. So far, it’s resulted in a show that’s a mash-up of individual scenes: some are quite cool, some are oddly shoddy, many of them don’t stand up to much scrutiny.

Review-bombing anything is so self-defeating though: it gives the producers such an easy out, and allows for any legitimate criticism to get folded into the more illegitimate stuff.

The Jedi are known for their disarming nature

Probably.
At one point, Yord mentions her mothers, so I wondered if it was that was part of it too. Female show runner, too, of course. I could probably delve into YouTube and see what’s stirred the bigots up, but I’d rather not get depressed finding out.

Yeah, on some level, I think that’s always been part of the appeal of it - I’ve used it for ages.

Yeah, I think you’re right. And I’ve played KOTOR fairly recently too. I might just be misremembering something from a podcast.

Ha. Fair enough. I’m still of the view that there was some kind of ‘no knives’ rule until recently.

It seems to be quite a lot for the server it’s hosted on though (which is not the snappiest). There are, of course, still areas in the world where - for one reason or another - people still are effectively on dial-up speed-wise.

Buster should turn their attention to the size of the images uploaded to servers like this: 1.1M is arguably overkill for this one.

Interesting that that opening fight had both knives and blood - I think there was a time (before Andor) where both those things weren’t really allowed in Star Wars. It felt like nothing that came after really lived up to that. Episode 2 had two writers, joined by the word ‘and’ rather than an ampersand, meaning that they worked on it separately, which doesn’t bode well (the last time I saw that for a TV show was Secret Invasion, and that was rubbish).

It’s okay, good enough to keep watching. It looks like it’s getting review-bombed though, so there must be something about it that’s upset people.

Also, as soon as my stupid brain heard that a character was called Osha, it didn’t stop thinking about Star Wars Health and Safety violations:

It probably is. I’d tried Mastodon but found myself not going back. Phanpy re-invigorated my interest in it.

Not much for beets. My config.yaml is just:

library: ~/.config/beets/musiclibrary2.db

import:
    move: yes

terminal_encoding: utf8

plugins: fetchart embedart

(so fetchart and embedart are the only plugins)

(from then on, a Navidrome server hosts the music, and I tend to use a Windows app called ‘Feishin’ to play it)