Dark One

The bit about the aldar smoked salt is that you use a lot less of it, since you can actually see where it's at. Compared to normal table salt, which pretty much disappears, the aldar stuff is a black/gray in color and contrasts nicely with the corn, letting you see where it's at.

A better explanation is thinking of good and evil as a pendulum. If you keep the pendulum more or less in the middle, then it's balanced. If you swing it too far to one side, it's going to need to swing to the other side at some point to balance things out.

Luke fits into it, because he's not that great a teacher or able to discern who is and who won't go Dark Side. Recruit everyone and occassionally some will go grr and some won't.

Easiest way, for me anyways, to avoid rubbery meat (that's already been cooked, just warming it up as leftovers) is to spread a little bit of butter over it and then cut it up into chunks to reheat. You get the added water/fat content of the butter to buffer against the dehydrative effects of microwaving it plus a little bit more flavor. Since it's cut up, it takes less time to heat through as well.

Eating a whole bag? Damn, you know why she was gripping the bed? That much caffeine catapulted her in Hyper Reality. It let her see all the stuff that our brains tell us isn't there and can't possibly be real. Like calorie free pizza that tastes good, ponycorns, and women that like guys that live in basments!

That would be enough to put anyone off their nut.

Try chocolate covered espresso beans.

The first time I ate them, I had four. You know that episode of Futurama where Fry drinks 100 cups of coffee? Ya, it kinda felt like the end of the episode.

No, Southern.

But I see how you could make that mistake.

I can see your point of view as well. Sometimes I wish I could shut it off and just enjoy a movie as a singular experience, but I can't usually. It's a gift and a curse, I see something in a movie and I wonder how that came about. They mention something that a character did outside the limited scope of the movie and I imagine it.

I'll admit my reading of EU stuff dropped off pretty dramatically, I didn't read the NJO stuff or really a lot of the newer things. I think my stopping point was when Jacen/Jaina were still kids and Anakin was just a baby/toddler.

As to what books are garbage? *shrug* I can enjoy a book if it doesn't have typos, the characters are consistent throughout (or near enough), and it can occupy some time. I read all kinds of things, from the Dune prequels (they aren't that bad) to SW books to WH40k stuff, etc.

After the crapfests that were Ep 1-3, how many people are willing to take Lucas' word over that of people who actually know how to write a story? Not as many as prior, I'd bet.


Maybe some people can. But I can't. Because when the ending doesn't make sense, it's not really an ending to me. And quite frankly, I could give a fig what Lucas considers "The End".

And that's fine.

For you.

However, some of us like to know how that situation came about. The people on Coruscant partying like it's 1999, hours after the Emperor is killed? Coruscant, the seat of Imperial power, is allowing that with all the stormies, police and political appartus? Just because you kill him, doesn't mean that beuacracy (sic) is going to stop immediately.

Tatooine and Cloud City I could kinda see partying...if Vader didn't leave a garrison of stormies on CC.

I prefer an active approach to movies and how they show things. You prefer the passive approach.

Except the ending IS flawed.

That might be a reasonable argument...had the Star Wars IP not been licensed out to all and sundry. Books, movies, games, comics, toys, etc. Expunge all that and your empire comes crashing down around your ears.

You kinda lose the right to say to people, "Oh that's not canon. Only what I write is canon." when all that merchandising is approved and released.

If by "perfect sense" you mean, "the exact opposite of sense", then yes I agree with you. Because you quite literally can't have a happily ever after in such a universe. For a universe that took great pains to set up it's basis for existence, there has to be something more than just killing the Emperor and blowing up the Death Star.

If only to compensate the contractors' families.

Had Sleeping Beauty spun multiple movies along with referencing say, the Little Mermaid, then yes I would've wondered. However, SB is a relatively self-contained movie.

A story that spans multiple decades. It's not really a clear beginning, middle, and end. What happened to Leia, Luke, and Lando during the year from the end of Empire and the start of RotJ? What happened in between ANH and Empire? How did Luke go from the wounded bird at the end of Empire to the relative bad-*** in Jedi? The movies are brief snippets into the lives and adventures of the main characters.

Not quite. That argument would have more merit if there were an EU of the LotR, but there's not, ttbomk. And by 'non-Tolkien' you must mean only the books right, no movies involved? Since the books are dry as hell, but the movies are quite good.

Sorry, but I really sincerly doubt that there won't be more movies once George is gone. If the heirs want to, they could just as easily remake all six movies and continue on the franchise.

Oh gee, I guess because the ever-infalliable Lucas says it is so, it must be, huh?



Sweet tapdancing monkies. Because he's never thought of anything, that means there's no story?

Except the one movie that was the top, namely Empire, didn't have Lucas' ham-handed attempts at directing and/or writing in it (though he did have a hand in the writing, there were others there to reign him in). The man may have made a damn fine universe, but he's not all that adept at actually writing stories in it, IMO.

Except that ending doesn't make sense. Oh, the Dark Side is destroyed...wait what? The Dark Side is what happens when people choose to use that power for their own greed and self-aggrandizment. Saying that they "destroyed the Dark Side" doesn't make a lick of sense in the context of what the Dark Side is. Saying that they destroyed is akin to saying they expunged all the evils of mankind from the universe.

Fear, violence, hate, of the Dark Side these things are.

They destroyed one user, true. But they sure as hell didn't destroy the concept.

It's not about the post-RotJ novels or the comics or the rest of the EU. It's about trying to make sense of a universe that has at least 20,000 years of history that has been alluded to, as well as events that are referenced in the movies.

Well, if you go by the Legacy comics, the Empire is still present and kicking about 130 years post-RotJ, iirc. The Republic is all but dead.

The Executor was but one of many SSDs. I can find reference to at least 10 others in the expanded lit. The Empire also had 25,000, at least, regular Imp-Star Deuces. Sure, it had a lot of the brightest soldiers on it, but by no means all.

Losing the Emperor doesn't take into account the various Warlords and whatnot running around. These guys are, mostly, dyed in the wool Imperial servants. They won't believe the Emperor is dead and would crack down on propoganda stating as such. Which is kinda why those scenes tacked on to the end of RotJ don't make sense. The news of the Emperor's death spreading that quickly and not being immediately stamped out by Imperial security forces?

No, she's not. I'm not even talking about the novelizations and whatnot, but rather extrapolating that universe to logical ends. You cannot simply erase Evil by the death of Palpatine, nor can you erase the Empire with his death. At best you have an anarchy state since there is no one/thing in power. Saying that it's 'better than it was' is while technically true, not the whole story.

If we accept that that universe has a backstory of at least 1000 generations, then we also have to accept other things. As well as accepting references to stories outside the movies themselves (Han's speech about the bounty hunter on Ord Mantell for instance) we have to accept that those stories exist.

Good can triumph over that particular Evil, but when Good rests on its laurels, Evil gathers power.

As far as Lucas goes...well, to me, he lost credibility when he has a 14 year old (elected Queen no less) falling in love with a 9 year old.

Wow...so the death of the Emperor completely eliminated any person's need for greed and power. What a fantastic world you live in.

And you honestly think that because you cut off one head of the massive military apparatus that is the Empire, the rest will just lay down their arms and give up their worlds?

Naive, you have a new poster girl.

Do you deny that the Dark Side still exists once the Emperor is defeated?

Do you also honestly believe that the Emperor's death destroyed the Empire for once and all?

Except it doesn't truly destroy the Sith. There's still holocrons out there with the Sith philosophy, there's still Korriban, there's still Sith spirits, there's still the Dark Side. "Sith" as it were, were an actual race in the Star Wars universe. Palpatine and Vader were adherents to the Sith (aka Dark Jedi who ruled over the actual Sith) philosophy.

And where there's human nature in that universe, there will always be a Sith. They may not go by that name precisely, but will decide that Might Makes Right.

Thank you, that's the one.

I do have an actual record player, so I can listen to it. It's just a matter of finding the time to do so.

Found it in an antique store for like $8-9. Not a bad price, IMO.

It's not quite Happy Hour time yet BBM...