The Legacy of the Force was a real problem. I think I’m a bit younger than you, these came out in 2006 and I was in high school at the time. I’d just finished cobbling together a library of star wars paperbacks and reading through the end of the New Jedi Order (The Unifying Force) which is an incredible 19 book series that expertly capped the SWEU of the prequels and post-ROTJ. My now-wife was also into reading the SWEU at the time and one of our conversations was ‘how could you end the star wars story any better than this?’

Yeah, you’re a bit younger. By the time the first books in that series were released, I was finishing college and starting on my Master’s degree.

LotF was the series that destroyed my fandom in STAR WARS, completely and irretrievably. The whole Hero’s Journey went straight out the window. You couldn’t figure out who was good and who was bad in that series. I liked Aaron Allston’s work, because I loved his writing style – he’s dead now, sadly, passed away from a heart attack at a convention – but everything else about that series was just awful.

And Karen Traviss’s handling of Mara Jade was… I’m struggling to find a polite term. “Abominable” is perhaps the closest I can manage.

Oddly enough, Karen Traviss did a great job with the HALO novels that she wrote. I’m given to understand that the STAR WARS: Republic Commando novels were good, so my guess is that she is very good with “Space Marine” stuff. But she’s HOPELESS with a big-picture sci-fi universe.

Sadly, LotF wasn’t the end of that part of the saga. The Abeloth saga in the Fate of the Jedi series was, apparently, even crazier and dumber. I couldn’t bring myself to read through it, after the torture of reading through LotF. But I’m told that those books were INCREDIBLY stupid.

The final episode has two problems;
Wife caught this: All the femail characters become the protectors and the only nurturing character is Mando, the man. Strange inversion.
Mine: All the female characters are irrelevant. You can edit them out of the episode without missing anything. The screen runners are just adding tokens to slow the story down, unlike season one where every character had a purpose to that episode.

I think it’s important to remember that Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau are not on “our side”, not really. These guys are caught up in Current Year politics just like the rest of Lucasfilm. But, unlike Queen Karen Kennedy and others, they understand what the fans want and will happily give it to them in order to keep selling us the rest of their product.

I couldn’t care less about The Mandalorian or anything else that Lucasfilm produces. But I am pleased to see that Luke Skywalker finally got the treatment that he always deserved as the hero and legend of the saga. I can understand very well why so many grown men were moved to tears and wept openly when Luke appeared on screen.

Do you have experience with the Batman Arkham series? The high ratio of ‘I feel like batman’ moments per minute of gameplay is exceptional.

Duuuuuuude… Arkham Asylum was incredible and Arkham City is possibly the best RPG game ever made. I didn’t like Arkham Origins quite so much, and I haven’t yet played Arkham Knight, but the first two games in that series were simply incredible. They got EVERYTHING right – the gameplay, the cinematics, the voice acting (Kevin Conroy! Mark Hamill!!!), the plot, the combat style, the level of difficulty… ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING.

China Uncensored: South Korea client state of China:
This is good to understand, thank you for including it.
I am wary of any telegenic lady explaining politics in English using USA political terms…but I probably wouldn’t understand it using native terms.

Star Wars:
The Legacy of the Force was a real problem. I think I’m a bit younger than you, these came out in 2006 and I was in high school at the time. I’d just finished cobbling together a library of star wars paperbacks and reading through the end of the New Jedi Order (The Unifying Force) which is an incredible 19 book series that expertly capped the SWEU of the prequels and post-ROTJ. My now-wife was also into reading the SWEU at the time and one of our conversations was ‘how could you end the star wars story any better than this?’
Then the SWEU Legacy of the Force is released. Aaron Allston! Karen Travis! Troy Denning! Each of these accomplished SWEU authors, a story distantly removed from the Unifying Force, so a clean canvas to work with and no messing around with the quality that came before… and then the books were terrible. She is one of those people who can read a paperback without crinkling the spine and bought the books. She was disappointed with them, and then loaned them to me to read. I read them and was sick over the trainwreck. Then she was angry with me because she couldn’t take them back to the bookstore anymore for being terrible. Turns out I am much harder on paper books than she is.

The apex x-wing pilot/Jedi Master Luke Skywalker was deeply compelling. They gotta make that deepfake face problem go away, it was a terrible rendering of him.
The final episode has two problems;
Wife caught this: All the femail characters become the protectors and the only nurturing character is Mando, the man. Strange inversion.
Mine: All the female characters are irrelevant. You can edit them out of the episode without missing anything. The screen runners are just adding tokens to slow the story down, unlike season one where every character had a purpose to that episode.

The drinker identifying the NPC’s all over Mando2…hahahahahahaha this is so right.

First Person Shooters:
Do you have experience with the Batman Arkham series? The high ratio of ‘I feel like batman’ moments per minute of gameplay is exceptional.

I first heard of Vai when I was a kid and watched ‘crossroads’ and realized that he did every bit of the playing in that movie.

But, I am not a guitarist, I play the piano and sax, so guitarists may have a different yardstick for measuring skill… but people who can do what Vai can do impress the hell out of me.

I thought Steve Vai and Dimebag Darrel were considered the best. I know Steve Vai writes music and was playing since the age of 7. At least that’s what he said. Plus he got mentored early on in his career. Kind of hard to beat that.

That kind of depends on your method of measuring “the best”. Dimebag was a legend, no question, and Steve Vai is amazing and can play all sorts of stuff. But there’s a real difference between looking at guitar heroes as a fan, and looking at them as a player.

Steve Morse was voted Guitar Player magazine’s “Best Overall Guitarist” for five years in a row – by other guitarists. He won so often that after his fifth win the magazine “retired” him into their “Hall of Greats” simply because he kept winning all the time.

Most guitarists can only play one or two “styles” of music. A very rare few, like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Eric Johnson, and a couple of others, can play multiple styles. Steve Morse is nearly unique in that he can, and does, play jazz, classical, bluegrass, country, rock, neoclassical shred, and funk – he can do anything.

Writing as someone who used to play guitar myself – VERY VERY BADLY – I can say this: I’ve NEVER heard anyone play with Steve’s level of versatility. What he does is simply impossible to replicate. Nobody else comes close to his tone and style. I could listen to Steve Morse’s solo records on loop for hours – especially Structural Damage and Major Impacts. That latter record gives you some idea of just how good SM really is. He basically goes about copying other guitarists’ styles and sounds EXACTLY like them, while still maintaining his own unique style of playing and composition. It’s a remarkable feat of instrumental work.

He can play almost as fast as Malmsteen without sounding boring – which is hard to do. I have huge respect for Yngwie but I can’t really listen to his work beyond a few songs.

As for Steve Vai – I have huge respect for the man, actually. But I’ve never really warmed to his music – it just doesn’t get through to me. I bought Passion and Warfare when I was a teenager and I’ve listened to it a bare handful of times.

Interesting fact about Vai – he was hired by Frank Zappa as a lead guitarist, but Vai himself will tell you that he was just there to add texture. Everything else was all Frank himself. Frank Zappa is possibly one of the most underrated musicians in history. What Steve Morse does with the guitar, Zappa did with entire bands and even orchestras.

The thots with guns are almost as good as Steve’s music and the instathot was good as well. Wasted genes, but I guess she know communism is bad.