Geek Confessions & Blasphemies

Miashara wrote:

I hate Bobba Fett. He's such a tool. He got retconned into not complete uselessness, but he's just garbage. Why is he a fan favorite?

Jetpack

Jayhawker wrote:
Miashara wrote:

I hate Bobba Fett. He's such a tool. He got retconned into not complete uselessness, but he's just garbage. Why is he a fan favorite?

Jetpack

And a cool helmet, and his silence let fans insert whatever persona they wanted him to have onto the character.

bnpederson wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:
Miashara wrote:

I hate Bobba Fett. He's such a tool. He got retconned into not complete uselessness, but he's just garbage. Why is he a fan favorite?

Jetpack

And a cool helmet, and his silence let fans insert whatever persona they wanted him to have onto the character.

And being told "no disintegratations" from Vader solidifies your badassitude.

McIrishJihad wrote:
bnpederson wrote:
Jayhawker wrote:
Miashara wrote:

I hate Bobba Fett. He's such a tool. He got retconned into not complete uselessness, but he's just garbage. Why is he a fan favorite?

Jetpack

And a cool helmet, and his silence let fans insert whatever persona they wanted him to have onto the character.

And being told "no disintegratations" from Vader solidifies your badassitude.

He stared Vader down without getting choked out.

Also, jetpack.

Plus, being the only worthwhile part of the Holiday Special probably helps.

Oh, and he has a jetpack.

And Han accidentally kills him, which is hilarious when you're a kid...right?

SpacePPoliceman wrote:

And Han accidentally kills him, which is hilarious when you're a kid...right?

Spoiler:

The Dark Horse Comics' Dark Empire series describes his escape from the sarlacc pit. There's also a short story in the anthology Tales from Jabba's Palace that describes him escaping as well. AND he's alive in the Legacy of the Force series of novels, in which he's approached by Jaina Solo to train her so she can fight her corrupted brother Jacen. This is set forty years after the Battle of Yevon.

dhelor wrote:
SpacePPoliceman wrote:

And Han accidentally kills him, which is hilarious when you're a kid...right?

Spoiler:

The Dark Horse Comics' Dark Empire series describes his escape from the sarlacc pit. There's also a short story in the anthology Tales from Jabba's Palace that describes him escaping as well. AND he's alive in the Legacy of the Force series of novels, in which he's approached by Jaina Solo to train her so she can fight her corrupted brother Jacen. This is set forty years after the Battle of Yevon.

All of which CAME FROM the hilarious bit of him being accidentally killed by Han because of his poorly-designed yet absolutely awesome jet pack. Because if it wasn't for that bit then he wouldn't have been so popular and thus he wouldn't have "survived" his death scene.

He's basically the Wolverine of Star Wars.

Miashara wrote:

I hate Bobba Fett. He's such a tool. He got retconned into not complete uselessness, but he's just garbage. Why is he a fan favorite?

Yes, all the above reasons and more. There was a good article about the allure of Fett in my local paper (of all places) many years ago:

The Tao of Boba Fett: Apparently sent to a slow, painful death in the belly of an intergalactic monster, this minor Star Wars character has been resurrected by ardent fans (Mayse, Susan. The Vancouver Sun [Vancouver, B.C] 03 June 2000: D12)

Remember the sinister bounty hunter in the closed helmet from the Star Wars trilogy? He wears body armour and packs more firepower than a Death Star stormtrooper squad. He speaks a grand total of four lines in three movies and dies ignominiously.

Boba Fett is the unknowable Star Wars character -- we learn nothing about his past, we never see his face, he spends minutes on screen, his voice and bearing are as cold and abrasive as the underside of a glacier -- yet he delivers mythic presence.

In the vast cyberspace cosmos created by Star Wars fans and fanatics, Boba Fett has emerged as a cult figure who challenges Darth Vader, Han Solo, Luke Skywalker and other marquee characters the marketers carefully groomed for stardom. So powerful is his grip that writers and fans brought him back to life and gave him hero status in the alternate universe of novels and short stories that surrounds the film.

Boba Fett ambiguously occupies a zone between the light and dark sides. The grey side, as other writers have called it, offers an untidy haven for smugglers, bounty hunters, fugitives, spies, all kinds of scum and villainy.

The grey side and Boba Fett entangle me more than either the light or dark sides, where destiny takes care of everything and characters face fewer ethical conflicts. The grey side demands more of its found-ins: every decision requires a wide-open, primal choice. In our galaxy everything's a choice, too, even whether to let the joker in the sports ute cut me off or run him into the ditch. As Boba Fett reflects in The Bounty Hunter Wars Trilogy by K.W. Jeter: "Whoever angers you, owns you."

George Lucas draws on several cultures to shape his myth; the do of Zen Buddhism and the Tao and te of Taoism seem to be his most important models for the Force.

The Zen nature of the Japanese samurai warrior has been described by D.T. Suzuki: "The fighter is to be always single-minded with one object in mind: to fight, looking neither backward nor sidewise ... he is therefore not to be encumbered, in any possible way, be it physical, emotional or intellectual."

Japanese fans, naturally, see Boba Fett as a samurai.

Our heroes and antiheroes, even those from an alternate universe, give us what we need most. Small kids think Boba Fett is cool for the same reasons dinosaurs are cool: he's armour-plated, frightening and bigger than them, maybe even big enough to scare their parents. Big kids obsess about the gadgets and weapons in that dented and scratched armour and the speed and armament of the galaxy's toughest- looking spaceship, Slave I. Dudes with backwards baseball hats take in Fett's mirror shades and polar chill. Men admire Fett's icy competence. Women think he's a hunk, judging by the fan fiction; this is a sizeable leap of faith since no one knows what's inside that armour.

So the TV show Community, after hearing about it from you guys and seeing that Chevy Chase is somehow involved, I'd like to try it out for a few episodes. But while the Pilot on YouTube shows 25 minutes on the search page, only 2 minutes play when I try to watch. So is there some way to see the first episode or two without having to buy DVDs or pay $2 per episode?

edit: looks like this site works: cucirca.com

Keithustus wrote:

So the TV show Community, after hearing about it from you guys and seeing that Chevy Chase is somehow involved, I'd like to try it out for a few episodes. But while the Pilot on YouTube shows 25 minutes on the search page, only 2 minutes play when I try to watch. So is there some way to see the first episode or two without having to buy DVDs or pay $2 per episode?

edit: looks like this site works: cucirca.com

Hulu maybe? I don't care that much about the show so I haven't checked, but it could be on Hulu.

Hulu (owned by NBC/Comcast), used to have all the back episodes, but recently only carries the latest 3 or 4 :/

McIrishJihad wrote:

Hulu (owned by NBC/Comcast), used to have all the back episodes, but recently only carries the latest 3 or 4 :/

The back catalog's there on Hulu Plus, though.

Hulu Plus seems to require money, so screw that. Why can't my expensive digital cable have back-episodes for pretty much everything on demand?

In the meantime my wife and I have watched a couple episodes on cucirca.com. The quality of the stream won't impress anyone but it's a good taste of the show. ...so far, it seems written well enough, but the characters' flightiness makes me uncomfortable. Is that intentional, since they're mostly 19 years old, and does it continue with such franticness, or if I choose to continue watching will I be forced to endure passion-of-week for season after season?

(Bonus points if you torture your spellchecker as I have here.)

Keithustus wrote:

Hulu Plus seems to require money, so screw that. Why can't my expensive digital cable have back-episodes for pretty much everything on demand?

In the meantime my wife and I have watched a couple episodes on cucirca.com. The quality of the stream won't impress anyone but it's a good taste of the show. ...so far, it seems written well enough, but the characters' flightiness makes me uncomfortable. Is that intentional, since they're mostly 19 years old, and does it continue with such franticness, or if I choose to continue watching will I be forced to endure passion-of-week for season after season?

(Bonus points if you torture your spellchecker as I have here.)

This is the sort of thing that makes Netflix snail mail service still attractive.

That said, I think we actually bought the first couple of Community episodes from Amazon VOD. Since we don't have the expense of cable TV, we don't hesitate to buy the stuff we want from Amazon VOD when we don't want to wait for Netflix. I didn't find Community especially funny, though.

I miss the days (oh so long ago) I would go out gothed up, and I wish I had committed to transitioning into cyberpunk instead of buying thrift store clothing like my friends in college.

I've bought tickets to Steamcon two years in a row but didn't have costumes finished so didn't attend.

I have never seen an entire episode of Buffy and have no desire to do so. I would watch the movie again, though.

Revisiting Star Trek TNG recently was a terrible idea and made me sad that I found it so tedious. It was my favorite thing ever for my after dinner TV time as a kid.

I want to play ParaPara Paradise in an arcade again very badly, and I used to rehearse a dozen of the dances at home when I still had one in the arcade nearby. I still remember several.

I used to mock people for being sucked into watching reality shows, and now I find I can't change the channel if Hoarders comes on, or Say Yes to the Dress. Tattoo Nightmares is starting to catch me as well. I'm still not sure why.

I have thousands (in some cases tens of thousands) of hits on fanfiction I wrote a decade ago and hundreds of positive reviews, and I'm still kicking myself for not having tried to publish any of my original work. I get a couple (positive) reviews a week to this day and it makes me wonder.

Keithustus wrote:

...so far, [Community] seems written well enough, but the characters' flightiness makes me uncomfortable. Is that intentional, since they're mostly 19 years old, and does it continue with such franticness, or if I choose to continue watching will I be forced to endure passion-of-week for season after season?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "flightiness," "franticness," and "passion-of-the-week."

Are you asking about the romantic subplots? If so, it's less that they consume less screen time as the show continues, and more that the show doesn't play them very straight any more and gets into much more meta territory with them.

Duchess wrote:

I miss the days (oh so long ago) I would go out gothed up, and I wish I had committed to transitioning into cyberpunk instead of buying thrift store clothing like my friends in college.

Haha. I was just reminiscing about the late 90's, early 00's NYC goth scene, about 5 clubs a week, great shows, everyone dressed up. Was always more of a "rivethead" or cyberpunk in terms of aesthetic.

Anyway.

Could never get into LOTR, or fantasy worlds in general. A slight exception for Warhammer. I don't "hate" fantasy, just never grew up with it so I don't have that connection to it. I was always more fascinated with history and the infinite possibilities of space growing up.

hbi2k wrote:

I'm not sure exactly what you mean by "flightiness," "franticness," and "passion-of-the-week."

Are you asking about the romantic subplots? If so, it's less that they consume less screen time as the show continues, and more that the show doesn't play them very straight any more and gets into much more meta territory with them.

I'm referring to two seemingly typical--and very annoying--habits of multiple characters. (And again, I've only seen the first two episodes so know nothing about romantic or other subplots.) First, they all seem entirely too on edge and defensive. Only Abed will allow the others to take cracks at him without freaking out and/or retaliating. Second, when Britta off-handedly mentioned reporters being killed in Guatemala (?), several of the others bought into it like it was the only and most useful information possible in the world, and took up organizing a demonstration. That combination of sheltered-ness and enthusiasm makes for a sickening combination.

Do these things keep occurring throughout the series or am I safe to continue and won't be made nauseous by repeated or similar breaks from reality?

Hmm. It would be more accurate to say that as the show continues, the entire thing becomes a break from reality. None of it's supposed to seem realistic or plausible, so it's not as jarring.

hbi2k wrote:

Hmm. It would be more accurate to say that as the show continues, the entire thing becomes a break from reality. None of it's supposed to seem realistic or plausible, so it's not as jarring.

That, and the example of the reporters of Guatemala is specifically parodying the sort of behavior that happens at a College.

ccesarano wrote:
hbi2k wrote:

Hmm. It would be more accurate to say that as the show continues, the entire thing becomes a break from reality. None of it's supposed to seem realistic or plausible, so it's not as jarring.

That, and the example of the reporters of Guatemala is specifically parodying the sort of behavior that happens at a College.

This. Blatant caricature.

SixteenBlue wrote:

This. Blatant caricature.

"You guys know he was hung and beaten to death, right?"

"Yeah, that's where we got the pinata idea."

Ok, confession time. I really did hate the Special Edition Star Wars movies. I really did.

But I liked the Special Edition assault on the Death Star better than the original in A New Hope.

I think Episode III is actually a good film.

II isn't terrible, either.

I still hate Episode I.

Grenn wrote:

Ok, confession time. I really did hate the Special Edition Star Wars movies. I really did.

But I liked the Special Edition assault on the Death Star better than the original in A New Hope.

I'd have to compare them side by side, because I don't remember any huge changes. Which is a point in the Special Edition's favor.

Gremlin wrote:

I still hate Episode I.

Grenn wrote:

Ok, confession time. I really did hate the Special Edition Star Wars movies. I really did.

But I liked the Special Edition assault on the Death Star better than the original in A New Hope.

I'd have to compare them side by side, because I don't remember any huge changes. Which is a point in the Special Edition's favor.

It seems like they updated the special effects for the dogfights but kept the overall flow the same. And no creatures randomly walking in frame.

Keithustus wrote:

II isn't terrible, either.

You take that back right now.