You are well aware that those are retcon? None of this existed before “A New Hope”.

Lucas had reems of material he used to turn out multiple screenplays before he ended on New Hope.

That’s a big part of where those changes in the re-releases came from.

George Lucas is the perfect example what happens when you don’t do world building.

If you get into those coffee table books about the making of the first three movies, you find lots of world building.

All the bounty hunters on the deck of Vader’s Super Star Destroyer in Empire Strikes Back have canonical backstories, for instance. The cosmology of the galaxy - with Corusant at the center of the Empire and Tantoine way out in “Hutt Space” - was laid out by Lucas far in advance. “The Clone Wars” wasn’t just an off-handed reference, it was a thing Lucas had defined as the WW2 precursor to New Hope’s Vietnam. Hell, the fact that the first movie released was “Episode IV” should say it all.

One reason you got so many derivative works following Return of the Jedi is that Lucas dumped his director’s notes to the public as merch when production initially stalled on the Prequels.

Eliminating 9,000 jobs only guarantees they’ll flounder even longer.

Maybe. Microsoft’s biggest revenue stream has historically been government contracts. I don’t see that failing them anytime in the next decade.

But retail consumer spending? That’s something that could seriously take a few hits in the next big downturn. I can see a company putting its finger to the wind and betting a '08 style recession will kill the market for console gaming in another two or three years.

Why should your fantasy game be limited by something like “health”.

One way of escalating drama and tension is by injuring a main character. The scene in Terminator 2, where Sarah Connor has to knock the T-1000 into the blast furnace with consecutive shotgun blasts, isn’t nearly as cool without her doing it with a wound in her arm. Frodo collapsing from exhaustion gives us the incredible moment of Samwise shouldering him and carrying the guy, ring and all, up the slope of Mt. Doom. Tinkerbell fading away after hearing “I don’t believe in fairies” is what gets the audience on their feet applauding her by the end of the third act.

And particularly for folks invested in the coolness of their characters, some conflicts are much more fun when the outcome isn’t anything either storyteller or player could have anticipated. A totally unexpected David v Goliath moment, where a scrawny guy fells a giant with a lucky shot, will be the kind of story people talk about for years - whether David or Goliath or both are PCs.

To write good Fantasy (of SciFi), you have to go through a process called “World Building”

I think this is more implying that you don’t have to work from the same framework for every fantasy world. Not everything has to be set in Arthurian Medieval Times with Crusader-Era social sensibilities. The menagerie of mythical creatures isn’t a prerequisite or delimiter (dragons / unicorns / etc are not a requirement nor are robots / cthulhoid horrors / woolly mammoths disallowed). You need internal consistency (to a degree) but you aren’t forced to adhere / omit any genre trope.

I would say, at an absolute bare minimum, you need some kind of fantastical or supernatural element to make it “Fantasy” as opposed to “Historical Fiction” or “Science Fiction” or some other category of fictional prose. Although, the genre of “Magical Realism” does make even that distinction a bit fuzzy.

many literature teachers / professors don’t even know about the idea of World Building

You don’t necessary need to go through the whole work of World Building if you’re just banging out a short story or novella. Even serial writers don’t necessarily bother going deep on the background material until they feel the need to expand the scope of the setting. I mean, look at the Star Wars setting. George Lucas didn’t have Jabba the Hutt defined as a big slug monster until the third movie. In the original film, there was a cut scene in which Han confronts Jabba, who was just a be-feathered chubby gangster.

If you’re just spitballing or cranking out bits of fiction in brief, World Building can be superfluous. A story that takes place entirely in a single house over the course of a long weekend doesn’t need the kind of scaffolding that a Long Walk to Mordor requires.

If they don’t taste like peppermint, I’m sending them back.

You probably think computers are supposed to solve real problems

It’s crazy to see how much of our society hinges on having access to the internet.

Paying bills, applying for jobs, registering for any kind of public or private service, long distance travel or communication… A technology that was supposed to make life quicker and easier has become this firehose of annoying digital chores, scams, and red tape.

Lemmy wants to rail on Windows 11 AND they talk shit about your average person not understanding filesystems.

At some point, it just becomes exhausting to hear people explain-o-brag about their ability to navigate the command-line, like typing “dir” into a cursor field makes them the hottest thing since Alan Turing.

Millennials will tell you they are tech geniuses, then throw up their hands when their dishwasher breaks or their check-oil light comes on. The need to be cluelessly smug rivals any 90s-era Boomer.

Bizarre AI-generated images are currently flooding Facebook, as engagement hacks and bots run rampant on the social media platform, spawning a meme-worthy image that has been dubbed “Shrimp Jesus.”

I mean, I know plenty of kids who learned this without strict parents. School staff, daycare workers, business managers, cops… anyone in authority looking to impose rules also taught these lessons.

You’d think nobody on this sub has ever shoplifted before, ffs.

That’s a billion dollar scratch that could have made a huge difference in thousands of lives.

Okay, sure. But consider that they didn’t earn those billions of dollars by sucking up to the right assortment of Wall Street financiers, rich family members, and ego-driven Presidential nominees.

The British Government considers being Arab as synonymous with being a terrorist. Not, incidentally, any differently than how Israelis see them.

Of course, the Brits were a colonial power that spent centuries quelling domestic revolts in order to extract natural resources and exploiting cheap labor. Also, not that different from their Israeli peers.

From my perspective Ukrainian strikes are carried out in self defense

And that’s the problem. Any amount of bloodletting is permissible if you stick “I think they’re defending themselves” in front of it.

So long as you’re aligned with the US of course.

I’ve heard Americans say the same about Middle Eastern casualties weighed against Israelis.

Certain people’s lives simply don’t matter.

the oil industry.

I guess it’s cool to kill civilians when they’re roughnecks?

It’s not that I didn’t know any of these

Strange that you would pretend ignorance up front

Can you elaborate on Ukrainian salvos please?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_in_Russia_during_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

And also - on Russian peace proposals too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_negotiations_in_the_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

they didn’t inherit their immense wealth

Except even that doesn’t hold up under close scrutiny. A big component of the market cap of any Fortune 100 company stems from equity and debt held by the generationally wealthy, typically through family funds managed by private equity groups. Amazon and Tesla aren’t worth $1T without the Vanderbilts and the Carnegies and the Adelsons and the Waltons bidding up asset prices. Microsoft doesn’t exist today without Bill Gates’s mom sitting on the IBM board of directors and handing her son the contracts for their 1980s OS. Hell, Berkshire Hathaway is owned by the sons of a Congressman and a federal judge, respectively.

What’s more, the biggest source of market capital is inevitably government contracts. You can’t tell me that Michael Dell is “independently wealthy” when the bulk of his fortune came via the Texas public school system buying all his company’s computers. Particularly when the governors, legislators, and board members making these decisions are (a) big shareholders of the Dell corporation and (b) legacy scions of wealthy Texas families.

It’s been open war for the last three years. Idk if you can blame the latest salvo on Russians being extra mean during Constitution Day any more than you can blame the next Ukrainian salvo on Russians deserving a double-plus bombing on Lenin’s birthday or whenever.

Every proposal for a peace plan gets flattened with a media barrage of “They’re inhuman monsters who are incapable of peace and all deserve to be exterminated!” So until the two countries can get past that (or one/both finally collapse - which I’ve been told will happen very shortly, continuously for the last three years) we’re going to continue to see new records set in the number of atrocities committed into the foreseeable future.

Unfortunately, that’s not how Imperial Presidencies work.