Chronocidal

I was able to cash in my VIP points on the 89 Batmobile, but it wasn't a direct exchange. I had to redeem the points as what amounted to gift cards, which worked alright, and I don't think the value changed from before, but there were only specific values of gift card available. It wasn't a problem for me, since I didn't have enough to get the whole set anyhow with my points, but it was a little awkward.

All told, the VF-19 in general is the only airframe I have nearly as many of as I have VF-1s. I grabbed as many of the Bandai release as I could so I can spread the ordnance around all my Bandai valks.

My only concern about this approach is what happened with the strike packs. For whatever reason, they just didn't forward any of the orders to Bandai before the window closed. Whether they knew there was a second order window coming or not, that delay in their process doesn't build my confidence that they'll be a reliable source.

While I would like to know the source on this, and whether it was from Lucas himself or the EU, my understanding was that Breha also died when she was very young, so if her father remarried, she would have had a second adoptive mother, and remembered Breha as her real mother, because she was never told otherwise. My instinct is that this was an EU detail. I never thought Leia even knew she was adopted to begin with until Luke spilled the details to her. Given the facts of her parentage, I could easily understand never revealing that to her, for her own safety. The thing to keep in mind is that it was entirely within Disney's power to unscrew that mess of a line and have Breha die in Leia's early childhood, but it sounds like they have her living until Alderaan was destroyed? For all the cherry-picking they do from the EU, that was one element they absolutely needed to keep, but I think coherent storytelling and world-building is entirely beyond them at this point.

As a TWE safety net, I've just accepted that I'm going to order a pair of everything, one each from NY and Anime Export. I've done the same thing with all the recent Bandai releases really, buying one from at least two different shops, but with standard releases you generally don't have a choice anyway, since most retailers limit you to one. I may not keep them all in the long run, but with how unpredictable order cancellations can be with Bandai's supply shenanigans, I can absorb the short-term cost for a little peace of mind until I have them in-hand. Unless it's something like the VF-31A or YF-19, in which case I'm just buying as many as I can get my hands on.

Context is important.

The biggest motivator for me was that Bandai went el-cheapo on the VF-1D, and didn't include any hardpointed wings. I'm just eternally baffled by their refusal to offer any option not explicitly seen on-screen for any of their toys.. (unless they decide to re-write the designs and give the M&Ms entirely different packs, weapons, and paintschemes, that is. ) Seriously, I don't care what's seen in the animation. There is no reason any VF-1 should not have standard hardpoints in the wings, including the VT-1, because how else do you mount training rounds? I need to do some paint matching, and just glue a few of those rings to my VF-1D wings so they can carry all those spare TV missiles I picked up.

I've actually made a few hardpoint mounts by drilling out and slicing up a section of sprue, but it's not an easy process. The mounts really are just a ring though, and depending on the tolerances, it might be very easy to just make a series of properly-sized rings with a 3D-printer.

I think people are fully aware of that, but the brainstorming board is also a good indicator of the writing team's priorities (or lack thereof). The fact that "actual ending" falls below "diversity" (which is on there twice even), "dinosaurs" got billing above the Sith, and the first entry under "Star Wars" is "Not pro-war" says a great deal about the thought processes currently involved in the planning for this series. Right at this point, I think a great number of fans have lost all faith in the direction the franchise is going, and want to head off any more massive mistakes before they build any momentum. The earlier a lookout raises the alarm, the easier it is to steer around the icebergs.

I'm honestly not even sure if being a TWE release is a benefit anymore.

Do we actually know they did last until Order 66 though? What if the traditions in KOTOR eventually faded into something less structured, but this new series explores a re-awakening of those schools of thought? A thousand generations is a long time. Not to get too deeply into any religious allegory, but think of how many major changes in establishment and policy an organization like the Roman Catholic Church has gone through in just one millennium. The Jedi Order could easily have mutated from a ruling class to a peacekeeping force and back again multiple times in that period of time.

Not so much that, I'm more thinking in terms of why the Jedi Order became so blind. Less about the details of Palpatine's rise, and more about the Jedi becoming overly confident in themselves, fixed in their traditions. That can overlap with the way they were portrayed in a monk-like society by the time the prequels hit. Just theoretically speaking, what if the era we see is one where Jedi are not quite so restricted? Intermarrying, raising force-sensitive families, and reaching a point where they could almost be considered a type of nobility, rather than servants. Any organization lasting thousands of years is bound to have cycles of growth and recession, and there had to be periods where traditions were questioned, and reformed. Maybe we start at a point where the Jedi Order has grown influential in the Republic, and begins to press that for advantages of some sort. They absolutely referenced "houses" on the idea board, and having a bunch of Jedi families pushing for influence could be an interesting premise, if done well. Big caveat there, of course, and I don't want us having another Game of Thrones, but if you played on the idea of different factions and schools of thought within the Jedi, you could open up a lot of setup for exactly why the Jedi behaved as they did in the prequels. There's a lot of room to play with it, if they stick to what works, and don't get too agenda-driven. I think we could have a genuinely interesting drama between disparate Jedi factions fighting over policy in the midst of a larger conflict, or threat of one. The end goal would be establishing the Jedi Order policy as seen in the prequels, which led to Palpatine. Hell, if they want to take the easy route, just go back and establish where the "chosen one" prophecy came from. You have thousands of years to play with, and the Sith certainly seem to like playing the long game, so play up the long-term setup. Have a Sith agent manipulate the Jedi to implement the "no families" rule with the explicit intent to setup the fall of Anakin several hundred years later. We know certain races live that long, so it's entirely possible Plagueis takes Sideous under his tutelage during this era, or maybe we see Plagueis slay his own master and begin setting up things for his apprentice. We're talking about heroes and villains that have a distinct ability to see into the past and future. Just play with that in an interesting way.

Only if Misa is wearing the helmet though!

Developers have taken the fact that storage space continues to grow as an edict that they should simply bloat their own assets to fill the space. If Super Mario Bros. were released now, Mario's single-pixel eye would be in 4k. Meanwhile, physical media has gone the way of the dinosaur, and heaven help you if you live in an area without high speed internet access, because you're going to be trying to drink an ocean through a swizzle stick. A few years ago (before cable was available in this area), I literally received a set of physical discs through the mail faster than the download of a game completed.

Shh, this has been the most entertaining thing about my workday today. Don't take this from me!

Here's a wacky idea. Setup the situation that enabled Palpatine to rise to power in the first place. I don't expect them to really play with this, but it would be interesting to see them explore exactly why the jedi order became so restrictive by the time of the prequels.

Curse you, I am seriously considering printing myself some YCAPS NU markings. Maybe I'll decorate a Toynami with them.

See, I would agree, if they agreed to keep it coherent.. but they don't seem to intend that at all. The EU itself wasn't always great, and I'm not going to pretend it was all a single contiguous story, but a fair bit of the EU I enjoyed came from a limited number of authors who collaborated to keep their characters and stories consistent. Having everyone existing on the same page from the start would be a huge step in the right direction. I don't want to see bits and pieces of the EU scattered about whatever new monstrosity they build of it, and I don't want them using existing concepts to shortcut building something else that can stand on its own. I just want someone to actually take into account writing a decent story, and making that the main focus, because without that you get... well, what we've had for the last six years now.

Recycling ideas is not in itself a problem, but the recent regurgitation of intellectual property is more akin to recycling old Star Wars paperbacks to produce toilet paper. Actually, scratch that, I don't want that material anywhere near that close to my backside. I think one of the things that bugged me the most personally over the past few years was just how lazy the copying got. I get it, the EU was dense, and full of fanon from over forty years' worth of fan speculation, extrapolation, and innovation. But Disney explicitly proclaimed that all of that didn't matter... and then immediately backtracked on that, and started cherry-picking bits and pieces that they decided they either liked enough to keep, or were just too lazy to take the time to invent something new. I'm going to refer to one specific instance here as an example, and it's very minor, but I think it makes a good case study. The new X-Wings in the sequel trilogy are labeled in official material as "Incom-FreiTek T-70" fighters. Incom was the company listed in old OT material, from what I recall, and carried over to the EU. FreiTek? That's entirely from the EU, the Dark Empire comic series specifically, if I remember correctly. They manufactured the newer E-Wing fighters meant to replace the X-Wings (which I really wish we had seen, instead of them literally making tweaked copies of every OT ship based on OT concept art). So... why did they use that name? Why pick up just the name, instead of using the actual E-Wings in the sequel trilogy? Think about what that name "FreiTek" represents. Beyond just the name, consider all the things associated with it. In the EU, FreiTek had a defined history, founded by the design team that defected to the Alliance before ANH, along with the early X-Wings. The company and people involved had backstories. I haven't read the Dark Empire comics, but I believe there was a fair bit of story involving the development process of the E-Wing, and working out bugs in the design, if the material I can find about the E-Wing is anything to go by. So, why did Disney appropriate that company name for the new X-Wings? Because it gave them a world-building shortcut. By referencing a name, they saved themselves all the trouble of developing something original and having to tell about it. Whether they explicitly told the history of that company or not, just hearing that familiar name would basically be dangling a bell in front of EU fans, hoping they would latch onto that reference (even if only subconsciously), and let it do their world-building for them. Again, this is a super minor case, with a stupidly tiny background detail, but it makes a good example of the lack of world-building for the new movies. They just did not want to try and do that work themselves, so they took referential shortcuts like this all over the place. Even though the company that made a ship is an absolutely minuscule background detail, by using a name that fans of the EU would recognize, they could try and hijack a backstory that they didn't have to write themselves. Now, before anyone goes off on this being a huge wall of text over a tiny background detail, yes, it is a massive diatribe on a tiny detail that most people would never care about. I'm fully aware of how nit-picky this is, and how little these details mean in the grand scheme of the movies. I honestly don't know a good way for Disney to approach this. At least with this New Old High Republic setting, they'll have to do all of their own world-building, because the time-frame is so far removed from both the Old Republic, and the OT/Prequels. I'll be interested to see how well they manage, but I still expect them to pull from as many existing sources as they can, including the EU.

See.. I thought it was doing just fine running entirely on books for a good couple of decades. In fact, I'm moving back to those, because the sequel trilogy demonstrated something to me very clearly: The current people running this franchise have no capacity to generate a compelling original idea, flat out.1 The new movies were a vomit-inducing blend of ideas already explored in the EU, and waste that I wouldn't want to ruin a dumpster with, and I don't expect this to be any different. The only reason they shipped the EU off on a bus was so they could bastardize the whole thing and cherry pick the bits they wanted to mash into their custom disaster blend. If I'm going to be force-fed (hah) old plot points, I would rather just experience them in their original un-sullied format in the EU. I've basically hit my "Nemesis" point with Star Wars now- the point at which the new material becomes such utter shite that I have to cut off my investment, and carry on enjoying the parts of the franchise that were, and still are, good. 1- I haven't watched the Mandalorian yet, so I can't judge that, but either way, it doesn't sound like either Favreau or Filoni are involved in this slow-motion trainwreck.

Yeah, everyone knows there's another release coming out though, so that's why no one's gone for it. I already put in a pre-order for the new batch with another site.

Not too bad? We really didn't get to see much of him, but it's not a bad likeness of the actor John Morton. I might have to track down one of these, but the problem is probably going to be finding the Hoth Luke figure to match it at this point.

See, that's true, but I only collect the fighters to begin with, and some of them are dead-on, scale-wise. The A-Wing absolutely nails it, as did the old snowspeeder, and the rest are basically close enough that a 1/18 scale figure can reasonably fit in a 1/24-ish vehicle. What I don't understand.. if that's a "Black Series" snowspeeder.. does that mean it's actually 1/12 scale? That's gonna be huge. On the other hand, can I maybe hope for a Black Series A-Wing?

Ok, the Snowspeeder looks beautiful, but yeah.. I'm not going to get excited for 6" figures. I just can't see a reason to collect them when I'm more interested in the vehicles, and they don't make those in the proper scale.

So, as an alternative, what if you drill out the screwcover, just accept that the cover is a lost cause, and make a new one after fixing the leg? Personally, I would try and cut the cover in half by drilling small holes down the slot in the center, then pry it out. Then if the halves are still good, sand away what remains of the recessed slot, and glue them together around a thin slice of plastic to rebuild the cover. The slot won't be as obvious if it's a slightly different shade of plastic.