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Peregrinus

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  1. I think that's why they rotated freely -- to indicate the approach vector. Whilst the grid showed where in the possible directions it could go it was going. --Jonah
  2. Yeah. And linear languages in general break down in the face of languages like Japanese. The entire structure of the sentence pretty much as to be worked out before you start, lest you use the wrong modifier with th enoun before you get to the verb... It's holographic, rather than linear, and that can trip early learners up something awful. --Jonah
  3. *lol* Although, as hinted at in the Star Wars novel/cut scenes from ANH, and shown explicitly in the Empire comic anthology, it can force a group of like-minded pilots to stage a mutiny. --Jonah
  4. The idea of the X-Wings having shields is mainly from the battle scenes of ANH. Several fighters took hits that caused a diffuse glow to cover the impact site for a second and then faded with no visible scorching or blown-off components. Red Leader, Wedge, and Luke all had this happen to their fighters. That said, I think the EU materials drastically overestimated their effectiveness. The shields seem to be more proof against glancing shots than a direct hit. FOr that matter, there's very little evidence of shielding of ships in the original trilogy anywhere. The Tantive IV's shots against the Devastator elicited metallic clanging, as of impacts against hull armour. The Falcon was seen to take a lot of impacts without showing lasting damage, though, so maybe those scenes warrant closer scrutiny... And back to the whole question of TIEs... Cost was only part of the equation the EU materials came up with for leaving off shields and hyperdrive. Lack of shielding also encourages reliance on one's wingman, whilst lack of hyperdrive encourages reliance on mothership/base. Both emphasise the pilot as part of a larger whole, rather than an independent element. And we all know the Empire discourages individuality. --Jonah
  5. To answer a hanging question first, in the 2004 DVD release of Star Wars, Lucas altered things further, including the aforementioned alteration to the Greedo scene. Now I get where you're coming from, JediHunter. If you like, I can give you a recommended-reading list of novels and comics. *heh* That interview with Kurtz and the one with Lucas are both very illuminating, and I want to echo the urge to read them. Lucas had a good idea, and fortunately was ignorant enough to do it right the first time out. Everything since, he's just been getting more and more in his own way. He actually considers Empire to be the worst of the movies. o_O Read the development of Return of the Jedi. There were some good ideas in the early drafts (and some clinkers, let's be fair) that all got watered down or left out of later editions. The roller-coaster ride is awesome if it has a purpose. The prequels were utterly devoid of anything I could sink my teeth into -- but they had a strong enough inspiration that it's like having the perfect steak dangled just out of reach. One of my scriptwriting professors gave me what was probably the best advice I'll ever get. Watching movies and TV to see how others do it is part of learning the craft, and he said, "If you're watching something and you find you don't like it, don't just sit there bitching about it -- get a copy of the script and see if you can do better!" I've rewritten Episodes I, II, III, and VI (and Star Trek I, II, III, V, Nemesis, and the premise of Enterprise, but that's not Star Wars, so...). Everyone I've shown or told about my efforts have been amazed and sad and wished those were the movies that had been made. And it didn't even take all that much effort. Hell, if nothing else, just swapping the last two scenes of Episode II yields a better movie. *heh* You can have a tight, intelligent story and whiz-bang effects. Lucas seems to have forgotten two things from his early film-making days. First, the setting is only where the action takes place. Don't lavish too much attention on showing off the work you put into the sets. And second, Hitchcock's distinction between storytelling styles. In one version, he said, you see a couple dining at a restaurant, chatting about banal things, when suddenly a bomb that was under their table explodes. In the other, you start focussed on the bomb, and can hear the couple chatting somewhere above the tabletop, and as the last few seconds tick away, you're anticipating the explosion. Lucas has switched his storytelling style from the former to the latter. The best stories I've seen -- including the original trilogy -- are those where the audience knows less than the characters, or find things out at the same time. By knowing everything in advance, thanks to the prequels, it totally changes the tenor of the original trilogy. The revolving-door cast of villains in the prequels didn't help either. Nor did dismissing dialogue of events from the original trilogy. And so, the whole suffers. --Jonah
  6. Is there a big difference betwenn the hungarian and the romanian language? Oh, my goodness, yes. Romanian is probably the closest living language to Latin, but with curious Slavic influences. Hungarian developed from an entirely different language group from other Indo-European languages, and isn't spoken anywhere else except Hungarian communities. I find them both fascinating, but Romanian stays with me better. --Jonah
  7. I wrote a whole long rant here, and at the last minute dicided otherwise. I saw this paragraph again: You say the EU has helped destroy the Star Wars univer, but you've not actually read many of the books. Hard not to make a personal comment here, you know. Of course the EU focusses on the minutiae and trivia. Every life is a biography, and every ship has a history -- same as in the real world. It's the nature of the differences of the two media. Most World War II films don't focus on the day-to-day details of the people fighting. That's what the History Channel and Ken Burns are for. But those stories are there, regardless. Of course the EU is going back and expanding after the fact. There was no Star Wars universe prior to 1976 to expand on, but the expansion started immediately. I have the novel, where already we're seeing things outside the scope of the movie. Let alone Splinter of the Mind's Eye or the Han Solo adventures, and a lot of the stuff in the Marvel comics and Archie Goodwin's daily comic strip have survived the test of time as worthwhile additions to the fabric of that universe. As for the prequels, George has good ideas, but isn't a good writer or director. He needed Larry Kasdan and Irvin Kirschner back, and a healthy humility in the face of what his low-budget sci-fi flick has become. But my point of there being a lot of errors and inconsistencies in the movies stands, especially between trilogies. --Jonah
  8. Attack of the Zombie Post!! Weiging in on all of this after a couple more years have passed. I would like to point out that at the time of the Battle of Yavin, the X-Wings had been in the Rebellion's hands only for a short time (according to the EU, whtever credence to want to ascribe that). And even if not, of the thirty Rebel fighters sent against the Death Star, twenty-seven were destroyed outright. If the battle station had not blown up when it did, if Han had not returned to disrupt Vader's attack against Luke, Yavin IV would have been destroyed a few seconds later and Vader and his two wingmen (plus however many surviving TIEs from outside the trench) would have quickly mopped up the remaining three fighters -- at least two of which were damaged. And the situation was most definitely dynamic. At the next battle, both sides had more advanced starfighters than they had the previous time. An empire might be the only way to make civilization in the galaxy work. As we saw in the prequels and in the New Republic-era novels, the Senate gets almost nothing useful accomplished, due to so many opposing viewpoints and cultural ethics. And, as we see in Legacy, when it isn't led by a Sith Lord, a benevolent Empire is possible. The policies of the Empire in the movies are fairly clear. Although the Rebellion started with mainly or entirely humans (largely due to budgetary isses), we saw women holding positions of authority in all three movies only in the Rebellion. We saw non-humans serving only in the Rebellion (albeit only in Episode VI). And the EU has supported and built on this. That said, the EU isn't perfect. It has created and perpetuated some silly or downright wrong notions, such as the existence of Rogue Squadron, the five-mile Super Star Destroyer, lightsabers as optical phenomena... I object to what the EU materials say about the clones. I know my biology. The Kamnoans accelerated the clones' growth. Growth and ageing are completely separate processes. I object to the EU materials saying the 501st in the Original Trilogy era was the only Legion still composed exclusively of Jango clones. This was contradicted in Episode IV, if nowhere else. But I pick my battles. Just because the EU gets some things wrong doesn't mean it gets everything wrong. And just because something is in the movies doesn't make it right. *heh* Now back to my rooting through the archives... --Jonah
  9. I'll dig, but e-mail it to me just in case. *heh* I'm still feeling my way with RebEd. --Jonah
  10. The only ones I've seen that were worthwhile were the Resident Evil movies (light and fun, moreso than th egames, but cool) and the films from the team that did Ghost Ship, 13 Ghosts, and the Remake of House on Haunted Hill. Those have been intelligently done, I feel. --Jonah
  11. The large file picture for the Imperial Commandos, if that's okay. --Jonah
  12. Somewhere in the last three moves, my Rebellion CD has gone missing. I have other things to spend my money on right now, so while I wait for the spare funds to get a new copy of the game, would someone be able to gank a piece of game art off the disc for me? --Jonah
  13. He did it for his Doctoral thesis in linguistics. Took into account what few words and phrases had been tossed about in the TOS and the first three movies, and by the time Star Trek V/2nd-season TNG came along, that's what they've used since. --Jonah
  14. I'm an engineer. This is more than a vocation, this is a description of a deep desire to understand why things are the way they are and do something with that knowledge. Part of how this has manifested is a fondness for etymology. In digging into word origins I get curious about the languages in question and it goes from there. One school I went to I chose Russian over the more pedestrian French (which I have trouble pronouncing) and Spanish (prefer Castilian over Mexican and Castilian Spanish isn't too common States-side). After that , my other school had Japanese in addition to French and Spanish. Same story there. Portugese I got into thanks to Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead". Here was a language that was like Spanish, but much more melodious and cool. Gaelic was something I ran into in researching my family tree, and so on and so on... --Jonah
  15. *snerk* Still think there should be a "non-aligned" category, but whatever. And Mad78, your user icon is full of awesome and win. --Jonah

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