Edward Chester

@iAmJoshHunt Outside of a decades long decline in multiple sectors, a lack of investment in public services, so much can be traced back to 9/11. Paranoia about Muslims and immigrants in general leading to needless wars, idiocy like Brexit, and continued dogwhistle issues like 'the boats'.

Question for everybody... If you had to pick one thing as the largest contributor to the sorry state the UK finds itself in, what would it be?

@BladeoftheS Don't perpetuate this nonsense narrative that it's corruption. It's a product of a highly densely populate country with rigorous safety regs, nimby folks with rights on the route, and all sorts of other red tape. Sure, corruption and political idiocy okay a part, but far from all

Hilariously by the time it opens in 2039 HS2 will be... The most expensive high speed railway in the world. The slowest high speed railway in the world. The longest time to build railway in the world. And the shortest high speed railway in the world. One word, CORRUPTION.

@wild_golbat @Only_Me_4 Fair point. I'm in charge now. All bow to me. And if you don't...

@Only_Me_4 what has democracy done for england apart from tearing through half a dozen PMs in a decade and shooting itself in the foot economically?

How it’s started. How it’s going.

@kristelxo So true! Very weird feeling.

Being 43 is wild. People your age are living completely different lives. Some are grandparents. Some are raising toddlers. Some are newly divorced. Some are newly engaged. Some haven’t slept in three years. Some are in St. Tropez posting Aperol spritzes from a yacht. Some look 25. Some look like they personally remember the invention of Tupperware. Nobody got the same assignment.

@noahs_corner Neither. Rogue One showed the potential. It was a sadly very obviously flawed movie with moments of greatnrss that transcended all the other disney SW movies. Andor feels like a pleasing extension of that potential that has no bearing on the original film.

QUESTION FOR ANDOR FANS Does the show make Rogue One a better or worse movie to you guys?

@SAAS1972N @ItsAndyRyan @titivilis @NoJusticeMTG @LukewSavage No you don't. You know full well you have no idea as to the poster's iq and meant the use of leftist as an insult (even though it isn't one).

@ItsAndyRyan @titivilis @NoJusticeMTG @LukewSavage You object to the term “leftist”? Or you deny that the observation was low IQ? I believe these are accurate descriptions.

You see recurrent versions of this everywhere, i.e. the idea people get more conservative as they get older. This is broadly true of exactly one generation blessed to grow up with shared prosperity and a welfare state that then decided no one else deserved those things.

@o_sneedy @LukewSavage Lol, no. It is a broadly universal truth that not having stuff means you want it, and having stuff means you don't want to give it away. But that doesn't render 'leftism' (f'ing cretinous term as that is) impossible. It just requires willpower and social awareness.

@LukewSavage That's not true at all. Data has shown this repeated for several generations. Usually it's because you gain more life experience and gain an implicit understanding of things like human nature and the market which renders leftism impossible

@LukewSavage Not it's not. Plenty of people from plenty of generations have bucked this trend. However, it very much is a cross generational trend. Wanting what you don't have and wanting to keep what you do have are near universal truths.

I had to sit with it for a few hours to find a fitting conclusion: The Last Jedi is the rare type of movie I find both severely and deliberately misjudged and utterly overrated. On a world-building front, it is entirely un-salvageable, both because J.J. Abrams reset the entire galaxy in TFA (all Jedi dead, New Republic wiped out before we see it, Resistance is 12 guys with duct tape and a dream) and because Rian Johnson doesn't really care to broaden the scope; the conflict feels smaller and smaller as the movies go on. Ending TFA with the handing of the lightsaber to Luke was a brilliant cliffhanger for that movie in 2015, but it completely robbed TLJ of its opportunities. There was no way to set it one or several years after the end of TFA, because the movie had opened questions that needed immediate answers. Because of that, we get no time for the conflict to evolve. Johnson actually *tries* to tackle politics in this movie, but it's only for a few scenes and it ends up being the most surface level analysis possible. It is a film that feels incredibly smug and snarky, because it ridicules the villains in a way that feels like a direct mirror of 2015/16/17/18 Twitter where people believed that clowning on alt right and MAGA idiots would be enough to prevent fascists from taking over. It is politically inept both in the way it presents its characters and in the way its critique of the capitalist system plays out. To this day, people praise how great TLJ's political messages are and I cannot for the life of me understand why. The Poe Dameron - Holdo plot takes up a significant section of the movie and its biggest flaw is how boring it is. Thematically, Poe's journey doesn't work because the lesson he should learn is not supported by the movie itself (everyone else gets heroic moments that are celebrated, it's only wrong when he does it) and the compelling idea of Resistance infighting in a desperate life or death situation plays out by everyone being petty towards each other. When Holdo says that she "kinda likes" Poe after everything that happened between them, it undermines its message even further. Just compare all this to the incredible infighting between the different Rebels in Andor! Mythologically, I believe what it does with Luke Skywalker and the legendary image of him really works. Rey and Kylo Ren are great characters in this movie and their force-bond scenes form a beautiful mythological expansion of force lore. Everyone's performance in this film is great. The fights for Ben Solo's soul and Luke Skywalker's spirit at the heart of this film are fantastic. The big issue with this part of the story is Snoke being clad in so much mystery that you're never able to truly grasp how Ben Solo's fall to the dark side happened. Because of that, the magnitude of it is never properly conveyed; it is difficult to understand how their relationship deteriorated and how Luke ends up at a point where he - if only for a second - contemplates killing Leia & Han's son. Again, this issue largely pertains to the way The Force Awakens was constructed and how almost every key development of the last thirty years is put in the opening crawl or only talked about in passing. I believe TFA should have been focused entirely on Ben Solo's fall and the New Republic's failures as the new government, showing us how and why Kylo Ren and the First Order rose at the same time and making the story of this trilogy far more compelling. Still, you can't all blame it on J.J.; Rian Johnson definitely should have given Luke and Ben's story more room to breathe instead of spending 15 minutes on some Casino planet. It's a shame that after every incredible scene with Rey, Luke and Kylo, it cuts away to Finn and Rose's detour or the slow space chase with Holdo and Poe. Whenever Johnson writes the force-user characters, I am enthralled by it (also thanks to the incredible cinematography). Everything else I can gladly live without. 6.5/10

@Super_Nothing @cryprecision Sure. Not the point being made, though.

@Ed_Chester @cryprecision And if someone grabs it from you because you don't know how to properly use it? You're fucked.

i think there is a big disconnect when it comes to to self defense, where people over estimate the amount of violence they are capable of enacting both mentally and physically.

@TSoS_ Ah, the big divide in critiques of this film. I can understand (though strongly disagree with) the view that it doesn't really matter in a world with the force and lightsabers, but it also makes no sense in universe when other bomber craft have been shown to exist.

The Resistance Bombers look really cool but I hate how easily all of them are destroyed for plot convenience. The actress for Paige Tico does an incredible job in her two minutes of screentime and the visuals & tension of the bomb dropping sequence are great. (No, I do not care about the bombs "falling down in space", this is Star Wars and I don't understand why people insist this doesn't make sense to this day)

@TSoS_ 💯 This was the overriding biggest problem with the film. Tonally ruinous. Finn running around with leaky tubes at the start, the saber toss, the prank call... None of it landed and it felt completely out of place.

Rian Johnson's hit or miss, overbearing humour (which also made Glass Onion borderline unwatcheable) is one of my biggest issues with this movie. Poe Dameron's prank-call is not as funny as Johnson thinks it is and it completely ridicules the villains. They are no longer compelling or intimidating, which they should be, considering they symbolise the re-emergence of fascism in the very literal sense of a Third Reich 2.0.

@cryprecision I think you're underestimating how hard these things hit. You need the strength and skill to hit the right body part and avoid being grappled, but you can incapacitate pretty quick. More so than a knife, unless you hit a vital artery.

idk if you've ever done stick fighting or been hit with a baton, but it's not a one and done sorta thing. the violence of action required to win an altercation and incapacitate an attack is by no means minimal.

@TSoS_ 💯 God there was so much potential in the first half of this movie.

Rey's introduction is 5 minutes of pure Star Wars magic. Perhaps the best character introduction in the entire saga. The way it bathes in the incredible aesthetic of the fallen Star Destroyers makes it one of the most visually stunning displays of scale I have ever seen.

@a_dead__account @BhawikTech @iupdate 👋

@Ed_Chester @BhawikTech @iupdate No you just don’t have reading comprehension. Android v iPhone. Poor v rich. Ford v Rolls Royce. My example may be exaggerated, but it’s my point. This convo is over.

I am 28 years old and still can’t comprehend how someone would willing use Android over iPhone

@LewisWetzel148 @ericwinter29018 @GreeneMan6 Nah, you just prefer that. That's fine. Projecting your view as though any detractors declaring themselves as such automatically marks them as idiot fanboys is not. Same as someone liking TLJ doesn't automatically mean anything other someone other than them being wrong.

@Ed_Chester @ericwinter29018 @GreeneMan6 Yes, my point was that Smith is funnier when he's being pedestrian rather than pseudo intellectual and that Mallrats is disliked for the wrong reasons. Oh no! Not "sexism" lol. You don't even live in a country that has "frat boys."

Firefly was good in the 2000s, but no one after the Millennials will ever look back on the show fondly. In concept the show was half: “Quick Chungus! Be excellent to each other my Dude! We are Reddit-big brain!” and half: “We are ex-confederate cowboys fighting against the encroaching total state” No young person today finds both these modes appealing . But 20 years ago almost everyone did.

@jpc2384 @willystaley That's not the point... 🙄

@Ed_Chester @willystaley You know that more than half of this website are bots, right? I really hope you’re not laboring under the delusion that the people on here are actually real.

You can be right about something for more than a decade — like, for example, that Drake sucks — and when everyone else comes around to the same realization, no one sends you a thank you card or apology or anything. They just act like it never happened.

@anon_opin Ew, ciabatta? Weirdo.

Brioche is just cake in denial; it turns into soggy mush at the first sight of grease and has no right to ruin a good burger. Ciabatta is superior - supportive chassis with great compression to keep contents in. Tastes better too. Fuck brioche

@AndyMasley Not minimalist doesn't have to equal naff.

Everyone complains about minimalist design until the company tries something fun and everyone reveals why all the companies have been forced into minimalist design

@LewisWetzel148 @ericwinter29018 @GreeneMan6 Not vindicated when your point was about his biggest fans. I'm thoroughly indifferent but grew up in that time so have inevitably seen his movies. Meanwhile, your point was, what, that Kevin Smith was at his best when being sexist and aping the worst of 90s culture? Ok. 😬

@Ed_Chester @ericwinter29018 @GreeneMan6 What's the opposite of being damned by a fool's praise? Being vindicated by the mewling of a a dork? Thanks for popping in and proving my point