Max Tagher

Our developer suite just got a new addition: Mercury CLI.

Disney spent $1 billion in 2019 building a Star Wars theme park where you were not allowed to meet Luke, Leia, Han, or Darth Vader. Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland was set on Batuu, a backwater planet in a narrow window between The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker. By that timeline Luke was dead. Han was dead. Vader had died 30 years earlier. Leia was alive but had no canonical reason to show up at an outer rim smuggler outpost. Imagineer Scott Trowbridge spelled out the design rule in 2022. Characters on Batuu would stay locked to their specific era. No visitors from other Star Wars timelines. The immersion was the entire point. In practice guests flew to Anaheim for Star Wars and walked through a $1 billion set to meet Vi Moradi and Dok-Ondar. The locals of Black Spire Outpost. The parallel failure was Galactic Starcruiser. $5,000 for two nights in the same sequel-era window. No Luke, no Vader, no Han, no Leia. Disney wrote down $250 million to close it 18 months after opening. On April 29, Galaxy's Edge at Disneyland abandons the rule. Darth Vader will roam Batuu hunting Luke. Leia and Han will appear at the Millennium Falcon. Kylo Ren is being pulled from the land and relocated to Tomorrowland. The ambient Batuu music gets replaced with the John Williams score. Disney spent seven years defending the design principle. Then Galactic Starcruiser closed with a $250 million write-down. Luke Skywalker showed up for one limited event last year and got swarmed by guests. The rule quietly got dropped. Avengers Campus figured this out on day one. You put Captain America in the Avengers land.

I love this pic. Remember it well. Sometime in the early/mid 1980s some brand genius at Patagonia invited customers to submit photos for the catalog. And some of the photography was really great--it still is actually. It's a great example of user generated content, and "lifestyle" storytelling instead of the (then standard) hard sale.

A Kuwaiti F/A-18 Hornet was the cause of the accidental shootdown of 3 F-15E Strike Eagles in a “friendly fire” incident over the country on Sunday, not a Kuwaiti “Patriot” Surface-to-Air Missile Battery like had initially been believed, three people familiar with initial reports of the incident told the Wall Street Journal. One F/A-18 launched three missiles against the F-15s, according to a U.S. official, with all three aircraft being hit and going down, but their pilots ejecting safely. The incident occurred soon after multiple Iranian drones had penetrated Kuwaiti air defenses, one striking a commercial port and killing six American servicemembers, with Kuwaiti officials on edge when their radars detected the jets flying in and fired on them.

Passkeys are the solution to this problem but people are mad about those too

Passkeys are the solution to this problem but people are mad about those too

From about age 4-7 (in the 80s), I remember shopping for shoes to be a wonderful experience. I'd walk into a little shoe store with my parents and a friendly preppy looking man would ask who we'd be getting shoes for. My parents would indicate it was me and he'd look at me and say, "Excellent! Welcome young lady, parents, please come this way." He'd ask my name and my parent's names and would indicate where I was to sit and then he'd squat down in front of me and remove my shoes and measure both of my feet on that metal measuring tool (and this was nice because we discovered one of my feet is slightly larger than the other so we'd go off that one) and if I was in between sizes he'd ask my parents if they wanted me to have a close fit or a larger fit (a wink wink money-saving fit) that would last longer. And then he'd put my shoes back on for me even though I was perfectly capable. And he'd ask my parents what kind of shoe we were after and what the desired price range was, and then he'd show us a few options. I have a memory of trying on a pair of red shoes and the man saying, "Something's not right, that doesn't suit you." He got a light pink version of the same shoes and put both on my feet and asked me to walk around again and see myself in the mirror. He asked "what do you think?" I smiled bashfully and he said, "Looks like we got the right color! Now let me tell you about this shoe..." He would hold up shoes for my parents to inspect and he'd talk about how the sole was non-slip, the leather would mold to my foot and the hardware was sturdy (we usually bought me a leather Maryjane in those years). (I want to mention that during this time my dad made very little money and my mom was a stay-at-home-mom and I had a little brother, too.) So the man would have me walk around the store for a while (and do a little run, a few jumps) while he talked to my parents to entertain them while I had "time with the shoes". Once a certain amount of time had passed, I was asked, "Do the shoes feel perfectly comfortable? Any tightness or discomfort? It's important you let us know so that your feet feel happy." Anyway, I'd leave with a great pair of shoes that fit just right (and I'd leave with them on, the man always made sure of it, because what kid doesn't want to do that) and my parents wouldn't have had to squat down once for the entire ordeal or hunt for shoes or put any away or figure out how to measure my feet. I remember one time we left and I looked back and saw the man had resumed his reading of a big book. The entire thing was idyllic to me. And when I've had service type jobs (I had many between ages 14-24) I emulated as much of that experience as I could. When the first free standing Chick-fil-A came to town here in the 90s I worked the opening week and got a prize for the most call ins from customers giving me a compliment for my service. I'm not naturally a good service-giving individual, I'm way too spacey and reserved, but I had been on the receiving end of the care and thoughtfulness that makes good service and that was enough to make an impression. Maybe when AI and robots take over all of our material needs we can get back to a substantial number of people working a service oriented job that suits their personality and abilities and keeps them feeling purposeful and connected to the community they live in. Perhaps the shoe store employee hated his job, but I refuse to believe so because he had nice, clean hands/nails, had a twinkle in his eye, a friendly smile, was relaxed, knew his stuff regarding all the products in the store, and seemed to enjoy talking to us. I remember two different male employees at that shop, very similar to each other in how they did the job and how they delivered great service. Eventually the little shoe store died to the malls and their large self-service styled shoe stores with more variety and stock. But the experience I had has informed me ever since on how to be a better human, I think. Like not the abstract belief stuff, but the simple behaviors, the thoughtful gestures, the anticipating of needs, the making someone feel like you want what's best for them. I don't know if this is how things were back then in general, maybe it was a one-off, but I'm certain we could bring it back one day, to everyone's benefit. You know what? No. It wasn't a one-off. I saw bits of this long ago at the pharmacy, at the grocery store, at restaurants, the bank, and the hardware store. How can we get back to it?