Please Pay for a Year of Nothing

> How does Disney fail to make money off Star Wars? Because they decided to build a shitty tech company in-house instead of just doing what they know and licensing their content to the experts.

They may or may not have tech issues. Their issues with Star Wars are far larger than anything having to do with tech, starting from the fact that apparently no-one associated with Star Wars in over a decade appears to like, understand or even be more than superficially familiar with Star Wars.

In the particular case of Rian Johnson, if one only examined The Last Jedi it would not be clear that he is even superficially familiar with cinema, film, science fiction, space opera or simple storytelling. The Force Awakens may have been bad fan fiction, but TLJ was something I’ve never seen before: hate fiction. Actually, maybe ‘hate’ is too strong a word: perhaps TLJ is evidence of a creative team who doesn’t appear to hate Star Wars so much as resent it. They appear to have resented it for existing, for being successful, for being a world they had to tell their stories in. But it’s resentment tinged with something verging into hatred.

I honestly believe that for generations to come Disney’s squandering of the Star Wars franchise will be taught in schools alongside the New Coke fiasco. It’s remarkable: while success would not necessarily have been easy, Disney could have churned out low-effort dreck like TFA for years. It would have been bad, but folks would have eaten it up.

I think the big "replayability" factor in FTL for me is the knowledge that there are guys out there with win rates over 95% on Hard difficulty.

There's definitely some sameness that creeps in over time, and the events are for sure one of the places where that happens.

But to me there's something almost mystical about the fact that some guys have managed to "solve" the game to that point - that for almost any problem the game presents you, there's a way to win. Even for the ships that seem shitty, with careful play you can get a run snowballing to the point where victory is assured. It almost feels like chess - if you could just see the solution you almost always have a way to win the game.

I don't use mods except a couple little quality of life mods, as most of the mods I've seen (in particular Multiverse) seem to deviate too much from the fairly minimalist design philosophy that I think makes FTL so great. I'd love to see some mods that just add some more events or something that feels like it's thematically in line with that minimalism.

Lastly, I think FTL is one of the best games ever made in terms of really putting you into the mindset of the theme. You just feel like a spaceship captain, or like a Culture style ship "Mind", when you are doing little micro moments like quickly pulling the power from oxygen to squeeze a bit more out of the engines. Or venting rooms to move boarders around your ship. Or planning for the worst on Mantis B and pre-venting rooms. There's so much depth in the game waiting to be exploited.

Usually I go through kicks with FTL and then lose interest for a while, sometimes years at a time - but I always learn something new when I come back and I've gotten to be quite good on my most recent obsession with the game.

I have not really encountered anything like that in a few years. It was pretty bad back when HBO Now and Go were newer, though.

The more hardboiled the detective story, the more they are willing to seek non-socially sanctioned retribution. It's kind of funny because Father Brown partially refutes both parent and GP: the police never arrest the right guy, and the priest is neither conflicted nor in need of self-discovery, and is motivated mostly by a need to carry through God's mission of forgiveness through repentance.

There are other aspects that you're both missing. One is the puzzle aspect: Detective Conan is almost entirely these kind of alibi and murder weapon tricks. There's only so much you can do in 25 minutes to characterize, after all.

The other aspect in common is dealing with the problem of evil, specifically what drives people to the edge, to the ultimate transgression. So often I'll spend more time thinking about the perps than the detectives.

I don't think it's OK to steal. I do think it's OK to copy, because the person I "stole" from still has his/her original.

Property laws exist because property is scarce. But if I copy your idea or your data, all I'm doing is wiring the neurons in my brain in the same fashion as yours, or arranging the bits on my own computer in the same order as yours.

"Intellectual property" is a contradiction in terms. I'm open to arguments that there might still be reasons it shouldn't be OK, but arguments from property rights or analogies to theft just don't work.