Who are the good guys in Star Wars?

So I keep seeing adverts for "Star Wars: Rebels" and it harkens me back to the the myriad plot points that bug me:

• Yoda: Super-powerful Jedi master. What does he do with his power and skills? Hides on a freakin' jungle planet out in the middle of nowhere, lies to Luke about being the last Jedi, and won't tell Luke the truth of his parentage.
  
  Conclusion: he's a lying, impotent little manipulator. Instead of trying to constructively counter the rising fascist Empire after his failed assassination attempt on Palpatine, he hides like a coward then manipulates the son of the very man he alienated and opposed joining the Jedi to shape into a weapon as a proxy.
  
  Further, he's a bit of a sexist, keeping Leia as the "backup" to Luke and never training her at all in Jedi powers.
• Obi-Wan "Ben" Kenobi: Pretty much the same thing, but he's a stalker on a desert planet taking a more active, manipulative role in turning Luke into a weapon against Palpatine and Vader/Anakin. He doesn't own up to lying until he's called on it after he's a Force ghost. He's as much of a coward and manipulator as Yoda, only more pathetic for letting Yoda set that policy from another part of the freakin' galaxy.
• Luke Skywalker: Seriously. He kept the surname of "Skywalker", the very name of the guy who leads the betrayal of the Jedi, slaughters kids, and all that. If you're loyal to the Jedi, you'd think that name would attract negative attention. If you're an Imperial agent, you'd think that name would come up and make its way to the Emperor's desk. WTF was the Empire doing on Tatooine, anyway?
• Stormtroopers: What exactly is the good of that armor if arrows and rocks can kill people wearing it?
• Yavin IV Base: Seriously. As soon as the Death Star popped in, WHY DIDN'T THE REBELS EVACUATE?
• The Sith: If there can only be two, why are there so many "Dark Jedi" being used by Palpatine and Vader in so many side-stories?
• Jedi: Okay, seriously, what's up with the impractical robes? Why was Luke in his black-outfit (which looked very Sith-ish) the only practically-garbed Jedi? Oh and the weird emotional-suppression creed Yoda preached: what the hell is up with that? You're a star-spanning civilization. You don't understand what that kind of emotional suppression can do to a human mind? Seriously? WTF?
• Chewbacca: Meets Yoda in Episode III. Forgets about it or never brings it up when Obi-Wan and Luke come on the Millennium Falcon for the first time. Um...?
• Actually, the entire Luke vs the Emperor and Vader thing: Unnecessary. A combination of Han and Leia's commando team on Endor, coupled with the space assault led by Lando and Wedge are what actually blow up the Death Star and kill everyone on board. The Force wasn't going to save Palpatine and Vader from an explosion of that size. Luke's entire duel on the Death Star II was irrelevant and pointless. One could argue the character stops being relevant right after A New Hope.

So, yeah. Star Wars. Left me with some issues. There you have it.

Review: The Rhesus Chart

Finished it last night.

The latest in the Laundry Files stories by Charles Stross, The Rhesus Chart tells the next story of Bob Howard, Darkside Hacker extraordinaire and apprentice Eater of Souls who works for the Laundry, the UK's occult intelligence service.

Without spoiling the story too much, the occult menace in this story is vampires (which, of course, don't exist), but as with any of the Laundry stories, that doesn't begin to touch on the actual situation.

I personally have mixed feelings about the book. As someone now-trained in Agile software development and on multiple Scrum teams, I found the Scrum (an actual group of characters in the story) to be disturbingly-familiar. Especially the character who leads the Scrum and speaks in buzzwords.

I'm starting to look at certain people in my company in a new light.

But I digress... there were cool things. I always enjoy Bob's true nemesis: corporate b.s. and matrix management, but otherwise I felt the story seemed to drag a lot. It meandered aimlessly for a while then the conclusion felt rushed and abrupt, if deeply, deeply fucked up.

I enjoyed it, but it felt a bit hollow next to the previous offerings. I'm hoping the next one is a bit meatier.

Wednesday Interwebz

• Hard not to agree.
• 
• A new take on shipping.
• That's no moon.

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In other news, I needed to use up some ingredients in the kitchen last night so I made a batch of brownies. Then I realized the only sugar I had in the place was some bags of cane sugar I'd gotten from FSM-knows-where.

An hour later, I was four brownies into the batch before I managed the Herculean effort of self-control and stopped gobbling them down.

Not as powerfully-sweet, nor as fluffy, but tasty all the same.

I may have to try this again one day. Y'know, for SCIENCE!

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My continuing education in learning JavaScript is a constant and painful reminder as to how I am woefully unsuited to coding.

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I'm about 95% done reading The Rhesus Chart by Charles Stross. The latest Laundry novel is okay. It's not really grabbing me like some of the others and feels a bit like a slog, but there's some clever stuff in there (as always).

In parallel, I'm reading The City of Light by Will Wight. The third novel in his Traveler's Gate trilogy is also okay. It's got some good stuff, but I'm still having trouble feeling a lot of sympathy for any characters. I do like his concept of "Incarnation" (a magic user uses too much magic and becomes the embodiment of the user's source of magic). Still worth my reading time.

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Guardians of the Galaxy on Friday. Woo-hoo!

Review: Space Pirate Captain Harlock

Earlier today, I watched Space Pirate Captain Harlock.

Released in Japan in 2013, Space Pirate Captain Harlock is a computer-animated film about the notorious space pirate, Captain Harlock (yes, I know it was hard to divine that from the title) as he fights against the corrupt Gaia Coalition that controls the Earth, the last resource for humanity.

So... yeah. The plot makes little to no sense, but I mostly manage to ignore that in favor of the visual effects, which are frankly outstanding. This was a gorgeous movie. Apparently it took over 1400 shots using 806 machines to render over five years. Something in the area of 250 terabytes of data in the rendering. Crazy shit.

If you have the time and you're looking for some brain-candy space opera, see if you can watch a copy of this. It's cheese-tacular and batshit crazy.

huh

This morning I've seen lightning flashes across the sky and now I'm watching it rain for the first time in... wow... months. And it's freakin' July. Odd.

Comic stuff

• So, Thor is now a woman. No matter how I look at this, it just seems like pandering to me. Marvel is just trying to say: "Oooh! Look at us! We're about diversity and being edgy! Ladies, buy our comics! And boys, we'll aim for some cheesecake shots so you keep buying!"
• I guess the Falcon is now Captain America? Cool? I honestly haven't been keeping track of Marvel comics in years, so I have no reaction to offer.
• I'm of two minds on the whole re-imagining thing that comics keep doing. On the one hand, it's nice they're trying to freshen up some brands, but on the other hand, it's kind of lazy. Instead of aiming for a new, cool character, writers just slap a socially-relevant label on an existing character as a sort of nod to being "diverse", such as a Middle-Eastern-American Green Lantern or a female Thor or whatever. Then again, it's just comics. I should give 'em props for trying to keep comics relevant to modern-day.
• I re-watched Captain America: The First Avenger yesterday (coincidentally). I'm still impressed by how well-done the film was. It really was the supporting characters that helped make it awesome. Agent Carter and the Howling Commandos were really solid and the Red Skull was just perfect.

Truth

All anyone asks, really.