I am a big believer in being restrained and selective for fan-servicey retcons, but having it be a sore spot did make the ANH exchange more amusing:

When I left you, I was but a learner. Now I am the master.

Only a master of evil, Darth.

Sick burn, bruh. 😡🤺🦵🦵🔥

It clearly pissed him off enough that he refuses to finish the next book out of sheer principle.

Perhaps the wings are articulated ribs?

Absolutely! I also like to point people to the father and son who worked on reconstructing the Original Pronunciation.

The Elizabethan/Jacobean drama scene could be crazy (though there were also command performances in noble or royal households which would have filed down a lot of the rough edges), and it was both popular and rowdy. Theatres were always getting shut down for censorship or indecency, tons of drama (LOL) with poaching ideas and even talent, and there was even Renaissance media piracy! I think there are at least four mostly complete extant versions of Hamlet, all a little different, and at least two just simple pirate printings from printing houses sending dudes out with their memory and maybe a pencil and notebook. Then, many of the plays would have been collaborations. Much of Shakespeare’s early and late output is thought to have involved co-writers.

Then, that’s to say nothing of the theatre people getting salty about everything, not least this rube coming down from Warwickshire, acting like he knows how to write, and upending the audience expectations.

This will be part of a series of reminders over coming months that Shakespeare will have truly coined a smaller number of phrases than he’s given credit for, and very few words at all. Dictionaries source by earliest known written use, and Willy Shakes was a unicorn for that purpose.

He was an upjumped middle-class prodigy from barely a century after the introduction of the printing press, with a mediocre education by the standards of the day, writing prolifically for both popular and elevated audiences. He was also famous enough in his own day to have had his collected works published, and the fact that his reputation exploded after his death ensured those volumes survived. He would have been writing slightly differently from many of his contemporaries, and a much higher amount of what he wrote has survived.

Part of the problem is that we are on US Constitution 2.27 (version 1 was a buggy mess and quickly re-written). Unfortunately, the v2 underlying engine was only built to be compliant with the “Democratic Republic 1787” set of standards. It was almost immediately patched in the 2.10 release to be compliant with the DR1789 revision, but required a major rework to be compliant with DR1865 and another for DR1920. subsequent point releases have generally been performance tweaks and bugfixes.

However, now it turns out that bad actors have exploited unpublished vulnerabilities that were open secrets within the dev community, and those bad actors are now largely in control of the production instance. The Steering Committee is supposed to bring on new members in 7 quarters, but it remains to be seen if the userbase will care enough make the right recommendations.

The whole issue here is that the American constitution is high level framework written in the legal jargon of three different centuries. It’s only viable if either (1) no one really cares about how the Federal government handles itself (1789-ca1850ish), or (2) there is a a tacit agreement that legal precedent and custom are actually important to get on with the business of governing (1865-2025).

The 14th amendment is extremely clear, with the sole exception of “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” Unfortunately, that one’s only “very” clear, and requires some very basic understanding of the legislative history and customary usage in a legal context. It basically means literally everyone present in the country with the exception of those with diplomatic immunity, invading armies, and (at that time) members of Native American tribes. There was no real regulation of in-migration when it was signed, but the debates were very clear that even “undesireable” people who could not be trusted to assimilate would be citizens merely by being born here, and no one challenged the point.

If you don’t understand anything about the history, though, or if you want to willfully ignore it because you have an idiotic textualism approach that would make Antonin Scalia cringe, then you open that back up for litigation. Then there’s the issue of Trump declaring everything an emergency and pretending that some dudes who want to cook some french fries or a single mom hoping her kids won’t get shot by a cartel are somehow equivalent to an invading army. It’s facially absurd, but the constitution being what it is, if they challenge it, then the courts have to at least consider it.

With the ascendancy of originalism at the Supreme Court, and with the right wing deciding to push a “unitary executive” theory to its ad-absurdum conclusion, they might get what they want and largely dismantle the checks and balances in the system without an official “coup” at all. This would remove the predictability that allows a system to chug along and slowly but inexorably change with the times (hardly good enough for true justice, but it at least sets some sort of floor for awfulness), and it would also seriously weaken the guardrails to having free and fair elections at all.

Oooh, when do we get to deploy the E-Meters?

I think we definitely want the same thing, at least.

I’m just backing up the (now absent, LOL) person you originally replied to. I think you can – and in Marvel’s case maybe you should, since they are no longer drawing on zeitgeisty, recognizable versions of their comics characters – think about what you want the story to mean at least as early as you do the events that happen in it. King is a talented writer, no two ways about it, but I don’t think you necessarily doom a script to be bad by starting with something like, “I want to tell a story about dealing with the conflict between who we wish we were and what life made us into.”

I reckon that for King, setting events into motion and figuring out the right traits to get characters through them (or to their natural stopping place), or what themes give those particular events meaning, that works for him. If they want to have him write the next Avengers movie, I’d be all for it, LOL. I just don’t think his approach is the only way to go about it.

Maybe the themes in a Marvel movie will be more universal and rather broadly drawn, but to avoid overstaying their welcome with a rote and repetitive “peril-catharis” cycle, the action needs to be in service to something compelling. Otherwise, it just sort of sputters to the finish line because ultimately we’ve seen the stories before. To the extent he’s not just talking out of his ass, King’s describing a workflow, not a philosophy.

Beyond anything else, this is also what infected the Star Wars franchise, except there it was even worse because so much of the connective tissue was relegated to novels and comics. At least with Marvel you can keep up just via TV and movies.

Dumped into a new series of films that rehashes the first? Explain it in a bunch of mediocre books! Sequel that thinks that setup was boring (and tbf, it was)? Build up to it in a crappy comic! Petulant manchild takes the worst possible lessons from the first two? Set it up in a video game, lift the plot from old comics, and then tell your animation wunderkind that his entire live-action career will now be to “fix it.”

Disney owns the lion’s share of the blame for both franchises malaise, but fan culture enabled it by obsessing over everything, not insisting on tight storytelling (the number of online people who believe that no deleted scene is too awkward to be edited back in is… disconcerting), and whizzing their pants in glee with every easter egg or end-credits stinger. Honorable mention to Peter Jackson with the LOTR extended editions and ROTK’s eleventy-billion endings that (LOL) still somehow omitted the Scouring of the Shire.

How to write okayish page-turners that are far from the only valid way to approach literature?

I have it on good authority that you’re not old.

I poked around a few other articles. A few are identical. Most are slight variations. Few are as different as these two. My guess would be that the original submission from the author or initial editor locks in a headline for the tab/title bar, but then the CMS lets them edit what appears in the main body of the webpage.

I am glad to see us respect our link-aggregation heritage of ignoring the article and starting heated discussions based on what we infer from the headline. 😂

It also seems that the headline currently on the article is different and switches out clickbait tactics from misleading omission to absurd pearl-clutching: “Are noise-cancelling headphones to blame for young people’s hearing problems?” If you combine them, you get something closer to actual content of the article.

Yes. It was a stupid thing the old EU did to retcon what was much more naturally (and at least one marked-up copy of the script says so) a shady smuggler trying to get one over on what he presumed were a couple of rubes. The old EU was infamous for taking every line completely seriously, turning every idle turn of phrase into a galaxy-wide convention, and ascribing galactic importance to every extra or creature that anyone noticed.

The fact that Solo doubled down on it was a mistake.