A Guide to Sith Lord Naming Conventions

So, got around to seeing it last night. If it hadn't been for the fact that I thoroughly spoiled myself beforehand, I might not have bothered to see it, because Phantom Menace had a good fight scene, ok, and Qui Gonn was hot, but that was about it, and then I saw Clones in the dollar theater and was so exasperated that I figured that Lucas could finish his little trainwreck prequel project without my support or my ticket price, which I'm sure made him weep and console himself by doing the backstroke in a huge vault filled with hundred dollar bills, all Scrooge McDuck and shit. But people I trusted indicated that while it wasn't the greatest movie ever made, it was at least entertaining, so the Bemo and I headed out last night and saw it.

( Use the spork, Obi Wan. )

There have been a lot of good discussions on the movie: here are some of the ones I've enjoyed.

Sars from Tomato Nation does a very good job tackling both the "growing up with these movies" and the "why do these movies not work as well as the original trilogy?" questions in Empire State. Includes a link to her review of Clones, which is also a great read.

Amberleewriter discusses how editing may have played a big part with some of the more WTF moments.

Penknife, Ladyjestyr, and Cupiscent weigh in thoughtfully and amusingly, plus there are some great comments following.

What all this hoopla has left me with is a yen for Obi/Padme fic. If anybody can point some out to me so I don't have to venture over to fanfiction.net, I'd appreciate it, because that place is damn scary.

On Reading

Something I posted to another journal of mine many, many moons ago, and was reminded of it by something in dichroic's recent post.

Excerpted from John D. McDonald's essay "Reading for Survival"


"The nonreader in our culture wants to believe. He is the one born every minute. The world is so vastly confusing and baffling to him that he feels there has to be some simple answer to everything that troubles him. And so, out of pure emptiness, he will eagerly embrace spiritualism, yoga, a banana diet, or some callous frippery like Dianetics..."

"Here in America, as elsewhere, there will always be tremulous little people of dim intellect and hyperactive imagination, burning for explanations to all life's vicissitudes. They grow impatient with learned analyses of the present. They are defeated by histories that illuminate the past. No species of scholarship or analysis could ever satisfy them; for they need that Wondrous Explanation that will quiet all their fears, thrill them with villains to revile, and never tax their feeble powers of intellection."

"The same idea was said in a different way by Eric Hoffer, the old dock-walloper, in his book years ago titled "The True Believer". Hoffer's theory was that the best fanatics are people who have nothing in their heads but wind, smoke, and emptiness. Then if any idea manages to slip in there, it does not matter how insipid or grotesque that idea might be, it will expand to fill all the available emptiness, and it takes over the individual and all his actions. He cannot hear any voice but his own. He is beyond reason, beyond argumentation. He is right and everyone who does not believe exactly the same as he is wrong."

"My point is that the man who reads is using the fabulous memory storage and relationship analysis of the brain his ancestors developed eons ago. He is facilitating his survival in the contemporary world. He will recognize the pockets of fanaticism around him and know what is causing these universal foci of dementia. Of course, he will be called an egghead or a bleeding heart or a secular humanist, but he can lean back and, in a certain way, enjoy the marvelously crackpot rantings of a Jesse Helms, a Botha, a Meese, a Kohmeni, a Falwell, a Qaddafi, a Gorbachev, anOrtega, a Noriega----people from both ends of every spectrum, whooping and leaping and frothing, absolutely livid at the idea their particular warped vision of reality is not shared by everyone. Their basic lack of education, of reading, of being able to comprehend the great truths of reality has left empty places in their heads, into which great mischief has crept."