John Debay

Every so often there’s some kind of trigger event that rekindles my interest in the horribleness of the Star Wars prequels. There’s something about the complete train wreck of those movies that makes me love to hate them. The most recent episode of The Talk Show has once again brought forth the anger, which leads to hate, which leads to… oh whatever.

Some prequel criticism I recommend include all relevant episodes of The Incomparable, the highlight of which is the always astute criticism of John Siracusa. I also recommend a seven part video review by Red Letter Media. There are also reviews of Episode II and Episode III.

I also started hunting for some criticism from 1999 when the movie was released. My recollection is that reviews generally ranged from lukewarm to positive, so I was curious who got it right at the time. I came across a review by Eli Roth, writer and director of Hostel, that pretty much nails the problems with the movie:

By the end of the film I was so disconnected from any of the characters that I really couldn’t have cared less about any of them. Watching an army of computer generated aliens fight an army of computer generated robots is boring after five minutes. None of it’s real, and you can’t even let yourself believe it’s real because there’s just too much computer generated imagery. What’s Lucas got against puppets? Halfway through the film I was bored–the story just isn’t very interesting at all. Forget the fact it’s too confusing, forget the fact the dialogue is embarrassing, the film doesn’t even follow it’s own logic. We meet young Anakin Skywalker and go to his house on Tatooine. He’s a boy genius who’s building his own robot named C-3PO. What? Excuse me? Are you telling me that Darth Vader built C-3PO? And 3P0 grew up on Tatooine? In the first Star Wars, when R2 and 3PO land on Tatooine they make it very clear that they have no idea where they are. They’ve never been there before, so how could they have grown up there? It’s obvious that Lucas wanted to throw the droids in, which gave me some sense of familiarity, but the way he used them makes no sense, even within the logic of Star Wars. Another major problem with The Phantom Menace is that Lucas casts great actors and gives them nothing to do. Save for a few light saber fights, Liam Neeson wanders around Tatooine for most of the film. And why is Sam Jackson in this movie? Not that he’s not a great actor, but he’s in the movie for five minutes and he just sits around talking. I’ve seen him in too many movies to buy him in the “Star Wars” universe. I just kept picturing him ending every sentence with “muthafucka!” However, this isn’t really Sam Jackson’s fault, since Lucas couldn’t come up with anything interesting for the character of Mace Windu, except to sit around and spout out preachy dialogue. The Jedi knights sit around in a room philosophizing about stuff. It looks boring as shit. The acting on the whole was good, but again, with Ewan MacGregor, Lucas makes him, literally, sit around and wait for Liam Neeson. MacGregor’s great as Kenobi, but most of the film he sits on the ship while Liam Neeson walks around Tatooine trying to get parts to fix the ship. Whereas all three Star Wars films were different in structure, The Phantom Menace follows the same blueprint as Jedi. There’s a battle on land with cutesy animals, a battle in space with fighters trying to “knock out the shield,” and a light saber fight all happening simultaneously. Here was the only interesting part of the movie: Darth Maul. Lucas created a wonderfully dark, mysterious character and decided to put him in the movie for about twelve minutes. We never learn anything about him, he’s just a bad guy who appears to be the only one who can take on Qui Gon and Obi Wan. The scenes he’s in are great, and it gave me a really good idea for a Halloween costume, but you will make yourself insane trying to figure out why Lucas had so many scenes with Jar Jar Binks, and so few with Darth Maul.

I was so angry after the film I wanted to punch someone in the face.

From Panic’s 2014 report:

[Low iOS revenue] is the biggest problem we’ve been grappling with all year: we simply don’t make enough money from our iOS apps. We’re building apps that are, if I may say so, world-class and desktop-quality. They are packed with features, they look stunning, we offer excellent support for them, and development is constant. I’m deeply proud of our iOS apps. But… they’re hard to justify working on.

Here’s a way to visualize the situation. First up is a sample look at Units Sold for the month of November 2014:

Wow! 51% of our unit sales came from iOS apps! That’s great!

But now look at this revenue chart for the same month…

Despite selling more than half of our total units, iOS represents just 17% of our total revenue.

There are a few things at work here:

1. We’re not charging enough for our iOS apps. Or Mac users are simply willing to pay more for apps. Or both.
2. We’re not getting the word out well enough about our iOS apps.
3. The type of software we make just isn’t as compelling to iOS users as it is to Mac users. Our professional tools are geared for a type of user that simply might not exist on the iPad — admins and coders. We might have misjudged that market.

It’s really hard to say for sure. One thing is for certain: we are more likely to increase the price of our iOS software over time in an effort to make it make sense. And we’re less likely to tackle any huge new iOS projects until we get this figured out.

Another data point that’s part of a larger trend that’s been visible for a while. The question is whether Apple also views this as a problem. I’m in the camp that thinks they don’t. I think the store they have right now, full of free and low cost apps is exactly what they want. I believe they would like the Panics of the world to stick around, but maintaining a huge quantity of free and low cost apps is more important.

The real question is not whether Apple will change the structure of the App Store to help companies like Panic be successful there, but whether the Panics of the world can find a way to make money despite the App Store’s limitations.

An amazing and wonderful bit of Scientology news in The Hollywood Reporter this morning:

THR has learned that Oscar winner Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) is putting the finishing touches on a film that tackles the Church of Scientology and its Tinseltown tentacles. HBO, no stranger to controversy, having ushered such hot-button docs as The Case Against 8 and the Paradise Lost trilogy to the screen, is eyeing a 2015 airdate for Going Clear, which is based on Lawrence Wright’s controversial book that was also exclusively excerpted in THR.

And:

The film, which is expected to feature new revelations about the controversial religion and its famous followers Tom Cruise and John Travolta, almost certainly will draw an aggressive response from the notoriously litigious church.

Wright’s article on Scientology in The New Yorker is the first real knowledge I had of the allegations against the religion and its leader. That article was so scandalous to me that I’ve been a bit obsessed with Scientology ever since. Going Clear is an amazing book, and it’s hard to believe that such dangerous cults on the scale of Scientology are still a thing in modern America.

I also noticed this bit:

“We have probably 160 lawyers [looking at the film],” says HBO Documentary Films president Sheila Nevins, who is bracing for protests as well.

And later:

Nonetheless, HBO and Gibney (UTA, Cowan DeBaets) aren’t inclined to back down, having taken on other powerful organizations in the past including the Catholic Church (Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God) and the U.S. military (Taxi to the Dark Side).

I would love to have HBO disclose a comparison of the litigiousness of Scientology versus the Catholic Church or the U.S. military. I suspect it’s way out of proportion to the size and power of Scientology, which is itself a significant sign they have something to hide. The Catholic Church, and, especially in the U.S., the military are two extremely powerful organizations.

Bill Carter, writing for The New York Times:

In the latest fallout from the sexual assault accusations involving the comedian Bill Cosby, NBC and Netflix have set aside projects with Mr. Cosby, and a lawyer for him issued a denial of a new claim from a woman who said he raped her decades ago.

And later:

The decisions come in the face of a wave of reaction to decades-old accusations of sexual assault against Mr. Cosby that have flared up again in recent weeks. In a television interview on Tuesday, the former model Janice Dickinson became at least the fifth woman to come forward with on-the-record accusations that Mr. Cosby assaulted her.

Mr. Cosby’s lawyers had, until Tuesday, issued only a blanket denial of all the accusations, denouncing them as “old and discredited.” They said they and the comedian would have no further comment on the case.

But after Ms. Dickinson appeared on the show “Entertainment Tonight,” saying Mr. Cosby took her to Lake Tahoe, where he drugged and raped her, Martin Singer, a prominent entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, labeled Ms. Dickinson’s account “an outrageous and defamatory lie” in a letter he sent to the entertainment trade news site The Wrap.

The New York Times editorial board:

The abysmally low turnout in last week’s midterm elections — the lowest in more than seven decades — was bad for Democrats, but it was even worse for democracy. In 43 states, less than half the eligible population bothered to vote, and no state broke 60 percent.

In the three largest states — California, Texas and New York — less than a third of the eligible population voted. New York’s turnout was a shameful 28.8 percent, the fourth-lowest in the country, despite three statewide races (including the governor) and 27 House races.

Over all, the national turnout was 36.3 percent; only the 1942 federal election had a lower participation rate at 33.9 percent.

Bad news for the country, but particularly bad news for Democrats. The higher the turnout, the better Democrats tend to perform. Republicans know this, which is why they focus so heavily on voter suppression.

Paul Graham, writing to undo the meme that he would fund anyone who looked like Mark Zuckerberg:

How could he have done so badly? He looked so much like Zuck!

It was not only a joking reference to a single incident, but the fact that we joked about it shows we knew that looking like Zuck had no predictive value.

As if anyone would think it did. Could anyone be so naive as to think that resembling Zuck would be enough to make a founder succeed? And is it plausible that we, of all people, who’d interviewed thousands of founders, would think such a thing?

So why have so many people since believed I was serious? For the same reason, presumably, that others cling so tenaciously to the idea that Obama was born outside the US: because they so want to believe it.

This last point is an absolutely essential truth of human nature that’s so often either not understood or is simply ignored. It is, however, why political arguments often ignore any “objective truth” that might exist (though often in politics, no objective truth does exist), why Scientologists can believe that L. Ron Hubbard is continuing his research on another planet, and why racists believe ridiculous stereotypes about people that don’t look like them. It is, in my ways, a root cause of the human condition.

Here’s a simple tip for setting up key bindings for individual share extensions in Safari on OS X Yosemite. It turns out that in addition to the action button in Safari’s toolbar, there’s also a “Share” menu item within the File menu. This means it’s possible to use OS X’s built-in (and awesome) ability to create a key binding for any menu item.

I wanted a keyboard shortcut for sharing items on Twitter. To set this up, in Safari, go to the File menu and hold your mouse over the “Share” item. Note the title of the extension you want bound (it’ll be the same as the name of the item in the popup menu accessed via the toolbar item). In my case, the Twitter item’s title is just “Twitter”.

Now go to System Preferences, select Keyboard, and click the Shortcuts tab. Choose “App Shortcuts” from the list on the left, and click the plus button at the bottom. In the sheet that appears, select Safari as the application, enter “Twitter” as the menu title (the text must match the menu item’s title exactly), and record whatever keyboard shortcut you want.

If you now go back to Safari and press your keyboard shortcut, the compose tweet sheet will appear. Obviously this kind of setup is applicable to any menu items in any application, including changing existing keyboard shortcuts that you might not like.

That’s it! Another win for keeping your hands on the keyboard as often as possible.

Great explanation by Michael Wolfe on why Dropbox is popular:

Well, let’s take a step back and think about the sync problem and what the ideal solution for it would do:

• There would be a folder.
• You’d put your stuff in it.
• It would sync.

They built that.

Why didn’t anyone else build that? I have no idea.

“But,” you may ask, “so much more you could do! What about task management, calendaring, customized dashboards, virtual white boarding. More than just folders and files!”

No, shut up. People don’t use that crap. They just want a folder. A folder that syncs.