Emperor

Emperor, 20 hours ago

“And I stand by my answer, Goddammit!”

Emperor, 23 hours ago (edited 21 hours ago)

I remember when this hit the news and do hope it’s been redone since.

edit: no updates on the Scottish Castle Association since 2012 and TripAdvisor photos show it unchanged other than some weathering.

edit2: Here is the episode of The Restoration Man that focused on the tower and it explains the planning process that led to this monstrosity.

Emperor, 22 hours ago (edited 21 hours ago)

It was featured in S1E4 of The Restoration Man, so I presume George Clarke is somewhere in that picture.

edit: and they return to it in S2E5 which is on YouTube.

Emperor, 21 hours ago

Here is the episode of The Restoration Man that documented the project - they go into the planning side of this in-depth because it’s really a head-scratcher. The owner tried many times to get planning for more subtle alternations but they kept getting knocked back because it has to be distinctive enough that it’s clear what is the old building and what are the new additions. What you see is the result of that messy process.

Emperor, 19 hours ago

Well it was filmed in the Scottish Lowlands not a million miles away (48 miles from Doune Castle).

Emperor, 19 hours ago

This mess is because the planning authorities rejected more subtle additions and insisted on something that is distinct from the original building, which is what they got.

Emperor, 21 hours ago

I see what you did there.

Emperor, 21 hours ago

I suppose the craziness comes from it being a $21B undertaken to build two of the largest renewable projects yet, which rely on both working properly. That’s quite a bold move and it’s risking a lot of cash.

Emperor, 21 hours ago

It’s starting to become increasingly common - there’s a project in the offing to run a cable from Morocco to the UK to take advantage of all that Saharan sunshine. There’s long been talk of stringing a few across the Med and building large numbers of solar farms across North Africa to speed up the green transition in Europe (at one point there was talk of worried insurance companies bankrolling such projects as climate change could bankrupt them). Eventually there will be a web of such cables into and across Europe shuttling energy around - excess British being stored in Norwegian HEP facilities, etc.

Emperor, 22 hours ago

He’s been on a real winning streak since getting over his financial precarious streak where he was pretty much taking any gig offered.

Emperor, 22 hours ago

I wasn’t as bowled over by that one (and I am a big fan of Cage, Tak Sakaguchi and Sion Sono, so felt like it should have been a guaranteed hit with me) - it seemed like it was trying too hard.

Emperor, 22 hours ago

Nothing yet but I’ll keep an eye out.

Emperor, 22 hours ago

Now that’s a trailer - intriguing, without giving away any details.

Emperor, 17 hours ago

And this.

Emperor, 19 hours ago

You can increase your midi-chlorian count but that doesn’t change your Force sensitivity - it’s what Moff Gideon’s experiments involved.

Ultimately it’s kept a bit vague possibly so creators can hand-wave away possible issues that arise if yiu could merely make new Jedi or Sith.

The Technical Commentaries for TPM dig into the implications:

Many observers assume that midi-chlorians are the cause of the Force or else the exclusive means by which sapient beings interact with the Force. This is not necessarily true. They provide one kind of objective test for Force-sensitivity, but correlation does not imply causation. It may be that certain people with strong potential to use the Force tend to attract midi-chlorians, rather than the midi-chlorians being responsible for the talent. (This attraction may be medical and heritable, or a direct manifestation of Force power.) Alternatively, the talent and the midi-chlorian concentration may be symptoms of some other, deeper cause.

…

The mere presence of midi-chlorians cannot be the only condition for Force sensitivity. Otherwise the Jedi or the Sith could cultivate midi-chlorians and then simply infuse them into the bodies of ordinary volunteers to create countless initiates with arbitrarily high potential.

…

The practices and beliefs of the Jedi must be taken into account in any discussion of the midi-chlorians. The STAR WARS civilisation is ancient and technologically static; scientific tools exist, but scientific practice appears to be finished and absent. It appears to be a society that depends on artisan engineers and mystics only. The “midi-chlorians” may in part be invented Jedi jargon. So far as we’ve seen, they serve only to provide an objective measurement of Anakin’s messianic potential. Or at least the Jedi read it objectively according to their superstitions — there’s no reason why the midi-chlorian count must be any more “real” than the use of tarot cards.

Jedi from different schools of thought might disagree about the significance or reality of the midi-chlorians. In The Phantom Menace novel, Qui-Gon Jinn admits a bias towards a “living Force” interpretation, at the expense of knowledge of the “unifying Force”. Perhaps this means that he is sensitive to biological interpretations of the Force to the point where he regards the midi-chlorians as a cause rather than an effect. Perhaps he drives his analogies too far. This may partly explain the consternation of some of the members of the Jedi Council. Perhaps to them he seems to have eccentric biases or holes in his understanding, making him a frustrating dissident whose practical skills compensate for his weakness in some theoretical areas.

Emperor, 21 hours ago

Her husband and business partner is Lance Cummins. It seems too good to be true.

Emperor, 20 hours ago

I suppose the moral of the story is that there are many paths to enlightenment and, if it works for someone (and no-one else is harmed by it) then that’s the important thing.

Emperor, 17 hours ago

Sorry, but I thought I’d share my suffering from the inadvertent flashback to Monkey Man whilst reading the reviews.

It was disappointing as there were a lot of good ideas in there that would set it apart from the other one-man-army films but they dropped the ball.

Emperor, 22 hours ago

I think the issue is that May is usually a big earner for the film industry but everything is under-performing so far. However, as they mention, the writer’s strike has pushed films back a month or two and I expect the start of the blockbuster season will be with the release of Furiosa this week but it should have an easy run at the box office as things are quiet until mid June into July: Inside Out 2, Quiet Place: Day One, Despicable Me 4, Twisters? and then Deadpool & Wolverine which is shaping up to be the big hit of the summer, unless Borderlands is better than it looks. Alien: Romulus and Beetlejuice² then finish out through to September. That’s a lot of heavy lifting being done by franchises with only films like Sting and The Watched having much potential to be breakout original hits.