fantastic_four

This is a pic Mattel provided showing the ball joints in the brachiosaurus's neck. I took this pic from a Youtube video that Mattel has up discussing their design for the brachiosaurus.

Last week I picked up the Mattel Hammond Collection brachiosaurus. If you're unfamiliar with the Hammond Collection it's the first highly articulated dinosaur toy line that can truly tackle dinosaurs of all sizes. Statues have long been the norm for people wanting to collect dinosaur models, but with this line Mattel is making them articulated for the first time in the 1:18 scale. The brach has a tail with three articulation points, articulation at the hips, knees, and ankles, and it has a highly-articulated neck with multiple ball joints along the length of the neck. Using those ball joints you can twist the neck to look right, left, down, or up. The eyes are kind of like marbles, and the jaw is also articulated to open and close the mouth. LOVE this guy. MSRP is $84.99 and it's a Target exclusive for now. They don't have her online, but you can find her right now in most stores. Target is also running a sale right now to get $25 off of a $100 purchase. I bought this before that sale, but I knew it was coming and I'm planning to buy a second one and return it under the receipt I bought the one in the pics on to get about $20 back. Below is the Hammond Collection brach next to the Hasbro Haslab Sentinel for scale. Note that the brach is a few inches below the feet of the Sentinel, so you can see she's much taller than that 28" Sentinel whether she's up on her hind legs or not. In the first pic you can also see the Hammond Collection tyrannosaurus rex, parasaurolophus, and ceratosaurus. In the second pic I have the brach balanced on two legs as we see in that first dinosaur shot in Jurassic Park. In my pic she's sitting on her tail mostly because she sinks a bit on that plastic box, but her legs and ankles are strong enough to balance on those two feet even without using the tail as a kickstand.

There is no "we" that encompasses all of humankind. Without any technology humans are tribal, and every tribe competes with the other. Without paper there would have been no centralized religion to move humans beyond tribes and into scattered kingdoms. Without the printing press the modern nation-state would not be possible to move humans beyond smaller kingdoms. And without the Internet we wouldn't even be able to hear your hypothetical question quoted above because there would be no way for you to communicate it to anyone aside from a small handful of the fellow moose-loving Canucks in your area, nor would we be able to keep going down the track of eventually uniting humanity at the global level in the way your question seems to assume is already possible. Without mass communication the capacity for humanity to cooperate as a whole simply isn't possible. As long as we're still fragmented as a species we can't make global decisions, and without that halting technology is impossible. One country can try, or 100 countries can try, but technology will still proliferate anyway in other areas. You can slow it down, but you can't stop it. It's inevitable. That's particularly true for a technology like AI that doesn't require scarce resources like fission or fusion does for nuclear weapons. No matter what any government tries to do AI will still play itself out. But to answer your hypothetical bolded above--no, we wouldn't have stopped it. The benefits outweigh the costs. As I've said to you a dozen times over the last decade or two every technology is two steps forward and one step back. If you focus on the one step back then yes, any technology from fire-on-demand or the wheel onward looks like a terrible idea. But humanity as a whole has always focused on both the cons AND the pros, and that's why it has always proliferated and continued to advance. It's unstoppable. Will we destroy ourselves with Prometheus's gift? Maybe. But by the time it's possible for one unhinged lunatic to kill us all we're also likely to be able to start colonizing the Milky Way, so even if we end up destroying Earth it's highly likely that won't be the end for the human species. Maybe we'll kill ourselves, or maybe we'll end up swarming the universe like locusts. We'll see.

Found an article outlining Ventress' original role in the prequels. Wow, she was the original villain in Attack of the Clones instead of Dooku! https://www.cbr.com/star-wars-ventress-attack-clones-origin-sith-lord/

I'm quite familiar with Ventress because she's heavily featured in the Clone Wars cartoon, but she was supposed to be in the prequels? What happened to her appearance?

The main reason I haven't seen Rebels yet is I'm working my way in order through the cartoons and am only most of the way through Clone Wars season 5. Been watching them with my kids for the past 3 years, and it's often tough to get them to watch Clone Wars instead of all the other cartoons they want to see.

Seem to recall reading somewhere that they were exempted because of British law, or something. Like, it would have been illegal for them to strike and/or they could have been sued/held liable for damages if they did. https://ew.com/tv/house-of-the-dragon-season-2-still-filming-sag-actors-strike/ Somehow I keep forgetting that there are places on this planet outside of America.

How did they wrap up shooting during the actors' strike?

There was a scene in Obi-Wan Kenobi where we saw the Sith Inquisitors had a vault of dead Jedi. I can't remember if they ever hinted where they were planning to go with that.

Forget everything I said about Dathomirians. Reading the Wookipedia entry on them shows they're a mix of humans and some species called Zabrak from another planet. Didn't realize Filoni had made the back story for Darth Maul's species so complex. I saw the Clone Wars episodes where they first showed the Nightsisters, but I don't recall them mentioning in those episodes that they were a mix of humans and Zabraks.

Nothing prevents a human--which in the Hollywood context means an executive or a producer--from taking 100% of the content from ChatGPT and just copyrighting it themselves though. Many of the most popular network television shows have always been formulaic. I can see a LOT of shows intended for less-demanding audiences being almost entirely AI generated in its current state. Surely showrunners will be trying the heck out of that in the near future if they aren't already. Does this new contract prevent it? Maybe, can't tell yet.

Why Peridea? Wouldn't Dathomir be home base for the Nightsisters since that's where they evolved? I suppose that links to your other statement... What makes you say that--was there a hint about that at some point? I suppose the fact that humans are all over the Star Wars galaxy implies that there must be a home planet for the species, and sure, that may have started in another galaxy. Certainly you've got to come up with SOME explanation for why there are so many humanoids in the same galaxy across so many different planets. Of course we know the real answer to this question--George Lucas just created aliens as similar mixes to organisms on Earth (Chewie is an dog/human hybrid, Yoda is a human/frog, the Noti are a crab/turtle, etc etc)--but for it to make actual sense you'd have to ret-con an explanation. Most Star Wars humanoids being from one place, say Peridea, but then settling all around the universe certainly works to explain it. I suppose Peridea being the cradle for the Star Wars galaxy also jibes with whatever "beginning" Baylan is looking for.

I don't fully understand the AI rules yet. I knew they'd never be able to exclude it entirely like they were trying to do, but I still can't tell if a producer of a formulaic show working with ChatGPT can still get around using writers somehow. The minimum number of writers per show seems to guarantee that writers can't be fully cut out in favor of AI--which is generally appropriate for now given how rough AI-written screenplays usually are circa 2023--but I still don't get how they will ever enforce some of those provisions or if there isn't a loophole that lets producers get away with less writers. That's inevitable and future agreements or extended strikes will reflect that harsh reality, but the studios mostly forgoing AI for the next three years makes some sense. How would anyone ever enforce studios not using existing screenplays to train AI? And does it even matter? There's plenty of content not written by WGA members to feed into any AI training algorithm.

Do we know why these Nightsisters are here to begin with? I'm guessing there was some indication about the significance of this galaxy and this planet in Rebels we're all missing. Wish I knew Rebels was such required homework before starting this show... Morgan mentioned that her people had been there a long time, but do we know why? That comment confused me entirely because I didn't realize she's a Nightsister anyway since she clearly isn't Dathomirian. Wasn't sure if she was referring to her human ancestors, her Dathomirian nightsister ancestors, or what.

Wait, what's this about zombie stormtroopers? I just thought their armor was heavily damaged and weathered due to being away from their usual galaxy for 5 to 15 years. What is everyone seeing that makes them think reanimated dead people? How long has it been since Thrawn and Ezra went to this galaxy, anyway? I figure it's somewhere between 6 and 20 years, but I haven't watched Rebels yet and am unsure how far before Episode IV it takes place.

Baylan said he wants to go back to the beginning. The beginning of what? The Force? The Republic? The Universe? I find him to be just as compelling as Thrawn now--maybe even more so in trying to figure out what that guy wants.

Still no word on which of the writers' demands got scrapped?

This is one of the areas where I'm most on the side of the writers and actors, but will the streamers ever publicly share viewing statistics? My guess is no, but almost everyone else definitely wishes they would. But even if they ever say they're going to start doing it I don't know that we will ever trust their numbers since they have EVERY incentive to lie about them.

I'm mulling over a multi-Target run this morning. I already have most of those on clearance, but they just put the damn things out a month and a half ago. That's well within Target's 3-month normal return window, plus another month if you have their Red Card. So if something goes on sale or clearance within 4 months of you buying it you can always buy the sale item and return the original. I can save myself up to $150 by buying clearance items and returning them on the original receipt if I decide to today. Target has long been my go-to place for buying Legends, Black Series, and the Jurassic Park Amber Collection and Hammond Collection figures, but man, they've gotten TERRIBLE at inventory management over the past 9 to 18 months. I could list a dozen ways they CONSTANTLY screw up inventory over, and over, and over. It's utter chaos at that place right now, and they're REPEATEDLY shooting themselves in the foot in trying to sell these things. They're also supposedly selling the best new figures on the market this year--the Jada Toys Street Fighter line. But my local stores have never gotten any, and they've never even shown up on the Target web site despite them having listings that never show up in search results (just another iteration of their constant screw-ups). If you haven't seen those they're $25 MSRP, but they have absolutely superb articulation and tooling, better than ALL other lines at the same price point. Right now only Ryu and Fei Long are on the market with Chun-Li being found at West Coast Targets, but Jada Toys is planning to release the entire Street Fighter character library over the next few years.

Another note about the writer's room composition--the reason I heard about it early on is I listened to Marc Bernardin defend it on the "Fatman Beyond" podcast he does with Kevin Smith. He explained the historical career path that writers have been on and how if the writer's room isn't structured in a specific way then there's no path for new writers to learn the trade. All I could think at the time was OK, that makes some sense as long as I assume screenwriting is magically different from every other industry and I ignore the history of unions attempting to control how things are made to this degree--but you just can't cling to the way things have always been done as the only possible way to do them. I get the challenge Bernardin is referring to, but writers will find ways to overcome the challenges as time goes on. Reorganizing workflows is a part of EVERY business, and companies just can't let unions dictate how work is organized down to that level. Auto workers have tried stuff like this on and off over the past century, and that's one of the major reasons Japanese manufacturers were able to swoop in and make better cars for cheaper prices over the past half-century. Every time unions try to fight change to an unreasonable degree the market ends up forcing companies to go around unions in one way or another.

I agree with most of the WGA and SAG demands, but not most of the AI ones or this one. I heard about this one early on, and there is no way the studios are signing off on this. It's completely disconnected from reality to an extent that it's almost certainly a major reason the studios haven't even wanted to negotiate on terms.

Filoni is great. As far as I've ever been able to tell Pablo Hidalgo is great too, but he's never been given the reigns so it's hard to say. I blame Kathleen Kennedy for that--as soon as Disney bought Star Wars she should have given Filoni or Hidalgo creative control of Star Wars, but she didn't. As far as I can tell she still hasn't given anyone the kind of control Kevin Feige has at Marvel, so we're all at the mercy of whoever is the showrunner of any given series or film.

Wow, didn't realize Guenhyvar was a magical panther. I guess my desire to use them outside of Dungeons and Dragons displays is the main reason I'm so satisfied with that Hasbro 2-pack!

That figure, the panther, and the effects that come with Drizzt in that set are all awesome. Seems about the size of a real panther to me, and it's got the most articulation of any 1:12 animal I own. I mostly use mine in Black Panther displays, and I use Drizzt's sword effects with Silver Samurai. How is it too small? Panthers are usually around 2 to 2.5 feet at the shoulder, and that's right about what this one looks to be. They're significantly smaller than lions or tigers. Below is a pic of Shuri next to Drizzt's panther along with Silver Samurai sporting Drizzt's sword effects. The Drizzt figure is pretty awesome too, but I only use him in Asgardian displays with Thor.

No I don't. She's wearing a full body Mandalorian suit so none of that rubbery stuff they use to hide joints.