Skallagrim's ramblings

People can be very bad with numbers, and especially so when they want to be. This is often the case when discussions about numbers are tangled together with some other topic: where the cold, factual conclusions are perceived to have a bearing on more subjective matters. This is invariably the case in politics, but it's also the case in less highly-charged fields. Right now, I'm thinking about the Walt Disney Company. More specifically: about its purchase of LucasFilm in 2010. And most specifically: about the financial results that this purchase has yielded them thus far, over the past eight fiscal years. This has been prompted by a discussion about that topic, in which it became startlingly clear to me that there are people who don't have any idea what the difference between gross revenue and net profit is. Their lack of understanding leads them to proclaim, quite incorrectly, that the Star Wars franchise has made Disney billions of dollars in profits. They can hardly be...

In my opinion, it's a bad idea to make villain factions "less evil" in all sorts of tiny little ways. This tendency is perhaps supposed to add nuance, but remarkably often misfires and instead just gives fodder to a certain type of fan; the type that wants to be able to say " See, the fascist dictatorship isn't so bad after all! " Naturally, there are settings in which various factions and sides exist, on a scale of grey-tones, and all or most are neither wholly good nor wholly evil. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about conscious attempt to "humanise" otherwise unambiguously evil factions. This is technically a general argument, but those who know me won't be at all surprised that I'll be using Star Wars as my main point of reference here. In the old Expanded Universe, before Disney purchased LucasFilm and shunted all of that off into a separate continuity, the Galactic Empire was as evil as anything can possibly be. We ...

With the sequel trilogy complete, I spent the last afternoon of 2019 (a.k.a. that weird lull before dinner and the new year's eve festivities) compiling some data about Star Wars films. Specifically: their reception by audience members and professional critics. I got around to finishing up my little analysis on January 2nd of 2020, and shared it over at alternatehistory.com (where we have a lively  Star Wars  discussion thread going). This information is now certainly outdated, but the overall picture it paints remains (I believe) quite accurate. So I figured that this, too, ought to be among the things to be re-posted over here... The most commonly cited website in this context is RottenTomatoes, whose rating system is actually quite deceptive to the untrained eye. In determining whether a film is 'fresh' or 'rotten', the site actually looks at the percentage of people (both professional critics and audience members, in separate categories) rate the film as abo...