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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2500 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What TV shows did you enjoy this year? Thinking about starting watching a new one with friends and figured I would solicit opinions.

So far this year I've watched Severance, Andor, and House of the Dragon; the former two I very much enjoyed and the latter I thought was mediocre.

Andor was the best Star Wars material I've seen since ESB, and had the interesting property of feeling quite edgily radical in its politics without actually being about specific contemporary controversies.

That’s because it’s about organizing an underground against realistic fascism, not an Internet tankie’s trite anti-corporate slogans. The stakes are far taller when you’re not a Skywalker and the universe doesn’t want you to win.

There was one downside to me. Gizmodo’s io9 fansite had an impossibly short-sighted article about how the final episode almost dropped an F-bomb, and they wish it had, but they had to be content with the several “Shit!” swears dropped throughout the show.

Really? This is a galaxy far, far away. They use kilometers because the meta-conceit is that the Skywalker Saga was translated from Galactic Basic recorded in the ancient Journal of the Whills to English for our benefit. Short Germanic words for bodily functions have no expletive heft in that context, they just sound wrong and shred my suspension of disbelief.

Wookiepedia has a whole article about The Galaxy’s various swear words. There are enough coarse expletive obscenities listed there that they could easily have picked ones which sound worst to American ears, had the lower-class characters use them throughout the series, and have that character use it at the climax. It worked for frakking Battlestar Galactica and for Firefly too, gorrammit.

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