Go to Moscow, hang a left. When you hit the North Pole, head south…not, not that south, the other one! The other other one. After a bit, take another left for a couple hours, and you’ll arrive at your destination on the right.

I think it’s been made pretty clear between Andor and Ashoka that the Old Republic, the Empire, and the New Republic are all essentially the same bureaucracy at their cores, just with different leadership and priorities at the top.

It’s really showing the banality of evil…people continue to do their jobs and following orders of whoever the current bosses are. By and large, they can’t directly see whether their own actions are used for good or evil, the paperwork must continue to flow regardless.

That’s why there isn’t a ton of chaos when one galactic government supplants the next. Setting up an all-new galaxy-spanning bureaucracy is extremely hard, why not just do some loyalty oaths and let the existing machinery keep on chugging along.

Well, that’s not at all what I said. Japanese compact cars were generally pretty cool and affordable in a way most similar small American cars were not, so of course they get customized a ton more that their American equivilents.

The people who actually made their cars perform were the racers, those who did the truly terrible mods were the ricers.

Yes, racist due to stereotyping. But it was more wordplay for insulting the taste of the person in question in comparison to the racers, not their ethnicity or the origin of their car. Bad taste is pretty universal. And as with pretty much anything in language, people can and clearly have used it as a racial insult. I just don’t think that was it’s origin.

I am really amused it has morphed into a more positive connotation with the *nix crowd, while still meaning essentially the same thing. Language truly is a living thing.

I mean it has clearly racist origins, but I’ve never actually heard it used in a racist manner in real life.

At least where I was, there were basically zero Asians, “ricers” were (typically but not exclusively) Japanese cars that were customized terribly, as someone else mentioned, all show and no go. You could have American ricers too.

The owners, the “rice boys”, were pretty much all white guys.

I get that Ukraine won’t consider the possibility of ceding any territory, nor should they. They probably don’t like their allies even mentioning it.

But, there’s the separate issue of not being able to join NATO with ongoing territorial disputes. Without much context to go on, I would almost interpret this as something more along the lines of “Ukraine could join NATO tomorrow if the dispute went away (by whatever method)”.

I suppose it’s the natural result of wanting to keep the show on as long as possible, when you’ve only got one good idea for the story arc. You need a lot of filler.

I’d like to see more shows done in the style of Babylon 5, where the creator had the whole 5 years written out from day 1. There was very little in the show that felt like filler or treading water.

Which also may explain why books are being brought to TV more frequently these days. But, TV showrunners have a bad habit of taking a good novel and totally mangling it in the translation to TV, so it’s not a guaranteed win.

It’s mostly decent, some interesting twists, but also plenty of dumb stuff in it too. It’s only 7 episodes, so even if you don’t end up liking it you haven’t wasted much time!

The Empire focused half of the show that was mostly made up specifically for the show is EXCELLENT tho, and really worth watching.

They should have just stuck with that and called the show Empire IMHO. Would have been an instant classic.

Frankly, you’ll enjoy Foundaton more if you don’t read the books first. Otherwise, you’ll be sitting there shaking you head wondering why they continuously mangle the core concept of the books so badly, despite characters occasionally directly stating how it works (only for the same episode otherwise showing utter disregard for said statement)

Dunno if Lexx is really worth it tbh. The original movies were worth watching just because it was so weird and different.

But if you were on the fence after those, well it doesn’t really change. Just season after season of the same sort of plots…if you like that, it’s great. If you don’t, it’s gonna get old really fast.

I rewatched all of Andromeda recently, and after a season and a half is was mostly awful, but it was occasionally entertaining.

I rewatched the first Lexx movie, remembered why I never finished the show the first time around, and moved on to something else.

Andromeda had such promise for a low budget SciFi show. The writing started out pretty good…then purple went gold and the writing IMMEDIATELY went to shit, no slow downward slide or anything. It was like a totally different show midway thru season 2, have never seen anything like it before or since.

Heck yeah, watched all of those, they were so fun. Cleopatra 2525 is one I had almost forgotten about, thanks for reminding me!