I've been a Star Wars fan for almost three decades and I think almost all Disney Star Wars is "fine" at worst. Even most of the things I didn't like had some sort of redeeming qualities, or I could recognize that I wasn't the target audience. The only thing I truly hated was Rise of the Skywalker, which is quite possibly my least favourite Star Wars thing ever.

I realize this puts me in the very small minority among Star Wars fans, and it's the reason I tend to avoid fan discussions these days - the relentless negativity is exhausting and leaves little room for discussing the things about Disney Star Wars I find good and/or interesting.

They do seem to have half-assed it. Maybe they searched something like, "who built the ark in the Bible," and ended up on the page for the Ark of the Covenant by mistake.

I played a lot of the second game. I borrowed it from the library on a whim and it captured my imagination like very few other things did. I remember always checking the CD-ROMS in every visit after that to see if it was available again, and snatching it to every time it was.

It might have been 22 Minutes instead of Air Farce, and it might have been Stockwell Day instead of Preston Manning. I couldn't find a video clip using any combination of show and politician.

As I said, it's deep memory from long ago. I mostly remember it for personal reasons and not the actual joke. But, you've reassured me that it wasn't just a hallucination on my part.

There's the Christian Heritage Party. I've known several people who have voted for them at one time or another.

Somewhere deep in my memories there is a Royal Canadian Air Farce skit about Preston Manning (I think) and how he "didn't campaign on Sundays." The joke is that him highlighting his supposed piety of respecting the Sabbath was, in and of itself, an act of campaigning. I did a quick search for the skit and couldn't find it, unfortunately.

Now, decades later, we have a party leader not just campaigning on Sunday, but making political speeches from the pulpit. I can't help but think this is a step backwards.

Wasn't the "sigma" personality just invented by incels when they realized that "being alpha" didn't work the way they thought it did and therefore they needed a new paradigm to keep their worldview from collapsing? Or am I remembering that wrong?

I'd say this is part of the "zeal of the convert" phenomenon, where someone who converts to a belief tends to be more fanatical than someone raised in that belief.

There's probably bias in this observation, as a couple of very loud people can drown out dozens of others and make a trend seem more prevalent than it actually is, but I also have personal experience here.

The most profoundly puzzling thing to me is their insistence that magic words will somehow make authorities back off.

Like, they believe that there is this grand conspiracy involving the Federal Reserve and maritime law and birth names and whatever else. And yet they also believe that the forces behind this conspiracy must acquiesce if you just invoke the right language.

Do they never consider that an entity powerful enough to do all that could also just ignore their demands? Like, even if the conspiracy is true, why would its perpetrators just give up because some random person told them to?

I'm always a bit amused when these sites and apps say things like, "If you turn off ad personalization, the ads you see won't be as useful to you."

My dude, I don't think I've ever willingly clicked on an ad in my entire life. "Personalizing" them won't change that.

Despite other flaws, the biggest (or maybe second biggest) issue I had with Solo was Lando's backstory.

See, I grew up reading some very old, very obscure EU books about Lando. In that series Lando was an expert card player but a poor pilot, and a lot is made of how he won the Millennium Falcon in a game of Sabacc but has no idea how to fly it. The movie reversed this, making him a card cheat.

I'm probably they only person in the world who cares.

But maybe new series, if it ever comes out, will be about Lando and his adventures with Vuffi Raa?

In the “Big Book,” the foundational document of these programs, “Chapter 4: We Agnostics” tells atheists and agnostics that they are “doomed to alcoholic death” unless they “seek Him.” The chapter characterizes non-believers as “handicapped by obstinacy, sensitiveness, and unreasoning prejudice.”

This really jumped out at me. What a horrible thing to say about someone, especially someone looking for help.