Lance Parkin

Trump's dementia has grown so extreme that a select group of advisors are now running the country without his input. To find who those advisors are and what their plans are, buy my new book, which will appear in March 2029.

A study published by The British Medical Journal has shown that if there is a new Doctor Who episode broadcast during the period from Christmas to New Year’s Day, the UK sees a lower mortality rate the following year.

The planet looks like Deadpool. it looks like Deadpool had sex with Deadpool inside a decomposing Deadpool.

George Lucas is a human being, with flaws, who tried very hard to make Star Wars as good as it possibly could be.

Accept that, your relationship with Star Wars will be richer and happier.

One of the uncanny things about Star Wars is you can come up with the most bizarre theory, search for evidence ... and find Lucas handing you the proof.

He got there before you. He always did.

He appreciates Star Wars on a much deeper level than we can imagine, and we can imagine quite a bit.

Releasing the 'original version' (a lie, but whatever) will only encourage 'see, it was never all that' hot takes. We should, of course, hunt those hottakers for sport.

But every huh huh poobrain who comes up with that ... is agreeing with Lucas.

He wants to get people addicted to cinema, and you do that dealing gateway drugs at the school gate, not just selling to the same regular group of old stoners.

Look, it's not complicated: Star Wars is older than the Flash Gordon serials were then. If you watch the DVD release of the original version ... it's *old* now.

Lucas wants it to be a current kids' film, not a creaky old one your grandpa liked.

... yet also, bizarrely, Lucas engineered and encouraged us to think that. Empowered us to.

So the idea that the Special Editions 'betray' Star Wars is just philosophically absurd.

But, unlike Lynch, he handed us the keys and showed how the engine was put together.

Star Wars is a collage of cinema. It is, as Jim Cooray Smith always says, made by someone who's first language is movies, with English a faintly distant second.

There are artists where you have to surrender to the genius, take the rough with the smooth. David Lynch.

I think George Lucas is one of those. If you think he's, y'know, Ron Howard, then I can't swear you're wrong, but we're not on the same page.

And we *owned* Star Wars. We literally had boxes and shelves of it in our childhood bedrooms.

We were also shown how it was made. We were given the source code, 150 action figures and told to make it ourselves.

... but it's so inculcated, it was so influential, got to its core audience so young, that we just think that all movies were and are always just like that.

George Lucas has always been a weird one. He's the first director anyone my age knew the name of. The original movie is *so* weird, so personal, that no one else making it knew wtf was going on, it was like being in Eraserhead or something.

It reminds me of the common Trek fan relationship with Roddenberry, where there's a creator with an original vision, but this only ever gets invoked when this creator's original vision is 'betrayed'.

'Release the original version, but with remastered picture and sound' has always been incoherent vile centrism.

Ah, the famous Christmas tradition of right wing men drinking cum.

US surrenders Caribbean to China.

NZ police recover swallowed Fabergé pendant from alleged thief after six-day wait It was retrieved through ‘natural means’, with no medical intervention necessary

Octopoopy.

www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a...

Mark Zuckerberg is never right:

aftermath.site/mark-zuckerber...

As a Doctor Who fan, I'd say this half-dead thing sat in a chair with one arm tucked away, surrounded by obedient fascist robots reminds me of Davros, except the Daleks aren't robots.

The co-founder of Kalshi says: " The long-term vision is to financialize everything and create a tradable asset out of any difference in opinion."

Labour strategists have presumably spent the morning convincing themselves that the solution to gender discrimination in Chess is banning all trans people from playing board games.

Stephen Gallagher, Sherlock Holmes. Feels like you should buying this.

@stephengallagher.co.uk

stephengallagher.com/uncategorize...

Here's some background info on this year's stocking filler:

Say what you like about Trump, he delivers on 'anti woke'.

I was never convinced it was Stapleton, I can believe it's the sinister, lurking presence of Boom Mike.

But, yeah, if the 'showrunner' isn't around, no one doing this is going to have much of a sense of ownership and legacy.

This example's telling because the person who signed this off could not possibly have been looking at the screen for this bit. And it's a fun bit, too.

So, meh, they screwed up this remaster of Mad Men, there will be another one along in a few years, if anyone still gives enough of a shit about Mad Men.