Obi-Wan anthology film is official

It’s finally official. The Obi-Wan Kenobi film is happening.

Ever since Disney bought out the entire Star Wars IP from Lucas and announced they were going to do anthology movies alongside three new saga films, I’ve been saying - along with practically every other fan out there - doing an Obi-Wan solo films is an absolute no brainer. Ewan McGregor’s Obi-Wan was one of the few bright spots in the prequel trilogy, and us fans are all wondering just what the Jedi Master got up to in between within the time between the Jedi purge and Leia’s distress message. 

Not confirmed is that Ewan McGregor is for sure doing it, but it’s mere formalities at this point, isn’t it. At least we hope it is: I for one will refuse to watch an Obi-Wan film without McGregor playing the titular character. 

The Obi-Wan Kenobi anthology movie may perhaps be the perfect tie-in between the prequels and original trilogy. They can bring back the same actors from Episode III to play Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru - we will no doubt be seeing a young Luke. Ian McDiarmid can reprise as the Emperor Palpatine, and the main villain can be, who else, Darth Vader himself. After the incredible and indelible hallway sequence in Rogue One, who doesn’t want more Darth Vader?

Hayden Christensen can even redeem himself to play Anakin in flashbacks. 

Qui-Gon force ghost? A brief visit to see Master Yoda? 

I for one cannot wait for a deep character-study film on Obi-Wan in what is for sure amongst his darkest days as the republic dissolves into the Empire. I’m immensely happy it’s officially happening. 

Why don't Kpop albums come in vinyl?

Like a true millennial hipster, I quite fond of vinyl records of contemporary music, not because I like the sound - I don’t even own a record player, but rather I’ve always enjoy album art (a hearty rest-in-peace shoutout to iTunes cover-flow), and they don’t come any bigger than in LP vinyl form. Naturally, I prefer to display my records trophy-display style instead of purchasing an IKEA Kallax shelve like everyone else and inserting them in vertically. 

On a similar vein, I’m an avid listening of Kpop, and the one thing I’ve come to lament about the “genre” is the absolute lack of vinyl print of Kpop albums - no, I refused to fork the over $250 price for G-Dragon’s limited vinyl release of his ‘Coup D'etat’ album. Kpop albums have some of the most creative and imaginative album-art designs, and it’s a shame I can’t procure them in the larger format for display. Of course, having a few albums with beautiful girls on the cover isn’t all that bad of a thing, either. 

At least Kpop comes fully correct in how they package their music albums in what is now old-school CD format. American music CDs arrives in the same classic jewel-case with only a booklet in addition to the front and back cover to differentiate. Kpop CD albums are full-on visual art productions, with innovative packaging (check G-Dragon’s first album), substantial photo-books, and various collectible totems such as trading cards.

In lieu of not having vinyl prints to purchase, I do often buy physical Kpop albums just on sheer art value. And like the LPs of American music I own, I don’t play the CDs themselves at all (who owns a CD player these days anyways?); online and on iTunes is where I actually listen to music. 

Are Moleskin notebooks worth the money?

You now those fancy Moleskine (or equivalent) branded notebooks that are extremely popular with all the cool kids (#Millennials)? I had no idea how relatively expensive they were! What amounts to really is a stack of about a few hundred sheets of paper bound together nicely and then companies will go ahead and sell it for 18 dollars. Is it just me or is that price insane? 

I remember back in my formative schooling period I would buy spiral-bound notebooks for about a dollar each; now people are buying Moleskine notebooks for many multitudes of that amount simply for style? You can’t convince me otherwise it isn’t all style; I’ve read the reviews and the sheets of paper used in the Moleskine aren’t any more durable or awesome than the loose-leaf sheets you can purchase by the hundreds for mere dollars. I mean, for sure those bound notebooks do indeed look beautifully clean and modern, but at the prices they are going for, no thanks from me. 

My travel/portable note-taking medium of choice remains the military-inspired Field Notes memo books. 

On Charlottesville...

Sometimes it’s difficult to ‘focus on only what you can control’ when the horrors of what happened this past weekend in Charlottesville is so blatantly hateful and tragic. 

Sometimes it’s difficult to ‘focus on only what you can control’ when we’ve got a Napoleon-complex President who took three whole days to come out in condemnation of neo-nazis and white-supremacist; reading from a teleprompter reluctantly as if he’s taken hostage and forced to read a ransom note on video. 

Sometimes it’s difficult to ‘focus on only what you can control’ when I read reports of people on the ground in Virginia standing tall and fighting back the hate and racism, while I self-examine that if given the opportunity would I have the decency and strength to do the same.

Sometimes it’s difficult to ‘focus on only what you can control’ when it’s 2017 and demons of this country’s past thought long ago suppressed and moved beyond have risen back up again to give us a grave dose of shocking reality. 

It was a somber weekend, and all my respects to the heroism and fight of Heather Heyer. 

Microsoft Surface line not yet on level of Apple

Consumer Reports, the magazine/agency that Millennials and younger have no idea who they are or what they do, announced today that it’s downgrading Microsoft’s entire Surface line of products from a previous ‘recommended’ designation to now, not so much.    

The independent research entity sites a multitude of reported issues, including random freezing, hangups, and unresponsive touchscreen, aggregating that: 

“25 percent of Microsoft laptops and tablets will present their owners with problems by the end of the second year of ownership.”

As an owner of a Surface Pro 4, I can only say: tell me something I don’t already know. 

I shall say upfront that I absolutely adore the SP4; the display is superb and better than the competition, the duo form-factor of tablet and laptop is a revelation, and the overall design and packaging is engineered excellence on par with the anything made by Apple, the industry benchmark.

The Surface Pro 4 has been on the market for over two years, and to this day there’s still inexplicable hangups and unresponsiveness on mine, the nadir of which is the utterly broken sleep function. Waking the device up from sleep is always a roulette-style game of chance of whether or not upon the first click of the keyboard the screen will return to life. Sadly, it’s miserably hit or miss, and Microsoft have seemingly given up on addressing the issue - after multitudes of firmware and software updates already - now that the fifth-generation Surface Pro device have arrived. 

There’s no question the Surface line of products from Microsoft have in short time revolutionized the Windows computing hardware experience. Finally, non-Apple users have access to high-end premium devices that are designed and created as meticulously as Cupertino has done for the past decade. I myself jumped onboard after having previously ran Macbooks since college. The competition from Microsoft have done well to spurn on both companies. 

What we are seeing today from Consumer Reports is a validation that Microsoft’s meteoric rise in the computing hardware business naturally includes tremendous teething problems.   

Case of the Mondays

Mondays.

Nobody likes them, correct? Given a gun to my head I’d for sure tell you I don’t much like Mondays either. That creeping feeling of despair you start to feel by Sunday evening; the work week is straight ahead, and that slight piece of weekend bliss will soon be done and gone. We’ve all experience it.

I’m beginning to think that if I’m heading into the week dreading Monday like the plague, I’ve already lost. 

What does the dread and thoughts that go along with it accomplish? Nothing supportive that’s for sure. It sure doesn’t make me want to go to sleep at a proper time. When that alarm clock announces its presence on Monday morning, it doesn’t make me want to escape those cozy sheets with haste. When I’m in the car driving towards work, the dread doesn’t make me look forward to the work-week with good vibes - rather I’m already impatiently counting down the minutes towards end of day Friday.   

How productive is that? 

What if I am actually happy and excited about Mondays? What if the notion of the work-week brings me the same joy and anticipation as the prospects of an entertainment-filled weekend? Wouldn’t I have a better disposition at work and whatever output be enhanced? You don’t have to particularly like you job, but since societal framework predicates that adults ought to have gainful employment, the job is a static reality: how you feel about it is on you alone. So instead of choosing dread, a negative reaction, why not view it in a positive light, even if you have to Jedi mind-trick yourself to achieve it. 

These days, I quite like Mondays. On Sunday evenings I anticipate with a sense of duty, and Monday mornings I jump out of bed ready to handle it all. Some weekends are more difficult that others, but overall this mental practice/exercise have helped my general psyche towards the work-week tremendously.  

Disney launching it's own streaming service

Disney has announced that it will soon pull its library of films off Netflix and will start it’s own streaming service, ostensibly with a monthly free just like every other provider out there. 

It never occurred to me until I read the news, but it’s kind of amazing that Disney, the media juggernaut with vast amount of IPs from its own production house, Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, and ESPN, doesn’t yet have its own online streaming platform. I've no doubts whatsoever the service Disney plans to put out would be a tremendous success. Wouldn’t you sign up if the only place to stream Pixar or MCU movies was on Disney’s own online property? ESPN’s entire 30 for 30 documentary collection?

Here’s the problem: it’s starting to get to be too many streaming platforms, compounded by the fact they all respectively have in-house original content. Therefore if you’re a TV and movie buff and want to stream a great majority of it, you’re looking at a potential monthly outlay similar to having a cable subscription, at which point isn’t the endgame of ‘cutting the cord’ completely lost? 

Of course, some tech-bro in the Bay Area will create an app that aggregates all the services together and sell it in an omnibus package priced from $70-$100. It’ll be christened as innovation while the Twitter hoard will lambast it for being a logically circular facsimile of the age old cable tv package. It’ll be like that whole ride-sharing app ‘bus’ episode a few months back all over again. 

As the online streaming fracture continues on, those of us without the financial means to subscribe to say more than two services at a time, the selecting process will be met with more scrutiny. With that I predict comes the battle for exclusives: ‘only on Neflix’ or ‘only on Hulu’ slogan in adverts will be a common thing. Console gaming has been like that for years: I’ve got a Playstation and not an XBOX because I value playing Gran Turismo, which is a Sony exclusive. 

It’ll be interesting to see how Neflix plans to fill that gaping void Disney will vacate in its library.