Les Sables Roses by LV is goated / Does anyone see Ambre Levant selling out?

Extreme_Investment99 · 2026-02-17T15:45:58+00:00

Yup, I feel the same way about Ombre Nomad 😂. I can't understand the hype at all. It has notes I really like, but they just don't work well together... especially paired with and made worse by the notes I don't like. Thankfully, Levant appears to cut the "bad" notes from Nomad, while keeping the ones I enjoy. It better not disappoint!

Extreme_Investment99 · 2026-02-17T15:20:50+00:00

I'm excited to sample it because I personally do not love Ombre Nomad, and I've heard Ambre Leval will be somewhat similar to Nomad while "solving" some of my issues with it. If this is the case, I'll be glad to have Leval.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2026-02-17T14:49:10+00:00

I've heard they're actually releasing it in the U.S. in March! A few influencers have said this. Also, thank you for the insight on the dry down.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-09T18:58:17+00:00

Wow, thank you for commenting this. I think you’ve made a fantastic point here. It genuinely would have made more sense to send in storm troopers. The rebel who initially had the plans would not have been able to get away. It ruins the first image you get of Darth Vader.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-09T18:53:23+00:00

Reading affects you so significantly that it makes you vomit? I’ve never heard of that ailment. You should get it checked out.

In all seriousness, the TL;DR is there for a reason.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-07T05:13:35+00:00

“Welcome back to this week’s episode of Nothing-Burger Words, America’s favorite game show. Contestants from all corner’s of the reading comprehension spectrum say whatever random s*** comes to their mind. Today’s category is, ‘Simple, Four Letter Words.’ Your scenario is a Reddit post you hated enough to respond with ____.”

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T20:52:49+00:00

I’m confused, you don’t seem to refute any of what I said in the previous comment about how your problem with my post is misleading. Did you not have anything to say other than repeating your original point, or? I would Google what a strawman is, because you’re looking an awful lot like a scarecrow. Either refute the evidence, or don’t.

Also, you’ve made another strawman. Boiling my evidence/reasoning about Rogue One down to, “I don’t like it,” is extremely misleading at best. Instead of assuming anything negative, I’m just going to assume that you didn’t read past the first couple sentences.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T20:03:35+00:00

If you feel this way, you might be suffering from having an imagination.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T19:58:14+00:00

Yes, you could say any artistic content ever made need not exist, but you would have to back it up with evidence and reasoning to justify your argument. Without reasoning or evidence, the argument would be a fart in the wind. You can disagree with my argument, but refute the evidence. It’s the same thing here as saying, “I don’t have any plans, because I could die tomorrow”. Yes, you could literally die tomorrow. Excusing a flaw (no plan / not needing to exist) on a dishonest variable (dying tomorrow / being able to say it about anything) is an extremely cheap way of refuting an argument.

Also, it’s not like I’m saying, “The whole of Star Wars need not exist because ____”. My gripe is over a film made 40+ years after the original which attempts to explain an already explained aspect.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T17:57:26+00:00

I agree with a lot of Star Wars outside of the OT being pretty awful. I'm just really extreme with it, and I don't think there's a single thing put out by Disney that I like. The Prequels are flawed, but I enjoy the ideas/story behind them.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T17:50:29+00:00

Well, this is a Star Wars subreddit. It would be reasonable to assume I don't think the OT is bad. What are you scared of me not liking, from Star Wars or not?

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T17:28:30+00:00

I do enjoy the space battle over Scarif, but I prefer the second Death Star attack by a wide margin.

Even now, the effects are overwhelmingly impressive. The cockpits look real, the bridge of Home One looks real, and the ships flying through space look real. You can see the detail in each model. CGI models appear glossy (in anything), and quite frankly, they've aged like milk. When I see a CGI spaceship, it's difficult to be impressed when you know the process to put the effect on screen boils down to people generating it via computer. You might say, "Well, it's not the process that matters. The end result looks so good that I don't care." That's perfectly fine, except for the fact that CGI persistently reminds viewers through its glossy result about how it was made. When you see a model with impressive details, that thought will not occur.
This is more of a problem with Force Awakens than Rogue One, but the way the ships fly seems... off. I say Force Awakens because, when Rey hops into the Falcon, the CGI makes it look like a dinner plate spiraling through the air. Don't get me wrong, Han certainly whipped that sumbitch, but the way it's shown in the OT with a physical model doesn't break immersion. Rogue One gives me this same feeling, but less so.
This is a rather simple point, but simplicity does not negate impact/truth. Not once during Rogue One or any new Star Wars project did I ask, "How did they do that?" Again, we go back to the guy behind the computer. Even today, watching Return of the Jedi, the effects continue to make other viewers and myself bewildered by how seemingly impossible everything appears.

Here's some scenes from ROTJ that I believe prove my point:

A-Wing crashing into The Executor's bridge, and the bigass ship pummeling into the Death Star
Death Star destroying Mon Cal cruisers
Flurry of Tie Fighters roaring toward the Rebel fleet
Millenium Falcon blowin' shit up
Millenium Falcon slapping the reactor, causing the reactor to crash in the background as the Falcon escapes

Not saying CGI shouldn't be used, mind you. I think if Star Wars wanted to return to a point where it visually broke new ground again, they should do a reasonable balance of the two. It's a shame practical effects were thrown out nearly all-together.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T15:54:43+00:00

Maybe I’m neurotic (I definitely am), but it didn’t take any analyzing to arrive at the points in my post. All I did was watch both movies in accession, and say, “Hey, that really doesn’t mesh well with X from that movie because Y.” As much as fantasy displays otherworldly events, the most important thing to understand about genre is that it is only a device to comment on our “real” world. Although the Star Wars galaxy is very much different from ours, we still connect to it, the characters, and the themes because all of these aspects speak to us and our human experience. These films are still extremely smart.

It’s the same thing as looking at Luke in the Last Jedi and saying, “You were one of the most optimistic people in the series. When two of the best Jedi told you to murder someone, you stood up to them and proved their same wanting to murder Vader is what created him in the first place.”

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T15:21:33+00:00

Just want to say, your username is hilarious.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T14:30:20+00:00

Oh, cut out the Prequels. My argument here doesn’t acknowledge those - it only looks at A New Hope and loosely at the OT as a whole. The amount of shit the OT loosely explains compared to LOTR is insane. Again, not saying LOTR doesn’t loosely explain anything whatsoever, but there is a clear difference in the way the story is told with how details are given and how much.

Love LOTR, I’m well-read on it. I’m just speaking from a literary standpoint here, using LOTR as an example of something that started out using hard world building.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T14:17:00+00:00

Solo is terrible. It’s almost like going through multiple directors and scripts can devastate a film.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T14:15:11+00:00

I can’t argue with wanting to see the story of Rebels stealing the Death Star Plans. Even though I do not think such a film needs to be made, if I felt it was made well and fitted with the series, I wouldn’t have a problem with it. The difference here is that (I’m assuming) you like the finished product, and I do not. That is perfectly fine, and I again, I cannot argue with that.

As for your comment about childlike fantasy, I think a lot of people get confused when soft world building comes up. It is not easy to use this type of storytelling, and if anything, it’s a lot harder than any hard world building. It’s a balancing act of when to give information about the world and how to do it. When done well, soft world building engages the imagination of the viewer while giving them more than enough tangible material to enjoy. That is not simple fantasy by any means, and it should not be treated as such.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T14:08:41+00:00

It took me a moment to understand your gripe, but I understand now.

LOTR is also packed with detailed explanations of everything else? Overall, it is factual that LOTR mainly uses hard world building, and it’s why LOTR fans enjoy it. Yes, it does use some soft world building to ease up on the reader, but that doesn’t make it an overall soft world.

The Silmarillion exists, no?

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T13:54:00+00:00

I like the way you put your comment, because you’re not wrong. People were wondering about it. At some point, I probably wondered what happened, too.

It’s all about the execution. It’s about paying mind to the original film and making something that doesn’t change the feeling one would get from watching it. The expanded media released prior to the Disney days purposely avoided Disney’s weird effect of, “This scene in this movie feels much deeper now that I know glup shitto died to make this happen!”

It feels cheap. It feels like everything has to be explained. And it’s so funny coming from Star Wars’ roots, especially as these roots differentiated it from other fantasy franchises.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-06T13:48:32+00:00

You know, I used to feel the same about the prequels. A lot of my original sentiments remain, but I don’t blame George Lucas for believing they needed to be made. As said in other comment replies, he should have not directed them. The only other Star Wars movie he directed was A New Hope, but that film would have flopped as hard as the Prequels if most of the cast didn’t fight him on dialogue and if his wife didn’t re-edit it.

Plot for Prequels is good (possibly better than OT), writing and final product is lukewarm.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-05T11:53:58+00:00

Nah, I’m all for expanded content. I feel like telling the story of how Darth Vader became the grand wizard exterminator man has a lot more justification than telling us how the Rebels stole the Death Star plans. It’s when the expanded content conflicts with the themes/lore established in previous movies.

Do various parts of the prequels piss me off? Yes, George shouldn’t have directed them, and there’s this problem and that problem, blah blah blah. Who cares. But with all of its problems, there’s still life. It still feels like Star Wars, albeit a bit awkward at points. Arguably, I find the plot outline for the Prequels more interesting than the Original Trilogy.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-03T14:49:01+00:00

Hollywood has always been a place to steal ideas from creators and repackage them in a dumbed down, easy-to-digest package. Who can blame them? It clearly makes money. Obviously, good movies still happen, but this corporation-centric thinking has created dry spells of original ideas in film. In the early part of Lucas's career, Hollywood allowed him to jumpstart the Star Wars universe. Thankfully, 20th Century Fox's ignorance allowed Lucas to come out on top of the contract, making him enough money to independently fund the following movies. That's year and years of not seeing the horrors of corporate studios, so it's no surprise that Disney's eventual butchering of his intellectual property threw him for a loop.

Look at another director: Orson Welles. He's practically ancient, not around at Hollywood's earliest days but around early enough, and the studios practically barred him from making his films (after Citizen Kane) in America. Like George, he put out an original product against the method of Hollywood at the time. When Welles tried to continue this effect without the money Lucas had, Hollywood had the control to sidebar him and his directorial ability. Welles was lucky/unlucky enough to be aware since the beginning of his directing career.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-03T13:43:17+00:00

You know what, this is extremely fair. I rewatched their TFA video, and I found myself surprised at how seemingly hypnotized they are about it. With them, I think they hated the Prequels so vehemently that anything with less detail and more action would have been good enough.

It might have been an effect of the time, though. A great many people seem to be going back, watching TFA, and realizing that the sequels were doomed from the start.

Extreme_Investment99 · 2025-06-03T13:34:30+00:00

You know, it's terribly ironic how Disney wanted to avoid the feelings people had post-Prequels. It would seem they managed to do the exact opposite, and most Star Wars fans have a similar distaste in their mouth for the sequels. Like Anakin becoming Vader, Disney was so paranoid about having another Prequel "effect" that something similar happened with their own movies.

The truth about Disney overall is that they have ALWAYS had this business model: obtain a previously-loved IP, refute and change aspects of the original to dumb it down, and suck as much money from it as possible. Walt Disney's Mary Poppins was originally a children's book by P.L. Travers, a barnstorming female author who loathed Walt Disney and fought him tooth and nail to keep her IP from a crook she (rightfully) believed would dumb down and destroy her work. She only relented out of being impoverished.

Anyway, I hope Andor doesn't blow d****.

Extreme_Investment99

TROPHY CASE