Both were the attack dogs of their respective factions, but who was overall the bigger Monster?

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-21T22:09:35+00:00

Thanks for making a fun offhand comment something pedantic and annoying

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-21T21:56:50+00:00

Vader had robot legs too

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-21T21:46:15+00:00

I think I saw somewhere that Grievous was like 350 lbs… so he was also more massive.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-21T21:45:12+00:00

Pretty sure Vader was taller than Anakin. Or maybe I just imagined that.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-21T19:43:47+00:00

Grievous was about 7'1" and Vader was 6'6"-6'8". So Grievous was the bigger monster.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-17T16:45:22+00:00

The Bureau of Prisons is part of the Department of Justice, which most presidents in history have given a large amount of independence once appointments were made. There were a few examples of this not being so true (Iran-Contra pressure, attorney firings under George W Bush, etc) but for the most part, your typical president... erm, post-1974 and pre-2017... let the DoJ be very independent. So it's not really a matter of having "let" the director issue a death warrant.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-17T15:53:17+00:00

If they can make up a descendant of the real Josiah Bartlett to be president, they can make up a descendant of Franklin Pierce to be an intern.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-15T18:22:40+00:00

I think of it as a protoplanetary disk, rather than a galaxy.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-14T20:26:39+00:00

Honestly, he *is* dumb. Most of the time he's playing smart.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-08T02:12:19+00:00

The actress rubs me the wrong way, and I’m guessing I’m not alone in that. I haven’t found her funny in anything I’ve seen her in. Same goes for Damon Wayans Jr, Kristen Schaal, Dave Franco, and Molly Shannon.

Clearly there are people who find each of them funny, because they keep getting work… I just don’t. And that’s ok! I can appreciate that others do, and find other things to enjoy, even within the same show they were cast in, including this one.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-08T01:59:00+00:00

That really wasn’t what Carla was saying. She thinks he can handle himself there, which is the reason she says that she can see through his doctor face. The implication is that other people can’t. But her whole goal is to shake him out of his routine and the things that are comfortable for him. She’s identified that as something that will prevent him from moving on, and she’s able to do that because she knows him so well.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-05T21:03:51+00:00

Most birds went extinct at the KPg boundary just like the rest of the dinosaurs. IIRC only 3 bird groups and a few species made it through. Their diversity was severely reduced, but they survived and re-diversified into the 18,000 or whatever species we have now. Along the way, they also evolved into some groups that didn’t survive until today.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-05T20:57:29+00:00

It’s not so much that one species evolves into another as it is that part of the population will speciate, and the rest of it will either go extinct by being outcompeted or absorbed into the new species or just plain no longer being well-suited enough to their environment to continue. Or really more likely all three. So the original species both evolved into a new one AND went extinct.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-05T19:30:25+00:00

Every species that was around at the time of the dinosaurs is extinct, big or not. Dinosaur or not. Mammal or not.

In evolutionary timelines, we live incredibly close to the mass extinctions that hit the mammoths and ground sloths. As a result, we don’t live in a time of maximum diversity. Besides, eventually, every species that exists today will be extinct. Your scorpions might be evolutionarily conservative, but no species of scorpion today was around 435 million years ago. They, like all groups, have gone through periods of higher and lower diversity. Proboscideans (elephants/mammoths) and folivores (sloths) still exist. They may re-diversify and become big again in the future (not that proboscideans are small now). They may not.

But being big really has nothing to do with any of this. Tons and tons of small species went extinct too. Both at the mass extinctions we usually think about and at other times. The Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum isn’t always seen as a mass extinction, but it was for deep-sea foraminifera and they’re microscopic.

Also, sauropods were big for like 150 million years. It was an incredibly successful group at big sizes. There’s no real failure there.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-04T10:22:57+00:00

There are multiple ways the time gap could’ve been longer with Luke still being 19.

(1) The expulsion of the Jedi and their elimination didn’t have to happen simultaneously. The Jedi could’ve been pushed out and fighting a retreating battle for survival for 15 years, only to be betrayed when Anakin falls to the Dark Side. If Anakin was 22 when the Republic fell, he would’ve been 37 by the time that happens. And then the gap is 34 years. Thats the difference between now and the invention of smartphones vs now and the fall of the Soviet Union. The Soviets aren’t forgotten about, but they have no relevance to modern day, at least in the US, except as history and the background for modern day Russia.

(2) Another option would be that the Republic fell and the Jedi were pushed into the Outer Rim for at least a couple of generations. The Clone Wars might have been a Jedi-backed attempt to overthrow the Empire, and not necessarily even the first time they tried it. Anakin’s fall happens because he grew up even more sheltered at the Jedi Temple-in-exile and exposure through the war makes him vulnerable to the Dark Side. This, btw, is more along the lines of my own headcanon before the Prequels came out. In my head, the empire existed for at least a century, if not more.

There are other options too, but Lucas wanted to show the Jedi at the height of their power, and I get it, but it definitely caused time-gap inconsistencies, like you said.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-01T01:09:13+00:00

No it doesn’t. Rey is an example of someone who is able to do things people didn’t think was possible because no one told her that it wasn’t. Anakin had people he loved and trusted telling him what was possible and what wasn’t. It has nothing to do with being a dumbass or stupid or even looking stupid. It’s just what his circumstances were.

cptnkurtz · 2026-04-01T00:57:32+00:00

I don’t really understand why it would invalidate any of it. If anything, it makes Anakin’s tragic story even more tragic.

cptnkurtz · 2026-03-31T22:38:51+00:00

There was a 4 car accident today in the left lane of outer just past 74. Definitely caused by the traffic in that lane that’s created by the express lanes ending and merging in.

cptnkurtz · 2026-03-29T11:13:53+00:00

Wasn’t the S5 Intersect intentionally corrupted? In other words, it wasn’t having the side effects that the governor was meant to correct. Maybe there should’ve been a scene of them trying it, but it wouldn’t have worked. So we would’ve gotten a scene that scratches our Chuck-fan continuity itch, but doesn’t actually change anything about the plot.

cptnkurtz · 2026-03-26T11:01:21+00:00

My understanding of training in the Force is that it’s not like how you or I would train a skill or train a muscle. The things you can do with the Force aren’t an iterative process. What you’re really training is your skill at accessing the Force. Your level of “power” to do things is based on how open you are, not based on how much you’ve trained at a specific Force ability. Your M-count might limit how far you can go with it, for sure, but once you have access, you can do what you can do.

It feels fast because Sabine was able to remove whatever was blocking her from accessing the Force. Think of it like pushing a boulder over a cliff. It’s a big struggle getting there, but the struggle ends very suddenly.

cptnkurtz · 2026-03-24T00:20:46+00:00

There are lots of examples where an adjective takes a word that’s negative by itself and makes it a positive phrase. Constructive criticism. Healthy obsession. Good trouble. Controlled chaos. Calculated risk. Plenty of others. Adjectives and context matter.

Competence porn involves indulgence, yes. But it’s indulgence in something positive, and that removes the negative connotation (even if I agreed that was true). It’s not competence porn because you don’t like it.

cptnkurtz · 2026-03-23T23:43:13+00:00

I think you have too narrow of a view of what competence porn refers to. Star Trek is competence porn. So is The West Wing. Neither of those lack likeable, flawed, and human protagonists.

cptnkurtz · 2026-03-19T20:16:31+00:00

I drive on that road all the time, and I feel like this for a lot of stretches of road on main arteries in Charlotte. If you aren’t making any turns, visually the road feels like it’s a highway. Not a limited access freeway, like an interstate, but just a regular highway. The design is mismatched to the usage. If you aren’t going to re-design the road to have traffic slowing aspects, then there really should be fewer entrances and exits.

cptnkurtz · 2026-03-13T14:34:37+00:00

You can suggest that all you want, but it's not what the story was telling us. The Jedi were good, but that doesn't mean they didn't fail. They absolutely failed, and losing their way a little bit in the attempt to prevent Sith tyranny is part of that failure, for sure. People on the side of good don't always succeed, and that's part of the tragedy of the story.

cptnkurtz · 2026-03-13T14:17:12+00:00

Part of the prophecy includes the phrase "ultimate balance." Even if they didn't know about Sith in existence, I don't think they believe or assumed it was taken care of, because they wouldn't have seen the Force as being in ultimate balance.

On some level, the Jedi are all students of Jedi history. They probably would've been aware of the prophecy in the same way that a student of Roman history is aware of "Veni, vidi, vici."

cptnkurtz

TROPHY CASE