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JB522

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Join date
13-Sep-2004
Last activity
10-Jun-2025
Posts
37

Post History

Post
#107223
Topic
A modest proposal: Should Lucas make more OT changes?
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/107223/action/topic#107223
Time
Originally posted by: Doctor M
The lightsaber battles in the originals are a bit sedate compared to what you'd think/hope a jedi duel might look like.
This is most notable in ANH. Obi Wan and Vader fighting it out on the Death Star is so low key, it looks like a couple of geriatrics fighting with canes.
I mean come on. Look at Anakin go in Eps 2 & 3. He is a force of nature with that saber. Now pop in RotJ and see him fight it out with Luke. (Ok you swing, I'll block, now my turn.) Or worse, go watch the afore mentioned Obi Wan/Vader battle. It's sort of sad looking.


To put in my two cents on this friendly debate, I'd say it makes sense exactly how it is. Darth Vader is damaged goods- he may have the brute strength to lift people off the floor by their necks, and he can command the force, but his body is not the body that fought in Ep 2&3. The machine parts just aren't that mobile. And that particular hall of the Death Star doesn't appear to have any equipment to rip from the walls with the Force to hurl around. I'm sure that design flaw was corrected for the second one

From Ben's side, as Darth Simon said, it's partly a control battle. Ben isn't young anymore. Even when he was, he wasn't a lightsaber genius, and his years in the desert have accelerated his aging. I know, Yoda shows signs of aging and yet still goes postal on Dooku, but Yoda's goal at that point is outright defeat of Dooku to save Ben and Anakin and stop the Clone War before it starts. Ben's ultimate intent is to distract and stall, with the full knowledge that it's a fight Darth can't win. Perhaps he devotes part of the physical energy he has left into mentally preparing himself for merging with the Force?

And as for Luke in ESB and ROTJ, I would assume that he just hasn't learned lightsaber mastery like Jedi of old. He progressed as far as the "slice-and-dice-the-bar-while-it's-in-the-air" trick (per the novelization and radio drama), but Yoda probably hadn't yet taught him the really advanced stuff, because Luke's role in saving the Jedi requires focus, resistance to the dark side, and persistance, not Windu-like prowess.

Anyway, just my thoughts.
Post
#106634
Topic
Episode 3 was disappointing on many levels...
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/106634/action/topic#106634
Time
Quote
Originally posted by: greencapt
Quote
Originally posted by: sean wookie
Disapointing a bit but arent all movies?


Well... uh.... no- not at all.

...

In fact, my personal 'first indicator' of whether a film is good or not is whether at any time I find myself glancing at my watch. If I do look at it, I know the filmmakers have not done their jobs well- they lost me and kicked me out of the story...


Funny you should say that... the theater I watched in this afternoon had pretty steeply banked stadium seating, so I could see nearly the whole audience. About midway through I noticed a lot of people checking the time, and that was just the ones that had indiglo watches or were checking on their cell phones! So a lot of people obviously did feel alienated.

I for one still liked it a lot, probably because I have read every novel and most of the Clone Wars graphics novels and have seen the cartoons. But it is definitely bad form to rely on them to fill the holes. GL (or at least Lucasfilm) have been saying for years that the only true canon is the films. That seems to have changed with the onset of the PT. I like it that they have set an official storyline and had authors stick to it, and small references to the novels on the side help enhance the experience for those that do read, but they absolutely shouldn't depend on them to explain things. (Kind of like the Ord Mantell line in reverse- if they had written a canonical version of the story before ESB, it would have been a neat tie-in for those that read the book, but it still would have worked just fine as a throwaway for those who didn't.)
Post
#93860
Topic
STAR WARS: The Torrents thread
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/93860/action/topic#93860
Time
Originally posted by: ApolloOne
Originally posted by: MeBeJedi
"This isn't the version he ever intends to sell again."

FanTAStic point! LOL!


That is one of the four tests when deciding whether fair use applies: the impact such use has on the market or value of the copyrighted work. Make sure the judge has Star Wars toys in his chambers, though, just to be on the safe side.




And when the owner quit the MPAA when they gave him flak about not putting star billing before the title, I would think it would make it even less likely.
Post
#90438
Topic
Usenet tutorial?
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/90438/action/topic#90438
Time
Originally posted by: JB522

And somebody mentioned Grabit. I think I tried it before NewsLeecher, but there was some reason I didn't like it...


Well, it was either another program or an old version of GrabIt. I just installed 1.5.1 Beta, and it looks pretty good. Not quite as polished as NewsLeecher, but it looks pretty solid, and it's free.
Post
#89845
Topic
Usenet tutorial?
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/89845/action/topic#89845
Time
Originally posted by: eDroj
Go with Newshosting or Giganews..... the ones that the ISP's provide are practically bantha poodoo.......
And Forté Agent NON free version works splendid with binarys, at least it does for me.


The big problem with Free Agent is that, last I checked, it hasn't been updated to work with par files, whereas I believe Agent (the pay version) has. What this basically means is that Free Agent doesn't recognize the multiple posts that make up the par as being part of the same file, and doesn't automatically decode them. I was trying to get my first OOT disc using Free Agent (Dr. G's ANH, before I discovered this website), and it was a pain to manually save the messages (which Free Agent thinks are just text messages) to disk and then decrypt them.

Especially if you're going to shell out the money for Giganews or another high-availability news feed, I recommend taking a look at NewsLeecher. It's a multi-threaded reader, meaning that it will open multiple connections to a news server. Most ISPs have their rates capped, but allow some number of multiple connections. If your ISP or news provider has multiple servers, you can set it up to do multiple connections to them too. I didn't buy NewsLeecher, but did use it during the free trial. With three servers and four connections to each, I had 12x the bandwidth of Free Agent. And, it seamlessly integrated the multiple parts of the par and decoded them too.

With no offense meant to you guys, it cracks me up that guys who are so smart in image processing, BitTorrent, etc. and don't know Usenet. For me, Usenet WAS the internet in the beginning- I started regularly reading news in 1989, back when the groups really were for news and commentary, not spam, porn, and file sharing. I haven't read actively in many years since web-based news and boards such as this suit me better, but I remember spending hours reading rec.arts.sf-lovers (when the Usenet community was small enough that SW, Trek, and everything else could share a group), then rec.arts.sf.starwars, and later a bunch of splinter r.a.s.starwars groups.

And somebody mentioned Grabit. I think I tried it before NewsLeecher, but there was some reason I didn't like it. I think maybe it saw each micro-part of a file as a separate message. (Basically, most of the posters in alt.binaries.starwars will archive a DVD into a rar archive and then add par information (which has redundant information that helps reconstruct the files if a few isolated pieces get lost). They split the rar into manageable chunks and post each chunk as a message, with about 100000 lines IIRC, and there will be 100-300 or so of these for a DVD. But the news servers actually break these up into smaller pieces to exchange them, and there will maybe be 500 smaller pieces to each big piece, which I'm calling micro-parts. Free Agent and most other readers I've used will report the big chunks as a message, and then will tell you if not all of the micro-parts are available, but I'm thinking that Grabit saw each of the micros as an individual message, meaning that it will show you tens of thousands of messages instead of hundreds. But I may be wrong on this last part- it might not have been Grabit, so it might be worth a try or I might not have had it set up right.

Sorry for the rambling at the last, but even if I'm wrong about Grabit I figure it might help someone understand a little more about how Usenet works. I think it's pretty amazing that a system designed for exchanging 100-line text messages works at all for multi-gigabyte files.
Post
#85399
Topic
***The "ISOMIX" feedback thread ***
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/85399/action/topic#85399
Time
Having just finally gotten around to fetching the ISOMIX ANH, I'm wondering if it's been updated with the Viper's corrected subtitles. The date for the tracker listed on the myorganicandowithoutifitruptures.net predates Viper's corrections, and I'm assuming that the files couldn't be corrected without breaking the tracker.

So, assuming that BT isn't flexible enough to allow the change or that it hasn't somehow been updated, is there now a permanent home for Viper's subtitles?

Thanks!
Post
#82451
Topic
Lucasfilm acknowledging fan hate
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/82451/action/topic#82451
Time
There's one thing I've been wondering since the MPAA started rumbling about going after BT users. Since GL burned his bridges with the MPAA rather spectacularly, would the MPAA care at all about the kind of stuff we trade? I would imagine that they would get perturbed about traders of the new DVDs, and Fox would too, but any copyrights that are being bent are held by a non-MPAA member. Any thoughts? This is kind of academic for now, but might not be if myspleen has to close up.
Post
#70382
Topic
.: The Zion DVD Project :. (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/70382/action/topic#70382
Time
Originally posted by: drjimmy526
Normalizing is a process which "standardizes" the volume level of a given audio file using peak levels...


This is a bit off-topic, but related somewhat. I've often wondered if there's an easy way to compress the dynamic range of sound files. What I want to do is make a copy of the OT soundtracks for listening to in the car, on the plane, etc. so that I'm not constantly twiddling with the volume to hear the soft bits over the ambient noise while not blasting out my ears or getting distortion on the louder parts. Does anybody know of an easy way to do this? Or does someone have a better solution?
Post
#65694
Topic
Chewbacca Life time achievement award
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/65694/action/topic#65694
Time
It's up at Blue Harvest in the OT videos section (http://www.blueharvest.net/video/original.shtml). I haven't downloaded it, so I don't know what the quality is.

Go get it early in the day- the site has a daily bandwidth quota (which it's already used today). They also have the SNL skit with Kevin Spacey doing Christopher Walken doing Han Solo, some audition stuff, and a few odds and ends. Their version of the Holiday Special has a REALLY tiny picture.