Not well rested, woke up in alot of pain most days, and didn’t eat one grilled piece of meat. (Darth Sibling didn’t want to cook.) Various member of the extended Sith clan came around, with lots of gossip and dissing of those not present.

Holiday’s over. Back to bashing.

Since so many are looking for Chefelf’s classic “Reasons to Hate (insert SW movie)” articles, I’ve updated the links in the sidebar. He’s already seen ROTS twice, and his tentative tally of reasons to hate ROTS is 82! He’s also promised to begin posting his article around June 6. I’ll post the link here when it’s ready.

Thanks to hours of seeing 404 error pages, I couldn’t really post anything yesterday. It wouldn’t have been my review, however. I’m still working on that, and wondering if I should see ROTS a third time.

To warm up my writing muscle (which I’m really going to need as I put together my review of ROTS), I’m going to tackle the last five keyword searches that brought people to my blog. Just about every referer nowadays is Google or Yahoo.

1) make lightsaber effects – I use various methods of doing lightsaber blades for my artwork. I even created a cheat for Photoshop Elements because a lot of these methods you find on the internet won’t completely work on Elements. Unfortunately, the link to the site I got my first instructions from is dead. As far as lightsaber effects on film…sorry, I can’t help. Film isn’t my medium.

2) why does count dooku, capture the emperor – it’s all a ruse. Personally, I think it’s a silly ruse. At too many places Palpatine (and his would-be rescuers) could have been killed. In the end, Palpy was saved, Anakin and Obi-Wan are heroes, Grievous gets away, prolonging the war, and the wheels of the Sith’s nasty little plan just keep on rolling.

3) palpatine is anakin’s father – makes me want to vomit. The only way that’s literally possible is if he had personally donated Anakin’s Y chromasome. But he didn’t. At least, I think he didn’t. Yuck.

4) yoda death scene – in ROTJ? Where he disappeared when he died? Using the secret taught to him from beyond the grave? Many headaches from this will I have.

5) emperor’s throne – yep, the chair Palpy was in on Grievous’ ship is similar to his throne in ROTJ. Compare that scene with him watching Anakin and Dooku fight to the scene in ROTJ with Luke and Vader fighting in front of him. Intentionally similar.

It was okay. I can’t really get a mental hold on it until I see it again; then I’ll post my review. If I had to rank it right now, I’d put it pretty close to ROTJ, and I rank that movie behind ESB and ANH.

…my best friend calls me saying she has two tickets for the 12:30pm showing of ROTS tomorrow, and she asked if I wanted to go. Hey, free ticket! Who am I to turn that down? I had intended to see it Monday afternoon, but I’ll probably still see it then. I got to go as a fan, or, at least, someone who doesn’t want the movie to suck. I got to behave myself.

I’m planning to sometime between now and Memorial Day weekend.

Reviews so far from the people I post with? A mixed bag. Gushers still gushed, bashers still bashed, some from both sides were either disappointed or surprised respectively. No wholesale mass conversion of bashers, as some gushers had loudly predicted.

How do I feel about it? I’m not sure. I’ve been reading the reviews mostly for entertainment purposes and not to make up my mind one way or the other.

Amid all the hyper-hype for ROTS, another event has gone largely unnoticed. Last weekend, UPN broadcast the last episode of Star Trek: Enterprise. For the first time in almost 18 years–a year and a half short of its 40th anniversary–there won’t be anymore first-run ST episodes. It’s a funeral that few people are showing up to. ST has been around longer than SW, was the first of the two to acquire a worldwide following, and the first to show its fatigue.

It rose like a phoenix in 1979 with The Motion Picture (no doubt spurred on by SW’s success) and began its run of 10 movies and, beginning in 1987, four TV series. I’m not sure when people started feeling that the franchise was beginning to run out of gas; I say it was starting to show part of the way through Deep Space Nine. The station-bound stories weren’t really all that exciting a lot of the time, so a ship (two ships, Borg-Busters both named Defiant) had to be trucked in to have adventures on. Things really heated up during the Dominion/Federation/Everybody Else War toward the end of the series, but once that was over, we went back into space with Voyager with, for the first time on a ST series, a female captain as the lead character. (The first female captain in any ST production was seen in The Voyage Home.) Then things really started to slide. In the middle of the second season, I found other things to watch in Voyager’s time slot. My watching of Enterprise was very spotty until recently. Man, I hate that opening theme song!

I had a great time with ST while it lasted, even during the reruns in the 70s with the cheesy sets, cheesier aliens, and Kirk’s gorilla appetite for anything in a short skirt. I still remember watching some of the animated series in 1973. I cried when Spock died in 1982. I was repulsed by the Borg Queen. I smiled in triumph when “Teflon™” Captain Picard rasped “there…are…four…lights!” at his Cardassian captors. I can’t think of any gul without putting “self-important” before the title, and I can’t resist describing any Vorta as “smarmy”. I had to watch whenever an episode went into Klingon culture. I hated Kai Winn and missed Kai Opaka and Vedek Bareil. I really liked the Holographic Doctor, and I wished Trip hadn’t died.

ST is one of the reasons I got interested in science fiction and, eventually, in writing it. ST and SW existed side-by-side for me. No war, no rivalry, no “this one is better than that one”. It was all good. And now, one right behind the other, they’re both closing the door and turning out the lights for good. ST didn’t go out with SW’s light and noise, but with a heart-heavy “can I rest now?”

Yes. You can rest now.

By this time, one day to go.

Not much time to think about ROTS since my site blew up. And Darth Real Life wants a chunk of my time, too. But I did find out that the other theater in town (the one I call the “sticky floor theater”) will also be showing the movie. It’s cheaper than the other newer place, plus I think a lot more people will be opting for the stadium seating and THX sound. Hopefully, when I go, there won’t be a lot of others to watch with me. But there’s got the be someone there. I don’t want to be the only screaming “you got to be kidding me!”

I was going to post the link to my new little archive site, but my bandwidth is being hit really hard right now (ROTS related), and I don’t have any excess to keep the whole thing from being shut down until next month’s allotment kicks in. So I took down the pages and images I think are attracting the search engines (deleted them, actually), and we’ll see if that does the trick. I hated doing that. For the future, I think I’m going to get a new webhost and pay for my space so I can get some added security features, like custom error pages and the ability to stop people from hotlinking to my avatars (which is also a problem). And I might finally get the darthsheba.com domain I’ve been thinking about for a long time.