THE LAST (TIME I EVER POST ABOUT THE LAST) JEDI

SPOILER ALERT! Oh, hell, no one ever reads this. Luke dies. Fuck you all.

I went and saw The Last Jedi because I am genetically required to, having been a child when Star Wars came out in 1977. I didn't like it, and I will enumerate the reasons why without calling everyone who liked it an asshole on Twitter. I don't care what you think.

1. Kylo Ren is a terrible character, horribly miscast and badly written. Speaking of Twitter, the hilarious Twitter feed Emo Kylo Ren perfectly captures how risible this role is, and every time poor Adam Driver came on the screen, I thought of this feed. Driver is quite simply in the wrong movie. I like him as an actor and in contemporary roles, especially, he is excellent. He's a perfect Brooklyn hipster in "Girls," for example. He doesn't belong in a sci-fi space opera, nor does this stupid character. Kylo Ren should not be a callow, tempestuous 20-something idiot. To really fill Vader's shoes, he needs to be more ominous and ruthless and played by someone who can convey that sort of dread.

2. I do not care what happens to Poe and Finn. They mean nothing to me. They are one-dimensional, have no charisma, no motivation, and I don't know why they are in this movie or the last one. Again, Oscar Isaac and John Boyega are very good actors, but they have nothing to work with here. The characters are beyond under-written. They are ciphers.

3. Re: number 2, who the hell are Rose and Paige Tico? Why are random nobodies being inserted as love interests and crucial plot points? This is a saga, and it's in episode 8. This is not the time for this sort of thing. Also, Rose's line "I want to put my fist through this lousy, beautiful town" is perhaps the dumbest thing ever said by anyone ever.

4. It's too long. Get over yourself, Rian Johnson. Bring it in under two hours, already.

5. The story here is about Rey, who is excellently cast and written, and her relationship to Luke and the Jedi and Kylo. Mark Hamill was born to play the role of Luke and he is fantastic in it, and Daisy Ridley is a revelation, even more than she was in The Force Awakens. Why couldn't we have gotten a few more scenes with their dynamic and infinitely less with the characters that mean nothing to anyone?

6. I'm tired of the Force and all the dumb things it can and can't do, and nothing about the mechanics of space flight or space weaponry or space in general make any fucking sense at all in this film. It's exhausting. They are just making shit up as they go along, which is their prerogative, I guess, but I don't have to like it.

7. We need more Chewie, C-3PO and R2D2 to connect us to the earlier films. Being droids and an alien of indeterminate lifespan, these are essentially timeless characters you can insert into any scenario, and they should have been central to the plot instead of mere adjuncts. Plus, everybody loves them! Why are you keeping them in the background?

8. Who is Snoke? The main villain just appears from nowhere and we should be afraid of him because he looks mean and is powerful? That is just shit plot construction. And then they cut him in half out of nowhere. Completely fucked up, and also, a near shot for shot copy of what happened to Palpatine in Return Of The Jedi, except for the actual method of death. Lazy.

I liked Laura Dern, and of course, Carrie Fisher was great. Benicio Del Toro should get his own spinoff. Now go back to writing your Rose/Finn/Rey threesome fanfic.

GASSED

Here I am, in my chosen profession, staying up all night in a gas plant in the southeast corner of New Mexico. How did it come to this?

In 2014, I joined up with the manufacturer of the hardware and software that I had spent the last 20+ years getting familiar with as a customer. It was a godsend, really, since I had spent the previous year working for a third-rate outfit that was essentially a cult of personality of the person who founded it, doing crap work with crap people for crap customers who treated us like dogs. I only took that job because my previous previous company was trying to relocate me to Salt Lake City, which is, in the most charitable description I can come up with, a city.

So, anyway, coming to my current employer seemed like a good idea at the time. My first project, which I took over in the middle, was being run into the ground by the project manager and ended up making him something other than a project manager. None of that was my fault. I worked very hard to deliver that project and it came in on time, albeit way over budget because of all the freebies the customer extracted from the no-longer-a-project-manager due to his incompetence. Again, none of that was my fault.

However, I think I somehow got the reputation of not being able to lead a project, because I haven't led one since. I keep being given this flotsam and jetsam of tasks that nobody else wants to do. Most of this detritus involves gas plants. Gas plants are little cookie cutter collections of tanks, columns, compressors and other equipment that some licensing firm designed 50 years ago. They sit in the middle of nowhere (Helllllooooo, Hobbs, New Mexico!) on various natural gas pipelines. Their purpose is to distill natural gas into its component parts, namely ethane, propane and butane, which is then sold either in trucks or sent back into other pipelines for use in other plants.

These plants are dirt simple. And I do mean dirt. Once they are built, they require only a handful of people to run them. Most of the people involved are support people, and since there is little support needed, the people are rotated among anywhere from five to ten gas plants in a 500-mile radius. This fact makes it incredibly frustrating to work with them. They will call us to accomplish some task that they can't quite handle, but for which a person like me needs only a few days if that to complete. The problem is that since the technical people are so scattered and nomadic, their ability to create professional documents is minimal, and the time they can give to support whatever task they want us to do and answer our questions is equally scant. They will usually hand us half-completed or practically illegible piping and instrumentation drawings (P&IDs, which are the lifeblood of any project and need to be complete and correct for a successful job), and then maybe a Word or Excel file that explains (poorly) what needs to be done. We are told to show up at a certain date and time, and when we do, we'll have a quick meeting where they try to explain what they want. Then, in almost every case, the contact person jumps in his truck and drives to another gas plant somewhere, leaving me there to fend for myself. The sites themselves are nasty, with old buildings that haven't been updated in at least 30 years, dirt parking lots (did I mention the dirt?), stray dogs running around, and highly variable weather. They are arduous to travel to and the nearby towns where I stay the night are not exactly tourist havens (Hellllllooooo, Midland, Texas!).

This particular job is a bit different, as this plant has decided to do a proper project and upgrade their control equipment. This is the kind of job that really pays our bills, and our supervisors pay a lot of attention and throw a lot of resources at it to make sure it gets done right. That's where I come in. The lead engineer designed the upgrade and went through the staging and testing at our office and made sure it all worked properly, and then was sent out here to turn it over to the customer. For whatever reason that I can't fathom, she begged off having to stay through the start-up, and the customer asked us to provide another resource. C'est moi.

I showed up last Thursday after getting a call from my boss at 7:30 am to book a flight at 12:40 pm that day (good planning, assholes!), and when I got here, they threw a curveball at me by telling me that the hardware they had tested in the office and tested again here suddenly wasn't working properly and that I might have to completely redesign part of the software as a workaround. Again, why the fucking lead wasn't here doing this, I have no idea. If I was the lead, you can bet your ass I would stay with the job, but nobody asked me to be the lead. In any case, the service guys fixed the hardware problem and I ended up just sitting there watching. Then, the next day, I found out that the lead simply didn't bother to complete a task during staging and I was forced to dig into it and try to figure it out. I fought with it for hours, telling the customer geniuses that have swarmed this job from various gas plants that the damned thing looked like it wasn't hooked up right. Six hours later, they finally decided to go out in the plant and check, and what do you know? The damned thing wasn't hooked up right.

Somewhere in there, the customer decided that they had enough of their people to cover days, and I needed to come in at night. FUCK!!!! I hate working nights. Nothing happens and your sleep schedule gets all fucked up for a week. Which brings me to now. They e-mailed in a panic at about 5 pm saying that their software licensing wasn't working. I was supposed to go in at 7 pm, but I called our company technical support to get their advice and then came in a little early to check out the problem. When I got here, suddenly everything was working fine. I don't exactly know what happened, but I'm sure it was some stupid thing they were doing. I also determined from the service guys that the software license they thought they had on one server was never there and didn't belong there. Geniuses.

Three more hours to go, and then another night of uselessness tomorrow. I need a new job. Again.

THIS IS ASSUMING TRUMP DOESN'T BAN BASEBALL FOR BEING "SAD!"

The Cubs are returning World Champs! And we have the stupidest human on Earth as President! I feel like those two go together in terms of things I never hoped to see in my lifetime. What fresh horrors will 2017 bring? Let's get to it.

NL EAST

The Nationals will be expecting big crowds in DC for a few years from people actively avoiding cable news. The Mets have the Big Five! Wait, the Big Four! Wait, Robert Gsellman? Seth Lugo? A spot start by Gabriel Ynoa, maybe? Oy. In Miami, Giancarlo Stanton of the Marlins will hit a ball to Cuba, which will prompt a "Bay Of Pigs" type nuclear standoff involving Twitter. The rebuilding process - sorry, I mean rebuiliding "thingy" - in Philadelphia will propel the Phillies all the way to a slightly more tenable 4th place. Cobb County's Braves have gone with a youth movement (provided you are a Galapagos Island tortoise) by signing Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey. The new park will not come equipped with a radar gun readout, I would hope.

NL CENTRAL

What can I say about the Cubs that the Murray brothers haven't slurred into various iPhones the last 6 months? The rest of the NL is hoping for some kind of superbug outbreak on the North Side of Chicago. The Cardinals, meanwhile, were last seen at a DNA sequencing lab. They also signed Dexter Fowler away from the Cubbies just in case they can't weaponize avian flu or whatever. In Pittsburgh, Pirates fans are saddened at the sudden ending of the short-lived Joey Terdoslavich era, whose last name sounds like something that goes on a Primanti Brothers sandwich, or is the result of a Primanti Brothers sandwich. The Brewers play baseball professionally, it is rumored. Bronson Arroyo was briefly back for the Reds! That tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about the Reds!

NL WEST

The Dodgers have so much money, they are slowly acquiring ex-Phillies in some kind of sick parlor game and still winning. Up the coast, the Giants have picked up Mark Melancon, and will be retiring Sergio Romo to a boutique slider farm up in Napa Valley. Nolan Arenado, DJ LeMahieu, Carlos Gonzalez, and Charlie Blackmon will be learning how to pitch for the Rockies this year because, why the hell not? The Padres GM A.J. Preller has installed software on loan from Wall Street that will execute 1,000 microtrades per second. To what end, I have no idea. In Phoenix, the D'Backs are agitating for a new stadium because, one would guess, the pool in the current one is mostly pee? Fresh water *is* expensive there.

East Champ : Nationals
Central Champ : Cubs
West Champ : Dodgers

Wild cards: Mets, Cardinals

Mets beat Cardinals

Cubs beat Mets
Nationals beat Dodgers

Cubs beat Nationals

AL EAST

Chris Sale changed footwear and will be making his famously violent sartorial critiques for the Red, not the White, Sox this year. Luckily, they haven't changed uniforms in Boston since before Whitey Bulger was wearing a onesie. The Blue Jays re-signed Jose Bautista, hoping he will work on his jab for the rematch with Rougie Odor. Aroldis Chapman is back with the Yankees. Bombers fans count this as their 27th and a half World Championship. The Orioles got 47 homers from Mark Trumbo last year but it didn't help because he was blacklisted. No wait, that was Dalton Trumbo. But the blacklist will be coming back, that much is certain. The Rays traded away Drew Smyly. Now, nothing much at the Trop will be smiley.

AL CENTRAL

The Team in Cleveland whose name should be changed got it together for a Series run, only to be the answer to a trivia question 108 years in the making. They are now the overall droughtmeisters in all of MLB. Theo Epstein is reportedly shopping for homes in Shaker Heights. The Royals big move this off-season was to trade their closer Wade Davis to the Cubs for underachieving outfielder Jorge Soler. I think they are taking the expression "to the victor go the spoils" too literally. Michael Fulmer, former Mets farmhand, won Rookie Of The Year and almost won the Cy Young for the Tigers. If I were the GM in Detroit, I would get a good Tommy John surgeon in my contact list is all I'm saying. Barack Obama returns to being the most famous civilian White Sox fan in America, at least until his extradition to Kenya is complete. The Twins finally went outside the organization for a GM. Unfortunately, he is not named Roger Dorn, who led the Twins to their most recent memorable (albeit fictional) season in 1998's "Major League: Back To The Minors".

AL WEST

Rougie Odor, his brother, Rougie Odor, and the rest of the Rangers will try to make another title run in one of their final years in a perfectly good stadium that will be cashiered for a stadium that had better be the cure for cancer at the price tag it's costing. My hometown Astros have Carlos Beltran back and have removed Tal's Hill, the feature that, along with Adam Wainwright's curveball, were the two worst things to ever happen to Beltran's knees. The Mariners had Mallex Smith for an hour. His greatness will not rub off. Or his lack of greatness will. Your choice. With Mark Davis moving the Raiders to Las Vegas, The Athletics have O.co Coliseum nearly all to themselves again. This includes fans, but not whatever creatures surface when the dugouts flood. The Angels will be signing Emma Stone to a long-term contract after the "La La Land" star won the Best Actress Oscar. I mean, it literally could not hurt.

East Champ : Red Sox
Central Champ : Indians
West Champ : Rangers

Wild cards: Blue Jays, Astros

Astros beat Blue Jays

Indians beat Astros
Rangers beat Red Sox

Rangers beat Indians

World Series: In a four game sweep not attended by a single Murray brother or even Eddie Vedder, the Cubs will repeat by trouncing the Rangers after Donald Trump deports both Rougie Odors after claims surface on Breitbart.com that they faked their birth certficates and that both of them are actually named Barack Hussein Obama.

FACTS HAVE NO LIFE

So, as per my recent post, she didn't make it by a hair's breadth, but lost by less than that. Fuck.

We have seen quite an acceleration of my (Grand?) Unified Theory since Dipshit's election, as almost every major media outlet has decried the end of facts. With a Strongman in power, we will see an end to democracy maybe before 2020. I don't really see any other way. No one can agree on anything, and conspiracy theories are being accepted almost literally as gospel on a daily basis. No government by/for/of the people can possibly exist that way. The basis of such a system is actionable information that connects to reality in some tangible way, and if the National Security Advisor is convinced that Hillary Clinton is running a child pornography ring out of the non-existent basement of a pizza joint in DC, and millions of citizens agree with him, the system is irrevocably broken.

To expand on my theory and to explain it in a different way, I came up with a corollary regarding information as it relates to the act of publishing. To begin, we look at the pre-Gutenberg era of human history. In this era, information was either passed down orally or, later, written down in longhand on papyrus and laboriously copied by monks or other learned folks. The information consisted largely of folklore, origin stories, or religious texts. The Greeks, Romans, Chinese and others also did amazing work in math, science, literature, and philosophy that lasts to this day because of the vast reach of their empires. After Rome and its final ancient worldwide empire fell, there was a period of 1000 years of the Dark Ages where relatively few new published manuscripts appeared and a great deal of information became lost to history (fortunately, some of it survived). The nature of information during this period was such that if it appeared in a text, it was generally thought to be true, even though a lot of it was completely fabricated, and most people didn't have access to the rare scientific or mathematical texts. People did have access to the religious texts like the Torah, Koran and Bible and fervently believed the religious texts and considered them the words of God. For any information not covered by the texts, they believed whatever they experienced in their own lives or were taught by leaders in their community.

In 1439, Gutenberg invented movable type and ushered in the next era of human experience, the Renaissance. With the printing press, anyone could publish information, but there was a significant barrier to publishing. You needed to have money or backing from a group of people to pay for use of a press and there had to be a compelling reason for the information to be published, that being either a profit motive or because the information was deemed too important not to publish. The Renaissance proceeded apace as this torrent of new information came into being and people spent the next few centuries sorting it all out and creating new technology, with each advancement building on the last. During this period, information that was published was generally accepted to be true because of the inherent barriers to publishing. This will probably go down as the "Truth Period" in human history, since this will be the only period when such barriers existed and the technology was sufficient for widespread dissemination of information.

Then, in 1989 Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web bringing us into our current age, which we have deemed, almost ironically at this point, the Information Age. The Web and the greater internet led to the ability for anyone to publish anything that could be accessed by anyone else in the world. The inherent barriers to publishing had been lowered significantly, and became increasingly minuscule over the next 25 years, to the point where anyone with a cell phone could publish in real time. In effect, and to almost everyone's surprise, the internet has now created a new "Dark Age". The old Dark Ages were characterized by a lack of good information due to the limited ability to publish. The new Dark Age is characterized by an overabundance of trivial, maliciously fabricated, or simply wrong information that completely overwhelms good information, and which is caused by the fact that anyone can create information at any time.

So, what next? Unless this new Dark Age is reversed, the world will go back to the old sacred texts, or possibly new superstitions that have arisen since the previous Dark Ages. This is why we are seeing right-wing parties taking over in Europe and the rise of Mr. Disphit in this country. The only things people can rely in in this new environment are religion, folklore and their own experience, which includes outrageous conspiracy theories pushed by bad actors that reinforce their worldview. Just as in the original Dark Ages, xenophobia and isolationism will take root and flourish. The institutions of international trade and cooperation will gradually, or in some cases suddenly, be dismantled. Wars, as we saw in the previous Dark Ages, are almost inevitable, and now that we have nuclear weapons and all manner of powerful conventional weapons at our disposal, they will be infinitely worse than before.

What can be done? One solution could be as simple as creating a new domain name for legitimate journalism, say ".jrn." Just as governments only get .gov, militaries only get .mil, and colleges only get .edu, ICANN could develop a system where only legitimate news-gathering organizations that follow strict fact-checking, correction, and journalistic ethics guidelines are allowed to get a .jrn domain. This domain would signify to all users that certain barriers have been overcome for this information to be published. Obviously, some bad actors would get through, but ICANN could set up a feedback system so that any .jrn organizations who violate the rules will have the domain name stripped. Also, as we've seen, those who are prone to propagating and believing conspiracy theories will simply deem this scheme as part of the conspiracy, but since a vast majority of people aren't prone to this thinking, it will be a way to isolate and minimize the effects of the tiny minority that do. In addition, Google, Facebook, and Twitter could play a huge role by blocking or algorithmically downgrading links from non-.jrn news sources.

It's not the answer but it's a small step in the right direction. After that, I have no idea.