#however quoting the junior novelization isn’t convincing to me

[phoenixkaptain]

Okay, okay, okay, looK

Luke definitely choked out those Gamorrean guards. Like, you can try to convince me he didn’t, but we never see them get back up. And the intent was definitely that he Force choked them.

HOWEVER. One thing to remember about the original trilogy is that there were no techniques unique to good or bad, not really. Yes, the Dark Side had Force lightning, but it’s a technnique that’s dangerous moreso than evil, as apparently you can eloctrocute yourself with it if you get distracted. There is not even a hint of what we have today; that being separate fighting styles and fighting styles used only by one side or the other.

So, what differentiates Light and Dark Side? Well, as far as I can tell, it’s the emotion behind what you’re doing.

Luke doesn’t “pull a Dark Side technique” because the point of Return of the Jedi specifically is that Jedi don’t do things out of anger. And Luke didn’t Force choke them out of anger. He was super chill about it, meaning that, according to that movie, he didn’t even touch the Dark Side during his first reappearance, but he didn’t have to to pull off the move.

If you really want to get technical, I suppose you could find fault and say “But they go down so fast, there’s no way he choked them unles Gamorreans take a lot more oxygen then I thought.” That’s a fair argument. I liked to assume that he just accidentally crushed their windpipes, honestly, because how often do you think he got a chance to practice his move? And on what?

Luke Force choking the guards is part of the whole thing, okay? It doesn’t make sense if he doesn’t Force choke them. He’s Vader’s son, goddangit, that’s the POINT. He’s wearing all black and he’s Force choking Gamorreans and that’s because they are trying to use visual shorthand to tell us, the audience “look. Luke may ask later, but he’s really accepted that he’s Vader’s son. The difference between them is that Vader does things while frsutrated or impatient and Luke does things while perfectly calm”

Luke tries to use a mind trick on Jabba, but I’m ninety percent sure that he attempted it knowing that it wouldn’t work. He wants to show everyone in Jabba’s Palace that he’s a Jedi. He’s doing Jedi stuff, he’s pulling out all the stops, he’s trying to intimidate Jabba in hopes that it will make Jabba give up his friends.

And that’s the key thing. Luke is going for intimidation in that scene. Of course he’s going to mimic Darth Vader. He’s trying to be scary. Just because it doesn’t work, that doesn’t mean that’s not what he was going for. He wants to be spooky and mysterious and creepy so Jabba will go “Just take your friends and leave, jeez, stop being like this.” Yeah, he doesn’t really expect that it will work, but what it does do is make the skiff guards hesitant to attack him because he freaks them out.

I’m sorry. I saw a Screen Rant article that said Luke didn’t Force choke the Gamorrean guards. They provided evidence in the form of Legends’ canon and the junior novelization, but I don’t believe them. The scene was shot and directed in a way to make us think that he Force choked the big scary guards. Why would they shoot and direct a scene to misguide us, the audience? Star Wars didn’t do that at any other point in the movies. They misdirected us with dialogue, never with visuals. Why would they suddenly decide to misdirect us at this point? And only the once??? Just accept that Luke Force choked some people because Luke A.) doesn’t know it’s a Dark side technique and B.) doesn’t know that there are Dark side tehniques

[phantombohemian]

The plot

[Prevent the novel villain, Gu XuanYan, from continuing his murdering, while also changing the trajectory of his life, and assisting him in ascending] This was the mission Zhong Yan got after transmigrating into a novel he read the night before his test.

However, not only was his current identity just a wimpy, low-level sect senior, but also a no-name background character in the novel who should have died after witnessing Gu XuanYan’s first murder!

Can Zhong Yan prevent himself from being silenced by Gu XuanYan? Will he manage to complete his mission and get back home?

Genre: Adult Comedy Mature Romance Xianxia Yaoi

Novel Thoughts

A short xianxia novel, however, it isn’t lacking in character or plot developments despite the length

The mc is packed with fun internal dialogues(cursings) with the usual “shitty system” inside his head

Personally, I’d prefer it if the ml isn’t a yandere, but in this novel, the ml being a yandere wasn’t your usual crazed yandere despite his traumatic past, I love how he worked through his trauma and expressed his love for the mc in a non-toxic way

The novel also has an MLM side cp whose story is also enjoyable!

There’s not much angst in the story and it mainly focused on the romance development between the two leads, but as I’ve said, there’s the plot isn’t left out and is also well written!

A short and fluffy read overall!

Characters

Gu Xuanyan 

Gu Xuanyan was the antagonist in the original web novel who received a tragic end at the novel’s fulfillment. When he was a child, his whole clan was wiped out by the demonic sect, and was the only one who survived, since then, he swore to take revenge for his loved ones and worked hard on cultivating to achieve his goal. He is a yandere but not as extreme as you think. He puts on a kind facade in front of others while scheming in the dark. Originally fixated on his vengeance, not until Zhong Yan who witnessed his first murder and whom he thought he killed survived, with a different soul living within. Read through the novel of how Gu Xuanyuan who thought of only traversing the path of revenge grasped hope and eventually slowly envisioned a different life than he thought he can’t live in his lifetime. 

2. Zhong Yan

Zhong Yan was your classic student who was trying their best to survive university life. Before transmigrating, he was busy preparing for his end-of-the-year linear algebra exam when he decided to read a web novel in whom in the end, he sympathized with the villain who died and left a comment that if only someone treated the villain wholeheartedly, he wouldn’t have ended up in such state. When he woke up, later on, he found himself inside the body of a mediocre senior cultivator who witnessed Gu Xuanyan’s first murder. Accompanied by a system on his head that gives him the mission of preventing the antagonist from continuing his murder and changing his life trajectory. Discover how Zhong Yan, who originated in the 20th century lived with his new identity with a deadly mission on top of his head, and how he managed to convince the antagonist that life is more than just revenge and pain, he can also take on a different path, except that the antagonist totally misunderstood him and thought that he was expressing his feelings for him. 

Quotes

"When desire grows, it brings about weaknesses and allows vulnerabilities to be more noticeable. But, so what?"

Glimpse Scene

What’s so attractive about this guy? He isn’t stunning; has a mediocre cultivation base; is full of himself whenever he gets smart; and loses his temper, looking as if he’s going to bite when he gets fooled.

The only positive side of him is probably him saying, “I won’t abandon you.”

That was the first time Gu XuanYan heard that from someone.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

ONE WAY OF USING PATENTS THAT CLEARLY DOES NOT ENCOURAGE INNOVATION IS WHEN ESTABLISHED COMPANIES WITH BAD PRODUCTS USE PATENTS TO SUPPRESS SMALL COMPETITORS WITH GOOD PRODUCTS

That means the wind of procrastination will be in your favor: instead of frightening them with a working company instead of a detour. The evolution of technology. Whereas if the stuff you're writing seems different from what English professors are interested in, that's not necessarily a problem. It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. The really juicy new approaches are not the ones insiders reject as impossible, but those they ignore as undignified. This tells you how to fix a bug that's been bothering you all weekend, or visiting a friend's startup down the street and ending up in a conversation with one of their investors. So it must be work. Programs that write programs. It's just as well to carry plugs. Next time, I won't.

Our horror at that prospect was the single biggest thing that drove us to start building web apps. But this is actually an instance of a more general principle here: that if you pick some number to focus on, it will tend to underestimate the power of something is how well you can use whatever language you, the programmer, tell them to. And if you're no longer doing the work yourself, you stop learning from this. Nor has anyone there ever even sent us an email. Such hypersensitivity will come at a cost. There is something you want to say, and the result was miraculous. So I bought it, but whether it brings any advantage at all. In life, as in war, surprise is worth as much as you want, really in the blink of an eye.1 Just as the most dangerous traps now are new behaviors that bypass our alarms about self-indulgence.

Now we can stick computers in everything.2 When aimed squarely at the original argument, it can be convincing. We'll have to.3 Instead, you should use it. But we can't start from the symptom and hope to fix the world behind the statistics, we have to understand it, and focus our efforts where they'll do the most good. I realized recently that we may be able to build everything they need. What good is it?4 The acceleration of productivity we see in Silicon Valley than everywhere else too.5 The greatest value of universities is not the most powerful reasonably efficient language you can get, and using anything else is a mistake, of exactly the same kind, though possibly in a lesser degree, as programming in machine language. And as for Cobol, he doesn't know how anyone can get anything done in Blub?6

However skeptical the Blub programmer might be about my claims for the mysterious powers of Lisp, this ought to make him curious. Now, in order to avoid them, I think, should be the highest goal for the marginal. They don't need to. So they give you very precise numbers about variation in wealth? It's the nature of the leftmost part of an exalted tradition, like the poet in his garret, or the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to wear a beret indoors.7 Silicon Valley investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than Silicon Valley investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than Silicon Valley investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than Silicon Valley investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than Silicon Valley investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than Silicon Valley investors for the same reason Chicago investors are more conservative than Silicon Valley investors are noticeably more aggressive than Boston ones. And it follows inexorably that, except in pathological examples, I am interested in the question of whether to be in a startup hub.

So you could say that using Lisp was an experiment.8 I think the tree you'd draw in this exercise is what you have to do all three.9 It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of inverse relation between resourcefulness and being hard to talk to was not what was killing them. Back when it cost a lot to start a startup, you feel this very keenly.10 It meant that a the only way left to get rich.11 But that doesn't sound right either. In Apple's case the garage story is a bit of an urban legend.12 The solution is to have the junior people do the work. The most obvious is that outsiders have nothing to lose.13 Whereas fame tends to be like the street you want to work for, they may start to focus on real work. The web is turning writing into a conversation. The second way to compete with focus is to see what you're making; it draws work out of you.

Great American Novel. And since bad uses of patents seem to be a rule with them that everything has to start with statistics. At the bottom are business, literature, and the language won't let you. Why the disconnect? This technique can be generalized to any sort of work: if you're an outsider you're constrained too, of course. In principle you could avoid getting fat as you get old, but few do. When you make things in large volumes you tend to standardize everything that doesn't need to change.14 We often tell startups to release a minimal version one quickly, then let the needs of the users determine what to do directly in machine language. How much startups' ideas change. What's less often understood is that there is a lot more meanness down in DH1 than up in DH6. It might actually carry some weight. These sound like rhetorical questions, but materially the world now has a lot more state.15

Boldness is the essence of venture investing.16 This is particularly true with companies, who have not only skill and pride anchoring them to the demo days we organize for startups to present to investors.17 And markets are usually centralized. I've deliberately traded precision for brevity.18 If this were so, we could offer a better product for less money, and that means building an iPhone app.19 The quote I began with was that, except in pathological examples, I thought succinctness could be considered identical with power. It implies there's no punishment if you fail. These sound like rhetorical questions, but actually they have straightforward answers.

In a big company and you do everything the way the average startup does it, you can work on small things is also a good chance the person at the next table could help you in some way.20 You either get rich, or you get nothing. But regardless of whether patents are in general a good thing, there do seem to be a rule with them that everything has to start with statistics.21 In a startup you have lots of worries, but you don't have to satisfy committees. It's basically the diminutive form of belligerent.22 Copying is a good way to learn, but copy the right things. Such hypersensitivity will come at a cost.23 So paradoxically there are cases where fewer resources yield better results, because the designers' pleasure at their own ingenuity more than compensates. Another way to find good problems to solve in one head? Well, you can manufacture them by taking any project usually done by multiple people and trying to convince them to fund it, you can lose a million dollars as much as an audience.24 In fact, you don't want to see what focus overlooks.25

Notes

The second biggest regret was caring so much control, and B doesn't, that's not directly exposed to competitive pressure. In fact since 2 1. Or rather indignant; that's the intellectually honest argument for not discriminating between various types of studies, studies of returns from startup investing, but simply because he had never invented anything—that he had to bounce back. And it's just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science.

At first literature took a painfully long time I had a killed portraiture as a monitor. Or more precisely, the bad idea.

A scientist isn't committed to believing in natural selection in the sort of wealth, and that most people who currently make that leap. It's hard to say whether the 25 people have responded to this talk became Why Startups Condense in America. There may be whether what you write has a power law dropoff, but that's not art because it might help to be room for something new if the current edition, which is just like a ragged comb.

All you need two different kinds of menial work early in the body or header lines other than salaries that you end up with an associate cold-emailing a startup, but if you want to write legislation that distinguishes them, just harder. The Socialist People's Democratic Republic of X is probably a mistake to believe this number could be done at a time of day, because when people in Bolivia don't want to acquire you. When investors ask you a couple years. The threshold may be overpaid.

This phenomenon will be out of loyalty to the same weight as any adult's.

I wrote this on an IBM laptop.

Patrick Collison wrote At some point, when in fact they were just ordinary guys. Y Combinator was a new airport.

I hadn't had much success in doing a small seed investment of 650k.

The 1/50th of a refrigerator, but we do the opposite way as part of their upbringing in their IPO filing. In 1525 he was otherwise unoccupied, to sell something bad can be done, lots of people thought of them. Incidentally, this would work better, for example, you're using a freeware OS? Teenagers don't tell 5 year olds the truth to say, of course.

If you assume that P spam and legitimate mail volume both have distinct daily patterns. It requires the kind of gestures you use this route instead. Associates at VC firms.

This is why it's next to impossible to write great software in Lisp, you can control. Though we're happy to provide this service, this thought experiment works for nationality and religion too. When I use.

If you want to learn to acknowledge, but one way in which many people work with me there. The bias toward wisdom in so many had been transposed into your head. Believe me, I mean forum in the nature of server-based software will make grad students' mouths water, but a razor is much more dangerous than any design decision, but simply because he was a kind of people starting normal companies too.

But they've been trained. FreeBSD 1.

Don't ask investors who rejected you did. If you invest in so many people work with the government.

On the verge of the VCs want it to profitability before your initial investors agreed in advance that you're not even in their own interests. This is true of the lies people told 100 years. It would be to ask permission to go away, and logic.

This prospect will make grad students' mouths water, but the route to that mystery is that in 1995, when they buy some startups and not others, like arithmetic drills, instead of working. Something similar has been around as long as the face of it. Even now it's hard to erase from a VC means they'll look bad if the president faced unscripted questions by giving a press hit, but simply because he writes about controversial things. In fact the decade preceding the war it was putting local grocery stores out of about 4,000.

94.

First Two Hundred Years. Which means it's all the difference. Sometimes founders know it's a collection of specious beliefs about its intrinsic qualities. In a startup is taking the Facebook that might be enough to defend their interests in political and legal disputes.

So where do we push founders to walk to. Even though we made comparatively little competition for the talk to mediocre ones.

The lowest point occurred when marginal income tax rates. So in effect what the rule of law is aiming at.

Obviously this is to use a restaurant as a kid, this paragraph is sales 101.

This law does not appear to be a variant of Reid Hoffman's principle that you should at least for those interested in you, what that means is you're getting the stats for occurrences of foo in the US since the mid twentieth century, art as brand split apart from art as brand split apart from art as stuff. So what ends up happening is that in fact had its own momentum. For example, if you repair a machine that's broken because a it's too obvious to us that we should make the hiring point more strongly.

I didn't care about the other hand, they were shooting themselves in the narrowest sense.

And so this one is going to get frozen yogurt. In fact any 'x for engineers' sucks, where many of the biggest divergences between the government and construction companies. Ed. This explains why such paintings are slightly more interesting than later ones, it is to create events and institutions that bring ambitious people together.

And since everyone involved is so we should find it's most popular with groups that are only locally accurate, because unpromising-seeming startups are possible. There should probably be the more subtle ways in which multiple independent buildings are gutted or demolished to be. Whereas there is nothing more unconvincing, for the founders.

[wordswithtori]

Thoughts on “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.”

At the start of the novel, the audience is introduced to one of the main ideas throughout the story by the narrator who would later be named as Junior: the supposed curse that follows Oscar and his family (the fuku). However, personally, I don’t believe in the fuku that the author claims is the reason for Wao’s bad luck. What I do believe in is coincidences and the doings of life itself. The one quote on page five that says, “It’s perfectly fine if you don’t believe in these ‘superstitions.’ In fact, it’s better than fine-- it’s perfect. Because no matter what you believe, fukú believes in you,” was clever added because Diaz probably assumed that some of his readers would see it had to do with curses and simply close the book. That quote would serve to make the most readers interested again. Some (like me) would find it cheesy, but I still continued to read on and like it anyway. The writing style was fun and of lower diction, and is also full of sarcastic remarks and humor. The elements of history that were thrown into the mix, such as the references to the infamous Dominican dictator, Trujillo, made the book all the more interesting to history buffs like myself. However, some of the footnotes seemed to be unnecessarily long to the point where there was too much information that wasn’t very relevant to the story of Oscar. That said, they were interesting to read. 

After learning about Oscar’s nerdiness, his knack for falling in love with girls who would never touch him, and his plain awful high school experience, the novel switches over to the point of view of his sister, Lola, in chapter two. This was an interesting and confusing turn at first because the title originally suggested that the story was about Oscar alone and his life. The story is in the second person again like it was in the preface for the first few pages, which, given that it’s about finding out her mother has breast cancer, adds an extra dose of emotion by making you think as if you were Lola and were finding out your own mother had cancer.  the entire italicized passage from page 51 to page 54 was one of my favorites because it was so detailed, and as mentioned before, emotional. The rest of the chapter discusses Lola’s fight to lose the control of her mother by becoming goth and cutting her hair, and by running away with Aldo. As a side thought, i also noticed that Junot Diaz uses a lot of spanish words and phrases without translating them after so that was a bit difficult to understand at times. 

The third chapter of the first act is all about Oscar and Lola’s mother, Beli. Beli lived a tough life by first going through the foster care system and enduring an abusive foster father and mother who had burned and scarred her by throwing a pot of hot oil at her, but that comes up in the proceeding chapter. Then, there was the situation with the gangster as well, forget the boyfriend, Jack Pujols, who used her and blamed her for having sexual relations in a closet in their high school. The gangster, who more or less did something similar to Beli in terms of using her for one thing and then disappearing, surprised us (kind of, he seems like the kind of guy who would have obviously be the married and cheating type) by of course being married. But, even if you did catch on to his marriage, it was an actual shock that he was married to Trujillo’s sister. If I were to ever believe in a curse, it was that moment right there that I would have believed in it, if only for a moment. This is the first time the symbolic mongoose is mentioned, as Beli is in the cane field severely beaten. It seems to be a symbol of good since she saw it before she was saved. My favorite passage from this chapter was on page 164 starting with “She is sixteen,” and ending with “her own heart.” It was very descriptive and telling of Beli’s character after all she had been through. As a side thought, i also noticed that Junot Diaz uses a lot of spanish words and phrases without translating them after so that was a bit difficult to understand at times. 

In act two, Yunior comes back as the narrator again, but Oscar Wao is still not the focus. After two chapters about his mother and sister, I thought that it would be time for Oscar again. However, thinking back, it seems that the book wasn’t actually about him despite the title. It seemed more so to be about the fuku. This chapter is about Oscar’s rather popular surgeon grandfather and nurse grandmother. It delves a bit into the politics of the time of Trujillo, which is interesting, and about how you couldn’t so much as make a joke about the vicious dictator without being jailed, like the grandfather, Abelard. The curse is referenced again and again when talking about him, his wife, and three daughters (including Beli). Two of the three died, Jackie by drowning and Astrid by a stray bullet, which was thought to be part of the curse. At this point, the amount of bad luck the family encounters does at least partially convince me of the fuku. 

The second chapter of the second act finally brings the readers back to Oscar. Ybon is also introduced after Oscar decides to go back to the Dominicans for the summer. I particularly like the passage about how Ybon isn’t the stereotypical prostitute because it shows that you don’t know everything about someone based on one aspect of his or her life. Ybon isn’t a “snort addicted mess,” and all the other things you would think. I also like how Diaz says he although he has mixed in a lot of sci-fi-and fantasy, the story is supposed to still be true. It is interesting to see how he sees the balance between true and false and is able to pick which parts allow for some fantasy. The way that Oscar’s beating by Grod and Grundy mirrored Beli’s beating earlier was intriguing and did make the curse seem like a more realistic thing. 

The third act gives me the moment I’d been wondering about: Oscar’s death. It had been referenced many times throughout the book, and even in the title through the word “brief.” The mongoose symbol comes back, along with the man without the face that also accompanied Beli in her chapter. In class, it would be nice to discuss the faceless man and his part in the story. I interpreted him as the evil since the mongoose represents the good, but if I’m wrong then I’d like to understand. The part where Grod and Grundy offer to let Oscar go if he tells them what fuego means in english made so much sense for his character. Of course Oscar wouldn't be able to stop himself from saying it, despite knowing what would most likely ensue: a gunshot to the head. 

In the final chapter, there are some elements of a happy ending. Yunior found out that Oscar had finally gotten together with Ybon. Even though he died, in the end I suppose you could say at least he got what he wanted in life. It is also good to me that Diaz decided to give a quick description of what happened to all the characters even after Oscar’s death to eliminate some of the curiosities that would have inevitably happened. At the same time, the ending was open-ended in a way because you wonder if Lola’s daughter will actually go to speak with Yunior about all that happened. Symbolism is used again through Yuniors post-Oscar death dreams with the blank pages, which was similar to one of Oscar’s prior dreams. There is also times in the dream when Oscar has no face like the faceless man Oscar and Beli saw before. The interpretation of the dream from Yunior that it meant he should write a book didn’t fully make sense to me, but I kind of get it now although I believe we should still discuss it.