cellio: (Default)

The premise of Stowaway, a new movie from Netflix, as shown in the teasers: a crew of three leaves for a two-year mission to Mars, and after departure discover an injured worker from the launch pad onboard -- not really a stowaway in that he didn't plan for this, but there he is. But the safety margins don't account for an extra person.

I immediately thought of "The Cold Equations", a classic SF short story. It seemed clear that there could not be a happy ending, but I was curious which of the several possible outcomes we'd get. IMO they chose the wrong one.

Spoilers below.

spoilers )

cellio: (Default)

I'm never going to look at my cat the same way again. Just saying...

cellio: (sleepy-cat)

A friend of ours organized a private showing of Guardians of the Galaxy 2 for 60 or so of us this morning. (Apparently if you show up with enough people and don't take away a prime showing time, some theatres will actually do this. Our showing was at 10:30AM.) We haven't seen the first movie, but we wanted to go for the social aspect at least. Reading the plot synopsis of the first one on Wikipedia was sufficient to be able to follow this one. We probably missed some in-jokes, based on when people were laughing when we weren't, but that's ok. Groot (Groot II? Groot Jr?) was very entertaining, and they had some fun schtick with him in the credits. (Do watch the closing credits.)

Instead of tickets we were given buttons, each of which had one of the characters. I didn't know these characters in advance, so I traded my "blue guy" for a "cute raccoon". My comics-reading friends tolerate me anyway. :-)


In completely other news... one of those "Jewish things" you might occasionally hear about is pidyon haben, the redemption of the firstborn. The idea is that firstborn sons "should" serve in the temple, but God instead assigned that duty to the tribe of Levi. Nonetheless, if a woman's first-born child is a male, the father needs to "redeem" the child by paying a kohein (a priest, a subset of Levi) a few silver coins. There's a ritual for it, which I have never seen.

The torah commands this not just for sons but also for certain first-born livestock. I remember, back when I first learned about this, asking a friend who is a kohein, "so, in principle if I have livestock I can make you take my first-born goat instead of paying you for it?". Funny, but he was reluctant to give me his shipping address after that. But anyway, this is a real thing (pidyon peter chamor), but most of us don't have livestock and never see it. But it's a mitzvah. So I learned today that a local organization has purchased three pregnant donkeys with the specific goal of performing this mitzvah. Two have already given birth to female offspring (and this only applies to males), but there's still one more chance. This sounds neat. (I do not know if the baby donkey is required to be present for the transaction or if it stays on the farm.)


Readers who use source-control systems might be interested in this article about Git usability. The graph of the Git learning curve is spot-on. This is timely for me, as I am in charge of migrating our documentation group from SVN to Git and, in the process, establishing a sane branching model.

cellio: (mars)
We saw Arrival this afternoon and quite enjoyed it. No spoilers in this post, though I can't make any promises about comments.

The movie is based on the short story "The Story of Your Life" by Ted Chiang. Even if I hadn't heard positive things about the movie, I might well have gone out of extreme curiosity about how they would translate the story to film. The short story is a thinky, introspective tale with a decent amount of linguistics as a core part of the story. Linguistics, unlike physical sciences, doesn't translate as easily to the screen (i.e. it doesn't explode). So the movie tells a slightly different story, with some different focuses, and that's ok. It's a good, solid movie that shows us truly alien aliens, all-too-human humans, and a linguist and a physicist who take center stage in a first-contact situation. The physicist is there to try to learn their science; the linguist is there to figure out how to communicate with them when there is no shared language upon which to build. (They could have afforded to spend a few minutes less on the visual effects to introduce the aliens.)

The alien language is very cool. And it reveals one of the things that makes them alien. Learning the language entails learning some of that alien-ness, too.

The linguist, Dr. Louise Banks, is the point-of-view character through whom we see everything else. It's nice to see linguistics get some love in popular fiction. (And I also learned a thing about the Sanskrit word for war.) I wish the character had come across as strong in the movie as she did in the book; it took a while for her to find her stride. The main story is interspersed with flashes into other times in her life, and that's all I'll say about that because I promised no spoilers.
cellio: (baueux-tardis)
We went to see the second Hobbit movie today. Now we already knew, of course, from (a) the fact that it's a trilogy and (b) seeing the first movie, that there was going to be a lot of extra stuff. Even so, I found myself wondering if as much as a quarter of this movie was in the book, or if my memory is faulty.

A visualization I would really like to see (and see updated when the third movie comes out): a "timeline" showing elapsed film time (not plot time), with a set of (discontinuous) lines or bars representing segments that are in the book. I want to know not just how much of the movie is in the book but where and for how long those stretches run. So, for example, the first bar wouldn't start until about 25 minutes into the first movie (as I recall), because all that preamble stuff was new.

Can we get the XKCD guy to do this? This seems like it would be right up his alley.

I'm not picking on the movies (well, maybe a little, but I'll still see the third one so it can't be that bad). I'm just curious, but not nearly enough of a fan to do the data-collection myself.

(I am assuming that the movies are a superset of the book, meaning there's nothing in the book but not in the movies. Is that assumption correct?)
cellio: (B5)
It's funny the things that do and don't trigger suspension-of-disbelief problems for me. I enjoy speculative fiction -- science fiction, fantasy, alternate history, etc. This means accepting some basic premises -- faster-than-light travel, teleportation, magic, time travel, or whatever. I'm totally cool with all that.

I had two recent experiences with other factors in such stories.

First, last night I finally saw Looper (Netflix: last year's movies this year, which is fine with me). I enjoyed it in general (the ending moved it from "ok" to "I liked that"), but some of the implementation details gave me pause. (Everything I'm about to say is revealed in the first ten minutes of the movie.) The basic idea is that "the mob" in the future sends people they want to kill back in time 30 years to have hired assassins do the deed and dispose of the bodies in the past -- easier to get away with. That's fine. But the assassins know that they aren't going to be allowed to live past that point in the future -- you get 30 years of high pay and then at some point the guy sent back is going to be you and you "close the loop" by killing him. Ok, I can work with that.

So...why does the future mob need assassins in the past? Why not just send bodies back? Or if the time-travel device only works with live people, then -- given that we've seen them land very precisely in geo-space and time -- why not send them into a live volcano? And if they need assassins, why not go back 100 years and then not have to worry about them catching up?

As I said, I enjoyed the movie -- but I couldn't help wondering about such obvious questions, which could have been addressed with a few sentences of dialogue but weren't, while at the same time accepting the time-travel premise just fine. Maybe I'm weird.

In a similar vein, I recently finished reading The Domesday Book by Connie Willis, which coincidentally also involves time-travel. In this case they're sending a historian back to the middle ages for direct observation. She's got an implanted recording device, something like a universal translator (also implanted)... and neither a homing beacon (should they need to rescue her) nor a beacon she can drop at the rendezvous point (matched up to an implanted detector). The history department has budget for a time-travel net but not homing beacons? Bummer. (I realize that this would totally mess up the plot of the book.) Also, apparently in the future they only have land-lines. I enjoyed the book (which I read because of the song (YouTube, lyrics)), but I couldn't help noticing.

I guess it's the little things that catch my eye.

Les Mis

May. 6th, 2013 10:55 pm
cellio: (mandelbrot)
I never got around to seeing the Les Mis movie in the theatre, but I watched it on DVD last night. (Remember when we had to wait a year or more, rather than a few months, for a movie to come out on DVD? My, how times have changed.)

It appears that my standards for musicality, for a musical, are higher in a film than they are on a stage. On the stage you get one shot, and sometimes you have to sing in challenging postures (like while lying down or leaning over), and you have to account for the acoustics of the hall. None of these considerations apply on film. So while I enjoyed many aspects of the movie, particularly being able to see details of gesture and facial expression and setting that I would never be able to see on a stage, in the end I was disappointed because the singing was not, in general, as good as I had hoped it would be. I've seen three live productions, and all had stronger singers. So I'm disappointed; I guess I expected that to be even better in the movie. I'm not saying the singing was poor; most of it was quite serviceable, and Javert and Marius were consistently good. Oh well.

Every time I see this show my appreciation of Javert as a tragic character increases. Here we have someone who is so bound up in a worldview as to be harmful, yet he doesn't come across as a nut-case as sometimes happens.

One question: in every production I've seen (including the movie), the child at the barricade has a thick, exaggerated accent (which I would call Cockney were this not set in France). What's up with that?

cellio: (western-wall)
I've been learning a lot and it's going to take a while to write it all up -- certainly not before I get home. So in the meantime, some shorter bits:

Read more... )

cellio: (avatar)
We went to see The Hunger Games this afternoon. I have read the first of the three books. I thought the movie was a good treatment of the book; they missed some opportunities but they added some nice bits too. (I don't think the rest of this post contains any spoilers that weren't in the trailer.)

The Rue plot in the book was very powerful, and I was disappointed that it was so highly abbreviated in the movie. I understand that a movie can't contain everything in the book and still be a civilized length, and they did a good job of trimming in general, but this one stood out as a misfire.

The book is written in the first person (first-person present tense, mostly, which is unconventional). This means that in the book you only see and know what the narrator knows. In the movie they showed some of what was going on "backstage" and I found those parts to be well-done, laying the groundwork for the political issues to come. They added rather than detracting -- not at all a safe bet when screenwriters decide to innovate.

Because of the POV, in the book the game-makers are largely invisible -- we see their work but don't see them. In the movie I thought the lead game-maker was particularly strong; seeing how what was going on in the arena affected him added a level of story not possible in the book. And oh, his final scene... nice touch.

A nit: I do wonder how Katniss was able to stay at full draw for so long, with a bow strong enough to kill a person, in that scene at the end. Especially given her state at that time. Just sayin'. (Also, what are the aerodynamic properties of silver arrows? The book referred to them as silver too, and it struck me as peculiar there too.)

The trailers I remember were:

  • The Avengers: meh
  • Spiderman: looked like it could be fun (but can wait for NetFlix)
  • (something like) The House at the End of the Street: no (horror's not my thing)
  • What to Expect When You're Expecting: looks very cheesy (that would be a no)
  • some Twilight movie: no
  • Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter: please make it stop!

cellio: (B5)
The Butterfly Effect got lukewarm reviews when it was in theatres and I don't go out to see that many movies anyway, so I missed it at the time. Last night I remedied that with the DVD, and boy am I glad I did. (No spoilers in this post, but I can't vouch for comments.)

The story follows a college student, Evan, who had several blackouts as a child, almost always in stressful situations. The doctors encouraged him to keep a detailed journal in hopes of finding clues to the problem. Eventually Evan discovered that he could use the journal entries around the blackouts to go back in time and change those situations. Change, however, is not always good, as any veteran consumer of time-travel stories will assure you.

There are some scenes in this movie that were very difficult to watch. (One in particular: cruelty to animals is a major squick for me; that it was not shown on-screen was not sufficient mitigation.) But I found the story compelling and the characters generally believable as they morphed through changing situations.

The DVD offers the directors' cut and the theatrical release; without any advance knowledge I chose the former, figuring it would pick up a few deleted scenes but be basically the same. (While for books I usually prefer works that have stood the scrutiny of editors, for movies I tend to watch the story the director wanted to tell unless I know of a reason not to.) Later, when I was looking (unsuccessfully) for a detailed plot synopsis online to confirm a couple details of sequencing, I learned that the endings are very different between the two. Having seen the directors' ending and read about the one that showed in theatres, I am glad I watched the one I did. While much darker, it seems a much more powerful conclusion to the story.

Recommended, with the caveats about some troubling themes. Not for kids.

cellio: (moon)
Spoilers in this post are few and marked; for comments you're on your own.

I had expected a movie this close to the end of the series, and one derived from the final book, to not feel so much like the middle book of a trilogy. I don't know what's coming in the second part, not having read the book, but it felt like the film-makers were just filling time in this movie, same as in the last one. Did the final book need two movies, or is that just the business arm of the franchise speaking? It wasn't a bad movie and it definitely had some nice touches (I've wanted a bag like that for a while; for that I'd actually carry one :-) ), but it felt slow to me for where it was in the series. $5 was a fair price to pay.

I particularly noticed the sound this time -- effective placement, so it sounded like things were coming from the right parts of the room. The visual effects were well-done (not the best we've seen from this series), and I could see some of the places where they were presumably planning 3D enhancements before they ditched 3D. I counted five visual-effects companies in the closing credits, but there was no indication of how the work was divided up. (They all had pretty much the same job descriptions.)

spoilers )

Trailers:

  • Kung-Fu Panda II: presumably targeted for the kids?
  • Yogi Bear: definitely targeted for the kids.
  • Voyage of the Dawn-Treader: maybe. I didn't recognize a lot of the trailer from the book; hmm.
  • Green Hornet: looks like it could be entertaining if you like that sort of thing, but I'm not sure I do. Netflix, maybe.
  • Red Riding Hood: um, what?
  • Green Lantern: looks like they're having fun with it, which is promising. Does it at all resemble the comic book, out of curiosity? And did I hear someone in the trailer refer to the job of being a green lantern? He's not a singleton?

Avatar

Jan. 31st, 2010 06:08 pm
cellio: (avatar-face)
We finally saw Avatar today. Because we dallied, our only options were 3D (digital or IMAX). To see the plain old 2D version we would have had to head off to the wilds of Bridgeville or Tarentum or the like.

Consensus on the Google-indexed parts of the Internet suggested the the odds were better than 50-50 of the glasses for digital 3D fitting over my glasses, so we opted for that. (Almost everyone agrees that you can wear the 3D glasses over glasses; they'd be crazy not to consider that need. But my glasses are thick and I didn't know if there'd be enough room.) This concern was easy to mitigate; we asked to try out the glasses at the ticket counter before buying. The other unknown for me was whether the 3D effect would work for me: do my eyes work together well enough, or would I just see a blurry movie? Only one way to find out. (The cheapo red/blue 3D glasses of yore never worked on me, at least for 3D comic books. I've never seen a 3D movie before.)

I could in fact see the 3D effects, yay. The glasses would have been annoying if they'd had any weight to them; on the ears they were perched on top of my regular ones, and there wasn't a lot of room on my nose to support them. Since they were made of light-weight plastic that was ok; I just sort of wedged them in place, and I'm not sure to what extent they were even in contact with my nose. If they'd been heavier that wouldn't have worked.

As for the movie itself... Read more... )

Netflix

Sep. 23rd, 2009 11:01 pm
cellio: (B5)
For my birthday I received a gift subscription to Netflix (I'd been considering it but never did anything about it on my own). This is excellent. I've populated my queue with enough stuff to get rolling, but I figure suggestions are always good. Here is your invitation to evangelize DVDs you think I'd like.

Recent TV I've enjoyed has included Merlin, Pushing Daisies, and Journeyman (last year, short-lived). I enjoyed West Wing, the first three seasons of LOST (more now on the way), Firefly, and the first season of Heroes. I'm a big B5 fan and have seen all the modern Star Treks. I don't get out to movies very often; the profiling there is likely to be unsurprising. If you're reading this, you probably have some other clues about me. I can of course pour all that data into automated suggestion generators; I'm providing it here for a bit of context in case it matters.

Anyway, fire away. :-) (A hint about why you think I'd like something would be much appreciated.)
cellio: (lilac)
Last week Erik spent the day at the vet's for an ultrasound (everything looks good, they said; awaiting formal report). When I picked him up, the person at the desk asked me to sign a photo release. It turns out that this was their day to take photos of staff members for their web site, and since my vet had made a special trip just to be there for this ultrasound, she asked that Erik join her in the picture. :-) (No, it's not on the web site yet.)

Thanks to those who gave me DTV advice. I had the wrong mental model for the converter box: I was thinking of it as a passive device, like an antenna, when it is more like a cable box. I don't think I'd realized before today that I will have to always set the channel on the box and not the VCR. That makes recording shows more of a hassle, but I watch little-enough TV that it probably won't be a big hassle. Still, one of the reasons I've never been interested in higher levels of cable service (except for B5's TNT year) is that the box displaces the tuner in my VCR, making recording more error-prone. Of course, VCRs themselves are on the way out at this point, so perhaps I should be looking for a DVR that does not involve a subscription service. (Again, don't watch enough TV to justify paying for a service.) I want to be able to program something and mostly forget about it until I'm ready to watch accumulated shows.

We saw Star Trek this weekend. If you don't think about the plot or the science too hard it's a good movie -- which is pretty much the calibration I expect from Trek. I wonder if the reset will lead to more TV shows or if it's just a movie franchise at this point.

Speaking of movies, thanks to [livejournal.com profile] osewalrus for passing on I'm a Marvel / I'm a DC (YouTube).

A seasonal note: a different kind of Omer calendar. Y'see, Jews are supposed to count the 50 days from Pesach to Shavuot, each night. Sometimes it's hard to remember, so people have come up with various reminder schemes. This one builds on the near-universal motivational properties of chocolate. :-) (Some commenters compare it to a chocolate Advent calendar. Advent calendars are completely outside my experience; sounds like I missed out on something tasty as a kid.)

Seen in passing, a useful-looking URL to have on hand: http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/.

Finally (below the cut due to image size) a cartoon that made me laugh out loud. I didn't particularly expect to find it on Language Log, but I'm glad they posted it so I could see it.
Read more... )
cellio: (moon-shadow)
There is a legend that, one night in Aushwitz, the prisoners held a court, putting God on trial for allowing the Holocaust to happen. As part of marking Yom HaShoah this past week, my congregation held a viewing of a PBS film, God on Trial, dramatizing this.

It's a powerful film, and at some point I plan to borrow the DVD so I can watch it again. (Viewing conditions weren't great.) It raises many of the usual issues of theodicy, or how God can permit evil in the world, about which I've written some before.

This isn't a review; it's some reactions, not necessarily well-organized.

Read more... )

cellio: (mandelbrot-2)
Dani and I went to see The Golden Compass tonight. Spoiler-free pico-review: pretty, and some nice scene-length bits of storytelling in need of their connective tissue.

more comments, with spoilers )

Previews: a sorry lot, I'd say. The batch included The Great Debaters (yawn, and "based on a true story" can mean anything, so why bother saying?), Sex and the City (vapid preview; can't say for the movie or TV show), Love, Actually (I think that was the name), a comedy about a clownish basketball team, and maybe one other or maybe not (previews felt short). The pre-preview commercials included a long music video promoting the National Guard; a venue usually pays for videos and charges for commercials, and I found myself wondering which side of the ledger this one was on.

During the closing credits:
Dani (reading): No animals were harmed in the making of this film.
Me: No animals were involved in the making of this film.

cellio: (moon-shadow)
We finally saw the fifth Harry Potter movie today. As usual, I have not read the book. (From what I hear, if I do decide to read the books I should still skip this one.) Overall... eh.

Read more... )

Trailers:

  • Bee Movie: Looks cutesy, so it comes down to the quality of the writing. I'm unlikely to bother absent good reviews from people whose assessments are good predictors of mine.
  • Golden Compass: We'll see this. (This reminded me to try their web site again. It still fails for me, differently in Firefox and IE. Oh well; I guess I wasn't meant to have a daemon.)
  • The Enchanted: This looks funny; I laughed out loud multiple times during the trailer. Definitely worth learning more about and hoping the trailer didn't contain all the funny parts.
  • I don't remember the name of the Loch Ness movie. At the beginning of the trailer it evoked memories of E.T., but the trailer suggests that a good chunk of the movie is about the search for and secrets of Nessie, more than it is about a boy and his pet alien, and that doesn't grab me.
  • Fred Claus: No thanks. Actually, a pretty good heuristic seems to be to write off anything billed as a holiday story. The snowflake logo at the beginning of the trailer told me everything I needed to know.
  • Get Smart: I was never a fan of the TV show, and the trailer hasn't led me to reconsider.
Two for six (one of which we would have seen anyway) is a better-than-average hit rate for me and trailers.

random bits

Feb. 6th, 2006 08:21 pm
cellio: (sleepy-cat)
Sunday night we went to see the Narnia movie (finally). The previews were mostly aimed at kids, with one notable exception (The White Countess); that was an odd combination. One of the previews was for Hoot, which appears to be another in the theme of "these kids, and only these kids, can save the world (or their small part of it)". I find that while I'm willing to suspend that sort of disbelief in a fantasy or SF millieu -- Narnia, my recent D&D game, and a number of novels boil down to this plot -- I am usually unable to do so for stories set in the real world. So Hoot came across to me as dumb and lame, even though I was sitting there waiting for Narnia.

A doctor friend was recently opining that "some guy" is responsible for about 80% of ER visits from violent crimes, and if we can just find him we'll all be better off. "For instance", he said, "you get reports like 'there I was, sitting on my front porch at 3AM reading my bible and minding my own business, when Some Guy shot me!'". Err, this might be more challenging than he thinks.

I caused a telemarketer to violate the script this weekend. I was lured in by him pronouncing my name correctly, so I didn't immediately detect his true nature. Then he said "I'm calling from the PA Pro-Life Commission" (or some such) and I interrupted and said "you really have a wrong number". He stopped mid-shpiel and apologized. Negative points for calling in the first place but positive points for not persisting. And maybe this one will actually put me on their do-not-call list.

A random thought: in this age of global communication, when giving an email correspondent your phone number it is polite to mention your time zone. On the internet nobody knows you're a dog, and also, nobody knows you're in Bangladesh. Or wherever. Fortunately, Google can answer these sorts of questions pretty easily given the phone number, unless it's a cell phone.

Saturday is a local SCA event, Dance and Romance. It's a free event (pot-luck food) at Pitt, and as the name implies, there will be a lot of dancing. Ensemble Rigodon (that's On the Mark's SCA identity) will be doing a short concert, and lots of us will undoubtedly be playing dance music all day. Should be fun!

cellio: (sleepy-cat)
Dani and I went to see the fourth Harry Potter movie tonight after Shabbat. Eh. Not bad, not good -- just "eh".

but I have more to say than just that (spoilers included) )

The previews were disappointing. Here's what I remember:

  • Ice Age 2: seems to be mostly sight gags. (I didn't see the first one.)
  • Monster House: the look was similar to The Incredibles; I didn't notice if it was the same people. I was kind of surprised to see Spielburg's name on this one.
  • Happy Feet: Huh? Is this really two hours of animated penguins dancing?
  • a Superman movie (I don't remember an actual title): I would be favorably inclined to a Superman movie, but the preview for this particular one kind of creeped me out. The Superman I remember was hastily put into a spaceship and shot off a dying planet in the hopes he would survive somewhere; that is not at all in keeping with a deep, booming voice that said, essentially, "I sent my only son to redeem this world".
Actually, the best thing I saw before the movie was the Coke commercial. (This also involved animated penguins, among other animals.)

cellio: (B5)
We saw the new War of the Worlds last night. This had the potential to go one of two ways, I thought. They might have decided to make a thriller action flick (which would not have been very interesting to me), or they might have made more of a character story. Wells provided a foundation that could go either direction -- not that movies necessarily take much from the books they're based on, of course.

here there be spoilers -- but c'mon; the movie's been out for two months )

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. I haven't seen any other movie/video versions of this story to compare it to. (I only know the book, the Orson Welles radio version, and Jeff Wayne's musical setting.) My favorite telling of it is probably still Jeff Wayne's; it and this movie are so different, though, that comparing them wouldn't really be feasible. That said, though, it's been years since I've listened to that recording and I should do something about that. And maybe dump it to CD if I can, since I currently have it only on vinyl.

HHGttG

May. 10th, 2005 11:13 pm
cellio: (B5)
Pico-review: some fun bits, but spend an extra hour and a quarter and a few more dollars (unless you rent) and watch the TV series instead. The movie wasn't awful, mind, but neither did it live up to its potential.

longer comments, trying to avoid spoilers )

Trailers:

  • Zathura: During the trailer I was thinking of Home Alone with a fantasy twist; at the end they said it's from the people who did Polar Express. I'm guessing that this means it's really for kids and that there won't be a second layer for adults, but I'd be happy to hear that I'm wrong.
  • Valiant: Carrier pigeons dodge evil falcons to save humanity. Looks like fun animation and maybe not much story. Can't really tell.
  • Shark Boy and Lava Girl: If it's a riff on comic books then it could be fun, but from the trailer I infer that it's more of a "heartwarming" children's story that just uses comic-book heroes as a plot device. What exactly do they think HHGttG's demographic is?
  • Pink Panther: Looks like a respectable version. I didn't care for the originals myself, but that's just me. One of these trailers is not like the others. :-)
  • Herbie: Ok, this looks like fun! Now that's closer to pegging the demographic!
I was kind of hoping for a War of the Worlds trailer. I figured fantasy, SF, alternate realities -- should be a no-brainer. Unless, um, it's too early? I've lost track of when that's coming out.

Hmm, why are they called "trailers" when they come before the movie?

cellio: (B5)
"Existentially speaking, is there such a thing as half a piece of cake?" -- [livejournal.com profile] kayre

This evening at dinner the fundamental dynamics of lightsabres came up. Specifically, how does the color encoding work? Is Luke's blue because Luke prefers blue, or because any lightsabre Luke uses will channel Luke-specific force, which is blue? If so, do the admission criteria at Jedi University include "sabre does not glow red" (and if not, why not)? Are there important qualitative difference between blue and green sabres, both of which appear to channel the light side of the force? Surely these are important research topics for someone out there who has, you know, seen all the movies.

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