Fuel in the Fire: Speculating on Luke Skywalker's Alignment

A few caveats before I begin:

• I am a huge fan of Star Wars (in all it's many forms) and have a degree in English literature. Where story, plot and mythology are concerned, I actually have some chops to make statements.
• I am not sure that I believe what I am about to write, but find it a fascinating line of thinking, in terms of story progression.
• I do not believe that fans have a say in the production of any story or movie. It would be a horrible world if that were the case - a movie created by committee and not with singular direction.
• I have intentionally kept a large part of others' speculation at arm's length to avoid coming into contact with any real spoilers. I apologize if any of the information contained herein qualifies as a spoiler for you or if it repeats others' speculation so far.

So let us begin, shall we?

There have been several interesting internet blurbs regarding the significance of the "Lack of Skywalker." Of course, much speculation has been given to the idea that Luke has become evil. A very unpopular idea or turn of story for many fans. However, I tend to agree that this is a definite possibility.

Luke Skywalker has very significantly not appeared on the new SW: TFA official theatrical poster. He has also not appeared clearly in any of the trailers or marketing. Let that sink in. We know more about Kylo Ren (the assumed bad guy in this movie) than we know about Luke. Considering Luke's pivotal role in Episodes 4, 5 & 6, this sort of media blackout seems more than a little odd. And before you get too up-in-arms, while we can assume we are witnessing Luke Skywalker fondly caressing R2 in the second teaser trailer, there is really no proof that it is Luke. We just see a hooded person in a cloak, while Mark Hamill does a voiceover.

Now consider that Han Solo (of all people) appears to be advising fledgling Jedi in this new chapter. Han Solo, the guy who patently states that he does not believe in the force in A New Hope. What happened to Luke in the past 30 years that would make him unavailable to new, aspiring Jedi? Or to prevent him from stopping the development of a character like Kylo Ren? Kylo appears to be something of a disciple of Darth Vader, but he couldn't possibly be more powerful than Luke, could he? If not, how can he and Luke inhabit the same galaxy for any period of time?

In the 30 years since the end of Return of the Jedi, Luke has found not one new force-sensitive being? That boggles the mind. The Jedi are aware of un-aligned and light-side force users - this much has been confirmed in canon (if not the Expanded Universe, which was been deprecated, according to J.J. Abrams) - remember that Yoda had been watching Luke for a long time prior to his arrival in Dagobah. In fact, if Luke chose to exile himself during these ensuing decades, his meditations would have certainly led him to at least a few force users.

Yet Finn appears to be the only "new" Jedi to appear in an entire galaxy for over three decades. In a galaxy where, during the decline of the Jedi Order, there were tens of thousands of active Jedi at any given time. And a galaxy where there is no Emperor Palpatine intent on hunting Jedi to extinction. It seems almost impossible that Luke would miss every prospective Jedi in all that time. Impossible that no new Jedi would have developed in thirty years.

So here's what I think happened.

I think that Luke not only went into exile, but experienced a fall to the dark side. I believe that Kylo is a result of this fall. And that Kylo and his associates, perhaps trained by him, have been hunting force users not aligned to his philosophy. Finn and perhaps one or two more characters are just the latest in Kylo's long list of targets.

I also think that having Luke experience a fall is important to the growth of his character. Perhaps Luke, like his father, needs a fall and subsequent redemption to realize his full potential - to recognize his full strength and place in this galaxy.

I get that many people want Luke to remain good - that there is a large contingent of fans who simply can't accept the idea of Luke becoming evil after defeating two Sith Lords. But let me remind you that Star Wars is a saga. One that George Lucas intentionally set up in such a way as to mimic classic, archetypal sagas. Sagas are always cyclical, especially in terms of their main characters. And heroes in sagas regularly experience a fall from grace.

So, of course we cannot accept anything that happened in the previous chapters to remain static. That everyone just got older and their universe remained the same for 30 years. So if we can't accept this, then something must have happened in the interim to explain a complete absence of Jedi during those decades.

I understand that many people would hate this turn in the story, but I also feel that it is a valid speculation based on what we have actually seen in the trailers so far, and from what little has been eked out from statements by J.J. Abrams.

Only time will tell. I almost hope I'm wrong.

After a Year Away From Blogging, I'm Finally Leaving Destiny (With Not One Tear Shed)

So, it has been a while. There is one very big reason for my long absence. Destiny (the game). Having anticipated this game for more than a few years, I was immediately consumed by its daily grind. As one who had scoffed at the effects of MMOs and their soaking up of free time, I was genuinely surprised at the time I have spent on this game.

However, the fallout is that I lost time writing, time spent with family and time developing my own interests and pursuits. A completely unfair trade. Even until a week or two ago, shortly after the "year two" version of the game was released, I was still having internal debates regarding exactly how much time I needed to gather this sort of material or in search of that particular weapon or armor piece.

I've spent hours playing Skyrim and Falllout 3. Long nights playing Mass Effect (exploring every nook of every planet). Destiny completely wiped out those investments in time. Where I might once have spent a week or two (possibly with a few overnighters) playing through the story of a game, Destiny kept me going for months seeking more powerful gear, more materials for upgrades and greater PvP accomplishments (something that was never a concern, prior to Destiny).

I'm still trying to understnd it. I may never really do so. I really can't stand games without stories. I have still not played through all the side missions in Fallout 3 after many, many hours of play. Each time I pick up that game, it has something new to give. Where as Destiny only offers the same thing, over and over. The grind. One more shader, one more gun. A slightly more powerful set of gauntlets.

Only recently, after a year on the market in players hands, did Destiny actually come up with a decent and engaging story. I don't know why I accepted that sort of game quality from Bungie. I am not a teenager, willing to try anything out, having experienced very little of quality games. I cut my teeth on Ultima, Legend of Zelda and Baldur's Gate. Story and gameplay matter to me. I'm not a mindless shooter. But Bungie somehow convinced me that was the kind of player I am. Bungie. The creators of Halo. A genre-defining game, in most part, because of the storytelling. Halo 4 took a deep dive from that standard, in part because 343 Industries just didn't have the storytelling chops for the takeover.

And I don't think it was too much to ask or hope that I would have a similarly expansive experience with Destiny. The raids were good. In fact, having never played WoW, I can easily say that the Vault of Glass (VoG) really set the standard for raids - challenging gameplay, challenging puzzles, and a required system of teamwork. Really stupendous.

But the raids added nothing to the story. In fact, we really only get hints at the larger story now with side missions from The Taken King (the latest update to Destiny). Sure, there are little "grimoire" cards that you receive as you find special items throughout the game, or complete specific milestones in gameplay. But that's not story. Especially if what you functionally have to do is go through disparate pieces of information, collect them like so many post-it notes and then assemble them in an assumed order to reveal a character narration or two. That's just not a story. Certainly not a story Bungie is capable of.

So I sit here, in a cafe, dumbfounded as to what kept me playing for so long. I think what really happened was that I became habituated to the rewards that I could receive each week (in year one) and actually sought out the comfort of having a small goal to attain each day. And don't mistake me. I am not really blaming Bungie for this - I am just as at fault for seeing an obvious trap and willingly falling into it. Also, Destiny has the sharpest gunplay I have ever had the honor to experience. So many guns that add so many unique ways to play through the game. But expending ammo isn't the be-all and end-all of any game, no matter how convincingly Bungie presents it.

What has changed? Well, for one thing, the daily small set of goals are gone. The economy has essentially flipped to something I cannot understand and which does not really reward me in a way that I can perceive as valuable. The new raid (King's Fall) requires far too much teamwork and investment of time to be valuable to me. The raid is essentially broken into four (or five?) encounters, the last of which can take an hour with an inexperienced team or with one player uninterested in following team guidance. It is essentially a minimum 3-4 hour time investment which you may have to just give up on as your teammates tire and decide to stop their Sisyphean task

Believe me, I've been through that on both the previous raids. Getting two or three friends together with a couple of randoms and then attempting VoG was often a nightmare. And VoG could regularly be done in about 40 minutes with an experienced, if not perfect, team. I don't want to, and cannot afford to, go through that with a 3-4 hour time investment. Something like that is just not possible for me.

What else has changed? Better to ask what has not. Destiny's PvP experience is a mess. In an effort to improve the gameplay experience and, I assume, with the expectation that most players in an online-only game would be coming in with a good-to-great network connection, Bungie developed netcode that essentially handed off server duties to the consoles. What does this mean exactly? Well, no one can really tell for sure, because Bungie has been completely secretive about how they actually handle matchmaking in terms of network quality and skill. There are some basic results I can personally report, however.

People with bad network connections are given advantage over those with a better connections. Pre-made fireteams (a six-player team made prior to matchmaking) are given a huge advantage, not just because of the ability to communicate with teammates, but because they are almost exclusively matched with a group of random players. Pre-made fireteams with one "bad-network" member are given further advantage. Matchmaking eventually shifts further and further geographically as you improve, as Bungie's matchmaking servers have a harder time matching you with players at your skill level also looking to start a game, locally. So how does this all happen?

Well, remember that in a match type called Control, where there are two teams of six playing against each other to control three objectives, each player can act as the "server" or host, and the other eleven players are clients. Good gameplay requires that each of the clients report in to the host on schedule (in terms of milliseconds) and if they don't, then one or more players create high latency, or "lag."

If you do not have the correct ports open on your router or cannot open them for some reason (you're playing on your university's network), you will almost always have high latency. Or if you are geographically distant from someone, you could have high latency. Or you could be intentionally increasing your latency by purposefully not opening ports, installing a "lag switch" on your ethernet cable, or by causing high traffic between you and another player via software (DoS or DDoS).

The point is, Bungie has done next to nothing to address this issue in the course of the year Destiny has been out. Occasionally they slap the wrist of a player reported to them through the in-game reporting system. On very few occasions they have initiated mass bans on players who made use of an exploit in their netcode or base code. You'll have heard of the "heavy ammo glitch" or "bumping teams" in order to get wins. But, fundamentally, the PvP experience is a mess - I regularly had 5-6 players out of 12 playing with high latency. That is, 5-6 people playing as "red-bars," making that match almost impossible to play.

Think about it. You would have a 50% chance to aim at a player character representation and have that player character actually be in the location you aimed, as opposed to three feet away, or right next to you with a shotgun. And since the red-bar player is favored in this code, their sync info to the host *overrides* yours and you always lose against them.

And while Bungie has been very responsive and communicative regarding issues in PvE (player vs environment; story missions), they have been completely silent regarding the PvP issues, not even admitting that there is a problem on their end that allows people to exploit the netcode. PvP is literally half Destiny's game with much of the content tied to objectives gained in PvP matches. After a year of atrocious gameplay, with no end in sight and no word from Bungie that something needs to be fixed, I am done with this game. Not to mention the fact that there are two PvP "end-game" rewards-based events (Trials of Osiris and Iron Banner) which become literal madhouses of this sort of gameplay. Trials of Osiris, where pre-made fireteams are a necessity, have less of this type of problem, but it is still very much a degraded experience.

Destiny has become a game of spinning wheels and being stuck in the mud. You can't even finish one of the primary story lines (The Taken War) without finding a team to complete the final mission. Or, you could attempt it solo, and be frustrated by repetitive deaths as you try nearly twenty times to surmount the ridiculously overwhelming odds stacked against you. Many of the exotic item quests also require teamwork and can in no way be attempted solo. For m a particularly frustrating experience, since I prefer playing story missions on my own. And I know I am not alone as frequent front-page posts to reddit attest.

So, it's now an obvious choice to leave the game at this point. after a few weeks of play, I have reached nearly every reward one can reach solo, and the rest of those rewards are hidden behind endless hours of team-based play or grinding though hours of broken PvP. My time is simply too valuable for that. Made even more so by the realization of how much time was wasted on Destiny in the previous year.

I look forward to taking a step back and writing more for this and other blogs. I look forward to doing gameplay videos on my YouTube channel, and removing gigabytes of video "proof" of PvP cheating from my PS4 hard drive. I look forward to letting Destiny go. Maybe I'll play once in a while to enjoy a great shooter but, with games like Fallout 4 and No Man's Sky coming down the line, and an ESO account, I am pretty sure the few hours a week I reward myself to devote to gaming will be spoken for.

Moving Away from Microsoft: I Have, and You Might, Too

For years I have worked in tech support. I started fixing computers, then managing the purchase of hardware for a department in a large company and finally managing large consolidating hardware projects for the same company. We used Microsoft products exclusively, and that translated into my personal life.

I spent hours building my own personal Windows boxes. I saved my pretty pennies for the newest version of Windows to install. I even devoutly defended Windows Vista to my friends and work associates. I still think Vista got a bad rap, but that is a digression for another post.

To me, other OSes were too extreme. Apple's OSX left little to no room for personal control. And those who bought Apple computers seemed to want a status symbol, more than a tool. Admittedly, Macs are easy to use, especially for those who know little about computers and prefer to know little about them.

On the further side of the spectrum, there was Linux. Ouch. Not easy to work with, if you were not willing to spend a lot of time learning. Kernels. DE's. "sudo." What? Linux is "free" (technically, Open Source) and it allows a lot of freedom for customization. But, whoa. Just starting from zero was difficult - while it looked similar to Windows XP on the outside, there was plenty to learn just to get the programs I wanted installed and printers running.

As a result, I relied on Microsoft to provide me with tools that would allow me to customize, but kept things pretty simple and familiar. What cause me to turn my back on that?

My displeasure with Microsoft began as I reviewed Windows 8 during development. It was simplified, but frustrating to use for an experienced user. For sysadmins, there were no easy paths to administrative tools. There was no start menu. There was no program list. Just cards telling me what Microsoft thought I might want to know.

Suddenly, my freedom was taken away. I could not use the OS the way I had grown used to using it. From Windows 3.5 to Windows 7, the basic functionality had not changed. Now it felt as though everything was different. I had hoped for changes between the Beta release and RTM (Release to Manufacturing), but very little was different. As my associates began to play with Win8, they also found the lack of support for expert users distasteful. In effect, I was learning how to get around an entirely new operating system.

And, as the Xbox One was being developed, I followed with fading interest. I really enjoyed my Xbox 360 and had made great use of it as a media center extender and a gaming box. But as I learned more about Xbox One, I began to feel more uncomfortable. You had to buy it with Kinect (a debatably useful accessory). While I had tried Kinect, I did not find it terribly comfortable. And I am fairly fit. I literally could not play Kinect Star Wars for more than 20 minutes without being exhausted. Compared to countless lost hours on Halo, this was a real change, and not a very inviting one. I had to find space for the Kinect, and the interactions were not always natural, even though they were intended to be.

As Xbox One approached its release date, many Xbox users became wary of the direction Microsoft was taking. Always-on internet. Always-on Kinect (it was watching you and listening, even when "powered-off"). A dedicated cable box (STB) that passed though to your existing cable box. Redundant much? Overbearing DRM that essentially required you to buy the same software multiple times, if you had multiple Xboxes (I can currently just carry a disc from Xbox to Xbox). And let's not mention the price of the console - more than $100 more than its closest competitor.

If you are considering watching TV through  your Xbox, Xbox One requires you to have an operating set-top-box already, which you must connect to your Xbox. And you must have a broadband internet connection. These are the requirements from Microsoft:

• A cable or satellite set-top box with HDMI output
• A connection to Xbox live for channel line-up download
• An Xbox Live Gold subscription ($60 retail, for a year)

Think about it. To watch TV through your Xbox One, you have to subscribe to your cable/satellite provider (for whatever that costs, montly), rent your STB (for whatever that costs, monthly) and then subscribe to Xbox Live Gold for a year, to accomplish what? Avoid using an additional HDMI port on your TV or surround-sound system? Heaven forbid you have a value-priced TV with only one HDMI port. Then you're FORCED to do this if you want to buy an Xbox that invades your privacy. Why are you trying to sell this to me, Microsoft? Oh, I know. You are just trying to take my money.

When I turn my 360 off, it is off. It's not listening for me to say "on", or watching me with a Kinect. It is not requiring me to have broadband internet to play a game or download portions or all of a game, or channel line-ups I can already get through my set-top-box. You are literally paying three times for a single service. I might as well just bend over and hand Microsoft a broomstick.

With the 360, it rankled me that I had to pay for a Gold subscription to watch Netflix. On a Roku or my laptop, I didn't have to pay for anything more than an internet connection and a Netflix subscription. Now I had to pay Microsoft as well.

But for a hobbled Media Center functionality that used  to come free with Windows and Xbox 360? No, I am not paying Microsoft for that. When customers complained about always-on internet service (requiring broadband for any Xbox One to operate properly), a Microsoft developer actually tweeted "get over it." Really, Microsoft? So who actually matters to you? Because it does not sound like you care about your customers very much. You appear to be too big to care.

That really turned the page for me. I already had a number of Xbox 360s, and nothing about the Xbox One sounded attractive to me. High cost, creepy cameras and microphones, onerous subscription services, and no games that made me want a new Xbox. They could not even get a Halo game out for launch. What Microsoft produced was a failed launch for Titanfall - only available for online play. Then there was Windows 8, requiring me to learn a whole new way of doing things. I had had enough.

Ok, Microsoft, here's my solution.

If I need to learn a new OS, I'll do it for free. Thank you to Canonical for Ubuntu, a Linux operating system that makes learning and set-up easy. There are no software suites I absolutely need on Windows for which I can't find a reasonable correlate on Linux. If you use Adobe products, or cannot function without MS Office, then stay with Windows.

But for those of you now needing to switch from Windows XP, I encourage you to consider Linux. Windows 8 is unlikely to support your XP software any more than Linux will, and it is actually more likely that Linux will have a driver for that 10 year-old printer you hate to get rid of.

If you are considering switching from Windows XP to Windows 8, be ready to relearn your operating system. If you're going to do do that anyway, why not get Ubuntu for free and install it on your current computer? Even if it is 5 years old (or even more) Ubuntu is likely to work well and it will not cost you any money. You are going to have to learn a new OS anyway.

Or you could get a Mac. But be prepared to dig deep. The last time I checked, the lowest-priced Macbook cost twice as much as the lowest-priced new Windows laptop. And you will still need to learn a new operating system.

Honestly, I am happy to move to open source software at this point in my life. It tends to be more secure, it is free and it has an excellent support system. Ubuntu in particular has an extensive peer support community willing to help you learn, provided you are willing to do a little foot-work yourself.

Leaving the Microsoft ecosystem would not have been something I would have considered a few years ago, but they have truly forced my hand. I do not delude myself into thinking that open source has all the answers, or that it is any more perfect than any other operating system choice. But it is a great choice if you are concerned about cost, freedom of choice, and security.

After reading this, I hope you will at least consider joining me on this next adventure.

An Introduction

Welcome!

I have been thinking about creating this blog for a while to tie-in all my efforts and ideas regarding technology and reviews. A friend of mine started a generalized blog some time ago, and convinced me we could collaborate. We'll share ideas, he'll do most of the technical side of writing (editing, design and grammar - ugh, grammar). And I'll provide most of the ideas and technical and industry information. I hope.

And, I won't be varying from the tech scope. No politics, no outside philosophy. Just the things you need to know about what is going on in the world of tech.

I know I cannot compare to outlets like The Verge, or Engadget. What I do hope to do is provide an open format. While I have my personal preferences, I want to be as fair as possible. As honest with my readers as possible. If you disagree with something I write, just let me know.

I welcome input and I don't suppose myself to be an all-around expert. Just someone with enough knowledge to provide an educated opinion.

With that out of the way, let us begin! And thanks for stopping by!