Fabulous!

Is the yellow part his cloak, or did the Medieval AI give him two shields?

Camel-lion, you say? I was thinking giraffe-puma-horse, but you could be right.

And also, getting back to Roland’s original point - being young and British does not automatically make one liberal. If we had 15 years of genuinely liberal governments, I would not be surprised to see the rebellious youth swinging in some other direction

That’s true, currently, but may not be sufficient. Do younger voters currently prefer the EU because they’re making a thought-out judgement that it aligns with their liberal values, or because they remember growing up in it when the UK wasn’t a basketcase?

(I’m a devoted Rejoiner and I’m dreading this)

Yes, but (sadly) this isn’t because the EU intrinsically appeals to young people. In 10 years’ time, young voters won’t remember the pre-brexit days. There’s a scenario where older voters with fond memories of EU membership fight to rejoin against youngsters without them, in a reversal of 2016

We all need a bit of Skyrim just now.

I left my last character in a cave in the Rift 9 months ago, and my thoughts increasingly turn to her

Yes, it’s good to be in a more civilised place!

I know you weren’t, but I was, while feeling guilty about it :-)

Rey has already turned down the opportunity to kill an unconscious Kylo at the end of the TLJ throne room scene. She ‘s passed the test that Luke fails in the Dark Side Cave and almost fails in the ROTJ throne room. We don’t need to see her beating herself up for being evil.

…who previously was vulnerable to the Dark Side through imposter syndrome, not through Skywalker flashes of rage.

I wish her struggle growth in RoS had been more consistent with TLJ, e.g. she’s just starting to feel like a Jedi when she makes some disastrous mistake and then has to get past it.

I hate to be a person who moans about Star Wars movies. But RoS was really held back by the seeming necessity of making the new characters follow the old characters’s paths. Luke struggled with his Dark Side inheritance, so Rey had to. Even though it seemed like the wrong struggle for Rey, …

Did you go for it?

Probably the creators would have done a much better job with a less punishingly tight schedule, also.

Yes I accept that it was a difficult and perhaps impossible burden. It just felt so messy. I’d told myself beforehand that I was going to happy with whatever story they told me, if they told it well, as I assumed they would - but then it felt like 5 story fragments stuck together.

I agree with everything you say, and we wanted pretty much the same 3rd instalment. There’s been so much good Star Wars since Rise of Skywalker, but I never get past the way Rise messed up the end of the Skywalker Saga for me. TFA and TLJ are nearly perfect though!

This is interesting, I’m not generally very positive about internet-based technology, but I think Google maps has greatly improved my sense of geography. I now visualise journeys in contextualised plan view, instead of as a procedure for getting somewhere along a sequence of lines.

Me too.

“The deep state….”

Ah yes Dom, you mean the Civil Service, doing its job, but you like to give it a scary, threatening name.

Utter twat.