Monthly Archives: January 2016

Ballroom Blintz

Cooking, Puns

ballroom_blintz

So, last year I made Nalysnyky* for Orthodox Ukranian Christmas**, based on an excellent (and very forgiving!) recipe provided by Tori Avery here:

Cheese Blintzes

I made a few changes to the recipe for various reasons, and I figured I’d copy it below.

Basically, Nalysnyky and Blintzes are some sort of filling wrapped in a crêpe. I chose cottage cheese*** instead of the Ricotta and Creme cheese suggested by the original recipe. My proportions may be a little different, as well. I feel like there’s something slightly missing in the filling, but I’m not sure what it is. They were still a hit at Christmas dinner last year and this year. (Last year, S and I made ourselves sick eating them, but they were oh so tasty. 😀 ) Both last year and this year, I made a double batch. IIRC, this makes 15-18 blintzes, more than enough to satisfy 7 and leave many left over for snacks.

This is a very forgiving recipe. You mix things in a bowl, the exact proportions don’t really matter, and you can pause partway through and nothing much will go wrong (assuming nothing is actively burning in your frying pan). The first time I made them, I had long pauses between steps (as it was my first time doing a new recipe in a long time), the second time, I only used a timer about 1/3 of the time, trusting in my ability to read butter cooking temperature (browns and crackles at 375 F), and how well done a crepe was.

Cooking utensils:
– Measuring cups
– Whisk and a lot of patience, or a blender or mixer capable of dispersing flour clumps from solution
– Frying pan (non-stick is better)
РPlates to store partially made cr̻pes
– Wax paper to put between crepes so that they do not stick to each other (essential if you’re saving time by only cooking one side of the crêpe to start
– Plates and paper towel to de-butter and store freshly cooked

Garnishes:
– Fruits, especially strawberries and raspberries
– Thawed blueberries, pineapple, and mango worked well today (just remember to thaw them completely)

Thinking about it, if you wanted to do this assembly-line style, you could have two frying pans on the go, one making the shells, one frying the results.

Crêpe shell ingredients:
– 4 eggs
– 1 cup flour
– 1/3 cup sugar
– 3/4 cup milk (I used lactose-free milk, for reasons)
– 1/4 cup water (I used H2O, for reasons)
– 1 tsp vanilla
– Pinch of salt

Cooking requirements
Р1-2 sticks of butter (I used two full sticks for a double batch. About 85% to cook the cr̻pes and the rest to fry the filled cr̻pes.)

You could also use whatever oil suits you. We used olive oil the first time we made them, to good effect.

Filling ingredients:
– 1 tub (500g) of cottage cheese (I used organic 2%)
– 1/4 cup sugar
– (Here, the original calls for an egg yolk. I’m not sure why. I left it out.)
– 1/2 lemon, mostly squeezed into the mix (original called for 2 tsp)
– 1 tsp vanilla (I put in a little extra****)
– Pinch of salt

1) Mix all the crêpe shell ingredients in a mixing bowl.
2) Stir these ingredients until no flour lumps remain. (I couldn’t get them all out, but they still ended up fine. You’ll get better consistency if you do this step more assiduously.)
3) While stirring, turn on your frying pan/skillet to 375F. (On our stove, this is 2.5 stops below half, but really, it’s wherever butter browns but doesn’t burn. I learned this from many years of making pancakes growing up, YMMV.)
4) Apply enough butter to the bottom of the frying pan/skillet to make a thin layer for cooking. You can tell by the fact that it is sizzling and slightly browning and coating the bottom of the pan.
5) Pour 1/3 cup of crêpe shell mix onto the frying pan/skillet, then add a bit more, perhaps up to 1/2 cup (this will make the shell slightly larger and easier to fit filling into
6) Wait 60-75 seconds (I set my microwave timer for 55***** seconds), or until the crêpe can be flipped without displacing uncooked liquid on its top (If you wish, you don’t need to cook both sides of the crêpe at this stage, you can cook the inside, add the filling, then cook the outside later, which may save you 15-30 mins, if you’re really organized).
7) While this is cooking, take a sheet of wax paper, and get it ready to receive the crêpe.
8) Flip the crêpe, and cook the other side for 60-75s.
9) Take the crêpe off the frying pan and place it on the holding plate and/or wax paper

10) Repeat steps 4-9 until all the crêpe batter is exhausted.

11) While you are cooking the crêpes, you can mix up the crêpe filling:
12) Stir the filling ingredients in a mixing bowl. You may want to add different amounts than above, to taste.

13) Put a small amount (one spoon’s worth) of the filling onto the lower middle of one of the crêpes. Fold the bottom part of the crepe over the middle, then each of the sides in, then fold the bottom ‘pocket’ up until the crêpe is rolled up like a burrito around the filling.

14) Melt about 1/3 of a stick of butter into the pan (this should be enough to cover the bottom of the pan…Add more if you want to brown more of the nalysnyky during frying).

15) 3 of the filled crêpes should fit in your pan. Cook for 1.5-2 minutes
16) Flip the filled crêpes, cook for another 1.5-2 minutes

17) Dry the excess butter onto a paper towel

18) Serve warm, with fruit, or whatever other garnish you wish!

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalysnyky

**https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas#Choice_of_December_25_date

***It might have been this page, or another, which suggested the substitution: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/212387/cottage-cheese-blintzes/

****Or a little ‘extract’? 😀

*****I have a personal rule that I must press the fewest number of microwave number buttons whenever I program a countdown. This leads to interesting regions like 0:55, 0:66, 1:11, 0:77, where you get some nice overlap. Usually, though, it’s 0:33, 0:99, and 0:55.

Agile: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond

Agile, Idle Speculation, Organizing Systems, Software Development

Scrum* is arguably the most popular of the Agile methodologies. It seems to be popular because it is lightweight while being structured. However, it is designed to interface with and compensate for the structural issues inherent in most large organizations.

The end goal of all Agile methodologies is to ship the greatest amount of useful, high quality software at a sustainable pace.

Scrum assists with this in the following ways:
– The ‘locked room’ iteration reduces or prevents distractions so the team can focus on their work.
– Requiring stories to meet specific, defined criteria in order to be ‘Ready’ or ‘Done’ adds clarity and reduces time wasted in clarification
– Channeling all outside asks through the Product Owner reduces distractions for the rest of the team
– Having the team perform the estimates provides a sense of ownership
– Having subject matter experts on all relevant subjects and from all relevant departments in the organization reduces the amount of time the team spends waiting for clarification
– Daily standups

There are more, but I think you get the point. Scrum is all about reducing distractions and time spent obtaining clarifications. Scrum also uses the crutch of iterations of a defined length to help reduce distractions from the rest of the organization, to help outside stakeholders get used to the idea that creating software takes time, but more importantly, to get outside stakeholders used to the idea that context switching takes time and has a cost.

I call the defined iteration a crutch, because there is another Agile methodology which does not have fixed iterations. I’m talking about Kanban, which is very similar (at least in my experience) to what I described above for Scrum, except that instead of Scrum’s timeboxing tasks to two weeks, Kanban focuses on enforcing a limit on the amount of work in progress.

For teams outside of operations and firefighting**, this requires more trust between the team and the organization, and likely a much more persuasive Product Owner to interface and control the conversation with the rest of the company.

But requiring a Product Owner to do this interface still feels like a crutch. What if everyone in the organization just knew what to do, and you didn’t need to separate out wrangling over priorities in order to stop distracting programmers?

Valve seems to be doing this:

http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

Their ethos is that they once a person has gotten through their very intensive hiring process, they are empowered to make all the decisions required to ship products. They seem to have found a way to gain the benefits of Agile without all of the crutches of the methodologies above.

We will explore more of this, and some possible steps in a future post.

Comments and topic suggestions below!

*In all of this, I am making the assumption that the team is running Scrum by the book. There are numerous obstacles to this which are outside the scope.

**Many operations and firefighting teams naturally gravitate more towards a Kanban approach than a Scrum approach, as they tend to have more volatility in their tasks, and possibly smaller tasks are required to make outside-world-visible results.

TNG: What Might Have Been

Nostalgia, Reviews, Space!, Thoughts on Thoughts

So, we were watching the TNG episode ‘Reunion’ http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Reunion_%28episode%29, and it got us thinking about what TNG might have been.

K’Ehleyr was such a big and interesting and *alive* character. Imagine if she had been a cast regular. The place she seemed to fit best in our mind was replacing Riker as the Enterprise First Officer.

First, a bit of backstory to set the stage:

It’s often been said that the original Star Trek was based around a ‘Freudian Trio’ of the Ego (Kirk), the Superego (Spock), and the Id (McCoy).
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FreudianTrio

Gene Roddenberry’s vision for TNG was that humans would have evolved to no longer ‘need’ the interpersonal bickering which characterized the Spock/McCoy interaction. Some say that this led to ‘too safe’ personal interactions amongst the crew, with the only sources of conflict being Worf’s conservatism, Riker’s devil’s advocate, and the management/engineering interaction* between Picard and Geordi.

This made the writers need to look outside the main cast for sources of conflict. This generally worked well, but wasn’t Wesley’s best performance in the series when he played the sulky teenager being called on the carpet by Picard?

All this is a long winded way of saying that it could have been a very different series with a more varied and emotionally expressive cast.

Back to Susie Plakson as K’Ehleyr as First Officer. You would have a very different take on the ‘Freudian Trio’, with the calm and rational emotional readings from Troi, and the more aggressive emotions from K’Ehleyr, with Picard bringing it all together. There’s a beautiful scene with K’Ehleyr and Troi talking just after K’ehleyr has broken a glass table in anger. So much interesting emotional depth to discover and explore!

Also, you’d have the fun dynamic between K’Ehleyr and Worf, with her as his superior officer, much more interesting than the never-really-explored-outside-of-the-book-Imzadi relationship between Riker and Troi.

But alas, TNG was a product of its time and executives. Riker with his daddy issues (which are important, and he carried the part well) must have spoken to those casting, and it must have not just been because he had the second highest rank on the ship that he got second billing, above all the ‘supporting cast’.

Also, the two women who were most like what we’re suggesting for K’Ehleyr were both written out of the show after the first season, both because they wanted more from their parts on the show. Denise Crosby left to pursue feature films, and Gates McFadden was pushed out because she was insisting on more substantive parts for her character.

It wouldn’t be until Kira Nerys that we would have a character close to what could have been with K’Ehleyr. Maybe in a Mirror Universe someday…

*It’s actually really fun to watch this, especially in the early episodes, where they have a number of classic ‘management/engineering’ conversations, including such gems as ‘I don’t want you to use the word impossible’.

Other interesting notes:

Apparently, ‘Wesley Crusher’ was almost ‘Lesley Crusher’: http://trekmovie.com/2010/08/26/1987-paramount-memo-reveals-actors-auditioning-for-star-trek-tng-cast/

Pages 293-7
http://www.amazon.com/The-Continuing-Mission-Star-Trek/dp/0671025597#reader_0671025597
Interesting notes include the fact that each of the actors had to pass personal interviews with the studio execs, that Marina Sirtis and Denise Crosby were originally cast in the opposite parts, and that Gene had to be convinced at length to choose Patrick Stewart.

Agile Power Dynamics

Agile, Analysis, Software Development

In a previous post*: http://nayrb.org/~blog/2015/12/31/agile-basics/

I talked a little bit about Agile and what I thought it meant.

Today, I want to talk a little about how decision-making power is different in an Agile world.

Fundamentally, for me**, ‘Agile’ is all about codifying some of the hard-won lessons from the first 55*** years of computer programming.

There are a number of interlocking ideas in the manifesto, and I keep finding new wrinkles to them when new situations arise, so I’m going to focus on power dynamics.

For this, I will need the strawman of ‘Waterfall’, the ‘development method’ most often contrasted with Agile. Most people represent ‘Waterfall’ as a number of time-sequential silos, with varying amounts of feedback between the silos:

waterfall_1_e96847237d43

waterfall-diagram-in-powerpoint

What is not generally mentioned about ‘Waterfall’ is that estimation is generally performed with minimal input from those implementing whatever solution is called for. This**** generally leads to time and feature estimates being imposed on those implementing the solution.

“You will be solving this problem, and it will take you 3 days to do it.”

It is probably not surprising then that large software projects are prone to cost overruns, as those doing the work are not generally involved in the planning process.

What Agile tries to do is to add and tighten feedback loops. Whereas in a ‘Waterfall’ process, you might release code every quarter, in an agile process, you might do so every two weeks, or multiple times a day.

Key concepts here are subdividing features into smaller and smaller bits, to make the smallest useful change each time, but do it very often.

Getting back to decision-making power, what Agile does is to separate Prioritization power from Estimation power.

Agile gives the Estimation power to the team that will be doing to work*****, while retaining prioritization power in Management. You say that it separates the ‘How’ from the ‘What’******.

This separation encourages more buy-in from staff, and can stop bad ideas earlier. Most importantly, it focuses each of staff and management on what they (theoretically) do best. Management is hired to make decisions about what should be done next, developers are hired because they know how to do things well[7*].

Next time, we’ll tease apart more of the manifesto.

*Same disclaimer applies: I currently work for a company. That company does Agile. From my limited experience, I think it does it well. I am not talking about that company in any way, shape, or form in this post.

**And many others

***I’m going from ENIAC, the first actual construction of a general purpose computer. Lest you think I’m forgetting about Ada Lovelace, you may want to read about the first six (all female) programmers of ENIAC: http://eniacprogrammers.org/

****There are also often issues of under-estimating the cost of things in order to obtain a contract/approvals, but this is outside the scope of this post. Suffice it to say that one who was singularly focused on landing a contract would have great incentives to ignore feasibility and estimation objections from those who might be implementing it.

*****Agile also tries to make sure that the team has someone skilled in every relevant part of the company, but that is outside the scope.

******The ‘Why’ is outside scope of this article. 😀

*******You are confident that your hiring process is bringing in good developers, aren’t you?

Touch Typing

Games!, Idle Speculation, Nostalgia, Thoughts on Thoughts, Writing

It’s the little things that you notice. I was writing something, and just happened to notice that I was looking off into the distance while I was typing. It was one of those choices I made when I was very young. I was in High School, our school didn’t have a typing class, and I decided I needed to learn how. I don’t even remember why. It might have been my mom’s stories about learning, with those typewriters with no letters on the keys, when she was growing up.

Anyways, I remember taking one course, one of those summer enrichment things, up at Northern Secondary. I seem to recall I also took magic, stained glass, and board games, but those might have been different years. (Come to think of it, it might even have been before high school…) Interestingly, I remember this being my choice, perhaps an odd choice for a 12 year old. I don’t even remember why I thought it would be useful, but I remember acutely that I knew it would be. Perhaps similar to my choice to pursue chemical engineering over computers, as I knew that no matter what I did, I would be using computers.

I remember taking that one course, and it being fun…They had these cool puzzles where they gave you a sequence of commands to type, making simple versions of what I could only find online as ‘typewriter art’: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&site=imghp&tbm=isch&source=hp&biw=1250&bih=694&q=typewriter+art

(Kind of early ASCII art, I wonder how much crossed over…)

In searching for the above, I found:

http://www.rapidtyping.com/online-typing-games/isogram-puzzle.html

It’s Mastermind, but with words! 😀

Which apparently has also been published:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/5662/word-mastermind

In a couple of different forms:
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1029413/word-mastermind
https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1151419/word-mastermind

Anyways, I took these classes, but I don’t remember really using my typing until we had an email group in undergrad called the ‘Mailstrom’, often hitting 3 digits of messages per day, where quick wit (and quicker typing) was key.

I suspect there was also some training from playing computer games, but that would really only train a few keys (mostly ctrl and alt, from that era), and the mental mapping probably wouldn’t be from the hand motion to the letter.

And right now, I’m touch typing this, and it seems so normal/natural. Such a weird skill. Happy typing! 😀

Each Person is Their Own Country

Idle Speculation, Nostalgia, Thoughts on Thoughts, Words!

I was in London during the summer of 2000, and one of the expats I met there described the inhabitants as “Each person is their own country”. This was their way of describing how the inhabitants of London (didn’t) interact with each other.

My experience there then was similar, with the only friends I made were other travelers, people from small towns, expats, and a most excellent MSF gentleman from Germany. I also had an experience I regret at the Church of Scientology, but we will speak no more of that.

More relevantly, we were talking at lunch today about large agglomerations of people vs. small towns, and wondering if there is something inherent to large cities that makes people colder or more distant.

AM suggested that it the interactions you would expect in a small town, acknowledging each other as you walk down the street simply become impractical when you encounter thousands of people each day. It’s also possible that people become more and more indistinguishable once there are so many of them, that it becomes a blur, and your mind automatically groups them or filters them out, as they’re too close to the average of ‘how much do I need to pay attention to this person today’. People whom you have befriended, family, co-workers all fall outside this category, but you can even see some of the effects of this if you’re working in a large organization of tens of thousands of people. Your brain will automatically take shortcuts, and group people, whether you want to or not; you have to actively fight this if you want to think of all of them as individuals.

Other possibilities include concerns for safety, concerns that the only reason people approach you on the street is to ask for money or to save your immortal soul, or just that the brain is set up to see 100-200 people as ‘your tribe’, and all others become NPCs*. Once again, this is something you have to fight against, or train your brain out of doing.

Finding “The conversation I can only have with you” can be non-trivial when your brain is full.

But still worth it. 😀

*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-player_character

How I Organize my Thoughts

Administrivia, Idle Speculation, Organizing Systems, Writing

Right now, I have 89 posts posted on my blog, 2 scheduled, and 93* drafts at one stage or another. I have 20 posts open for editing, 11 Google docs, 1 Google spreadsheet, 19 tabs of various research, and 12 minimized browser windows. I also use Clear**, Apple Notes, and I have written journals going back to 1997. I also have about 3600 emails in my inbox and roughly 400 emails in my ‘project’ folder.

For some reason, though, I feel like I’m finally taking charge of this. I think the maxim ‘Real Artists Ship***’ applies. I’m finally shipping some of my thoughts, closing open loops****

When I’m working on my computer, it seems to be a 2-6 brain system*****:
1) Blog post ideas go straight into drafts. (I have 23 that I’ve created or edited within the last two days
2) Longer form ideas go into a Google doc, if there are a lot of numbers, into a spreadsheet.
3) Plans go into my calendar immediately
4) Various things I’m tracking go into Clear
5) Emails go out when they need to, as soon as I can send them out
6) If I need a blank sheet to think about something, it goes in my journal

Interestingly, I’ve been using 3,4,5,6 for a while, to close open loops. What makes this different now is using 1 and 2 to actually release some of those closed-but-in-abeyance loops. Even though the loop is closed and saved, there is still a cost in knowing that I have so many just waiting to be reopened.

This blog seems to be functioning as the ‘bigger can’ to re-can all of those mind worms that pop out when I go trawling through my ideas.

There are plenty of ideas on the go, but I’m sure you have many as well. Let me know if there’s something you’d like me to write about.

*94 now!

**It is amazing todo- and other- list software. Try it!

***Attributed to Steve Jobs

****A concept central to ‘Getting Things Done’, is that of ‘open loops’, or mental distractions, things you’re worried about, or worried about forgetting. A large part of the method is to reduce these as much as possible.

*****I used to call it a ‘3-brain system’ when I just had my PDA and journal. Things have spiraled a little since then.

The Six Answers to a ‘Yes or No’ Question

Analysis, Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Nostalgia, Puns, Thoughts on Thoughts

There exist the traditional five answers to a ‘Yes or No’ question:

– ‘Yes’, indicating complete agreement
– ‘No’, indicating complete disagreement
– ‘Maybe’, indicating something in between on that axis
– ‘I don’t know’, indicating a lack of relevant information
– ‘Mu*’, or ‘unask the question, it contains an incorrect assumption’

Recently, J EB (nee K) mentioned that ‘like’ is a new answer to a yes/no question. (On my post ‘No Spoilers Awaken’)

The Facebook ‘like’ seems to mean a number of different, sometimes overlapping things…
– ‘I like this post and I want you to know’
– ‘I agree with you’
– ‘I’m curious to hear the answer to this question’
– ‘I support you’
– ‘I understand your feelings’

It is very clear (to me) that ‘like’ is a valid answer to a ‘Yes or No’ question, and it is most delightfully ambiguous. It feels more discovered than invented, as we’ve always had ‘interesting question’, it was just rarely expressed by random people around the world, in response to a conversation they are not explicitly a part of.

*For those who wish a slightly more formal treatment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28negative%29 specifically: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28negative%29#.22Unasking.22_the_question

You may also be interested in the somewhat related: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-valued_logic

But my favourite is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong (Thanks DJ!) This is one way to say ‘Mu’, but usually only if you’re trying to be insulting.

Similar but not Identical

Analysis, Machine Learning, Programming, Thoughts on Thoughts

How do you make a a playlist of songs which are similar, but not identical. Ideally, you want to play music that the user is likely to want to listen to*, but you probably don’t want to play the same song, even in different remixes over and over. So, how do you detect similarities, while removing identicals, even when they may not be so identical?

In practice, there is probably a lot of separation between the spike of identical songs and those that are merely similar. You could also use the Web 2.0 crutch of looking at what people searched after other songs, and/or the machine learning approach of trying to put songs after one another and seeing what people skipped or turned to from the suggestions instead.

Similarly**, cleaning data of artifacts is still an open problem. It feels to me like a similar one. You’re trying to remove this *huge* signal which is overwhelming your sensors so you can get at what you actually care about. Assuming both the artifacts and the signal are within your detection limit***, you have to determine the nature of the artifact, both where it is in the signal spectrum, and what axes it spreads through and how. It might also have related harmonics****.

Another related problem is the removal of 60Hz***** noise from all sorts of electronics. I’m not sure what sorts of filters are used, but even band reject filters have non-ideal behaviour, so perhaps smoothing the edges in a known way works better, but this is all speculation. I mostly like using the field around power cords to test oscilloscopes and to get people to think about electric fields.

But back to artifact removal. I don’t have particular insights right now, outside of specific problems spaces. I just think it would be a really cool problem to work on (and one that people work on in a specific way all the time).

*Or perhaps something just similar enough that you’ve been paid enough to play.

**But not identically,

***My favourite procedure/process is the one I learned from an analytical chemist, which is that the signal has to be 3x the noise for you to consider it signal.

****I’m using signal processing as an analogy, but the concept is the same for other artifact removal, just different math.

*****50Hz across the pond

The Spoilers Become More Awake

Idle Speculation, Internet Culture, Nostalgia, Reviews, Space!

Earlier, I talked a little about fear and redemption in The Force Awakens:

The Spoilers Awaken

This post is more a bunch of scattered thoughts…

The movie was all about Han Solo, and that was a good thing. Harrison Ford has really matured as an actor (I should see how he is in American Graffiti), where you see the gravitas, which smoothed out the ‘scruffy-haired nerf-herder*’

There’s probably something about having actors of varying ages and maturity levels, and how it smooths things out. (Even though the young actors in this movie are more skilled (or better directed), they still have the very young energy, attractiveness, and rushing intensity, all of which can do better with guidance…)

‘Droids’ is an excellent example of good ‘in universe’ lingo**.

Seeing the characters old and the death of Han Solo was not just the passing of the torch to the next generation of Star Wars, but also perhaps a passing of the torch to us, that it’s time for us to step up (similar to when Jack Layton died)…

Leia’s dress with a New Republic neck was a nice touch.

Some people have said that Leia was not the most convincing actor, but her acting worked fine for me. Her scenes with Han were very touching, along with the scene near the end with Rey. I also found her convincing as a general, who ‘went back to what she knew the best’, and seemed to fit well in that role.

In a galaxy with hyperdrive and even reasonable astronomy and astrogation, how could you not tell where a sector was, if there was a map of it that included 5-10% of the galaxy? Even with 300 billion stars in a galaxy, you wouldn’t need very many to be narrow down a sector, if the map had any reasonable level of accuracy…

So much regret for time past with problems remaining unresolved…Like Tron:Legacy…

Good use of X-wing quad lasers in ground combat against stormtroopers (apparently they added an under-blaster-cannon in the updated model for the movie), similar to R2-D2’s method for dealing with Joruus C’boath (even a jedi master cannot deflect startfighter-sized weapons, and/or they cannot predict what droids will do). Also, I liked the new X-wing colours. Apparently the shape is slightly different, but I didn’t notice that. http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/T-65B_X-wing_starfighter#Behind_the_scenes

It was very fitting that the new death star reformed back into a sun…

The art department had many scenes of groups of aliens, just doing their thing, ‘world building’ as S says.

The establishing shots were really well done (you should do Comic Book Boot Camp http://comicbookbootcamp.com/).

The force continues to be weak in dealing with droids…The light side of the force more often appears with empathy, so they they can use that to interact with droids

A very tech-savvy force user…Anakin, perhaps Luke, for sure Rey…Either a force ability, or something about growing up on desert planets. If it’s a force ability, interesting that it allows much easier repairs and jury rigging, but not sensing or understanding the motivations of droids.

A small complaint about Cineplex showing spoilers in the opening ‘pre-movie games’

Also, the imperials just sound better with English accents.

Interesting the ‘order’ vs. ‘freedom’ contrast between ‘The First Order’ and ‘The Resistance’.

*Similar to how the last few vestiges of Garath the thief were the only differences between Belgarath the Sorceror and Aldur…

**The counterexample I always use is ‘Argonians’ and ‘Kajhit’ in Oblivion, where no matter how racist the character, they always used the official names, which I always found jarring and unrealistic.