Star Wars
No spoilers for the newest movie, just FYI.
Two things. First, I don't like Disney. Terrible corporation, not very good at
their jobs, plus there's the whole atrocity that was the Disney Channel sitcoms.
Blagh. And then those crummy live-action remakes and the whole thing with their
Disney+ network and augh. No thanks.
Secondly, until recently I didn't really give two hoots about Star Wars. This is
mostly due to me never having watched the movies growing up. Which is silly,
because my dad's a big movie buff with a big ol' DVD/Blu-Ray collection. We HAD
the movies, at least on VHS anyways. But also my dad never cared much for Star
Wars either, despite being literally the prime demographic when they first came
out. So, yeah. Meh.
But my parents have taken me to see the new trilogy plus Rouge One. And, well,
I can honestly say that I like *aspects* of the Star Wars universe. I think the
new trilogy was largely a flop with some very dumb ideas. Granted the newest
movie handwaved some of that away, but eugh. The fact that they had to is still
bad. We could've had some genuinely interesting plot but nope, just rebellion vs
giant empire. Gotta give the prequels some credit, at least they were coherently
written and did something different with the universe. And I really enjoyed
Rouge One too, just for being solidly written.
There's a few things that are drawing me into the Star Wars black hole, though.
I really like the aesthetic of old clunky futuristic technology pushed well past
its breaking point. I like all the radically different civilizations, seeing how
they sustain themselves and build housing and all that according to the needs of
each planet. The different species, the droids and the humans and the.. other..
things. (Again, I don't know much about Star Wars). And, yeah, it's a little
cliche at this point, but I like the political squabbling, the different systems
fighting over how to best govern their land, and the trading posts and just...
there's so much they could be doing with this universe.
I guess that's what the EU is for, but Disney axed that. The background charac-
ters are genuinely more interesting than the main characters sometime. I've
recently come across one that was basically a background prop in a small scene
in the newest movie, "AL1-L3", or "Allie". She was a protocol droid in some
mines, witnessed a droid revolution, and became inspired. She was scrapped due
to disobedience but as she got scavenged she started rebuilding herself and
now operates as a cargo hauler taking on exclusively droid clientele. (Kinda
copy/pasted all of that from [1].)
Like crap. That's interesting. Good visual character design, good setup if you
ever wanted to do something with her, it's neat. I realize it was likely just a
inspirational writing thing for a background prop, but dangit if she doesn't
have a lot more potential than a lot of other characters in this latest trilogy.
(also she shares the same first name with me so maybe i'm biased. :p) Also
Twitter is saying stuff about the implications of droids wanting freedom and I
don't know enough to comment but again, *neat*. Civil rights stuff. Plot
potential. Maybe there's droids who go against their masculine/feminine prog-
ramming. Do robots love each other? Is there robot racism? IDK.
Last thing, the FIRST Robotics Competition. It's a high school robotics compo,
you build big beefy floor rectangles that do things. I was on the team, it was
fun. A big part of the reason why I went down the EE path in the first place.
They today just unveiled their latest challenge, Infinite Recharge.[2] The whole
thing's Star Wars themed. Like, hardcore. Trench runs, "droids", the galatic
alphabet and the tell-tale visial design on all the panels. The compeition is
incredibly bog-standard. Put balls in the endgoal, hang at the end. Whatever.
The color wheel is neat, as that's fairly easy to do. If you can convince your
team to purchase a color sensor and then figure out how to program it. ...which,
from experience, good god damn luck. How's a high school sophomore supposed to
know how to interface with some random I2C component? In *LabVIEW*???
Right that's a nice segue. FIRST relies very, VERY heavily on corporate sponsor-
ship. Everything from the only allowed control computer (a National Instruments
roboRIO embedded controller device, which in fairness is nice but also a total
pain in the butt to work with. The configuration dashboard, which you HAVE to
use for firmware updates and CAN bus diagnosis, is written in *Microsoft Silver-
light.* Granted this was also circa-2016 but I can't imagine they've changed it
much since then. The only allowed motors are typically provided by AndyMark, a
corporation that at this point only sells FRC parts and makes a solid chunk of
change off of it. The supported programming languages/compilers include Java ME
(fine), Windriver C++ (Windriver is the provider of VxWorks, which is totally
not the RTOS used I don't think), and NI's LabVIEW, a programming language I
genuinely and passionately hate. No version control (very important on a team!),
lots of mouse work, terrible search, terrible keyboard shortcuts, terrible at
math (a thing that you *kinda have to do* on a robot), etc. I used it when I was
helping a professor set up some physics experiment where he needed to store and
graph data from a few isntruments that used IEEE-488 and it was fine there. But
for a robot???
Sorry, got carried away by passion. I can vent about that later. Anywho, over
the years FRC has gone from dinky, generic but loveable compeitions featuring
just plain ol' geometric objects (Recycle Rush, where you stack storage bins,
Aerial Assist, where you basically play football with exercise balls, Rebound
Rumble, basically basketball) to rather overdesigned and very heavily themed
games (Stronghold, medevial themed, featuring a lot of strange gimmicks you
had to overcome to cross a "moat", Steamworks, steampunk themed with the goal
being to give gears and "fuel" to these giant "flying" towers, etc.) And now
it's just flat-out Star Wars themed. Right after a *different* space-themed
game. Hey high school students, sure hope you like Star Wars.
I dunno. I feel like it cheapens the whole thing. The still-generic themed ones
were fine, even if they went waaaay overboard with the gimmicks but now it just
feels less like "yeah, hands on engineering, solving fun but real problems" and
more just one big advertisement. Which it always was, let's not lie. But, like
up to 11 now. When I was on the FRC team I always felt restricted by the stupid
proprietary hardware/software and it's inherent clunkiness, and now it just
seems like that but worse. I understand these robots and the competition is very
expensive, and it's not gonna fund itself. But, ugh, bad taste.
...wow that tangent went on way longer than i thought. how'd i spend an hour
writing this? i really need to cut back on the length of these things.
[1]: https://twitter.com/ykarps/status/1212743012083798017
[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmiYWTmFRVE