The Last Jedi (why it's dumb)

The Star Wars sequel trilogy is dumb for a bunch of reasons, starting with the way it totally undoes all the good that was done with the original movies, both in terms of plot and also the character development of all of the original cast. But Episode 8, "The Last Jedi", might be the dumbest of the lot, because the plot holes are just so huge.

(It has been pointed out that the movie also fails to give Rey any real character development; all of her actions are obvious and require no change or sacrifice. And Finn gets totally shafted in terms of story. But I need to move on to the bad science.)

A big chunk of the movie centers around this long chase scene, where the good guys can't jump away in hyperspace, and they're being chased by a big bad guy ship with lots of starfighters, and slightly-faster sublight engines. The good guys have decided that their only hope is to make it to the closest planet, where maybe they can hide. (How this helps if the bad guys are in orbit and there's no way to jump away, I'm not really sure, but ignore that for the moment.)

Right away, this premise is stupid, for a couple of reasons.

• Even though the bad guys' big ship is taking a while to catch up, the TIE fighters could easily go and take out the rebels. But the bad guy leader dude explicitly says no to this plan. I guess he really wants to use the big guns, even if takes days to catch up.
• Unlike the good guys, the bad guys can do a hyperspace jump. They could just jump a short distance ahead - either to catch up, or (if that's too tricky, given Star Wars hyperspace computation logic) a little bit farther, putting themselves in-between the good guys and the planet they're trying to reach. Then the good guys would have nowhere to run to.

Please note that neither one of these issues relies on any kind of real-world science knowledge, or deep Star Wars lore. It's just basic logic, based on obvious principles and established conventions. The bad guys are just being stupid. But wait, there's more.

As the good guys are fleeing, Finn and Rose decide to take a side trip to another planet. For info or something. (I've only watched this once, and it was a long time ago.) They're not speeding ahead to the planet the big ship is going to; they go to a totally different planet. If that was an option, why doesn't the whole fleet head there? Did they have a little ship with a hyperdrive? And if so, why didn't they use it to shuttle other people off of the main ship, so they're not all targets on the same ship? The place you're running to is either your only hope, or it's not.

So aside from any storytelling, the whole premise makes no sense at all.

The way they treated Luke Skywalker is even worse.

Lemmings

Sometime back in the 90s, my friend rented Lemmings for the Super Nintendo, and we played it a bunch. It's a fairly simple puzzle thing, but it has these endearing creatures that you're supposed to save, and its music is just legendary. (You'll have to trust me on this. It's all chiptunes, but so many of them have an incredibly epic feel, and they have remained firmly stuck in my head in the decades since I played it.) Before I went home, I memorized my password to the tune of one of the game's music pieces. (LGSSCZL)

To give you an example of how I feel about the music: there is exactly one piece of piano music that I can play with both hands without having to practice and scrutinize written music, and it's an arrangement of the Lemmings tune with the Pachelbel's Canon chord thing in the background. I worked it out from memory one summer at my grandma's house. (I later wrote sheet music using Noteflight. A PDF is here.)

I don't love everything about the game. For one thing, you can't save all the lemmings. In fact, you have to blow some of them up. (It's just pixels flying, so it's not gross or anything, but it's not exactly a good plot point.) And some of the hazards that can take them out are a bit disturbing. And the game can get hard, in the tedious way. I mean, it's also challenging to use your various skills to make the lemmings a path to the exit. But even when you know exactly what to do, it's easy to make one little mistake that messes you up.

There are versions of the game for the PC and pretty much everything else that was out at the time. And there's a modern fan-remake called NeoLemmix, which adds quality-of-life improvements to fix that stuff. But I do care about intellectual rights. So, like 30 years after I played the game, I bought it on eBay and continued where I left off. It was just a few levels away from the end of the easiest difficulty level ("Fun"), so I have finally beaten the game!

If I keep playing, I'll probably use the NeoLemmix version. But either way, the music is on my internal playlist forever.