Ultimately, Dooku’s status as an apprentice or not is irrelevant because Palpatine never gave a damn about the Rule of Two. Palps is the logical end result of that system - a greedy sociopath who cares only about himself and his own power with no regard to ideology or what happens when he’s gone. Palpatine had Dooku and Maul as apprentices simultaneously while mostly keeping their existences secret from each other because neither of them were intended to replace him, but to be specialized tools with different purposes. Maul was an assassin meant to kill his enemies without being traced back to him, and Dooku was there to stage false-flag attacks so he could increase his political power. Enforcing the Rule of Two on them and making them fight to be his only apprentice would have been detrimental to his personal plans, the Sith as an organization be damned. He was also totally fine with Dooku blatantly violating the Rule of Two by openly training Ventress right up until he thought Dooku and Ventress might be able to overthrow him, at which point he suddenly started enforcing it by making Dooku kill Ventress.

And part of the reason the setting is almost never China in adaptations is that the original 1001 Nights version of the story is very much set in China in name only, with the setting being modeled after the Middle East anyway. I mean, there are two jinns, a sultan, and the sorcerer is from Morocco. And when characters are actually named, they have decidedly non-Chinese names like Mustapha.

Why? Didn’t improve Musk.

Yeah, the BS answer is less off than it seems. Still pretty off, but touching on the likely reality.

Costing…how much?

$1139

Doesn’t matter much in relation to reputational damage.

Early '60s, actually.

Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, too.

He’s banking on being POTUS for the back half of Trump’s term. Trump could keel over any day, but if he’s still alive by New Year’s we’ll almost certainly see Vance try to remove him with the 25th. Once he’s in power, he just needs to be less batshit than Trump for two years and he’ll be in a good position to win an election.

The previous one, Pope Francis, not the current one, who is Pope Leo XIV.

It’s still on old reddit, for some reason.

Dutch were the damn spice traders of the world.

I’m just going to point out that the English were also spice traders and made good use of the spices themselves until they had to sell all their spices to prop up their collapsing empire.

There’s also the Coptic Church.

Yep.

Anglicanism is sort of Protestantism. It forked off of the Catholic Church after the start of the Protestant Reformation, but wasn’t really part of the movement. The king of England at the time specifically had a problem with the Pope and essentially took over the churches in England, keeping the Catholic traditions and power structure but changing the head of the faith from the Pope to the king. The English monarch is still officially the head of the Anglican Church.

Americans are very much not Anglican and many of the people who emigrated to the colonies were religious minorities from proper Protestant groups.

Yeah, that wasn’t a good example since taste is weird. A better example would be that most people would agree that the pink background on this sprite sheet is almost painful to look at while other, more luminous, elements are fine. If our perception significantly varies, then simple mid-luminance color blocks shouldn’t have consistent effects from person to person. Parts of that yellow gradient on the right should cause more strain to someone you know than the magic pink field if perception is strongly variable.

The logic is based on perception, though. Colors either clash or go together because of how we percieve them and which colors go with which is pretty consistent between cultures and time periods.

Given that color theory works the same for anyone that isn’t some variety of colorblind, I’d argue we probably see colors the same way or very very close to the same.

He wanted to make a Flash Gordon adaptation, not Dune. It shows, too, with Star Wars’ aesthetic being heavily inspired by both Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.

Narratively, the original trilogy is heavily influenced by pulpy sword-and-sorcery books and comics and Kurosawa’s films, but with the twist that it’s in space.

Dune, meanwhile, is Hamlet crossed with Lawrence of Arabia in space.

Spice appears in both, except what spice actually does in Star Wars wasn’t explored in anything Lucas made and Frank Herbert died before any of the expanded universe existed. There are only three mentions of spice in the entire original trilogy, all in ANH, and those are a bit about Luke believing his father was a navigator on a spice freighter, 3PO mentioning the spice mines of Kessel, and Han having to dump a load of smuggled spice. It’s clearly just a shout-out; the spice is just a background reference and doesn’t feature in the story. You could replace spice with beanie babies and nothing would change.

What parts of Star Wars do you feel originate from Dune? I’ve never actually gotten a straight answer and I’m genuinely curious.

Most of those probably aren’t maintained well enough to actually be useful. I mean, a few of them probably get used for target shooting every so often, but they probably have most of them just to have them. Like how some people collect action figures, dolls, or cars, some people collect guns.