Quick Hits & Stray Thoughts (12/13/2019)
Danny Aiello was the first person I ever heard say the word "Nintendo" on TV, outside of a commercial or newscast. It was jarring at the time. An adult, a grown adult adult, talking about "playing Nintendo" in a heist movie.
I suppose the point of the reference was to hammer home how much the world had changed while Bruce Willis's burglar was inside. It's jarring again how well it works, in retrospect. Eddie went in at the start of the 80s and came out a decade later and the in the middle of his lost decade, a hundred-year-old playing card company revitalized and revolutionized the home video game market by sneaking their console onto post-crash retail shelves as a toy robot "entertainment system". Nothing has been the same since.
It's useful, when one is going through a blue period, to have a firm grasp on the difference between regrets and laments. When you wish you would have done things differently, that's a regret. When you did everything you could reasonably have done and then some and things still don't turn out how you would have wished, that's a lament. You have to make peace with both of them, but understanding which one you're dealing with helps a lot.
Sometimes, what you wish you would have done differently is actually what you wish you could have done differently. Knowing the difference there, too, is key.
As of December 20th, there will not be any trilogy of Star Wars films that does not reveal Emperor Palpatine in the third episode. As of Episode IX, that is officially just what they do. You reach the third episode, you reveal Emperor Palpatine.
Thought for the day:
“Life is made up of meetings and partings. That is the way of it.”