Jake Hoffner

What we have yet to understand is only the beginning.

[Jake Hoffner @jake_thehoff]

@EricLDaugh But what’s the solution? Instead, we gain more homelessness & the money is funneled into unknown projects that may benefit higher classes. If the program was flawed, what’s the fix? Defunding & fixing aren’t the same. What’s $1 billion compared to the $200 billion Iran extension?

[NASA @NASA]

Introducing Artemis III.

Four astronauts. Three launches. Two dockings. One splashdown.

In 2027, the Artemis III mission will practice docking the Orion spacecraft with two lunar landers in low Earth orbit — the capability we need to return humanity to the Moon’s surface.

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

The ending of “Victory and Death” (2020) is the moment THE CLONE WARS stops feeling like a cartoon and starts feeling like a tragedy. Years spent turning the clones into individuals, only for the final image to be rows of identical helmets in the snow.

[Eshan @eshanbuilds]

Hayden Christensen was 23 when Revenge of the Sith came out. He was 42 when he returned to the role in Ahsoka.

For 17 of the 19 years in between, he was effectively exiled from the franchise and from Hollywood.

The exile was not voluntary at first. Christensen was the focal point of the cultural backlash against the Star Wars prequels in the mid-2000s. The performances were mocked. The dialogue was mocked. The acting choices were mocked. He was 22 years old playing the most analyzed character in cinema history and the analysis decided he had failed.

He kept working for a few years. Jumper in 2008. Takers in 2010. A handful of smaller films. None of them landed. By 2012, the offers were drying up and Christensen had largely stepped back from acting. He moved to a farm in Ontario. He spent years out of public view. The Hollywood narrative was that he had been broken by the prequels.

Two things happened during those years that the Hollywood narrative missed.

The first was the cultural reassessment of the prequels. The generation that watched them as children grew up and rewatched them as adults. What had read as wooden dialogue in 2005 started to read as deliberate stylization. The political plot, which critics had dismissed as boring senate scenes, started to read as one of the most substantively serious treatments of how democracies collapse into autocracy ever put in a blockbuster. By 2017, the prequels were being rediscovered as the most thematically ambitious Star Wars films in the franchise.

The second was what Christensen was doing on the farm. He kept training. The lightsaber choreography he had learned for the prequels was technically demanding stage combat, taught to him by stunt coordinator Nick Gillard over months of rehearsal for each film. Christensen never stopped practicing it. When he came back to the choreography in 2022 for Obi-Wan Kenobi and 2023 for Ahsoka, the muscle memory was intact. He was technically better at 42 than he had been at 23, because he had spent 17 years quietly preparing for a return nobody had told him was coming.

The Ahsoka scene that the fan accounts keep posting is from the episode where Anakin confronts Ahsoka in the World Between Worlds. The choreography is fast, precise, and recognizable as the same combat style Christensen used in the prequels two decades earlier. The body knows what to do. The body has been keeping the role alive while the rest of the industry was writing him off.

What landed differently in the return is that Christensen at 42 has a stillness the 23-year-old version did not. The 23-year-old was performing Anakin's intensity. The 42-year-old is embodying it. The role finally fits the actor in a way it did not when he was first asked to carry it.

The audience that mocked him at 23 had also grown up. The audience that watched the return at 42 had spent fifteen years missing him without realizing it.

The exile turned out to be the preparation.

[Atchfam77 @atchfam77]

@NASA @NASAMoonBase Power restored. Artificial gravity and life support systems: ONLINE; in: RECEIVING BAY, TUNNEL 6, TUNNEL 11, LABORATORIES, BIODOME.

WARNING: Excavator Epsilon will cause decompression of BIODOME in: SIXTY SECONDS

[NASA @NASA]

We're building a Moon Base!

@NASAMoonBase will serve as a habitat where astronauts live and work during long-term science missions.

Join us at 2pm ET on Tuesday, May 26, for a live news event where we’ll share updates on our lunar exploration plans: https://t.co/IJXA7xYwju

[Robert Irwin @RobertIrwin]

Anyone who knows me, knows I am a massive Star Wars fan… so touring the Mandalorian and Grogu set with Jon Favreau was an absolute dream come true!

[Black Hole @konstructivizm]

Star Wars drone show in South Korea

[Jake Hoffner @jake_thehoff]

@EricLDaugh Quoting what he said won’t make any more sense of what already makes completely no sense.

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

Michelle and I can’t wait for you to visit the Obama Presidential Center!

Starting on June 19, the Center will be open to the public, and you’ll be able to check out the Museum along with public spaces like a new branch of the Chicago Public Library with a reading room, a two-acre playground, a fruit and vegetable garden, and more.

Tickets available at https://t.co/ahkDMKalIn.

[Jake Hoffner @jake_thehoff]

@JessKozdra @RoboKnowsBall That makes sense based on what I remember, because I definitely remember seeing it on the air for some time. Maybe they later received some backlash?

[Time Capsule Tales @timecaptales]

During the production of 'Star Wars: The Phantom Menace' (1999), Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi) and Ray Park (Darth Maul) trained so intensely that their lightsaber choreography was blisteringly fast — faster than anything seen before in the saga.

Ray Park, a professional martial artist, moved with such speed and precision that the stunt coordinator had to tell the actors to “tone it down” for the final film. George Lucas even had the cameras over-cranked (filmed at a higher frame rate) to slightly slow down the footage in post-production, because he worried audiences simply wouldn’t believe how quick they were moving.

[LOTR Universe @Lordoftheringsu]

Sir Christopher Lee predicting the impact of The Lord of the Rings on cinema history.

Sir Christopher Lee who originally wished to play Gandalf before ultimately becoming Saruman predicted the impact of The Lord of the Rings long before the films were even released. As the only cast member who had actually met J.R.R. Tolkien, he had a rare understanding of Middle-earth’s depth and mythic weight.

He spoke early on about how monumental the trilogy would be for cinema, and he was absolutely right. Few film series have reshaped modern fantasy the way The Lord of the Rings did, and Lee’s insight, passion, and reverence for Tolkien’s world made his prediction all the more powerful.

[Jake Hoffner @jake_thehoff]

One day, our kids will look back on decisions like this, and wonder how we could be so ignorant to those who came before us, to those who dedicated their lives to a cause larger than our own instantaneous gratification. If we don’t learn, I hope they do.

[Lee Zeldin @epaleezeldin]

The Trump EPA has ENDED the Green New Scam.

We proudly rescinded what has been referred to as the “Holy Grail” for the “world is about to end” climate change zealots, the 2009 Obama EPA Endangerment Finding, without apology or regret.

$1.3 trillion in savings. $2,400 more affordable new vehicles. The end of the start/stop climate participation trophy. All while protecting our environment.

[Tolkien World @TolkienWorldG]

Sir Ian McKellen's favourite scene in all 6 films:

[Jake Hoffner @jake_thehoff]

@ToIkienverse Starting to reach Gandalf age 😮‍💨

[Culture Crave 🍿 @CultureCrave]

Happy 67th Birthday to Sean Bean 🎂

[Lee Pace @leepace]

Back to Middle Earth.