The talent level in our community is starting to give me a complex.

OMG JIMMY IS SO SCOTTISH

Okay, everyone brace yourselves: George made the right call here. I don't know if there are AT-ATs either in the new ride, I haven't gone on it yet, but the point of the thing is to ride through the exciting bits of Star Wars, canonical timeline be damned. You may recall that the original ride was a trip to Endor, where you became caught in a rebel battle against a completed Death Star destroyed by a trench run and photon torpedoes in the exhaust port. I don't think I need to explain to anyone here what's wrong with that, but I never gave a damn while I was on the ride. I also never took the Back to the Future ride (   ) as official canon, either.

So while I appreciate that the Imagineers were thinking about the broader context, what matters is a badass ride. It's that Lucas took the same cavalier attitude to the movies themselves that created problems.

That is hilarious. They should all be like that from now on.

Well I hope you've learned your lesson alt-Trey.

Disclaimer: I am not Eddie.

The short reason as I understand it is that the various company logos and trademarks have not been "cleared" to appear on the show. So they blur it out because, on the one hand, a company may not want to have their logo or other branding associated with the content of the show, and having it appear in said show can give the appearance of endorsement. So the production company staves off a lawsuit. Same reason they have to blur faces on COPS or in the background of man-on-the-street interviews -- they didn't get permission to show those peoples' faces on television. This also, I believe, extends to artwork and graphic design. Just like if you want to use a stock photo or video, you need to pay for the license, if you want to display someone else's visual IP -- even something like a KFC menu -- you have to either get permission or blur it out. Additionally, the production company doesn't want to give anyone free advertising -- especially if the brand in question is a competitor of the show's actual sponsors -- so it behooves them to blur out any identifiable branding for that reason, too.

If you're seeing branded signs or T-shirts that are not blurred on American television, you can expect to see ads for that brand at the commercial break.

Any story has three broad stages -- beginning, middle, end. Shit starts happening, the shit gets worse, the shit gets resolved. You can choose to subdivide those categories any way you like -- even hardcore three-act cheerleaders will divide the first act into introduction and inciting incident, the second has a "midpoint turn" bisecting it, and the third act typically includes both climax and denouement -- but in the end the story falls into one of those three stages.

The three act structure is descriptive, not prescriptive. It's useful when telling a story, especially in screenplay format where you have rigid page count restrictions, to be able to divide the script into thirds and get a feel for how well it's paced. If it takes you until well into the "second act" (or, god help you, the "third") to actually get to the point of the fucking script, you have a problem. If the "second" act isn't a constant escalation of complications, you have a problem.

The mistake people too often make (because all the screenwriting books tell them to) is to to fit every story into the same box. Oh shit, I'm on page 72, it's time for The Romantic Leads Have A Falling Out. There's no legitimate reason for them to, at this in the story, but the Page Count Gods have declared it thus. This is what "formulaic" means.

Storytelling is a fractal thing. At every level you're dealing with beginning, middle, end. Ideally, you should be able to subdivide a story into as many acts as there are scenes, because every scene should end with the characters somewhere they weren't when the scene began -- emotionally, physically, knowledgably, geographically -- with no easy way, or no way at all, to get back to where they started. Because if a scene doesn't accomplish that, it better be funny as fuck or there's no reason for it to exist.

Three act structure isn't a myth, but following it slavishly and calling yourself a writer is like doing Video Copilot tutorials and calling yourself a VFX artist. You know which buttons to push to accomplish a very specific task, but you don't understand what each step is doing and can't synthesize them into anything new, which is where artistry actually begins.