I always thought it was Cary Elwes.

Pascal, too.

Freax.

Like in Superman 3?

No. That’s not true. That’s impossible!

Bring back widdershins!

Clean Code With a Vengeance.

Did she say “Pardon my English” afterwards?

Excellent.

Amiga.

Oblate spheroid.

At least it’s still got its accessories.

The question is, as always, why not a buttplug?

How close did we come to being a footnote in the history of a future species that would happen upon our ruins ten thousand years from now? Would they indulge in the fiction of their own immortality until the Shivans came for them? And how long had this gone on? Did the Ancients stumble upon the monoliths and the tombs of their predecessors in this distant corner of space, dismissing the warnings carved into the walls of the sepulchre? And when the destroyers came at last, what did the Ancients think as they sifted the cremation of dust and bones, staring into the mute remains for a key; some solution to their plight?

What if there had been countless races stretching back into infinity? And like the nine cities of Troy each civilization had been built on the rubble of one that came before. Each annihilated by the Shivans.

The Ancients died eight thousand years ago, as humanity emerged from its neolithic infancy. They believed their voyage across the sea of stars awoke the dragon that slept beneath the waves. That the Shivans were birthed from the flux of subspace and their destruction was the revenge of an angry cosmos.

“But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that’s going to be Human and isn’t yet, or used to be Human once and isn’t now, or ought to be Human and isn’t, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet.”

Their brain is a neural-net processor, a learning computer, but Skynet sets the switch to read-only when they’re sent out alone.

There isn’t a Luke equivalent. That’s kind of a big change.

No Han or Chewbacca equivalents, either.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10/i-hope-you-like-text

Herbert kept writing Dune novels until 1985.

Star Wars and The Hidden Fortress aren’t that similar. There’s some clear inspiration in some aspects, sure, particularly with the Droids, but the overall plot evolved into its own thing.