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Mark Hamill's one-word-a-day tweets get an explanation

Raise a toast of blue (or green) milk, it's Luke Skywalker's 67th birthday!

Gael Cooper
CNET editor Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, a journalist and pop-culture junkie, is co-author of "Whatever Happened to Pudding Pops? The Lost Toys, Tastes and Trends of the '70s and '80s," as well as "The Totally Sweet '90s." She's been a journalist since 1989, working at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Sidewalk, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, and NBC News Digital. She's Gen X in birthdate, word and deed. If Marathon candy bars ever come back, she'll be first in line.
Expertise Breaking news, entertainment, lifestyle, travel, food, shopping and deals, product reviews, money and finance, video games, pets, history, books, technology history, generational studies. Credentials
  • Co-author of two Gen X pop-culture encyclopedia for Penguin Books. Won "Headline Writer of the Year"​ award for 2017, 2014 and 2013 from the American Copy Editors Society. Won first place in headline writing from the 2013 Society for Features Journalism.
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Gael Cooper
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Happy birthday, Luke Skywalker, you Jedi prankster, you.

Star Wars star Mark Hamill wrapped up his 12-day, one-word-a-day tweeting session late Monday night, and it turns out there was a very personal method to his madness: It was all leading up to his 67th birthday.

Hamill has been busy tweeting single-word, all-caps tweets since Sept. 13, when he stirred things up simply by tweeting "THE" and noting that the sentence was "to be continued."

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At the time, Star Wars fans jumped to the conclusion that he might be hinting at the title for Star Wars: Episode IX, which didn't seem that crazy, considering both The Force Awakens (aka, Episode VII) and The Last Jedi (Episode VIII) began with "the."

But soon Hamill's single-word a day tweets made it clear he wasn't dropping any title hints, but had another mission in mind. Hamill's a prolific and smart tweeter, but if you combed through his feed every day looking for the lone one-word, all-caps tweet, the message slowly emerged. It reads: THE PURPOSE OF ANNOYING EVERYONE WITH INANE TWEETS IS DISTRACTING FROM MY BIRTHDAY.

Sept. 25 is indeed Hamill's birthday, and his final tweet not only completed the weeks-long thought, but shared four photos of himself at various ages.

Fans applauded the tease leading up to the special day, with the birthday tweet earning more than 11,000 likes in under an hour. And really, no one seemed mad about the title fake-out, whether it was something Hamill intended or just something fans invented themselves. Wrote one fan: "Happy birthday Mark!! 67 years young! Thank you for being a hero, an awesome actor and a wonderful human being. Love you."

At least one Twitter user says that she predicted the meaning of the gag early on. She wrote: "And so I was right that all of these daily words were leading to your birthday I wish you to have a wonderful day and thanks for this funny countdown, happy birthday."

There's still no word on when the real title for Episode IX will be released, but whenever it happens, it likely won't come one word at a time.

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