Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
At Emerald City Comic Con back in late March, a panel featuring Billy West, Tara Strong, Maurice LaMarche, John DiMaggio, Kevin Conroy, Jess Harnell and Rob Paulsen performed Star Wars: A New Hope in the voices of almost all the characters that they ever played. It’s pretty awesome, and hilarious. If you’ve never imagined Luke Skywalker as played by Bender from Futurama, then apparently you haven’t lived.
Some of the language in here gets NSFW, btw. Don’t watch it with your kids.
When I was in college, I lived with one of my best friends for a year. We lived in the on-campus apartments so we had quite a bit more freedom than anybody in the dorms did. I had known that my friend was in the Imperial 501 and that he had several other costumes that he’d either purchased or made. I’d even watched the process of him building his own set of Mjolnir armor from Halo, and then proceed to paint it blue and drill a hole in one foot to make it Caboose from the popular webseries Red vs Blue. He helped me put together a few things of my own as time went by, the only one that I’ve been terribly proud of was my ODST helmet. My brother has the Uruk-Hai orc helmet that he built. What I’m trying to say is that I’m familiar with the process of building a costume out of cardstock, fiberglass, resin and Bondo.
So, I can understand all of what I’m about to show you and, given several months to work
on it, I might be able to emulate this. But probably not. And certainly not like this.
What you’re looking at is one artist’s work on making a piece for charity. Harrison Krix built this helmet for an auction that will take place at Celebration VI that will benefit Make-a-Wish. 40 artists were contacted to make their own variations on Fett and Clone Trooper helmets for this purpose. If you’re going to be at Celebration, then you really need to take pictures of these helmets.
This piece was inspired by the game Skyrim and its protagonist, the Dragonborn or Dovahkiin.
For those of you interested in seeing the process of building this piece of art, check out the artist’s site.
I find Star Wars music videos and other things that make me scratch my head. This particular video a parody of the chart-topping indie rock hit ‘Somebody that I Used to Know’ by Belgian-Australian performer, Gotye.
So, now we’ve reached the end of the initial run of the X-Wing series. The Bacta War is the capstone to Mike Stackpole’s work on start of the series and it represents, to me, some of the highest points of all four books. The tone of these books is different than the books in the past have been and for very good reason.
After we were left with the end of The Krytos Trap, many of us were on edge, disbelieving what happened and completely ove awed by the possibilities. Please be aware, once you cross this jump, you are deep into spoiler territory.
… and I think I might be losing my mind.
Apparently Saturday was Star Wars Night at the home field of the Arizona Diamondbacks and here’s the evidence. It’s really great to know that there is one piece of Sci-fi popular culture that extends so far into the popular consciousnesses that it even intersects our nation’s past-time. Follow the link for pictures and video from the event!
Continuing into part two of our ongoing retrospective on the illustrious X-Wing series, we move past the introduction to the series Rogue Squadron and into Wedge’s Gamble. The second book of the series is less about letting the readers slip into the military pilot perspective instead of the farmboy, Jedi or smuggler, and more about exploring the characters and their relationships with each other.
On that note, there really isn’t even that much in the way of dogfights in this book. Whereas in Rogue Squadron there were at least three different blood-pumping, heart-pounding battles where the readers felt like they might lose the characters who they’re just starting to care about, we’re given the opportunity to fear for them in much different ways.
Be sure to check out the rest below the jump.
As some of you may know, the largest gaming conference in the world is taking place right now in LA, The Electronic Entertainment Expo, or just E3. I’m just going to try to hit the high points of what’s been going on as best I can, although I haven’t been as plugged in as I have been in the past.
The biggest things that people have been looking forward to in the whole expo have been the new hardware from the ‘Big 3,’ Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony. Last year, Nintendo announced a new console system called the ‘Wii U,’ and this year they’ve given us more of the details of the system. Microsoft has shown a new addition the X-Box 360 that will probably add some serious life to the system, called Smart Glass. Sony is yet to have their day at the convention, but the buzz is that they will be introducing a new console, although I haven’t heard anything more. (Edit) Sony’s press conference was last night, they debuted God of War Ascension, a few secenes from The Last of Us and a new project from the maker’s of Heavy Rain. I hadn’t heard anything about this from any of the sources I’ve been reading or watching and had to actively look for any of this with the exception of God of War, and that didn’t seem to be drawing a lot of buzz.
Check out the rest after the jump
The US release
I know, this isn’t exactly what we do here normally, but I figure that as long as we’re a blog that puts you, the readers, in the know about geek culture and the biggest and best of novels and other media there is to experience, I simply have to point this out.
The final book of the Wheel of Time, A Memory of Light, is dated for release on January 3rd, 2013. The cover art has been released, pictured here. The first section of the prologue is available to read at Dragonmount. If you’re interested, you can find it here.
More after the jump.