I’m watching Felicia Day play the violin. I was convinced my crush couldn’t become any bigger. I was wrong. I WAS WRONG.
— Brian (@LaneWinree) April 23, 2012
Although I was waiting for Tom to say vem-PYRE at some point.
Category Archives: Star Wars
James and Lily Potter Go To See Star Wars
Ah Tumblr, home to some of the most delightfully absurd things in fandom. This popped up on my dash last night.
And then James and Sirius went and had lightsaber fights in the flat until one of them accidentally gave Remus a black eye.
‘The Old Republic’ May Already Be Losing Subscribers
The great Word of Warcraft killer? Perhaps not quite reports Ars Technica.
In an investor note released today, Cowen and Company analyst Doug Creutz said he suspects that subscription levels for The Old Republic may already be lower than the 1.7 million EA reported in February. Creutz’s primary piece of evidence for this belief is publicly available server population numbers assembled and reported by TORstatus.net. These figures have shown a roughly 10 percent decline over the last two months. That doesn’t necessarily mean the game has lost 10 percent of its subscribers in that time, of course, but it isn’t really a sign of strong player growth, either.
I’m, unfortunately, one of those subscribers who canceled their TOR subscription. For the first month or so, I was greatly enjoying the game playing through as a smuggler. The first three worlds were a delight but the problem came when I got to the fourth world I visited. It was pretty much a carbon copy of the third. By this point I was growing a little tired of the recycled dialog, battle mechanics, and fetch quests.
The Old Republic might be a neat Star Wars-skinned MMO, but it just can’t escape being a bit too much of a grind for me. Those hoping that Bioware somehow managed to squeeze a Knights of the Old Republic experience into the game didn’t get quite what they were looking for.
Sports and Geek Fandom: The Bizarre Double Standard
Here at Tosche Station, we mean it when we say we’ll talk about anything and everything that has to do with geek culture.
I’m a sports fan. Gridiron football, soccer, basketball (though we’re not on speaking terms until the Sonics come back to Seattle). My first love, though, was baseball. I grew up watching the Seattle Mariners and listening to Dave Niehaus* weave together a daily narrative of America’s grand pass time. Even as my enjoyment of gridiron and basketball waned and my passion for soccer rose, baseball always stayed at the top of my list. But why? Why a game that’s admittedly slow-paced, is crammed full of breaks in the action, whose popularity always seems to be waning? A simple answer, really. Baseball lends itself beautifully to geek culture.
*And to give this a bit more of a science fiction feel, one of the greatest Niehaus calls ever occurred when outfielder Ichiro Suzuki threw a ball on a line from right field to third to gun down Terrance Long. In his words, “Ichiro threw something out of Star Wars.”
Buy a Cool Shirt, Support a Great Cause
Hey Twitter users and Expanded Universe fans, want to support a good cause and get a stylish new shirt for your wardrobe? EUCantina sultan and our Podfather Austin Blankenship is selling wardrobe with my favorite hashtag, #SWEU. Just the thing to take with you to conventions.
Profits will be donated to Reading is Fundamental, a nonprofit geared towards getting books in the hands of kids. A multitude of styles and colors are available, so head on over to Cafepress to get yours.
Check Out Nanci’s ‘Survivor’s Quest’ Retro Review at EUCantina
Our own Nanci has a new review over her other gig at EUCantina. This time around, she takes a look back at Timothy Zahn’s Survivor’s Quest.
As a self-contained story, Survivor’s Quest doesn’t add much to the main storyline. As a standalone novel, it could easily be passed over if one is trying to catch up with the main storyline.
However, skipping the book entirely would be a grave disservice.
SQ is a must-read for fans of the Chiss, the Empire of the Hand, the Fels, and the 501st Legion. In fact, SQ is the novel that first canonized the 501st, named for the fan costuming organization. We meet two new prominent Chiss, Formbi and Drask, and learn more about Chiss culture and hierarchy. This novel first identified the Empire of the Hand, the government established by Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Unknown Regions.
Check out the rest of Nanci’s review at EUCantina.
‘Star Wars Insider’ Short Story Updates
Who wants updates? You guys do! Or at least some of you do. There are lots of you. With many different tastes. I’m clearly stalling at this point so let’s just get into it. Star Wars Books released a list of upcoming shorts you can look forward to in future issues of Star Wars Insider.
-Issue #132 (on sale now) features Jason Fry’s short story “The Guns of Kelrodo-Ai” and stars the “Rebel Destroyer” Shea Hublin (with some beautiful art by John VanFleet!).
-Issue #133 will include the tale of Parella the Hutt, hunter extraordinaire, from Star Wars: Scourge author Jeff Grubb.
-Issue #134 is your first taste of post Fate of the Jedi action as author Christie Golden brings you a story starring Jaina and Jag.
-Issue #135 sees Karen Miller return to the SWEU with an exciting story starring Myri Antilles.
I’m definitely looking forward to issue #135. Myri Antilles as the lead of her own short? Yes, please.
If there’s a short you’d like to see, leave a comment on the announcement post.
Children of the Jedi, Part 4 and Conclusion
There are a few things that I expect when I’m reading a published book from a major series from a major publisher.
One of those things is editing.
Another one of those things is that when I read it, I don’t feel like I need to be proofing this for my fourteen-year-old brother for a freshman English assignment. The writer submitted this, which is one problem. The second problem is that someone then approved it.
And I just want to make this clear: at this point, I am not talking about the things I talked about before—story elements that don’t make sense, characters not acting like they should, etc. I’m talking about literal technical writing ability.
My expectations were obviously too high.
Trope Tuesday: Red Shirt
It’s another edition of Trope Tuesday, the segment where we highlight a literary theme or device that makes our favorite fictional entertainment work. On the docket this week is an old standard: Red Shirts. Hit it, TV Tropes!
The color of shirt worn by the nameless security personnel on the original Star Trek series. Their only job was to get eaten, shot, stabbed, disrupted, sped up and killed, frozen, desalinated, or turned into a cuboctahedron and crushed. Their death would give William Shatner and DeForest Kelley a corpse to emote over, and Leonard Nimoy a corpse to, well, not emote over.
A Red Shirt is the Good Counterpart of Evil Minions and Mooks — set filler for our heroes’ side. Their purpose is almost exclusively to give the writers someone to kill who isn’t a main character, although they can also serve as a Spear Carrier. They are used to show how the monster works, and demonstrate that it is indeed a deadly menace, without having to lose anyone important. Expect someone to say “He’s dead, Jim“, lament this “valued crew member’s senseless death“, and then promptly forget him.
As you can tell, the trope namer is That Other Star Franchise. Isn’t that right, Ensign Ricky?
This trope tends to be used a great deal in the Star Wars Expanded Universe to prove that the heroes are in grave mortal peril (even though the only way the Big Three will ever die is if The Maker allows it to happen). Michael Stackpole’s X-Wing novels loved this trope. See someone new on the roster that wasn’t there in the previous book? Chances are fair that character is going to suffer a Red Shirt Death.
Of course, Star Wars has also subverted the Red Shirt once or twice …
Paul R. Urquhart Talks ‘Essential Guide to Warfare’
Were the endnotes from Jason Fry not enough for you? Suvudu has a lengthy piece from Essential Guide to Warfare co-author Paul R. Urquhart discussing all sorts of fun little details that went into crafting the book.
But what do you do when you’re writing a book that needs to describe the technicalities of how an Ewok defeats a Stormtrooper? You have to come up with straight-faced explanations that don’t seem completely crazy or compromise the inherent fun and lightness of the saga.
That’s the situation I found myself in when I was asked to co-write Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Warfare – a new guide to the warriors and weaponry of the Star Wars saga. Of course, I jumped at the chance, and thus, I became a sort of kilted Boba Fett sidekick to lead author Jason Fry’s baseball-bat-wielding Darth Vader.
And then I realized just what I’d gotten myself into.
How do you describe the technicalities of how an Ewok defeats a Stormtrooper?
The authors clearly had fun putting this book together and you do have to admire how they straddled the line between taking things too seriously and preserving the often amusing absurdities of the epic space opera. Occasionally the Expanded Universe feels like its too caught up in making itself edgy and dark. Essential Guide to Warfare is a lovely change-of-pace.
For more, head on over and read Paul Urquhart’s first Suvudu post.