Tosche Station Radio at SWCA: A Celebration of You

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As you may be aware, Tosche Station Radio has been selected to participate on the Celebration Podcast Stage. On Sunday April 19th at 10:30AM, you can head into room 208A to see Nanci, Bria, Sho, and myself record a live show in front of an audience. It’ll be a lot like our normal episodes. We’ll have the usual intros, highlighting stuff we’ve posted to the blog, Fixer’s Flash, Deak’s Dirt, and Camie’s Concerns.

For that last segment, though, we’re going to change things up a bit: we want you to participate.

Nanci and I have already decided to call this episode A Celebration of You. We want to hear your stories. We want to learn how you became a fan of Star Wars. We want to find out what you’d love to see represented in the Galaxy Far, Far Away. We want to have a conversation with you, listener and Star Wars fan.

Tosche Station Radio has, from the beginning, been a podcast focused on diversity. Diversity in storytelling, diversity in characters, diversity in creators, diversity in fans. We know that there’s a huge range of fans out there that don’t fit the normal demographic checkboxes. When we sit down on the stage to record this April, our goal is to let your voice be heard.

We look forward to hearing your story. See you at Celebration.

-The Tosche Station Staff

A New Approach to Recommending The EU

If you’re an Expanded Universe fan, chances are you’ve had to field the following question at least once: “Where should I start reading the Star Wars books?” Everyone has a different answer of course but the most common is usually “The Thrawn Trilogy. Duh.” As the first EU book, it’s accessible and doesn’t require more knowledge than the films and it’s simply a pretty darn good trilogy. The problem, however, is that I don’t think this works anymore.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve had two people ask me where they should start reading the books and I had to pause and reconsider the instinctive and age-old Thrawn Trilogy answer. We now live in a world where there is Star Wars canon and there is Legends with hundreds of books. For me, this changes that game completely.

Taking my probably belated realization into mind, I wanted to share with all of you my new method for deciding which EU books I should recommend to someone. It’s only been tested on two people so it’s hardly foolproof but it may be useful to some of you.

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Tosche Station Radio #106: Wild Mass Guessing II – The Guessening

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Rogue One and Journey to the Force Awakens? Mike Cooper joins us for WILD MASS GUESSING!

Kicking off the show, the hosts highlight What’s New on the Blog. Bria reviewed Star Wars #3. Brian wrote about Separating the Art from the Artist and why he’s worried about Lords of the Sith. Nanci explained the big problem with Heir to the Jedi. We’ll be discussing these topics in depth next week along with a sort of State of the EU.

Deak’s Dirt starts with comics news this week. Stuart Immonen will be the new artist on Star Wars starting with #8. Meanwhile on the lit side of things, Journey to The Force Awakens announced. In additional Marvel comics news,  the cover of Shattered Empire #1 by Phil Noto was shown off. Finally, we got official confirmation that Aftermath will be written by Chuck Wendig.

Over in Biggs Bull$^%*,  Rian Johnson officially confirmed for Episode VIII and the release date is set for May 26, 2017. Rogue One announced as the first standalone movie, will be released in December 2016. Directed by Gareth Edwards, written by Chris Weitz, and starring Felicity Jones. Alexandre Desplat will do the score. Stackpole had a  blog post on the subject. Meanwhile, Andrew Liptak posted a history of Rogue Squadron at B&N

There’s so much news this week, we’re just continuing it in Camie’s Concerns! Mike Cooper from Eleven Thirty Eight joins us to break things down and engage in wild mass guessing (our favorite passtime).

You can see Mike’s work here at Eleven-ThirtyEight and follow the blog here on Twitter.

Tosche Station Radio is the official podcast of Tosche-Station.net and a part of Majestic Giraffe Productions. If you like what you hear, please leave a review on the iTunes Music Store. We can also be found on Facebook and Twitter.

Nanci and Brian are the co-founders and writers of Tosche-Station.net. You can find Nanci on Twitter with the handle @Nancipants and you can find Brian with @LaneWinree.

This podcast has been brought to you in part by Her Universe and Audible.com.

Her Universe - Flaunt Your World - www.heruniverseshop.com Listen to a bestseller for $7.49 at audible.com!

Review: Princess Leia #2

Princess Leia’s mission to track down all her remaining Alderaanian survivors continues as she lands on Naboo with her new accomplice and fellow Alderaanian Evaan. Mark Waid, Terry Dodson, Rachel Dodson, and Jordie Bellaire knock it out of the park yet again with the second issue that’s in stores today!

This review contains mild spoilers.

Our Alderaanian heroines arrive on Naboo to find retrieve the Melodic order; a famous performance group from their homeworld. It will hardly be an easy task though to elude Imperial detection… even with the help of Leia’s old friend Lord Junn.

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Journey to The Force Awakens: Aftermath Cover and Author revealed

AftermathWell, the author is officially revealed, anyway.

A few days after Random House’s publicity site let slip that Chuck Wendig would be writing the first Story Group canon era novel set after Return of the Jedi, Jen Heddle made it official. While she can’t say much, Jen was able to tell us that this will be the first book in a trilogy. Also, this:

What I can reveal is that you will be introduced to a sweeping new cast of characters, along with a fan favorite from the films. And who knows what other familiar faces will pop up along the way? And once you’ve seen The Force Awakens in movie theaters, you may find that certain names and places in Aftermath have a relevance you never knew–so keep your eyes wide open!

Additionally as you can see on the right, the cover was released as well. I don’t know about you, but I absolutely dig that look.

Welcome to the Star Wars community, Chuck!

Separating the Art from the Artist: Why I’m Torn About Lords of the Sith

Lords of the SithI don’t want to feel conflicted about this, but there’s no way around it.

It goes without saying that an LGBTQ+ character being introduced into the Star Wars story group era canon is unequivocally a good thing. Any step to diversify one of the most prolific and powerful pieces of entertainment in the world is welcome. Despite this obvious good news, I can’t help but be wary. Not because I don’t doubt there are good intentions by the story group and the folks at Del Rey, but because the author who is introducing this character has a pretty dubious history when it comes to speaking about diversity.

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We have our first Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens image!

Not content with dropping the breaking news mic all week, the Star Wars folks have released the very first image from Marvel’s contribution to Journey to Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  Check out the cover of Shattered Empire #1 by superstar artist Phil Noto below.  The first issue will be out in September.

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