Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
Today’s big Star Wars event at San Diego Comic Con was a Clone Wars panel with Dave Filoni. While we couldn’t be there, we’re all fortunate that all-around awesome person Amy Ratcliffe was on hand to live-tweet the big stuff. She’s been kind enough to let us compile her coverage for the blog, so go say thank you by giving her a follow on Twitter!
Spoilery TCW goodness below the jump!
Del Rey and Dark Horse held their Future of Star Wars Publishing panel this afternoon (or evening, depending on your time zone). Thanks to Bryan Young from Big Shiny Robot and Star Wars Action News for their live tweeting of the event.
The news is as follows:
Edit 3:49 PT:
.@infinata says there will be bigger announcements at #SWCVI. #SWEU #SDCC2012
— Bryan Young (@swankmotron) July 13, 2012
And a post-panel link roundup
That sound you just heard was Nanci screaming in glee.
The Celebration VI staff has announced today that Mark Hamill will be back and in attendance this year! Prepare for a long queue if he does a marquee event. As Nanci mentioned on the latest podcast, last Celebration she was in line for nearly two hours to get in.
Kicking off the show, the hosts highlight what’s new on the blog. Nanci reviewed Wraith Squadron and Iron Fist as part of Tosche Station’s ongoing summer X-Wing retrospective. Shane reviewed Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, the novel. We asked, and you delivered: the future of Star Wars at San Diego Comic Con. Emily recapped her trip to Fandom Fest. Finally, we’re starting a grassroots effort to get the release date of Scoundrels pushed up a week.
In Fixer’s Flash, Nanci’s been busy reading Janine Spendlove’s latest book, War of the Seasons: The Half-Blood. She’s helping to prepare for a Wizard Rock concert. What’s Wizard Rock? Stay tuned and you’ll find out! Brian’s still reading Mageworlds, but mostly he’s lamenting his poor decision to stack college and work at the same time.
Deak’s Dirt brings casting updates from Catching Fire. The Dramatis Personae for Mercy Kill was released by Random house, along with a new excerpt featuring Myri Antilles. They also released the cover blurb for Scoundrels. Not content with just that, Random House also wants to record your fan fiction, and the hosts go on a tangent as a result.
In this week’s Camie’s Concerns, the hosts are tackling two topics. First off, they offer advice for those attending Celebration VI and Dragon*Con this year. Later in the segment, they discuss what future Expanded Universe books they expect to hear announced from San Diego Comic Con this week as well as what listeners and readers are hoping to have announced.
For Wormie’s Works, Nanci highlights Wizard Rock group The Whomping Willows and Brian links to EUCantina’s contest to raise awareness for children’s literature.
The hosts round out the show by answering questions from listeners and discussing the Trope of the Week: Genre Savvy.
Tosche Station Radio is the official podcast of Tosche-Station.net and a part of the Solo Sound network. If you like what you hear, please leave a review on the iTunes Music Store or the Zune Marketplace. 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
For those of you that don’t read the phenomenal webcomic Penny Arcade three days a week, like I do, here’s today’s comic. It’s below the jump for language purposes, so if you’re at work or with your kids, give it a pass for now. Otherwise, have a good chuckle.
A little earlier today, Nanci and I got an interesting press release in our inboxes from Lucasfilm, Del Rey, Dark Horse, and the other Star Wars IP publishing houses. This fall, you can participate in an event to celebrate literature and Star Wars.
Lucasfilm and its publishing partners announced today a national Star Wars Reads Day to be held this October 6, 2012. Star Wars Reads Day is a multi-publisher initiative that celebrates reading and Star Wars. On October 6, events will take place at hundreds of bookstores and libraries across the United States. Participating publishing partners include Abrams, Chronicle Books, Dark Horse, Del Rey, DK, Scholastic, Titan Magazines, and Workman.
Officially participating bookstores and libraries will receive a Star Wars event kit (free of charge). The kit includes: an exclusive Star Wars Reads promotional item (25-50 per event); raffle prizes; promotional giveaways; a packet of event ideas, reproducible activity sheets and trivia; and more. The events will have the PR and marketing support of the eight participating publishers and Lucasfilm.
If your store or library would like to participate in Star Wars Reads Day on October 6, please sign up athttp://us.dk.com/SWRDevent. Volunteer costumers can sign up at http://us.dk.com/SWRDvolunteer.
Follow Star Wars Reads Day on Facebook!
Promoting literacy and Star Wars? Now there’s something I can get behind.
So, yes, we’re pumped for this book. There’s just one little problem. It’s due to release on December 26th, 2012.
I’ve had some conversations with friends and other bloggers around the EU fandom, and for the most part we’re all in agreement. This is a book we would gift to other fans during the Holidays. It’s a book that fans would put on their gift list. It’s, really, the perfect Expanded Universe gift for that time of the year, but its release date misses that target.
We want to see books like Scoundrels succeed. Moving the date up just one week, we believe, would help bring in new and lapsed readers and would encourage longtime readers to pick up a copy.
So we’ve put together a petition asking Del Rey to slide the release date up just one week. We’d love to have a few days before the Holidays to pick up this book for friends and other fans. It’s just the book for any Star Wars fan and we want to make sure people read it.
To make his biggest score, Han’s ready to take even bigger risks. But even he can’t do this job solo.
Han Solo should be basking in his moment of glory. After all, the cocky smuggler and captain of the Millennium Falcon just played a key role in the daring raid that destroyed the Death Star and landed the first serious blow to the Empire in its war against the Rebel Alliance. But after losing the reward his heroics earned him, Han’s got nothing to celebrate. Especially since he’s deep in debt to the ruthless crime lord Jabba the Hutt. There’s a bounty on Han’s head—and if he can’t cough up the credits, he’ll surely pay with his hide. The only thing that can save him is a king’s ransom. Or maybe a gangster’s fortune? That’s what a mysterious stranger is offering in exchange for Han’s less-than-legal help with a riskier-than-usual caper. The payoff will be more than enough for Han to settle up with Jabba—and ensure he never has to haggle with the Hutts again.
All he has to do is infiltrate the ultra-fortified stronghold of a Black Sun crime syndicate underboss and crack the galaxy’s most notoriously impregnable safe. It sounds like a job for miracle workers . . . or madmen. So Han assembles a gallery of rogues who are a little of both—including his indispensable sidekick Chewbacca and the cunning Lando Calrissian. If anyone can dodge, deceive, and defeat heavily armed thugs, killer droids, and Imperial agents alike—and pull off the heist of the century—it’s Solo’s scoundrels. But will their crime really pay, or will it cost them the ultimate price?
Scoundrels is due to hit bookshelves on December 26th. Any chance we can talk Random House into pushing the date back a few weeks? I’ve got people I’d love to buy this for during the holidays.
Take that, Game of Thrones.
It turns out that if you have a wildly successful animated show that manages to beat out Game of Thrones in ratings, your hosting network may want more episodes of said wildly successful animated show. According to EW, Nickelodeon has ordered an additional 26 episodes to be added to The Legend of Korra’s run.
It’s official: The Legend continues! Nickelodeon has picked up a second season of the animated adventure series The Legend of Korra, EW has learned. After averaging 3.8 million viewers for Season 1, Book 1, which concluded June 23, the Avatar: The Last Airbender sequel is receiving a second-season order of 26 episodes that presumably will be divided into two parts called Books 3 and 4, bringing the total number of episodes to 52.
Who says an action show centered around a well-crafted female lead can’t be a winning product?
Can’t make it to the Firefly Reunion panel at SDCC? That’s okay–the Science channel will be airing a special so we can all enjoy on Sunday, November 11th. It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years since we first went into the black, but Browncoats Unite will be the capstone to the Science Channel’s 10-year anniversary celebration of this Joss Whedon classic.
Shiny.