Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
One of the most popular responses, Winter Celchu
There’s no getting around it. It’s been another slow news spell and really, things have been dry since the Internet’s Bad Star Wars-Themed Pun Day. Which is why we decided to crowdsource blog content to you. Again.
This week’s Twitter List asked you to tell us your favorite non-Force sensitive Star Wars Expanded Universe characters because we firmly believe you don’t need a connection to the Force to be a badass. To the jump!
Saturday’s attempted launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon capsule looked like it was going to go off without a hitch. Until one second remained in the countdown.
Launch aborted: slightly high combustion chamber pressure on engine 5. Will adjust limits for countdown in a few days.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 19, 2012
Engineers have spent the last few days looking over the number five Merlin 1C engine and have determined the Falcon 9 can be cleared for another launch attempt tomorrow morning, only a few days after the latest scrub.
With any luck, at 3:44AM EDT the mission can resume and we’ll find out if we’re one big step closer towards a new crew transport vehicle.
All of those awesome new shirts and items that Ashley Eckstein and Her Universe have been previewing for the last several weeks officially went on sale at the site today. Some of these new products include …
Clockwise: Looking For Love In Alderaan Places tee, Sith racer back tank, Calavera Vader Scoop tee, and the Self-Rescuing Princess children’s tee.
To purchase one of the above or to check out the other new offerings, head on over to Her Universe.
In this week’s batch of endnotes, author Jason Fry talks stormtroopers and women among their ranks.
A Female Stormtrooper Remembers: The femtroopers you see at cons are serious fans and work as hard on their costumes as anyone else does. Check out the work of Sith Vixen: Yes, she looks amazing in femtrooper gear, but she also looks great as Maul or a Kaleesh warrior, costumes that demanded an enormous amount of work.
That said, midriff-baring stormtrooper armor always struck me as a bit unlikely in-universe — I figured the Empire had female troopers, but I was pretty sure they weren’t wearing armor that looked like that. With this in mind, “female stormtroopers” was one of the first things I wrote down when beginning to work on the outline for Warfare.
This batch of notes has a lot of great material about stormtroopers in general. For more, head on over to Jason Fry’s Tumblr.
You can be forgiven if you’ve written off the live-action Star Wars television series.
Rick McCallum says that the project is still on the table and scripts have been written. The issue remains the cost of production. There’s an incredible amount of visual effects they want to work in, more than any of the films they’ve done in the past. Sadly, I think that this series just isn’t going to happen unless Lucasfilm is willing to scale back on the effects. Fans aren’t looking for a visual masterpiece in a television series, they’re looking for regular installments of story and characters. You don’t have to squeeze blockbuster-grade visuals into a 45 minute television episode.
Perhaps the showrunners should call up Ron Moore for a consultation.
(Shane insisted we use that title)
Marvel’s The Avengers is still flying high at the box office, claiming the top spot for a third straight week and smashing all challengers into a fine pulp. This week, it seems, it didn’t have to work very hard.
Rotten buzz and superheroic competition sunk Universal’s “Battleship” over the weekend. Costing over $300 million to make and market, Peter Berg’s “Battleship” managed to sell about $25.4 million in tickets in its first weekend in North American theaters – a second-place finish behind “Marvel’s The Avengers” (Disney), which took in an estimated $55 million for a three-week domestic total of $457 million.
While it’s been a year of incredible blockbuster successes (Hunger Games, Avengers), it’s also been a year of embarrassing flops. Battleship joins John Carter as an expensive film that has not only stumbled, but faceplanted and rolled straight off a cliff in its domestic opening. At least John Carter can claim horrific marketing as part of its problem, though it was still a mediocre film. Battleship was marketed heavily to court the summer popcorn crowd. Unfortunately, moviegoers decided that they would rather see the eye-popping and well-written Avengers for a second or third time rather than another critically panned film based off of a Hasbro product.
One of our illustrious staff has the good fortune to live in FL and is currently enjoying the fun of Star Wars Weekends in Orlando at the happiest place on Earth, Disney World. Since the rest of us are far flung from Orlando, we’ll have to get by on just videos of some of the attractions. Like this year’s Hyperspace Hooplah!
As you may have heard on the latest podcast, we’re happy to endorse a new comic this July: the all-new Captain Marvel.
This July, Carol Danvers, once known as Ms. Marvel, will take on the legacy of a legendary hero in CAPTAIN MARVEL, a new ongoing series by writer Kelly Sue DeConnick and artist Dexter Soy.
“My pitch was called ‘Pilot’ and the take can pretty much be summed up with ‘Carol Danvers as Chuck Yeager,’” says DeConnick. “Carol’s the virtual definition of a Type A personality. She’s a competitor and a control freak. At the start of our series, we see Carol pre-Captain Marvel, pre-NASA even, back when she was a fiercely competitive pilot. We’ll see her meeting one of her aviation heroes and we’ll see her youthful bravado, her swagger. Then over the course of the first arc we’re going to watch her find her way back to that hungry place. She’ll have to figure out how to be both Captain Marvel and Chuck Yeager—to marry the responsibility of that legacy with the sheer joy being nearly invulnerable and flying really [expletive] fast. Sporting a revamped costume to compliment the codename, Danvers not only faces unfamiliar dangers and challenges, but also delves into her own history as well as that of the late Kree soldier Mar-Vell, the first person to operate as Captain Marvel.”
I know I’m excited for this. I’m still a relative newcomer to the world of comics, but one character that has quickly become a favorite of mine is Carol Danvers. Great backstory, compelling, lots of depth. Just the kind of female character that fandom needs. And now she’s getting one heck of a (very deserved) promotion to Captain Marvel.
If you’re looking to support a great female character written by a great female author, pick up the new Captain Marvel this July.
News just dropped that Palpatine himself will be attending the Star Wars convention to end all Star Wars conventions. From the official site:
Ian McDiarmid, the actor who unforgettably played the evil galactic mastermind and the ultimate villain of the Star Wars saga, will be making a rare convention appearance atStar Wars Celebration VI, appearing on-stage and signing autographs.
In 1983, McDiarmid embodied the full depth of the dark side as the Emperor in Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi, his face hidden under ghastly makeup and his eyes concealed behind sickly yellow contact lenses. When his true face was revealed as the apparently kind and helpful Senator Palpatine in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999), he projected a different kind of evil — a subtle manipulator of galactic events, a villain hidden in plain sight. As the prequels progressed, so too did Palpatine’s plans until finally, in Revenge of the Sith (2005), McDiarmid got to play evil at its fullest, and revealed the true power of Darth Sidious.
This will be McDiarmid’s first time at a US Star Wars Celebration (he made a brief appearance at the opening ceremonies of Celebration Europe), and his first time ever signing at the Celebration Autograph Hall.
McDiarmid will be joining the likes of Peter Mayhew and Carrie Fisher at Celebration VI this August.
Apart from a love of all things science fiction and geek culture, the staff here at Tosche Station has one thing in common: we’re all space junkies.
Tomorrow morning, Elon Musk and his SpaceX private company are prepared to launch the Dragon capsule aboard the Falcon 9 launch vehicle. io9 has prepared a day-by-day breakdown of the mission. Should everything proceed as planned, the unmanned Dragon capsule will embark on an two-week mission that will include a stop at the International Space Station for a supply dropoff.
Elon Musk and the Falcon 9 Merlin-1C engines
The launch will be only the third flight of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle, a craft NASA is pinning a great deal of hopes on. If the vehicle proves to be a capable cargo and crew launcher, it will free up NASA to focus their efforts perhaps on a heavy launch vehicle that can deliver payload beyond the confines of low-Earth orbit.
A successful mission will be an extraordinary boon for the space agency. If NASA can get out of the business of being a space taxi to the International Space Station, they might be able to do something interesting with their criminally underfunded budget.