Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
Happy Real Star Wars Day!
Thirty-five years ago today, Star Wars: A New Hope hit theaters and gave birth to the wonderful and occasionally nutty fandom that we all love so dearly. As you can expect, the entirety of the Internet is getting in on the action and celebrating both the 35th anniversary of A New Hope and the 29th anniversary of Return of the Jedi. To keep tabs on what’s going on around the web, keep your eyes on this Club Jade post.
The Old Republic: Annihilation Cover
The cover for the new Drew Karpyshyn novel, The Old Republic: Annihilation, has been revealed on the official The Old Republic website.* The website also features a Q&A with author Drew Karpyshyn.
*A guy with a gun! Not a lightsaber! Gasp!
A little more CVI related news today. The creative forces behind Robot Chicken are heading to Celebration VI. Could they be bringing news of their secret Star Wars project?
The twisted masterminds behind Robot Chicken — Seth Green and Matthew Senreich — will be attending Star Wars Celebration VI this August 23-26, 2012, in Orlando, Florida as special guests. Star Wars fans from the very beginning, Seth and Matt have been honored guests of past Celebrations since their hilarious Robot Chicken show moved beyond just the occasionalStar Wars sketch to full-fledged specials showcasing the hilarious side of a galaxy far, far away. Three Robot Chicken: Star Wars specials later, they’re still mining the saga for comedy gold, including working as consultants for the team developing a new animated Star Warsseries at Lucasfilm Animation.
For more, head to the official site.
Tom Taylor just made my month with this tweet.
So what do you get when you take Rob Paulsen, Maurice LaMarche, Tara Strong, Billy West, John DiMaggio, Kevin Conroy, Jess Harnell and then give them a Star Wars script? The most incredible thing ever. Introducing the Star Wars Trilogy radio play performed at Emerald City Comicon 2012.
(And it goes without saying, with this group there’s a NSFW warning)
So you’ve got Batman narrating Star Wars and fans suggesting characters for the voice actors to read lines as. For example, Tara Strong reading Darth Vader as Bubbles, Maurice LaMarche reading Leia as Vincent Price, and a Rob Paulsen reading a stormtrooper as Pinky.
Shut down everything, the Internet has been won.
Are you heading to Celebration VI, the Star Wars convention to end all Star Wars conventions? Do you want some wardrobe to commemorate the event? Well you’re in luck, for $30, you can pre-order the official CVI shirt.
Keep in mind, you must have a ticket to the convention to order. To get yours, head on over to the Celebration VI show store.
Beka, aka Tarnekep Portree, wants you to read these books. Now.
Last night, after a marathon reading session, I finally finished By Honor Betray’d, aka the final novel in the Mageworlds trilogy. When I finished the last page, I broke into a grin. A few moments later, when I was able to form a coherent sentence, I thought, “Wow. This is what it feels like to be completely satisfied by the end of a series. I’d almost forgotten what that was like.” My second thought was “everyone needs to go read these books right now.”
Left: A comlink from the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Right: A smartphone
Sometimes, science fiction can get a wee bit dated. In a comlink, you have a glorified walkie talkie in an easy-to-lose form factor.
In a smartphone, you have a miracle device that can instantaneously place calls, access information from an unlimited number of databases from any location, give you directions, tell you where you are, access a wealth of auditory culture from across an entire civilization, instantly take photos and videos…
Then again, a comlink isn’t running on the AT&T network, so it’s guaranteed to work when you find yourself trapped in a garbage compacter.
We’re just going to keep talking about this book until we convince you all to buy it.
If you have ever been curious about an Expanded Universe author’s offerings outside of the realm of Star Wars, the first novel you absolutely must pick up is Timothy Zahn’s The Icarus Hunt, a science fiction noir and chase mashup that’s made its way onto my list of yearly re-reads. If you need a bit more convincing, check out the review I wrote a little while back for Roqoo Depot.
The Icarus Hunt is a fascinating book because it delivers a sense of grandeur but, at the same time, is a rather intimate story. Alien species, futuristic technology, starships and freighters, sprawling locations, and criminal factions. With this setup, it would be easy to delve into a tale about war between species ala Ender’s Game or some sort of galactic apocalypse ala any major multi-author Star Wars series since 1999. The framework was there to tell that sort of a novel. Zahn, to his credit, chose instead to dial back on the type of doomsday conflict that we see far too often in science fiction and tell a different kind of story.
If you have a measly $7 handy, you can get yourself a copy via Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Congratulations to Timothy Zahn as well, I know in talking with him on his Facebook page that he and his agent have been working for a long time to secure the rights to get this out in eBook format.
There’s a scene in The Avengers where Black Widow is fighting Hawkeye. He’s being mindcontrolled by Loki and is trying to kill her; she just wants to incapacitate him. A few minutes before this fight scene, she hurt her ankle and was visibly limping when she was fleeing the Hulk. She volunteered to go after Hawkeye, despite being understandably shaken by her encounter, and the fact that she and Hawkeye clearly have an emotional bond.
Oh, and the fight? She won. And she didn’t win because Hawkeye was distracted or something happened that got his attention or he was wounded from a previous scuffle. She won because she’s better. There was no reason for her not to—Hawkeye is an archer, not a hand-to-hand expert. If it had been a contest of marksmanship, he would have won, and rightly so. But it wasn’t, and she won by simply being a better fighter.
The best part, though, was probably when he looked up at her, after being hit in the head, and said “Tasha?” A lot of people would have stopped fighting then—I probably would have done—but Natasha Romanoff is a trained spy, and she just clocks him in the head again. It’s the choice of someone whose job is to be suspicious of other people, regardless of what they might mean to her.
This sums up a huge part of why I love Black Widow—Natasha Romanoff—so much: she is a professional and she acts like one.
Bioware Austin has announced that staff layoffs have occurred as part of a “restructuring” move by the Electronic Arts owned developer.
“BioWare has restructured its studio in Austin today. Of the employees impacted, some will be able to join other projects within EA, others will leave the company. These are very difficult decisions, but it allows us to focus our staff to maintain and grow Star Wars: The Old Republic,” a spokesperson told Game Informer.
“BioWare Austin remains a large and important part of BioWare and EA, working with other studios around the world to continue to deliver a high-quality service and exciting new content for Star Wars: The Old Republic.”
After losing nearly twenty-five percent of its subscription base, this was perhaps inevitable. Totals peaked around 1.7 million but those numbers have crashed to Earth in recent weeks with upwards of 400,000 canceling their subscriptions. It’s a big disappointment for both Bioware and Lucasarts, which had pinned a great deal of hope on the game taking a bite out of the crowded MMO market.
Unfortunately, the end result seemed to be a game that didn’t please nearly enough people. Those hoping for a robust MMO like World of Warcraft were left disappointed by the somewhat shaky gameplay mechanics and those wishing for a storytelling experience on-par with the Knights of the Old Republic franchise didn’t quite get the depth they were promised.
For Bioware, it’s been a year they’ll wish to forget. In addition to the struggles of The Old Republic, their marquee release of the year in Mass Effect 3 was met by fiery scorn by hardcore fans for what they deemed to be an unacceptable ending to a critically acclaimed trilogy.