Star Wars, Geek Culture, and Power Converters
Yesterday, the folks behind Celebration VI released the official mobile phone app for the convention. Unfortunately, right now it’s pretty much just a countdown timer and a link to a Google map of the convention area. Eventually, you’ll be able to view panel times, guest listings, signing times, and exhibitor lists.
To get the app, head to the official CVI page.
Don’t even start, you two.
It’s Tuesday, which means that we’re not even halfway through the work week. Now isn’t that a depressing thought? To alleviate some of your despair, we bring you another edition of Trope Tuesday, a weekly sojourn into the literary devices and themes that make entertainment fun (and gives us an excuse to use alliteration in a recurring segment, also fun). This week, we’re examining the Hurricane of Puns.
A sudden, protracted volley of puns. Approach this technique with caution, as viewer nausea (or a lynch mob) may be a side-effect.
In a Sitcom, a Hurricane Of Puns often appears after one or two characters have done something embarrassing and decide to not talk about it. Naturally, every conversation they have is rife with unintentional puns and Freudian Slips that go unnoticed by others but drive them to sheer panic.
On the other hand, sometimes these storms approach from the opposite direction… One person cracks a pun, another feels the urge to one-up it, and so it goes until the ammunition is exhausted and the puns fall silent.
Rarely, someone will just rattle off a string of puns for the hell of it.
Puns are a dangerous form of comedy, and it takes a good hand to make them into something that won’t incite a mass groan of disapproval. Doing this repeatedly is even riskier, as it requires an amazing level of ability to play straight on most television aimed at mature viewers.
Normally, I hate puns. That’s a product of having grown up with friends that loved them. I hate puns because even the most innocent of conversations would give my friends a cue to drop them. You’re having a conversation about, say, The Avengers and they’ll suddenly say “Well I hope this movie is Loki.” And then they stare at you, grinning like an idiot, expecting you to be amused by their latest “clever” turn of phrase when all you really want to do is bludgeon them to within an inch of their life for dropping the eighteenth pun in the last ten minutes worth of conversation.
But I digress
I hate puns because they’re often used excessively by people and are extraordinarily forced in conversation. Now, when it’s used well, a pun can be great. Let’s look at an exchange from one of my favorite Expanded Universe novels, Starfighters of Adumar. In this scene, the band of heroes are talking to a documentary filmmaker with a camera made out of a droid’s head:
Janson grinned at her. “Some days make you just want to beat your heads against a wall, don’t they?”
Hobbie said, “Maybe not. The young lady might not have her heads on straight, after all.”
Tycho said, “Still, I think she ought to get her heads examined.”
Wedge looked at them, appalled.
Oh Wedge. I feel your pain.
If you’ve been holding out on Timothy Zahn’s Choices of One because you have an obsessive need for bookshelf symmetry or you’re engaging in a fruitless blanket protest against hardcover sales, good news! The sequel to Allegiance is now available in paperback format. With a shiny new cover.
If you haven’t read it yet, go pick up a copy. Or, you know, try to win one from us.
Jason Fry is back with another batch of Essential Guide to Warfare endnotes, and this week he’s looking at two characters that play in heavily to our summer X-Wing series retrospective. First off, let’s take a look a Ysanne Isard.
War Portrait: Ysanne Isard: Paul Urquhart writes: “The idea that there was a Lusankya facility before there was an Super Star Destroyer hidden there is new; the phrase ‘dagger and fist’ is designed to suggest a less subtle and more violent form of deadliness than the traditional ‘cloak and dagger,’ one in which an opponent is disoriented and defeated through a simultaneous attack by two separate, overt, and dangerous threats — Isard is the dagger, her brute squad are the fist. ‘Brute squad’ itself is a Princess Bride homage. Armand’s fall from power is covered in the novella ‘Interlude at Darkknell’ (collected in Tales From the New Republic), but its position in continuity is complicated because it’s one of several contradictory stories built around the Rebels learning about the Death Star, so the context is simply alluded to obliquely in the reference to the ‘new-generation Imperial projects.’ I also took a moment to clarify Isard’s relationship with the Ubiqtorate (though Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor also suggests that at least one of them was also overseeing her); her role in organizing the reconquest of Coruscant in 10 ABY hopefully fits well with her activities.
“The idea of Isard being imprisoned on Lusankya at the end is a homage to a very old fan theory, though one that resurfaces with some regularity. It’s not intended to be canonical reality, but it was hard to resist the image.”
Isard’s one of my favorite Expanded Universe villains, simply for her sheer crazy. On the other end of the good/evil spectrum, Fry looks into one of the EU’s most notable Ascended Extras, Wedge Antilles.
War Portrait: Wedge Antilles: Wedge is such a familiar Expanded Universe figure that I didn’t want to spend pages rehashing him, and none of my attempts to capture his character through another character’s words seemed to work. In the end, I went for something short and I think a little sad, an account that hopefully adds depth to a well-known character. By the way, I like Wedge’s pale-blue R5 unit in Jason Palmer’s painting. If memory serves I chose the color. Does that mean Hasbro will send me one gratis? Or at least make the parts for him available at Tatooine Traders?
For more about the fragmented Empire, Warlord Zsinj, and other bits of EU goodness, head over to Jason Fry’s Tumblr to see the latest batch of notes.
MUCH better.
It’s always nice to get a bit of vindication. As you might know, we’re running a contest that tasks you with replacing that gorram-awful leather catsuit artists are CONSTANTLY portraying Mara Jade in (seriously go check it out, we’ve already gotten some awesome submissions). Just yesterday, EUCantina posted an interview they conducted with Random House art director Scott Biel. One of the questions posed was quite relevant to what we’ve been up lately.
EUC: Mara Jade Skywalker is generally depicted wearing a catsuit. Why do you think that particular outfit is popular? If you could design a cover with a different outfit, what would Mara Jade wear instead?
SB: I’m not sure if it’s necessarily popular, but I feel it’s depicted like that because it’s become her de facto costume (similar to superhero costumes). On the paperback cover for Choices of One, Daryl Mandryk took the initiative and redesigned it in his illustration. By adding some armor and making the suit more functional it becomes a more practical interpretation.
(emphasis added)
See? SEE!? That catsuit is utterly impractical! Combat armor? That makes way more sense, and props to Scott and Daryl Mandryk for going ahead and portraying Mara that way.
To read the rest of the interview, head on over to EUC.
Another set of exclusive prints for CVI were released today. This time around, artists Brent Woodside, Marc Wolfe, John Carlisle, Tsuneo Sanda, Mark Raats, and Hydro74 are featured. On the downside, another Slave Leia illustration (we get it, she wore a metal bikini). On the upside, Ewoks!
You’ll be able to pick up these art prints at the convention. To see the rest of this batch, head over to the official site.
Add another guest to the growing list of CVI attendees. The Orlando Sentinal reports that director and Star Wars fan Kevin Smith will be present and will be holding his own panel on the first night of the convention.
Director-actor-podcaster Kevin Smith has never worked on an official “Star Wars” project, but he’s enthusiastically talked about the films enough to be added to the upcoming Star Wars Celebration at the Orange County Convention Center.
“An Evening with Kevin Smith,” a question-and-answer session on Aug. 23, will be his contribution to Celebration, a four-day fan gathering that also will feature Carrie Fisher,Anthony Daniels, Peter Mayhew, Seth Green and other luminaries.
“I took my fandom of ‘Star Wars’ and kind of made it one of the cornerstones of what I do,” Smith said Thursday. Mentions of the films were worked into “Clerks” and “Mallrats,” two early Smith films.
You will need to purchase a separate ticket for the Q&A session, which will be held at 8PM.
(Via)
A young human woman in clothes styled to resemble a starfighter pilot’s jumpsuit and jacket but made of crinkly gold cloth, her hair a more striking and unnatural red than Face’s, bumped into Face, made a vague noise of apology, and hurried past, continuing onward toward the exit.
Voort scowled at Face. “I saw that.”
“Of course you did.”
“What did she slip you?”
Face reached into a suit coat pocket and drew out a datapad. It was small, its once-gleaming surface scratched and dull. “This. It’s wired to overheat and ignite in about three minutes.”
“Well, then, don’t hold it in your mouth.”
Mercy Kill is due to hit bookshelves on August 7th.
While not directly related to The Old Republic, this bit of analysis by Games Industry is anything but good news for the floundering MMO. The stock trend for publisher Electronic Arts is not going in a good direction.
Electronic Arts’ stock has lost almost 40 per cent of its value since the start of this calendar year – and in fact, since the middle of last holiday season (around November 2011) the company’s stock has been in a steady decline which has now wiped close to 50 per cent off EA’s valuation. It’s not a decline as sharp as THQ’s, but it represents a much larger loss of value – THQ’s market capitalisation is only around $50 million, whereas even after this enormous loss of value, EA is still capitalised at around $4 billion.
Games Business put together a rather telling graph comparing EA’s performance to the NASDAQ index and another pair of publishers. It’s not pretty.
While Electronic Arts isn’t alone in the downward trend (Hello, Take Two Interactive), it’s not keeping up with one of its chief competitors in Activision-Blizzard. Worse, it’s not keeping pace with the NASDAQ composite index. But here’s the scary thing, see where the downward trend begins for EA? That’s right about when The Old Republic debuted, the most expensive undertaking in EA history. How much of TOR’s stumbles have fueled EA’s trouble isn’t fully known, but it certainly has contributed.
Quite honestly, I had forgotten how much I enjoyed The Krytos Trap.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve always known this book is quality. I just had it in my head for a long time that of this four-book arc, Wedge’s Gamble was my favorite of the bunch. That changed about two years ago when I went back and re-read through a bunch of my favorite Expanded Universe novels from the Bantam Spectra era. It had been a little while since I’d read through the X-Wing books* and my memory was a little fuzzy. Suffice to say, the third entry in the X-Wing series was significantly better than the already positive memory I had in my head.
*College. Instead I got to read fine literature like “Cybersecurity Ethics.”
(Head to the jump to continue reading)
