Sorry, Sorry, Nothing to See Here

Very busy, had company in town this week, and in my (scant) free time, have been off doing other pursuits. So I am updating quickly to confirm that I am still alive.

In other news, now that I have (semi) conquered PC gaming, Mike thought it would be fun to do the Star Wars RPG together. Me, I feel like I am crossing some geek threshold, because it is one thing to play KOTOR on the computer, but it is entirely something else to sit around your coffee table rolling dice. I am intrigued, though. I have never done this before. It involves a lot more math than I expected. But I don't know what the plot is yet. Because he won't let me look at it.

In the process of gearing up for this pinnacle of geekery, I discovered what might be the coolest site ever: Star Wars Artists' Guild. It's a bunch of people who have drawn pictures of their characters, all different species, only they are far better at it than I am. I'm so impressed and fascinated by the art there.

Girl Revan Is Not Pleased

So my brother has a shop on CafePress. I was toying with the idea of making one, because I am the kind of person who likes funny slogans. One morning I kind of went crazy, and came up with a bunch of stuff that may or may not be funny to anyone who isn't me or my brother. (We spent a whole day on the phone making Space Quest shirts.) The only problem with the free shop is that you can only have one of each product (ie: one white t-shirt, one bumper sticker). This sucks if you have more than one design. Because I tend to get carried away, I shortly had more designs than I knew what to do with. So instead of paying the $$ and getting a premium store, I just made a billion little mini stores.

I was really just trying to make T-shirts that I wanted, so I could buy them for myself. But! Some random people have bought my stuff! The most popular thing thus far seems to be my Girl Revan shirts. In the game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the character you play can be male or female, light side or dark side. But then the LucasFolk had to go and ruin the fun by declaring "Canon Revan" to be a light side male. This decision has always annoyed me. So I made Girl Revan Is Not Pleased, and Girl Revan says, what is this canon you speak of? I really, really want to buy one (both!) for myself, but there's this whole zero dollars thing. Someday soon.

Once I made the base design, I kind of went out of control. I was really on a roll there. I also have Girl Revan Hearts Flyboys. And I have several more on my hard drive, including Girl Revan Finds Your Lack of Faith Disturbing and Does Girl Revan Have to Slap a Sith?, but I drew the line at uploading them onto CafePress. I wouldn't want to glut the Girl Revan shirt market (me! and apparently like four other people!) with too many products at once, ya know.

Is That a Lightsaber or a Hydrospanner?

Or a post about Mara Jade! By yours truly! Imagine that!

You expect Mara to have a romance with Karrde, her boss, but she doesn't. You expect her to have a romance with Luke, and she doesn't. She's not there for anyone else, but is instead portrayed as a character in her own right, with an emotional arc that has nothing to do with a man. It certainly defied my expectations when I was twelve.

Read the rest here...


(I'm referring, btw, to the nerdiest IM conversation ever, in which my brother and I argued about whether that's a lightsaber or a hydrospanner clipped to Mara's belt, above, in my header. And then felt like huge geeks because we knew what a hydrospanner was. WHICH REMINDS ME. I swear to god, the other week we realized they have hydrospanners on Star Trek too! Or something that also performs a screwdriver-like function that sounds like the characters are saying hydrospanner. And now I'm going to have to go look that up, and I feel like an even bigger loser. THANKS, BLOG.)

Star Wars Is 30 Today

This makes it older than me by almost exactly four years, so I don't have any of those memories of seeing it in the theater. Although I believe my parents (married 1978) saw it on a date. And we did camp out for both the Special Edition theater showings and Star Wars: Episode One when I was in high school.

But as anyone who's seen this site might be able to guess, I have a deep and abiding love for Star Wars that even the prequels could not quench. I think the first time I saw it I was five. And, like many kids who grew up in the '80's, we had our own crappy copies of the movies on VHS, taped off of TV, and we watched them every single weekend. We even had a homemade audio tape for when we went on car trips. Therefore I am really not kidding or exaggerating when I say that I can reliably recite every line of all three movies.

As evidence, I present a 2005 IM conversation between my brother and me:

Me: jabba wa ninchee co ee tane ti tanyee wanyaooska... he he he
Bro: Chuske nawa oochooto
Bro: Yes, I'll bet you have
Me: splat
Bro: Ches cuckoturo cristo crenho....yaposka!
Me: yaposka!

Which is, obviously, a reenactment of the scene where Han shoots first (but without the subtitles). Hel-lo.

I included this screenshot because it's my favorite scene in the Star Wars saga, and for me, it represents what Star Wars is all about. There is no dialogue in the scene, because there doesn't need to be. The music is enough. Because isn't this really what it's all about? Dreaming yourself somewhere bigger, somewhere with more adventure? Somewhere you can see the stars close up. Wanting more. And I think we are all glad that George Lucas found his "somewhere bigger."

Happy Birthday, Star Wars.

P.S. There are rumors that KOTOR 3 might be announced by LucasArts at Celebration IV tonight. It could just be a rumor, but I'm keeping an eye out!

Here's Where the Fun Begins

It seems like everyone is posting this one, but I got a laugh out of it, so... The Top 10 Han Solo Quotes You Need to Use in Regular Conversation. You know, considering that this blog uses a Han Solo quote in its banner. It's a good list.

Except I'm gonna go ahead and add one:

"I thought they smelled bad... on the outside!"
When to use it: When you're cleaning out your Katrina refrigerator after it's been sitting in 90 degree heat for a month, obviously. I know firsthand that this is the absolute best place to use this Han Solo quote. Because I used it. And it fit so, so well.

I Want an R2 D2 Mailbox!

There are 400 of them. The U.S. Postal Service made them in celebration of the Star Wars stamp series that comes out on May 25th. Apparently they have been spotted across the U.S. And what is up with there being one in Baton Rouge and not here? (I don't know why this surprises me... there aren't any street corner mailboxes here, period. They never put most of them back after Katrina.) They're pretty cute. I kind of want to be a geek and hunt one down to take my picture with it too!

But wait, it's better! They have a site where you can go vote on your favorite stamp. Whichever one wins, it will get its own sheet. I cannot pick! They're all good.

"Stand By, Ion Control. Fire."

Just in case it's been too long since my last Star Wars: Special Edition rant, I am pleased to announce that I have the nitpick of all nitpicks coming up tonight. Those of you who haven't viewed Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back at least 30 times should probably run and hide in a deep dark closet far, far away from this post.

I was watching my Special Edition DVD of The Empire Strikes Back the other night, and I noticed that the Rebel chick who fires the ion cannon is missing! I have no idea how this escaped my attention before... probably there were so many other itty bitty stupid changes to harp on that I somehow missed this one. During the escape from Hoth, she is the one sitting in the command center who says, "Stand by, ion control. Fire." And the ion cannon knocks out the Star Destroyer that's sitting in orbit above Hoth, allowing the first Rebel transport to fly past it and get away. Maybe you didn't notice her as a child, but I sure did-- she was our first glimpse of a female Rebel, besides Leia. I mean, there were only three altogether that we saw in the entire trilogy-- Mon Mothma, Leia, and the Stand By Ion Control Girl. You can clearly still hear her saying the line, but there's no close-up: she's simply not there, just this disembodied voice.

Now, there are a couple of reasons I can come up with for this change. It bugged me so much that I spent (actual amount of time edited: let's just say it was way too long) Googling for some kind of explanation. I found one site which seemed to indicate that this is in fact a Fullscreen vs. Widescreen issue. While it is true that both Mike and I have the gold Fullscreen boxed sets, I don't see why this would make a difference-- I also have the 1995 THX pan and scan VHS boxed set, and at least two homemade versions taped from TV airings on Fox between what I would estimate had to have been 1986-1992. All of these tapes certainly had the unidentified Rebel chick. So there is the explanation that she was possibly cut out of the shot on the Fullscreen edition. (If anyone has the silver Widescreen set and can confirm this, that would be great.) But I don't see why she would have been, when she appears on the previous edited-for-television versions. I also saw a reference to a blooper in that shot, where you can see someone behind her giving a cue. This might be a reason for cutting her out of the TESB:SE.

But I'm still going to argue that this change was somewhat irresponsible of Lucas, and here's why: as a feminist, it just pisses me off. I am more than irked here. Rebel Chick was the Wedge Antilles of female Star Wars fans, the "everygirl." Not everyone can be a Princess, but you could dream of being the behind-the-scenes hero, the girl who saved the day by immobilizing a whole Star Destroyer with that funny egg-shaped ion cannon. She should have been left in solely because she was a female face. The fact that she isn't sitting there at her console with her chunky headphones and brown hair deeply disappoints me. Why, George Lucas, why? There were already shockingly few females in our favorite space saga. Couldn't you have left us this one?

Hell, you deleted the only scenes in Return of the Sith that portrayed Padme in her actual role as a Senator-- you know, doing her job. Sure, her outfit "conveniently" rips and she runs around in her kicky midriff-baring outfit in Attack of the Clones for half an hour, but the main female lead actually expressing an opinion of her own, sowing the seeds of the Rebellion in secret meetings with Bail Organa, and showing that she exists as something besides a blank face for Anakin to obsess over? Well, that's going to have to be cut so we can put in more special effects.

Leia? She's a great character. My problem is that she appears to be the only woman inhabiting the galaxy. Honestly, I'm surprised he didn't CGI more of them in (I mean, he can CGI dinosaurs in, but he can't CGI some women? Of course I know they're called dewbacks, not dinosaurs. I know more about Star Wars than most sane people. I just hate to acknowledge that anything in the Special Editions exists) purely for continuity's sake-- after all, Lucas has officially endorsed the books and comics in the EU, and the EU is full of female characters. I was always grateful to these authors, feeling relief that they were correcting a mistake. It was vindicating; I wasn't the only one who noticed the disproportionate male/female ratio. I wonder whether it's because Lucas panders to the majority, or that he simply doesn't care. I believe the Exile is the first Star Wars video game PC to be named canonically female, for instance. And that was only very recently.

A quick search through the Star Wars EU reveals that the Rebel Chick has been given the name Toryn Farr. But never mind that. Her name is irrelevant. What I care about is that she was there. And now she is not. And I want her back.

Because I am a female fan, and it's my saga too.

Tags: rant, feminist, star wars, empire strikes back, george lucas, special editions

Thirteen Things I Hate About the Star Wars Prequels

(Boba Fett says: I pity da fool who likes the Prequel Trilogy!)
People who were around for the thirteen reasons I hate the Star Wars Special Editions probably know what they are in for. It is SO MUCH FUN to rant on topics about which one is knowledgeable. And, well. I know Star Wars. Oh, I know Star Wars. I know it to a degree that induces strangers to suggest that I need to go out of doors more often. So believe me when I say that all the hate I am about to dispense, I dispense out of love. Pardon me if I begin to foam at the mouth in a geekly frenzy. And when you are finished, go down to the post below and tell Jolee Bindo he is pretty. Thank you. With that said, here goes:

1. Jar Jar Binks. You knew it was coming, so let's just get that one over with and move on to the real meat of the hate.

2. How Padme died of a broken heart and lost the will to live. Oh come on. Seriously? Seriously? The woman was married to Darth Vader. One would think Lucas could come up with something more interesting and less... Victorian... than dying in childbirth of a broken heart.

3. Padme. A feminist deconstruction of Padme follows: She sucks. She is a decorative yawn of a useless female character who doesn't do anything. Really, you have to wonder where her daughter got her spunk from, 'cause damn.

4. The dialogue was lame. Especially the cringe-inducing "romance" dialogue in Attack of the Clones.

5. Continuity errors. "Do you remember your mother? Your real mother?" Luke asks Leia in Return of the Jedi. And then you have her die in childbirth. Oh sure, people try to hedge around it and come up with wacky theories (she remembers because they spoke in the womb using the Force, Leia thought Luke meant her mother on Alderaan, blah blah), but let's just admit what it really is: it's a huge glaring hole in the story that didn't have to happen.

6. One of my favorite aspects of settings like the original Star Wars and the Firefly 'verse is the lived-in rusted-out look. Lucas wanted it that way originally, because it made space different and fresh and real. Why he gave it up I do not know. The problem with CGI is if you use the right amount, impossible things come to life before the viewers' eyes. Use too much of it, everything looks fake. The prequels look fake to me.

7. There is a poop joke in The Phantom Menace. I think this is one of those things I'll never get over.

8. That creature with the lips in Jabba's Palace! I hate that thing!... Oh, fine, you got me, that was in the Special Edition. I am raving. I admit it. But I hate that thing with the diamond shaped head in the pod race. I hate that thing too, and it also lives on Tattooine, so #8 on my 13 has not been completely wasted.

9. Why did we even need to have Anakin as a little kid? Lord, that was annoying. Can we say marketing gimmick? Can we say merchandising? ("Moychandising! Moychandising! They put the picture's name on everything! Spaceballs the Lunch Box! Spaceballs the Breakfast Cereal!") But here's the little secret Lucas and his crew must have missed. News flash: I was five when I saw Star Wars for the first time. I still remember it. I loved it at first sight. Were there any kids in the original Star Wars? No, there were not. But ask my generation and the Gen Xers whether it mattered to them.

10. Pandering to the fans. They liked Boba Fett? Put him in! They liked C3PO and R2? Put them in! They liked Chewbacca? Put him in! Never mind that this is all highly, highly implausible in terms of plot.

11. Oh! Speaking of which (geez, get me going and off I go! I'm on a roll!), if Anakin Skywalker built 3PO and he and Artoo tagged around with the main characters for the ENTIRETY OF THE PREQUELS, why would Ben Kenobi not recognize them in Star Wars?

12. It didn't feel like Star Wars to me. To borrow a term from writers' workshops, it didn't "work." Nobody's motivations "worked" for me because we never got more than a superficial feel for the characters. Especially Anakin. He came across as more of a whiny teenager than a real villain. It was disappointing. It could have been so much more. This really came home to me in November, when I started playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. How come a video game felt more like classic Star Wars to me than the prequel trilogy? It seems like sacrilege. But they just got the atmosphere spot-on. The prequel trilogies, and the Clone Wars plot in general, felt like the sort of plot I would come up with when I was tired and out of ideas, patched together from a bunch of crap in my head, that I would edit the hell out of later, when I felt more inspired, because the story was lame and lacked spice.

13. Crap. No more space in the 13 and so much hate left to dispense! Yet, I feel benevolent tonight, so I will now dispense some love. I love Aayla Secura. Love. Her. And she was in the prequels. So there. If only we'd had more hot blue Twi'lek Jedi and less Jar Jar, it would all have been shiny.


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Tags: thursday thirteen, star wars

Custom Star Wars T-Shirts

I tell you, I am drooling all over this in a way that only a true nerd can. There is this little voice in my head saying, "Whatever! Whatever! It's my birthday!" (This might have been a good argument before I ordered a Vienna Teng CD and Firefly on DVD from Amazon. For... myself.)

Tags: star wars, geekdom, merchandise

Thirteen Reasons I Will Probably Buy Star Wars Again on DVD

This September the original versions of the first three Star Wars movies will be released on DVD. Mike likes the new ones and believes that George Lucas is the artist and therefore should be able to say that the special edition is the definitive version. I disagree. But I do think suckering people into buying Star Wars on DVD twice is what he had in mind all along.

1. Greedo does not shoot first. I know Lucas got old and had kids and wanted Star Wars to be prettier, but no. Just no. This is the viewer's first opportunity to see what kind of guy Han Solo is. He lounges at the table, mouths off, shoots Greedo under the table with the gun he's slowly pulled throughout the conversation, flips some credits to the bartenders, and goes, "Sorry about the mess." That is just the guy he is, and we loved him for it.

2. I liked the explosion of the Death Star without the big ring around it. Just think about it, logically-- if it really blew up with a whole ring of energy bursting out from it, wouldn't it seem that much more unlikely that those x-wings who are 50 feet away get out of there alive? Wouldn't they instead be knocked on their asses?

3. "You were lucky to get out of there." My brother and I, having watched all three Star Wars movies pretty much every weekend in a row when we were kids, know every single line. I could prove it to you by typing the entire opening crawl from Return of the Jedi out of my head, but I won't subject you. Just believe me. This is why we notice things that are not apparent to the casual viewer, such as how, in the special edition Empire Strikes Back, Luke says the above line to Artoo when he gets spit out by the whale thing on Dagobah instead of, "You're lucky you don't taste very good." I am sure there is a technical reason for this, like that they couldn't digitally remaster the original shot because it was corrupted or something, so they used an alternate take. But it's still dumb.

4. Ditto the part where Han Solo is hanging upside down over the Sarlacc pit and he says something different to Lando. Instead of "It's all right, trust me!" Han inexplicably says, "It's all right, I can see a lot better." OK, honestly. This type of pointless dialogue change confuses the kiddies who are reciting along at home. Also, the "trust me" always seemed particularly fitting there because it echoes Lando's dialogue at the end of the previous film.

5. Old Darth Vader. The poor guy. I don't want freakin' Hayden Christenson's whiny Anakin face standing next to Obi Wan and Yoda in the blue glow at the end. Give us old Darth Vader back.

6. The fans demand the Max Rebo band! Why did he get replaced by something stupider and faker looking? I mean, here is the problem with CGI in a nutshell: how can anything be stupider and faker looking than a BLUE NYLON ELEPHANT? If the new "band" looks fake compared to Max Rebo's blue nylon elephant suit, we've got issues.

7. I hate the new song they play too. I mean, I really hate it.

8. I figure I might as well list this separately from the CGI band and the lame song, because I hate it so much: I hate the part where we zoom in close and the singer's lips and tonsils take up the entire screen. Are we in Star Wars or a cartoon?

9. The Sarlacc's extra snaky tongues. Bleah.

10. Those dinosaurs in Mos Eisley. I hate them. I thought the point was that Tattooine was a desolate place, not one filled with bizarre creatures upon whom poop jokes are based in the prequels (don't get me started). I don't get the argument that Lucas didn't have the technology to put more creatures in before, so he added them to make it look the way he originally wanted it to look. Star Wars had a nicely spare style to it. If he wanted creatures, why not add some banthas? Banthas are so peaceful and chill.

11. The Ewok song. Sure, it was lame lame lame. But dammit, it was what we had so we got used to it, and we clung to its lameness, and now it is gone! Why oh why the Ewok song? Not only is the new music just blah, the scene where the Ewoks play the drums with the stormtrooper helmets in tune with their music now looks utterly stupid because there is no music. The lack of the Ewok music literally ruins the end of Star Wars for me. Thanks, Lucas.

12. The special editions destroyed my childhood.

13. I am a huge sucker.

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Feminism, Star Wars, and Writing

There's a very interesting Livejournal community dedicated to feminist discussion of SF/F. It spurred me into an examination of my own novel, which I'm going to run with.

Once I met a guy at a party, and we got to talking about Star Wars. He asked me what my favorite part was. I have always had sort of a theory that you can tell a lot about someone by their favorite part in Star Wars. I said, "This might sound kind of weird, but it's when Luke is standing on Tattooine looking at the twin sunset." He said, "No way, me too!" Just that one moment. No action, no special effects. For me, that moment has always been the epitome of what science fiction/fantasy (and Star Wars) means to me: a glimpse of possibilities, the appreciation of being a small person standing on a world made of sand, the knowledge that something is out there. Anyhow, I ended up breaking up with the guy because he was, well, too much of a dreamer for me... but the scene remains.

I took some stream-of-consciousness notes on my novel this afternoon, a list of questions and missing scenes and things I need to emphasize better. I've had these characters kicking around for years. (I think I have a complete list of planets in the system on looseleaf paper dating back to when I was fourteen. This also why the character of Ari remains fourteen; even though I've grown up, I didn't want to lose that.) The crux of the matter being this: I love Star Wars. But it always bothered me that there was so much of this galaxy far, far away that Lucas left unexplored. Or rather, just ignored. Where were the people like me in Star Wars? Princess Leia was a pretty cool female character-- she was opinionated and she could shoot. But why the hell was there only one of her?

I wanted the characters in my novel to be people I would want to read about. I have four female main characters. They take turns having scenes. I figured, since I have four women, not just one, they will actually have distinct personalities, unlike most SF (how I detest the "token beautiful young genius" who appears in every ensemble cast of males to sleep with the hero). My failed rebellion against the evil government is a girls' club. I've got the behind-the-scenes computer programmer who is suddenly put in charge, the space jock who doesn't care about much of anything except getting her impounded ship back, the sophisticated bomb maker who wonders when the glamour in the whole rebellion thing disappeared, and the tagalong teenaged former waitress with paranoia and an attitude. The characters you'd expect to hook up don't.

I have a feminist vision myself. I want this to be reflected in my writing. The fact remains that I'm not writing a deep thought-provoking type of novel. I'm writing a soft sci-fi space opera adventure. I'm keeping it sort of campy; for instance, I've got a bomber who is attacked the morning after a one night stand and has to nakedly kill a bunch of assassins. I'm trying to have humor and also to have some deeper thoughts about war, people, and the vastness of space. But mostly it's a noir adventure in a corrupt city.

I just really want to accomplish what I'm trying to do. Is the simple fact that my characters are there enough, in this genre? I want to believe it is.

Tags: science fiction, fantasy, star wars, writing, feminism, dcds