Star Wars with occasional sarcasm
Katie Johnson, daughter of 501st founder Albin Johnson, passed away this week after a long battle with cancer. She was 7 years old. Our thoughts and prayers go out to her family.
The Johnson family is accepting donations for funeral costs and the Make-a-Wish foundation at ForKatie.org
With the JadeCon bearing down on us, blogging has been rather sparse. With my apologies, here’s a few things to check out:
The cast of the upcoming Star Wars Trilogy: Musical Edition (you may remember them from C3) will be performing at the opening of the Boston Museum of Science’s “Science of Star Wars” exhibit this fall. George Lucas himself will be there! We’ll going to start gathering nausea tips and soothing vapors for the cast at JadeCon.
Charles Ross, who performs the One-Man Star Wars Trilogy, has been getting quite a bit of press lately – mainly Reuters and The Associated Press which means he’ll no doubt be appearing in your local paper on the next slow news day.
Lucasfilm has hired Joshua Katz as a new head of marketing and is running Presidio with AMD Opteron processors.
Business cards for various Star Wars and Star Trek characters. (Via Boing Boing)
And finally, for Hyperspace members, CJer Charlene Newcomb’s story Turning Point is the latest story on starwars.com.
I believe that about rounds it up… For now.
New planet is not officially named after Xena: Warrior Princess, despite reports to the contrary.
Instead, they’re looking for suggestions.
Is Kevin J. Anderson a Scientologist? Is he? Isn’t he? Doesn’t really matter. But the thread title caused me to laugh maniacally, and that’s more than enough reason to link.
The official site has coverage of George Lucas at the SIGGRAPH 2005, the digital arts conferance. There’s a full recording of his Keynote Q&A for Hyperspace members. He also addressed plans for the two television shows.
More coverage of the event:
– Life is too short for busy Lucas (Reuters)
Astronomers say they’ve found a 10th planet in orbit around our sun. Several objects have been found beyond Pluto before, but this is the first large enough to be considered a planet – it could be at least one and a half times larger than Pluto. Exciting news!
The starwars.com gang and a few other familiar faces visit Steve Sansweet’s Rancho Obi-Wan. Bonnie takes pictures.
SF Gate critic David Kipen gets some rather radical feedback over his less-than-positive review of Half-Blood Prince. It prompts some explanation of reviewing myths that are more than worth the click-through.
The New York Times has an article today on the economics of used books and the the place of Amazon.com in the market.
Personally, I love used book stores. Amazon is great if you really need something, but nothing beats the browsing experience. Fantasy and sci-fi is such a tough genre sometimes – the covers and blurbs are so awful and misleading that it’s hard to pick anything up at the bookstore – and if it’s crap or yet another lame Tolkien rehash, you’ve wasted your money. (Libraries, meanwhile, will often only get the best-sellers.) With a used bookstore, you can unload the crap and get more books for half off the cover price or less. It’s a win-win situation for the reader.
In fact – may Lucasfilm and Del Rey not smite me as I type – I would recommend getting used books if you’re trying to catch up on the Star Wars novels. They’re plentiful in many used bookstores and with the ups and downs in quality, you’re probably better off not wasting the extra cash on anything but the authors you know you’ll enjoy. Face it – the Jedi Academy trilogy is simply not worth $21 new when used copies are available on Amazon for as low as 39 cents.
Generally, with authors I enjoy, I do make it a point to buy new when possible. But the amount of authors and series I’ve gotten into because of used bookstores is hard to estimate. But with new releases, I simply don’t have the patience to wait for books to hit used. I shudder to think of what I’ve spent on the Expanded Universe over the years – I even bought Shadows of the Empire new, even though I knew it probably sucked at the time. (And so it did!) Learn from my mistakes.
Revenge of the Sith DVD to drop November 1st. One of the featurettes explains the exact nature of the whole ‘Chosen One’ thing, which will no doubt set the fandom into a froth of argument.
(Bitter. Sorry. Read too many Dark Nest spoilers from the crazy zone this week. It’s hard to have any faith in fandom after visiting the TFN boards.)