Tag: fan sites

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StarWars.com’s Hyperspace to end in 2011

Hyperspace is going away next year.

Started right before Revenge of the Sith began principal photography as subscription section on StarWars.com, Hyperspace went through several incarnations. During the ROTS filming it offered fans extraordinary access to film’s set in Sydney with a live webcam, chats, and a set diary by Pablo Hidalgo. (It also had the nice side effect of effectively ending the cut-throat fansite spoiler-wars that marked the runup to The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.)

However, once Revenge of the Sith was released, Hyperspace had much less to offer subscribers (even the ‘ad-free’ promise eventually expired.) Features were added, like the blogs, but the content over the past few years has been irregular and often only of interest only to those who enjoy fairly obscure parts of the GFFA.

It even merged with the fan club and became part of a package deal with Star Wars Insider for a time. The Insider is no longer included, but the Official Fan Club still uses the ‘Hyperspace’ name. (If Hyperspace is truly being discontinued, will the fan club be getting another makeover in the coming year…?)

I can’t say I’m surprised at this – the ‘exclusive’ content has been sparse for years and StarWarsShop probably brings in far more revenue – but Hyperspace has been around for quite a while in internet times, and it’s entwined with some particularly interesting times in the fandom for me. But it’s clearly been on the backburner for quite a while, so might as well give up the ghost and move on. And hey, what the hell – I renewed my subscription one last time this evening for old time’s sake.

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Forcecast talks with Steve Sansweet in Chicago

TFN’s Forcecast (which now has a brand-new website of their very own) caught up with Steve Sansweet at Chicago Comic Con. He talks about Celebration V and the issues as to why we don’t have a definitive announcement yet. Key statements: He hopes to announce it before the end of the summer, and “It could very well be later in the summer” than the previous events.

They also address the whole ‘second animated series’ thing. “You don’t build two animation studios and just do one series. You have other things in mind,” and “not nessarily Star Wars,” Steve said.

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The fandom minute: Ewoks, Webbies, Vader, Death Star BBQ, Wedge (fake,) and lists

For the budding anthropologists in the room… McSweeny’s has Yub Jub Means “Devour the Weak:” An Authoritative Study of the Ewoks From the Field. (Also noteworthy, though not Star Wars: Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sample Copywriter.)

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EUbits: Hyperspace fiction, Bohnhoff, Insider, book club and free Clones

The fiction is coming from inside the house! The latest piece of Hyperspace original fiction, ‘Death in the Slave Pits of Lorrd,’ is by TFN’s Adrick “TalonCard” Tolliver.

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Say goodbye to GeoCities…

Geocities.com in 1997 (before Yahoo bought it.)

Yahoo will be closing down GeoCities later this year, and I’d like to ask for a moment of silence.

No, really.

It may be hard to fathom now, but back a decade or so ago, when this here internet was still shiny and new, the free web space that GeoCities was as important to fandom as… Well, blogs and forums and wikis and Livejournal are now. It was the place where people were driven by their passion for whatever random bit of… whatever… made sites dedicated to their foci. Sure, it looks goofy now. (To quote Heidi MacDonald: “If you want to see the Web as it existed ten years ago just find any webpage hosted on GeoCities.”) It’s certainly not where fandom – even internet fandom – began, but it’s an important touchstone. And soon it’ll be gone.

Here are a few sites where you can get a feel for the internets of fandom past:

At least we’ll always have the Wayback Archive – not that anyone can actually remember those giant 90’s URLs.

Scour your bookmarks (or take offerings to Google) and drop your old favorites in the comments. (Basic HTML works.)

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TFN thread of the indeterminate time period: The key phrase here is ‘historical perspective’

After nearly two decades, three actual movies, a TV show/movie, and (approximately) a thousand other books, of course Heir to the Empire and pals have some continuity issues. Sorry, that’s just how we play it in the GFFA. Suck it up, fanboy.

But we can agree on one thing: The covers have always been pretty bad. Of course, some of the EU’s worst have nice Drew Struzan covers, thus proving the old adage…