The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
How messy is your desk?
Mine is probably just past the point where a neat freak would go “GAHHH!!!!” at the sight of it, but I don’t think my desk is really messy, either. I think I’m generally in-between. My whole library area could use some tidying, though. Maybe on an upcoming long weekend….
How about you?
John Scalzi pointed out a goofy thing where you can have a photo edited to be like an album cover, matching the style of an upcoming movie about NWA called Straight Outta Compton. Now, I don’t know the first thing about NWA, but I’m always game to play with some photo-styling doohickey, so here are my creations, straight from the 14127!
(Hey, you know that thing I sometimes do with this feature and others when I screw up the scheduled publishing and don’t realize it until night-time? That’s pretty funny when I do that, right?)
I’ve had this insanely earwormy song in my head for days, and now you can, too! I actually like this song quite a bit. Here’s “Little Talks” by Of Monsters And Men.
Some random thoughts on recent Star Wars stuff (or not-so-recent Star Wars stuff that is nevertheless new to me:
As Episode VII draws nearer and nearer, we are seeing more groundwork being laid for the fictional state of affairs in the Star Wars universe, with only the new materials being produced from this point on being considered “canon”, along with the original films and the Clone Wars animated series. I assume that Episode VII will be written so as not to assume knowledge of everything that’s already happening, but the non-film media stuff has been essentially rebooted, with a lot of new stuff scheduled to come out soon (or has come out already, in the case of many comics).
The first big release appears to be a novel by Chuck Wendig, called Aftermath. In this book, we apparently get to see the shifting in Galactic politics after the defeat of the Empire at Endor. Starwars.com has released a sample of the new book, and I did read it. My reactions?
Well, it’s definitely well-written. It moves along briskly and sets up some story stuff that I’m curious about pursuing. However, there are a couple of tonal issues I have. The first is pure taste on my part: Wendig writes the novel in present tense, and quite frankly I have never liked present tense in my fiction. It takes some very good writing indeed to pull me into a story that’s been written in present tense. I don’t know why this is, but it’s just the way I’m wired.
Slightly more troubling to me, though, is the tone of the story. We begin with the celebration on Coruscant and the toppling of the Emperor’s statue, which is shown to us at the very end of Return of the Jedi (the Special Edition, that is). In the movie, we cut from this back to the party on Endor. Wendig, though, reveals that while we’re watching friends hug Ewoks, smile at Force ghosts, and then listening to the music as the end credits roll, the remaining forces of the Empire are cracking down and the people have to arm themselves with chunks of stone from the statue to defend themselves. I suppose that’s a logical thing to assume happening, but…I don’t know. There’s something about the tone of Wendig’s excerpt that makes me worry about the grimdarkification of Star Wars. Gritty fighting in the streets amidst political chaos is a fine trope, but I’m just not sure it’s the kind of trope I look for in Star Wars, which is to me about the mythic and the fantastical.
But we’ll see. It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong. It is just a short sample, after all.
And then there’s the video footage that was screened by the Star Wars people at San Diego Comic Con. It amounts to something of a third official trailer for Episode VII, and here it is:
So why the “Yay! Practical effects!” cheerleading in the video? Well, this is where the conspiracy-theorist in me comes out. I wonder if this isn’t code-speak for Star Wars fans who hated the Prequels. One of the most common complaints about those movies (unfairly, in my mind) is the overreliance on CGI, so I’m wondering if all that talk about practical effects isn’t just the current Star Wars producers’ way of saying to the fans, “It’s OK. We got this. George Lucas isn’t involved. We’re giving you what you want.” I’m getting this faint whiff of this movie, and the Star Wars stuff to come, as being fan service to those who hate pretty much everything since 1980.
Another piece of evidence here? In an interview apparently consisting of yes-no questions, JJ Abrams was asked if there are midichlorians in the new movie. He said “No”. Now, that’s not in itself a bad thing; if there’s no story reason for midichlorians to be mentioned, then they shouldn’t be mentioned. To maintain otherwise would be similar to demanding that every Star Trek story must include Klingons. But many of the articles (case in point) I’ve read on this have taken exactly the tone that bothers me: “It’s OK, we’re going to ignore as much of what George Lucas did as we possibly can.” This might be wishful thinking on the part of the people writing these articles, but JJ Abrams and the rest of the Episode VII crew have not exactly been expending great effort to suggest any admiration for the Prequel Trilogy at all, which reinforces, in my mind, the idea that the goal is to let those films be “out there” but pretty much ignored completely. And that irritates me.
(Besides, people tend to be spectacularly wrong about the damn midichlorians, anyway.)
Let’s see, what else? I watched thirty minutes or so of a documentary called The People vs. George Lucas, which is pretty much what it sounds like: an exercise to air complaints about George Lucas. The first fifteen or twenty minutes are fairly benign, providing something of a background on the degree to which Star Wars has shaped culture the last 38 years. A little of this goes a long way, but there it is. However, about twenty to twenty-five minutes in, we get to the complaints, starting with the Special Editions. After about five minutes of listening to people bitch about Han shooting first, I turned the thing off and didn’t watch the rest. These complaints were just embarrassing to listen to. One guy said something about how it was like George Lucas gave us all the best coloring books as kids but then he showed up and took away our coloring books and…come to think of it, that complaint might well have been when I stopped watching. It was so nonsensically over-the-top, and the tone was so persistently whining, that I just wanted to punch everybody in the movie.
And I agree that Lucas should never have changed that scene.
The degree, though, to which “Han shot first!” has become a shibboleth amongst Star Wars fans is kind of creepy to me, though. Leave me out of it.
So I shut the documentary off, well before it could get to the Prequels.
However, the news is not all bad or troubling! Years ago, when The Phantom Menace first came out, there was a series of articles on Space.com called “The Phantom Heresies”, which delved into that film’s mythic structure (under the assumption that it actually did not suck ). I greatly enjoyed those articles, which shaped a lot of my thinking about the Prequels over the years, including when I wrote the “Fixing the Prequels” series. Well, it turns out that the person who wrote those articles, one Paul Hamilton, has a blog called The Star Wars Heresies. I’ve started dipping into it, and it’s interesting stuff, albeit from a more academic-style viewpoint than I usually take when writing about this stuff. Hamilton also wrote a book on these same types of issues, which I will probably check out at some point. (It’s a bit on the expensive side, even for an ebook, but I’ll get it eventually.) And from his blog I found another, The Star Wars Prequel Appreciation Society, which also seems to be full of interesting stuff. (I’ve not dug much into it yet.)
Let’s see, what else? Not much, really. Just waiting for the new movie and to hear what John Williams does with the music. I hope that the disturbances I’m feeling in The Force come to nothing, but you never know….
Oh, and this is a pretty nifty image (from the international trailer for The Force Awakens):
Some things I’ve seen the last week or so….
:: Bill Altreuter reflects on a visit to Gettysburg:
I believe the United States has as its chief value in the world its aspirational qualities, and I believe that those qualities are best expressed in the Constitution and its supporting documents, particularly the Federalist Papers. The Constitution, a living document, is, like all scripture, flawed. The 3/5ths Rule, for starters was the seed for the horrors of the war I’ve spent the weekend thinking about, but we spent the next century plus– up to and including now, today– addressing the problems created by the country’s economic dependence on chattel slavery in an incomplete and unsatisfactory manner. It’s great that we have the 14th Amendment, but it would be a far better thing if we had more Supreme Court Justices that believed that the 14th Amendment means what it says.
:: Briana Morgan opens up about depression and how it affects her writing career:
I’ve been battling the blues since I was seventeen. As days of sadness turned into weeks and months and even years, I tried to wrap my mind around this new reality. When would I feel better? When would I be cured? Would the existential loneliness ever go away?
(Briana is one of an increasing number of awesome writers I’ve met on Twitter and Instagram. Seriously, she’s really great.)
:: Roger meditates on Hiroshima and Nagasaki:
Regardless, I was never convinced that the United States should be the first country to drop the bomb. The sheer devastation, not just immediately but in the aftermath, troubled me.
(I confess that I’ve always believed the “party line”, that the A-bombs had to be dropped to keep the war from grinding on into an awful, bloody, hellish 1946. I also confess that my belief in such is not informed by the closest reading of history.)
:: Sheila O’Malley on the anniversary of American Bandstand:
Dick Clark was no dummy: he made sure the show was aired in the afternoon, right when kids got home from school. It became Appointment Television for American teenagers. You could watch new music, hear new artists, see your favorites perform, and participate in the frenzy of rock ‘n’ roll, which was still exploding, outward and outward and outward, a Big Bang Theory of culture. Elvis had already moved on, his explosion was so powerful (Martin Sheen made the comment that Elvis reached the sun – what was it like up there? Who else knew but Elvis?), but many many more followed in his wake.
(I don’t remember ever watching Bandstand, but I’ll read Sheila writing about anything.)
:: John Scalzi points out, yet again, that GamerGate consists largely of dummies:
Seriously, though. How these people get through life without poking their eyes out with spoons is entirely beyond me.
(Ayup. I’ve yet to encounter anything from GamerGate that isn’t flecked with frothing stupidity.)
:: SamuraiFrog on the death of Rowdy Roddy Piper:
Man, he’s only a year older than my Dad. That’s hard to think about. I can’t imagine what his family is dealing with right now. He was just a piece of my childhood puzzle, you know? Sad, sad news.
(I have to admit this: I had no idea who Piper was, even as he died. It’s not uncommon for me to be totally unfamiliar with this or that famous person’s work when they die, but Piper took me aback, as I watched people on Facebook — friends of mine I know reasonably well — openly mourn his passing as a part of their childhoods. I had to wonder, increasingly, just how I’d managed back then to be so unplugged from the wrestling world that I literally couldn’t remember ever hearing of this man, who seems to have generated an awful lot of good will in his time here on Earth.)
:: Cal is unimpressed with Donald Trump.
Conclusion – Trump is a maniac that can’t be dealt with like a rational human being. His ego is writing checks that his butt can’t cash at this point.
:: Jennifer is not impressed with what her dog did to her glasses.
This. This is a photo of me with my now fixed glasses.
(I’ve broken two pairs of glasses in my life: one when I stepped on them in second grade, and one in college when I slipped on ice and landed flat on my backpack with the glasses inside.)
:: Lance Mannion is impressed with the rowing team he watched.
The coach finished talking and the crew set to work again. The scull took off and I ran out of room to chase after them anymore. But if I could have, I might have followed them the whole nine miles upriver to Poughkeepsie if that’s how far they were going, it was that thrilling to watch and that pleasant to be be outside and if not on the water then at least by it.
:: Lynn is not impressed with somebody’s rules for eating hot dogs.
I use whole wheat buns. Is that okay, Your High-and-Mightiness? I haven’t seen any sun dried tomato or basil buns but I would try them. Then they tell us the exact order in which the condiments must go on the hot dog. Sorry, I put the onions on first, then the chili. And I’m right; the Hot Dog Council is wrong. Putting the onions on first keeps them from falling off.
(She’s right. Onions on the bottom. I put chili on top, though…and when I have a chili dog, I eat it out of a bowl with a fork because that’s how I roll.)
:: Abby Hathorn is impressed with her new pair of vintage overalls.
On my last trip to Nashville, I stopped by this lovely little vintage shop called The Hip Zipper. There, I picked up bunches of new-old goodies, but the piece I am most excited about is my Liberty overalls!
(Abby Hathorn is another writer I met on Twitter and Instagram. She’s primarily about fashion, and she writes about clothes and fashion with an infectious sense of fun. She really likes color and variety, which is really cool, and she does not think it’s impossible to look good in overalls. Oddly, I do not own any pairs of Liberty overalls. I should probably rectify that at some point…they were the staple brand worn on Hee Haw, which we watched a lot when I was but a wee bairn, and which may well be a big part of my lifelong fascination with overalls. Hmmmm…I honestly don’t remember, but I wonder if there was pie-throwing on that show….)
Blogistan is still a nice place, even if nobody goes there anymore!
I’m sure you’re all just dying to know what my current tools for writing are. Wonder no more! Head over to the Official Site and find out!
