Apart from the Empire’s hunt for Obi-Wan, most of the plot seems to revolve around interpersonal conflict. (Those of you who have started watching already may be able to fill us in on this!) There seems also to be an introduction of the first true female antagonist of the franchise. (I don’t count Captain Phasma, as she didn’t get nearly enough screentime.)
Obi-Wan Kenobi was released on May 27, 2022.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Ukraine has been at war for 105 days now. That’s 15 long, grueling weeks. (Also the length of Finland’s Winter War with the USSR, which is why the number is significant to me.)
Russia’s craven attack (despite the incompetence it seems to have been implemented with) did change the world, albeit a bit differently than intended. Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia have submitted their applications to join the EU.* There’s an unprecedented feeling and showing of solidarity towards Ukraine in Europe. Russia—and especially their petty, piddling thing of a presidential figure—is becoming something of a pariah at least in the Euro-American world. Furthermore, Finland and Sweden are joining NATO, ditching their long-cherished military independence.**
That’s in the first three months. Much like the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, it’s felt three times as long. Unfortunately, I’m afraid this conflict will be a matter of years. Sigh.
World, any time you want to return to duller times is okay by me.
*) Getting even a membership candidate status isn’t simple, though, so this isn’t happening soon.
**) And thanks to Turkey’s pretentions of power-playing, this isn’t going to be as much of an open-and-shut case as we thought, either. Ohwell. I do believe Finland’s and Sweden’s NATO membership will happen eventually.
Good grief! Either I haven’t been paying attention, or there really is a whole slew of SFFnal trailers out in the past month for me to blog about and comment on. Here we go…
The end cap for the dinosaur park franchise(s), Jurassic World Dominion, puts together characters from the original trilogy and the sequel trilogy. And dinos, of course:
I was surprised to learn the movie takes place four years after the preceding one; it will be interesting to see how the writing team will have figured humans and dinosaurs might coexist. It will also be very nice to see some of the older characters, and I hope there will be less time spent on my least favorite faces and more on the nicer ones.
There is, however, one thing I will NEVER want to see again: high heels that stay glued to the female protagonist’s feet while she’s running through the jungle. Oh, hello?! Yuckkk!
At this writing, Jurassic World Dominion will be released on June 10, 2022 in the U.S.
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
One of the astounding things about living right now is the sheer amount of scientific knowledge and technical skills humanity has gained in the past 100 years or so alone.
These days it’s trivial, for example, to get high-quality photos from a neighboring planet brought to your personal device.
(Ok, it’s not truly trivial in the strictest sense since so many steps and technologies are involved, but at the same time: Photos. From another planet. Automatically delivered. Via the Internet. Which many (if not most) of us in the West have casual access to. Pretty much daily! So yes. Trivial.)
Specifically, I’m talking about the Persevererance Imgage Bot on Twitter. It’s a project by computer engineer Niraj Sanghvi. He has automated image tweeting mostly from NASA/JPL-Caltech sources for an impressive, ever-growing collection.
The photos are purely functional, of course, helping the rover to operate, but some are also quite interesting as photographs. Below are some recent favorite shots.
(Click on the image source links below to find more about each photo.)
As before, the head and shirt slots are hidden and the bracers aren’t visible. I also retained the two fist weapons mogs (Silithid Claw).
The update is built around the Bronzebeard Heritage Armor set. Since I tend to find the pre-made sets often a bit lifeless, however, I only used the shoulders, chest, hands, and feet, and filled out my new transmog with Dignitary’s Traveling Cloak, Stygian Belt, and Harvester’s Court Leggings. I was suprised how well the diamond-patterned quilting in the Revendreth pants fit with the diamonds in the Bronzebeard shoulders, and the red in the belt exactly matches the pants.
Finally, I added some red tattoos (Gryphon pattern) to match the pants color and the detailing on the shoulders.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s speculative work The Last Man starts very much like a run-of-the-mill regency-era novel with its three-book structure. You even start to wonder whether much of interest is ever going to happen.
And then a plague hits. Book three, especially, where people drop off like flies, felt rather grim even before living through a pandemic myself. (I read it a few years ago.)
Since the plague aspect is a little too on the nose, I’m going to skip all of that for now. Instead, below is what the protagonist thought about reading:
“I felt convinced that however it might have been in former times, in the present stage of the world, no man’s faculties could be developed, no man’s moral principle be enlarged and liberal, without an extensive acquaintance with books. To me they stood in the place of an active career, of ambition, and those palpable excitements necessary to the multitude.”
– Lionel Verney in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man
Sounds astonishingly like Mr. Darcy’s line about a truly accomplished woman who must improve “her mind by extensive reading” in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, doesn’t it? It must’ve been very much in the air in the early 19th century.
Caoileann O’Mahony crocheted some wheelchair spoke covers and blogged the instructions for the Glasgow in 2024 Worldcon bid. This isn’t your sleepy granny square crochet, though, oh no; O’Mahoney also made little planet appliques and turned the spoke guards into a model of our solar system.
And round and round it goes. I like the color selection (although I wish the photo were a little clearer). Saturn and Uranus even have their rings. How cool is that?!
In September 2021, Photographer Dmitry Kokh visited the currently unoccupied Kolyuchin Island in the Chukchi Sea between Russia and Alaska, and documented some of the wildlife there. A bunch of polar bears seem to have settled in the abandoned buildings of a former Russian weather station.
You can see the bears casually stroll in between the houses, and apparently even spend time inside the buildings, often peeking out of the glassless windows. Astounding!
Kadri Liik shared on Twitter some of her family history of using mines to dye fabric for colorful folk skirts in western Estonia in 1930s.
Strictly speaking, of course, it’s not mines themselves that were used in dyeing, but the picric acid in them. Russian World War I battleship Slava sank in 1917 between Muhu island and mainland Estonia, only 12 years after putting to sea.
Estonians scrapped the ship in the early 1930s. During that process, picric acid was extracted and put to use. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, picric acid was first used in dyeing in 1849, initially of silk. In Muhu, it was apparently used with wool.
The bright yellow derived from picric acid was locally known as mine yellow (miinikollane). Below is the Muhu skirt made from scratch by Liik’s grandmother or great aunt in 1930s:
Apparently, Muhu skirts enjoyed such popularity that older women might be doing their everyday chores in them as late as the 1960s.
It’s quite striking, isn’t it? It seems that some of these traditional patterns survive, either in traditionally woven textiles or as prints on modern fabrics, which is fabulous. I’m not sure I’d like to know exactly how the picric was extracted in the 30s, though…!
Obi-Wan Kenobi, a live action series with six episodes, is nearly here.
Apparently, the series is supposed to gap the pain of Ewan McGregor’s young Obi-Wan and the hope of Alec Guinness’ old Obi-Wan. That makes for an unusual angle to approach a Star Wars story from, and the first Disney+ series I have any interest in seeing.
At this writing, Obi-Wan begins streaming on Disney+ on May 27, 2022. So soon! (It was supposed to be May 25, 2022, the 45th anniversary of the release of the original Star Wars, but apparently something something—publishing is weird, and tv publishing doubly so.)
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Co-Geeking 