Eppu – Page 31 – Co-Geeking

Second Trailer for Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

November 20, 2019November 17, 2019Eppu

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is now a month away. Here’s the second (and apparently final) trailer:

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker | Final Trailer by Star Wars on YouTube

My my, it looks more epic than before, and you really cannot fault episodes VII and VIII for being bland. Furthermore, the movie seems epic in all senses, with beautiful work in both the visuals (environments, propping, fights—did you notice the outstanding cutting of the trailer?) and the story (resistance, courage, friendships, sacrifices).

Now I have one wish: that J.J. Abrams won’t ruin it. (His work has been a hit or miss for me in the past.)

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Delightful Music: Fringe Theme

November 13, 2019November 10, 2019Eppu

One of the most enjoyable things about Fringe is the theme song. Here is a full, 6-minute version:

Fringe Theme [FULL] via mrbrzoskwinka on YouTube

It’s composed by Michael Giacchino, who has an extensive music department background in genre tv, movies, and games (Jurassic franchise video games and movies, Alias, Zootopia, some rebooted Mission Impossible and Star Trek movies, Rogue One and both of the new Spider-Man MCU movies, for instance).

It’s rare to come across a speculative show theme that uses the piano so unapologetically, let alone a story of an FBI agent investigating weird crimes. I’m in no way an expert, but I seem to have noticed that piano has fallen out of fashion these days, so for me the Fringe theme is valuable on those grounds as well.

An occasional feature on music and sound-related notions.

The Mandalorian: Second Official Trailer

November 6, 2019October 15, 2022Eppu

Disney has released a second official trailer for their new Star Wars tv spinoff The Mandalorian:

The Mandalorian – Official Trailer 2 | Disney+ | Streaming Nov. 12 by Star Wars on YouTube

Like the previous one, it’s quite dark; I’d say even darker than the first. This one is also 15 seconds longer, but I’m not sure how much of that is actually new footage and how much is repeat scenes spliced up differently. There seems to be a more scuffed up reddish armor plus a shiny silvery one, so perhaps the Mandalorian will be kitted up for a big confrontation? And speaking of, there seems to be ever so much fisticuffs, perhaps even to the exclusion of plot—but what else would you expect from a series focusing on a bounty-hunter?

I’m a little icked by the hint of a romance, because there was a time when Hollywood claimed that’s the only thing women were good for (or, as audience, could ever be interested in), and that time hasn’t quite yet met the pitiful depths of the most lone corner of the deepest abyss imaginable that it so amply deserves. At least there also were women doing other things in this trailer, including an armored, physically competent-looking woman in a bar. Hard to say for sure, though; as we know, no group is a monolith, and trailers always lie.

Streaming is to start on November 12, 2019.

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Quotes: Because the World Is Yours and It Is up to You

October 30, 2019December 8, 2024Eppu2 Comments

I remember reading Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising pentalogy in a Finnish translation as a child. This summer I read them all in the original English. I didn’t remember much of them at all, just impressions, and was struck by how much more simplistic the story was than I’d thought.

There was only one section in the whole 1,000+-word tome that the present-day me reponded to:

“We [Old Ones] have delivered you [humakind] from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands—your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth. The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always there, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.

“[…] and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy.”

– Merriman in Susan Cooper’s novel Silver on the Tree

The novel this quote comes from, Silver on the Tree, was originally published in 1977. I wonder whether World War II and/or the fear of atomic power might have been behind this paragraph? For me, however, it clearly applies to the current climate crisis.

Cooper, Susan. The Dark Is Rising: The Complete Sequence. New York: Margaret K. McElderry Books, p. 1079.

Image by Eppu Jensen

Serving exactly what it sounds like, the Quotes feature excerpts other people’s thoughts.

BB-Hate Pumpkin for Halloween

October 23, 2019November 2, 2025Eppu

Grab black paint, duct tape in a few colors, permanent markers, and two plastic pumpkins to make your very own BB-hate pumpkin this Halloween.

Desert Chica Karen Heffren How-to-make-a-Star-Wars-BB-9E-Pumpkin

Check out the tutorial by Karen Heffren at Desert Chica. She’s also made a cool BB-8 from an actual pumpkin!

Image by Karen Heffren

This post has been edited.

In Making Stuff occasional feature, we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.

A Levitating Snitch Cake

October 16, 2019September 21, 2019Eppu

Twitter user Michael Harris shared a cake made by his significant other, Kate Pritchett, with an actually levitating quidditch snitch (follow the link for a video):

She shared a few details of the cake:

“I told you I was going to make a floating Snitch cake. (3 x 2 layer white chocolate mud cakes with vanilla meringue buttercream and blueberry and lemon or raspberry and black pepper filling. Special shout out to the wood-look board I made. [fist icon])”

Pritchett clearly is a foodie—just have a look at her amazing Twitter and Instagram feeds. Her dedication to getting the details just right is incredible. Everything is thoroughly thought-out and carefully prepared.

I’m gawping here! (Yes, I just declared gawp to be a word.)

Kudos!

Images by Kate Pritchett via Instagram: Cake. Closeup of details. Snitch wing prototypes.

Geeks eat, too! Second Breakfast is an occasional feature in which we talk about food with geeky connections and maybe make some of our own. Yum!

The Mandalorian Trailer

October 15, 2019October 15, 2022Eppu1 Comment

The Star Wars family of spinoffs is about to have a new member: The Mandalorian. Here’s the trailer:

The Mandalorian | Official Trailer | Disney+ | Streaming Nov. 12 by Star Wars on YouTube

A much darker view of the SW galaxy like in Rogue One; the story is set after the fall of the Empire and before the emergence of the First Order.

The writing credits are split between George Lucas and Jon Favreau, and episode directors include Taika Waititi and Bryce Dallas Howard. It won’t be Howard’s first directing gig, but the first I’m likely to see. (Basically I only know her as the twit of a corporate lady whose heels were practically glued on for the chase scenes in Jurassic World, although apparently I’ve seen her as Gwen Stacy in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 3.) The series music is by Ludwig Göransson, whose work on Black Panther I really liked, so that’s also promising.

One point of personal delight is the glimpse of a small craft flying over a flat, wooded land dotted with small lakes and smaller fields (the sequence starts at about the 15-second mark). It’s one of the very few instances on the large, international screens of places that look like my home that I’ve seen. I hope that’s not all of it!

Other than that there’s not much definite info to be got, so we’ll have to see. I can’t even decide yet on the basis of this trailer whether The Mandalorian is worth the trouble of looking up what Disney+ streaming might take to access or whether we should just wait for the disc release.

Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.

Visual Inspiration: Organic Shapes in a Garden Cottage

October 11, 2019September 29, 2019Eppu

This ensuite cottage in Pali Hill, Mumbai, sits within a garden and literally brings the nature to your side. There are doors and windows, but both are oval or roundish, and even the former are see-through.

It was created by the India-based architectural studio The White Room, run by Nitin Barchha and Disney Davis. The organic shapes immediately have an otherworldly effect—at least I’ve never been in and rarely seen a house like this.

And here’s the ensuite bathroom:

I do have a vague recollection of maybe seeing something like this in Star Trek somewhere. Other than that, the closest existing visuals that come to mind are sets Weta Workshop created for The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogies. It would be nice to see—or read of—more interiors that deviate so starkly from our own.

Found via Colossal.

Images by The White Room

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

On the Finicky, Fussbudgety Facts of Faction Fighting in WoW

October 8, 2019October 6, 2019Eppu1 Comment

Writing on the patch 8.2.5 story for the World of Warcraft Battle for Azeroth expansion, Robert “Bobby” Davis blogging at Kaylriene puts into words what I’ve long thought: while I understand the need for a company to put the best positive spin into talking about their own products, Blizzard really needs to stop deluding themselves about the quality of their storytelling. Here’s Kaylriene on the topic:

“Saurfang says what I’ve thought about the writing of this story the whole time – the faction conflict is stupid and outdated, because Blizzard tries to pretend there is a depth and nuance to it that doesn’t exist in their writing. The Horde are villains, outright – every time this cycle comes about, the Horde does something awful and atrocious that pushes the world into conflict, the Horde leaders who suddenly have conscience about it reject the action and rebel, we storm up to Orgrimmar to depose whomever the despot is today, and then we move on until the next time it happens. He makes clear in-lore precisely what I’ve felt about the faction conflict the whole time – it was set dressing that no longer serves a meaningful purpose.” [emphasis added]

I’m not inclined to be generous to a story that repeats the same gimmick ad nauseam. Granted, you don’t need to look farther than our own human history—and not very far at that—to find nigh-endless faction conflict. But this is supposed to be fantasy, a genre that can have anything happen.

It’s been years since I logged back to WoW for the story—these days I play for completely different reasons than following the plot du jour. Not being a PvPer the faction conflict never was a big draw to begin with, but it used to have at least somewhat interesting turns.

Now, I also understand the difficulty of a rotating team trying to keep up with past writing, storylines, character arcs, details, all of it. There is, however, a lot to be said for storytelling, continuity, and proactive quality control, especially in case of a billion(!)-dollar tech company, lest you end up looking rather like an incompetent fool.

Image: World of Warcraft screencap by Robert on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.