The first trailer for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is out!
ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY Official Teaser Trailer by Star Wars
I’m delighted to see Felicity Jones cast as a protagonist. I enjoyed her performances as The Unicorn in Doctor Who (season 4, episode 7, “The Unicorn and the Wasp”) and as Catherine Morland in the 2007 adaptation of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. According to IMDB, also Alan Tudyk, Forest Whitaker, and Mads Mikkelsen are among the cast. Mikkelsen seems to have been busy with genre roles lately – first Doctor Strange and now Rogue One.
Rogue One is the first in a series of spinoffs outside the episodic Star Wars core collectively known as the Star Wars Anthology Series. If this trailer is anything to go by, the series should be a lot of fun.
At this writing, the release date is set to December 16, 2016. Can’t wait!
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
A team of archaeologists has unearthed a potential new Viking site in Newfoundland, Canada with the help of satellites. Dr. Sarah H. Parcak, an archaeologist, space archaeologist, and Egyptologist, lead the effort to take infrared images from space to find new archaeological sites.
According to The New York Times, while searching the coastlines from Baffin Island (in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, west of Greenland) to Massachusetts, she found
“hundreds of potential ‘hot spots’ that high-resolution aerial photography narrowed to a handful and then one particularly promising candidate — ‘a dark stain’ with buried rectilinear features.
“Magnetometer readings later taken at the remote site […] showed elevated iron readings. And trenches that were then dug exposed Viking-style turf walls along with ash residue, roasted ore called bog iron and a fire-cracked boulder — signs of metallurgy not associated with native people of the region.
“In addition, radiocarbon tests dating the materials to the Norse era, and the absence of historical objects pointing to any other cultures, helped persuade scientists involved in the project and outside experts of the site’s promise.”
Point Rosee is approximately 700 km (approximately 400 miles) away from L’Anse aux Meadows, the only currently confirmed Viking site in North America. The Norsemen staying at L’Anse must have traveled further south, though, because butternuts and worked pieces of butternut wood – which are not native to Newfoundland – were found among the Norse objects at the settlement.
CBC News reports that evidence of a Norse-like hearth and 8 kilograms (approx. 16 pounds) of bog iron was found at Point Rosee during a dig in 2015. It isn’t yet known for sure whether the site was a temporary base camp or a settlement, or whether it even was associated with Vikings. If confirmed, Point Rosee would be the second known Viking site in North America.
The evidence is still clearly on the scant side. Digging at Point Rosee is to resume this summer, so maybe they’ll find more.
As a sidenote, isn’t it so cool that we now have space archaeologists?!
“Shooting people was such a stupid activity, why should everybody–anybody!–be so impressed? Silver wondered irritably. You would think she had done something truly great, like discover a new treatment for black-stem rot.”
– Lois McMaster Bujold: Falling Free
Silver, one of the genetically engineered, learning-oriented people known as quaddies, expresses her deep dislike of violence.
Beer brewers Night Shift Brewing in Massachusetts made a Baltic porter aged in apple brandy barrels. They call it Elevensies, and describe it as dark and of high gravity.
Elevensies beer by Night Shift BrewingElevensies beer. Screenshot from Night Shift Brewing
Sounds like it would’ve made a perfect partner for our Prancing Pony dinner. Maybe we can still find some…!
A movie version of Jane Austen’s never-before-adapted epistolary novel Lady Susan is coming out in a few weeks (released on May 13), and the trailer is finally here.
I’ve been waiting for it for a long time without any real idea of what it’ll be like, as I’ve never even heard of the writer / director Whit Stillman before. It looks absolutely hilarious! Kate Beckinsale as Lady Susan seems perfect in every way; I’m also looking forward to seeing more of Jemma Redgrave, James Fleet, and Stephen Fry. Can’t wait! Fansquee!
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Jeffrey Veregge, an artist and member of the Port Gamble S’Klallam Tribe in Washington state, makes positively fantastic versions of mainstream genre icons like superheroes, movie characters, Transformers, aliens, and the like.
“This site, the work that is seen on it is a reflection of a lifetime love affair with comic books, toys, TV and film. Taking my passions and blending them with my Native perspective, artistic background and the desire to simply be me. Basically I am just trying to have fun and get back to that kid that went to art school to begin with, wanting to create artwork that I want to see and make just for the hell of it.”
Shield by Jeffrey Veregge
Several of his designs would make fantastic fabric prints, like this Flash-inspired one, for example:
Scarlet Blurr by Jeffrey Veregge (2012)
If there was a fabric Flash version, I’d use it for pencil cases, zipper travel pouches, or a table cloth. Or maybe tall, tall shades with a wide border on the bottom; that would look really striking.
“In a twinkling the table was laid. There was hot soup, cold meats, a blackberry tart, new loaves, slabs of butter, and half a ripe cheese: good plain food, as good as the Shire could show, and homelike enough to dispel the last of Sam’s misgivings (already much relieved by the excellence of the beer).”
Barliman Butterbur serves up a filling supper of good home cooking at the Prancing Pony and we’ve done our best to do his fare justice. We have a soup of roasted root vegetables, cold chicken and ham, and bread with butter and cheese. A simple blackberry tart makes a satisfying dessert and a home-brewed blackberry stout goes with it all.
We imagined a material culture in Bree-land that combines Hobbit and Bree Human features, possibly with some Dwarven-made touches. The color white is pulled from Mr. Butterbur’s white apron and the white tablecloth on the four Hobbits’ dinner table. Expanding on that, we used mostly white dishes, white candles, and clear glass. The soup bowl with leaf imprints on its inner surface is similar to the green one in the Long-Expected Party. A fabric-lined basket holds a variety of bread, and half a wheel of cheese invites nibbling.
What if there was a fantasy world where moose were tamed and selectively bred for cavalry? I spent some time pondering it after a couple of things found online collided in my head.
Their size, speed, and ability to gallop through deep snowbanks make moose fearsome and pretty near unstoppable. Imagine a line of ginormous moose thundering at full tilt towards you across a field – that’s a truly frightening thought! Also bogs don’t slow them down by much, I believe, which might conceivably tip the scales in the right kind of a campaign.
Then, I saw this photo of an albino moose:
Natural snow camouflage. Hmmm.
It’s not that far-fetched an idea, apparently. The Soviet Union attempted to build a moose cavalry in the first half of the 20th century, but they were unsuccessful. In our world, the solitary habits of moose seem to be standing in the way of domestication. If we’re talking about a fantasy world, however, I don’t see why not.
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?
Did you know there’s a band dedicated to making mariachi-style covers of video game and pop culture themes? I didn’t, until today. And, boy, Mariachi Entertainment System is brilliant! Here is just one of their recent productions: the throne room theme from the end of Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope:
Co-Geeking 
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