Month: May 2016

Categories
Television & Movies ToyBox

Heroes included at no extra cost

The FalconIf you’re not interested in a very brief rant about Star Wars figures, you might as well skip this one.

I see that the only way to get a 3.75″ scale Maz Kanata figure is going to be in a box set that repackages all the Finn and Rey figures that didn’t sell individually last fall. It’s kind of cringeworthy because the trailers made it very clear: these people, they are who the movie is about. Oh, and Han and Chewie show up too. We knew these people, and the new X-Wing pilot, were our new heroes.

Of course, in the southern states (such as where I hail from), Rey and Finn were peg warmers. It was almost as if everyone was rejecting the notion that a woman and a black guy were the heroes of the new Star Wars. (What, did they think Mace Windu was a fluke?)

So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go ahead and get this new box set, just for Maz. Maz is cool; Maz almost makes the movie and I’m beyond happy that she’s already confirmed as being in the next one. I will then take the spare Rey, Finn and BB-8 – all of whom I already have – and put them in my ’78 Kenner Falcon, which sits in the box 364 days out of the year. I will enclose a handwritten note about how foolish people still were in 2015, and how I expect whoever is receiving the note (and the ship and its new crew) to do, and be, better than we were in 2015.

Maybe it’ll be my grandkids.
Maybe it’ll be someone else’s grandkids.
Maybe it’ll be somebody who gets the message, in which case the Millennium Falcon once again saves the day.… Read more

Categories
Conventional Thinking Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Fatherhood, Fandom, Fading Out, and a Book Update

Fatherhood, Fandom and Fading OutSurprise! New book! And probably (with apologies to Steven Moffat) not the one you’re expecting. Fatherhood, Fandom, and Fading Out is a book of essays, largely culled from this very blawg as well as from theLogBook.com ‘Zine, though there are a few “previously unreleased bonus tracks” in the mix as well, and of course everything’s been modified so it works as a book. Watch for it later this week in theLogBook.com Store and Amazon.com.

So let’s talk books for a little bit, because I haven’t talked books in a while, and the last time I did talk books, this new one wasn’t even a gleam in my eye.

FFFO, as I’ve come to call it, is just a little bit of a stopgap project, something that will (hopefully) bring in a wee bit of scratch while I finish up working on the next book, which will be WARP!1, the first Star Trek guidebook in a format similar to my previous Doctor Who guidebooks, VWORP!1 and VWORP!2 (both still very much available in theLogBook.com Store, by the way). But it’s not a completely cynical, let’s-make-a-quick-buck thing. The element of the VWORP! books that has gotten more feedback than anything is the brief essays that offer much-needed detours from the synopsis/cast-and-crew/trivia/review format that is 90% of those books. The essays seem to connect with people – a lot. So an all-essay book was always in the offing; I simply decided to move it up in the schedule, just in time for Fathers’ Day no less, while I decided what to do about the WARP! books.

Because the playing field has changed a bit where WARP! is concerned. We now have a new Star Trek series in pre-production, with such luminaries as Bryan Fuller, Nicholas Meyer, and Rod Roddenberry doing the honors. After years of mega-budget popcorn flicks bearing little resemblance to the Star Trek we know and love, the idea of an all-star return to form is incredibly appealing…and it changes things up a lot. … Read more