Ayant grandi dans l’Église de Jésus-Christ des saints des derniers jours, c’était normal que je m’engage comme missionnaire mormon à l’âge de 19 ans. Comme j’avais déjà beaucoup étudié le français, on m’a affecté au service missionnaire en France et en Suisse, où j’ai donc habité entre 2007 et 2009. Mes souvenirs de cette période de ma vie sont un peu compliqués. Comme je n’ai plus les mêmes croyances religieuses, j’ai certains regrets.

Remaking Star Wars would be unpardonable, but once enough hits the public domain, I want alternate sequels and prequels. Riff on the original in new ways. Give me a follow up where Darth Vader was never Anakin Skywalker. Bring back human, Irish Jabba. Go wild.

Very excited to watch this.

I think I got this in an NPR Humble Bundle, and I’ve been meaning to relisten to it for a while. It’s a real mix of good and bad: Thanks to John Williams and Ben Burtt, it’s got some great audio to work with; however, it does a lot of awkward “tell since we can’t show.” It sometimes feels like it’s reaching to fill in an extra four hours, but also it maybe demonstrates that Star Wars could maybe be a miniseries with some better writing?

The NPR radio adaptation of Star Wars would be a lot worse if the movie’s sound design and music weren’t so dang good.

I recently finished an audiobook of Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society and have been finding other things to listen to now that I don’t have mid-twentieth century French philosophical reflections on technique to think through anymore. Last night, I began (re)listening to the National Public Radio Star Wars radio drama—adapted by Brian Daley—while cleaning up the kitchen, and I continued listening on the way in to work today. The radio drama is interesting in so many ways!

There is one really good story in here and one okay one, but I finally found the limits of my impatient with Star Trek and/or comics nonsense, and it was a Star Wars-like “let’s take a character who barely appears on screen and explain why they are the most important person in the world” story smack in the middle of the volume. Not going to stop reading the series, but it’s definitely slowing me down.

John Siracusa recommended the anime adaptation of this on the year-end episode of The Incomparable, and the premise sounded interesting enough to try getting into manga again. I love stories that explore the mundanity of fantastic worlds—there are lots of things I don’t like about the Star Wars prequels, but Jedi Knights resolving trade disputes is great—and this story delivers on that. It picks up after a D&D-style adventure party has completed their quest and asks what happens next.

Look, I’m a bit hesitant here, but Aardman’s take on Star Wars was great, so fingers crossed!!

J’ai une petite collection d’aimaintins au travail qui me donne de la joie, même si la plupart serait incompréhensible à mes collègues.

Excellent article that sums up a lot of my thinking on this show.

I’ve blogged a fair amount over the past year or so about how ethics intersect with fiction. I’ve blogged about whether one should try to live by one’s values in TTRPGs and about my discomfort with the Star Wars franchise (which I otherwise love!) when I put it in tension with my aspirations toward non-violence. I think these are valuable questions (otherwise I wouldn’t publicly write on them), but whenever I write that sort of thing, I also worry that I’m overthinking things, that there’s a way to enjoy fiction without having to think through all of its ethical and moral ramifications.

Over the weekend, I bought a print of a Biggs Darklighter portrait from a local artist, and every time I walk past it, I feel better about the purchase.

We are big fans of libraries in our family. In fact, live near the border between two counties, and we split our library visits between the Lexington Public Library (where we are residents) and the Jessamine County Public Library (where we are not). Luckily, Kentucky library systems tend to be fairly liberal in handing out library cards, so this isn’t usually a hassle (this was not the case in Central Michigan, but that’s a story for another time).

When I was slowly making my way through David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything last month, I was having trouble processing all of the ideas in the ambitious, dense book, so I was surprised when one idea sounded familiar: schismogenesis. A few years ago, Cory Doctorow wrote an essay using schismogenesis as a theme. Here’s Doctorow’s explanation of the concept from the original book, and the beginning of his thesis in the post:

One of the joys of teaching a class on content management is the way that the concepts we discuss and work with have seeped deep into my brain, making it impossible to consume web content casually ever again. I write that half jokingly, but it’s amazing how much ICT 302 affects the way that I see the web, and how much my everyday encounters with the web shape my teaching in that class.

I’ve been reading up on (and aspiring to) non-violence recently. As I noted in a series of posts almost a year ago (here’s the one that wrapped up the series, and it links to the two earlier ones), I’ve been trying to figure out what that means for playing games and consuming media. I don’t necessarily believe that a commitment to non-violence means that you can’t play through an epic battle in D&D, but I think the question is worth thinking about.

This was good! Not perfect: there were some rough edges, it’s hard to take some scenes seriously if you’ve watched The Good Place, and there’s a bad case of the Force working as the plot needs it to. Despite all that, though, I love the franchise leaning into a “actually, the Jedi kind of suck” story, and there were some interesting fight scenes and compelling story elements. Happy to see Star Wars experimenting like this… though, of course, it should be moving into the public domain so that everyone (not just Disney) can do that experimentation.

This is a fun article.

Doing some quick math to compare how old I was when I first watched Star Wars to kiddo’s current age. Also hoping my parents haven’t tossed out the cassettes I got at that age in case I want to hunt down a VHS player and watch it that way.

I have unexpectedly hit a point in my life where I associate the voice of Alec Guinness with George Smiley instead of Obi-Wan Kenobi.

I know I should probably exercise the MST3K Mantra here, but I don’t understand how you can carry a weapon as inherently dangerous as a lightsaber and describe yourself as a “guardian of peace and justice.”

I’ve gotten this same vibe from my students: Prequels are okay, and it’s the sequel trilogy that must not be acknowledged. I don’t fully understand this thinking, but to each their own.

The show started off strong, and there are lots of individual details that I liked (including a compelling dark Jedi who made lightsaber duels interesting again). However, by the end, it felt like a mishmash of fanservice, addressing plot threads from a show I haven’t seen, but then setting them up for a future movie instead of actually resolving them. So many decisions seemed to happen for the sake of plot or convenience, and it was kind of a slog to finish the dang thing.

Pete and Sarah were mainstays of my Mormon experience growing up. Their oldest—a famously rowdy boy with several rowdy younger brothers—was present on the Sunday when I was introduced in children’s classes as a newcomer to the congregation. When I outgrew children’s classes and made my way to youth Sunday School, Pete was our teacher for a while—the kind of teacher who tried to suppress a giggle (and usually unsuccessfully) whenever the word “ass” (especially “dumb ass”) appeared in the KJV.

I don’t even remember when this season ended, but it took a while to convince myself to get through it. The first season of this show was near-perfect, but it’s gotten dumber over time, and this season was particularly disappointing. It felt stuffed with fanservice and worldbuilding I didn’t care about, indecisive and self-contradictory, and like everything proceeded on the logic of plot. Makes me miss Andor.

In the spirit of ultra obscure references, I really want to name something “Waughmp Rat,” combining a Homestar Runner onomatopoeia and an unseen Star Wars creature.

My alarm woke me from a dream in which I was trying to recruit Latter-day Saint missionaries as pilots for the Rebel Alliance, and I have a lot of questions about that worldbuilding.

This book took me a while to get into. I gave up on the print version a year or three ago, and even the audiobook wasn’t doing great at capturing my attention for a while—I had to rush to finish this before it was due back to Libby. I’m glad that I stuck it out, though, because I liked what I got. I never read the X-Wing novels from the old EU, but I wanted something like what I imagined they were.

I did not know until today how much I needed an Aardman Animation claymation Wedge Antilles in my life.

This book is one of the mainstays of the old Star Wars EU. I hadn’t read it in years, but after exploring some of the new canon and hearing the news about a likely remixing of it into a Dave Filoni movie, it seemed like a good time to revisit. The audiobook production was great, and even if I’m not planning to finish the trilogy, I enjoyed checking this title out again.

I read (and listened to) a lot in the early months of this year and have hit a wall recently. This audiobook was a nice way to get back into reading; I’ve felt a hunger for Star Wars media recently, and this book came recommended on a podcast I’ve sampled. It’s fun to get more into the new canon: I thought this did a good job of setting up some of the Episode VII worldbuilding, and it reminded me of the fun I had reading through the old EU growing up.

It sure looks like Star Wars is heading toward an Heir to the Empire remake, and even though I know it’s fan pandering, I am really excited about it.

I recently finished a relisten of my favorite Star Wars actual play podcast, and now I want to start a Star Wars FATE game.

Over the past few days, I’ve been relistening to the One Shot podcast’s October 2018 Kids on Bikes episodes (which starts here). There’s so much to love about this six-episode series. I remembered enjoying the characters and the players, but it wasn’t until this morning that I remembered the perfect moment where one player describes the biblical Jacob as “history’s best angel fighter” and summons him to help a science teacher fight off a terrifying seraphim (which I promise makes sense in context).

This “Don’t Fly Solo” board has been up in the hallway of our building since before I was hired. I took a picture of it back in December 2017, when I was here on a job interview. It was one of the most prominent signs (no pun intended) that this would be a friendly and fun unit to work in, which was one of the biggest considerations on my mind when I decided to accept the job (though the adventure of changing disciplines and the convenience of living closer to family shouldn’t be discounted).