Category: Simple Tricks

The Eleven-ThirtyEight Gazetteer, Vol. II

Posted on December 23, 2014by

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History and the EU

As a history major, former Eleven-ThirtyEight contributor Tyler Williams decided early on that his focus was going to be the influence of events and motifs from antiquity on the Star Wars universe—hence his personal editorial header “This Belongs in a Museum“. While this focus pervaded most of his work here, it found its primary expression in this loose three-part series subtitled “A Long Time Ago”. In it Tyler covered three major cultures of the GFFA—the Old Republic, the Tionese (roughly, the Greece to the Old Republic’s Rome), and the Mandalorians—and the ways that they were drawn from real life.

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The Eleven-ThirtyEight Gazetteer, Vol. I

Posted on December 22, 2014by

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Every six months or so, the staff of Eleven-ThirtyEight takes a well-deserved week-long break to rejoice in not having to write about Star Wars for a minute—also there’s some sort of pine tree festival going on; not sure what the deal is there. Because I, much like Mrs. Claus, am not at liberty to leave the premises, I use these skip weeks to run a feature called Second Look, where I revisit specific pieces from the past few months that deserve another moment in the spotlight.

I’m going to do it a little differently this time, though—after eighteen months of regular publishing, we’ve amassed a pretty damn huge back catalog; with more gems than I could ever revisit adequately. So this week I’m presenting the Eleven-ThirtyEight Gazetteer. See that “Ongoing Series” word cloud down there on the right? Think of this as a map of that territory—each weekday (yes, all five of them) I’ll list in detail a few of those recurring series, some finite and some still ongoing, talking a little about the goals of each series and what makes them interesting. Read More

Loose Canon – Examining The Reboot, Six Months Later

Posted on December 15, 2014by and

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This past summer, Del Rey released a “sampler” of its first four post-reboot Star Wars novels; those excerpts from A New Dawn, Tarkin, Heir to the Jedi, and Lords of the Sith were our first glimpse at the new canon, or New Expanded Universe if you will. Rebels was still a couple months off, but bits and pieces of promotional material had already revealed that Sienar Fleet Systems and COMPNOR, among other elements of the Legends EU, were nevertheless sticking around. Between those bits and the assorted references in that Del Rey sampler, there was already enough EU showing up that we thought it would be fun to count down to the release of A New Dawn with a special Twitter hashtag, #EUPurgeSurvivors, highlighting a different EU escapee every weekday for a month or so.

We did the same thing in the lead-up to Tarkin, and the plan at first was to keep the practice going with each new release, as the “survivors” continued to accumulate…but then we started actually reading Tarkin. As our respective lists crept into the range of one hundred entries—including literally dozens of EU planets, and in some cases weird situations where the Bilbringi Shipyards, say, were canon but not necessarily the planet Bilbringi itself—it started to appear that maybe a new paradigm was needed. Read More

Menace_480.mov, and Other Trailer Memories

Posted on December 8, 2014by , , , , and

Mike: Apparently I’m unusual.

And not just in the “runs a Star Wars blog” sense, but even amongst Star Wars people—I say this because when I pitched today’s topic to the staff—describe your earliest memory of seeing a Star Wars trailer—the majority either had no relevant memories whatsoever, or in one case, had never actually watched one!

Maybe it’s because my major in college, visual effects, happened to involve making a couple myself, but I’ve always been a huge fan of trailers—and I have numerous strong memories of my favorites, both Star Wars and otherwise. Ironically, while the Special Edition trailers were almost certainly the first ones I technically saw, I don’t remember them at all. It’s funny; I remember the two guys behind me laughing maniacally at Threepio in A New Hope, and I remember getting to Empire a couple minutes late and missing the opening crawl (still the only part of a SW film I haven’t seen on a big screen), but the advertising beforehand? Nothing. Read More