Just a heads up - I'm making one last call to move comments off the forum before it goes *poof* this coming Saturday.
You have been warned! ^.^
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Mickey the new Jedi by ~OakKs on deviantART
In case you haven't heard - Disney recently announced the acquisition of all of Lucasfilms, including ILM and LucasArts, for 4.05 billion in cash and stocks. I have not heard as of this writing, if it also includes Skywalker Ranch and/or Skywalker Sound, but it seems likely.
In a followup, Lucas announced he was donating the majority of the 4.05 billion to charity.
You go, George!
With all that in the buzz, Disney has also announced that they will indeed be making a new Star Wars film, Star Wars: Episode VII. At first this seems unwise, as the performance of episodes 1-3 was, well, we won't go there. One must also remember that Marvel Studios was once the house of shlock pre-Disney, but became the champion of awesome post-Disney.
I've been trying to find time to watch at least a couple anime series each week (as opposed to Smudge, who just devours almost everything...), and have been meaning to spread around a few recommendations.
First off, after four episodes, Girls und Panzer is being a lot of fun. Lots of classic girl's high school and sports tropes thrown in and played straight-faced over-the-top in a silly world.
The main thing I've been following for the last half-year is Space Brothers. Set in 2025, it follows two brothers who have dreamed of being astronauts since they were children. At the start of the series, the younger brother is in the space program, and the older has ended up in the auto industry. The series follows Mutta (the older brother) as he rediscovers his dreams, and does an excellent job showing the space program from selection and training to actual operations. The best of the all-too-few hard SF anime titles out there. (Added bonus, episode 30 has the second best launch sequence in anime ever.) Really, really, highly recommended.
Kids on the Slope is set in 1966. Insular high school student Kaoru Nishimi has to stay with his uncle for a while, and is going to a new school. He is drawn out of his shell by a notorious troublemaker, love, and jazz. Lots of jazz.
I'm still watching this, though it finished some time ago (12 episodes). It's a fairly quiet drama, with a lot of slice-of-life to it. Does a great job with '60s Japan. Highly recommended.
I started off not watching Sword Art Online, but it quickly became one of the shows Smudge looked forward to each week. I've ended up watching much of the end of first season, and am watching second season. I'll be catching up on the rest of it as soon as I'm done with Kids on the Slope.
In 2022, a new virtual reality MMORPG, Sword Art Online, goes live to the usual first-day flurry of activity. However, it is soon discovered that people can't log out—the option isn't there. The creator of the game declares that the only way out is by fighting though the entire game, and beating the final boss at the end of it all. The story both centers on the efforts to progress through the game, and two people finding each other in the middle of this (their interactions is what started drawing me into the series). Recommended.
An interesting note: this is an adaptation of a series of light novels. Each major story arc is done in two books, the first of which covers the main story, and the second of which is is bunch of short stories set during the first book. The anime, thankfully, integrates the short stories into the main plot.
I blog about a few things on my own site that might be of interest to various people here. Instead of just trying to remember to spread links around each Friday, I figure I'll start posting links to them here every month.
Recent Reading:
10/5–The Lone Samurai (and the Martial Arts)
10/18–The Prospect of Europe
10/23–The Armies of Agincourt
Patch and I had an on-line session of C&C:A:
10/9–Two Rounds of Utica
I've been re-posting old forum threads of ASL games between me and Patch every Thursday. The current lot:
10/4–A33 Tettau's Attack
10/11–A34 Lash Out
10/18–A35 Guards Attack
10/25–A36 Oy Veghel
Work has been going forward on getting the forums into the blogs since Smudge's announcement. All the old initial posts have been converted into blog posts backdated to their original post time. Through the magic of admin privileges, these are also all assigned to the original author.
However, we can't fiddle with the author of a comment to a blog post, so the bulk of the comments are not moved over and will be lost. If you remember making a good comment to a thread on the forum, I recommend you look it up and copy it over. However, there's not a lot of that at the moment.... 😛
Things that need doing:
- Troopers vids originally embedded a College Humor video, but I can't get the blog post to not eat the entire embedding code. Smudge, can you fix that?
- Bel, you had some good comments on my Guild Wars 2 post; you may want to copy them over. Or, just include it all in your upcoming post on the game. ^_^
- I've updated the original No pigeonholing with Bel's suggested builds at the end. Smudge, you might want to copy over your comments on Titanium's build.
For those of you not used to posting on a WordPress site (which is the software that powers this blog), when you are logged in, there will be an 'Admin Bar' across the top of the screen. That has a couple of links, but the main one is "+ New" which when hovered over will drop down to a "Post" link. Clicking on that will get you to the main posting screen. Clicking on the site name (Minions of the Fickle Muse) will get you at the dashboard, where you will be able to get at any drafts that have not been posted yet. Further advice on how posting works can be found here.
If you do not already have an account with Gravatar, I recommend you get one. It's basically just a user icon-service, so that you can have a user icon associated with all your comments and posts. You'll need to tie it to the same email that your account here is tied to, of course. This will also work across a variety of sites, and can be handy if you get into the habit of occasionally commenting on webcomics.... 😛
Also, you should notice that Smudge has switched over the sidebar widget so that we will see recent comments on posts instead of recent forum activity. If you do comment on an old post, everyone can still see that you've done so there.
Finally, the blog is here for us to keep in touch, so go ahead and post anything that you think other people in the group will be interested in! It doesn't have to be just about the MMOs.
