Disney to Buy Lucasfilm – will the nerd rage ever end???

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So George Lucas and Robert Iger announced today that the Walt Disney Company will be buying Lucasfilm, in all of its Star Wars glory, to the tune of $4.05 billion.

I, myself, am intrigued by the idea – Lucas is ready to retire, so he’s officially passing the baton to someone else to continue making stories … arguably one of the most successful storytelling companies around today, so I like to think that Star Wars will be in good hands with Disney. Sure, they’re going to rigorously promote the brand and crank out new merchandise like crazy, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be a bad thing and besides, it’s not like there isn’t a ton of Star Wars merch around already!

What makes me the  most curious is to see what exactly this means for Star Wars in the theme parks – sure, the upgrades to Star Tours were already completed not that long ago, but maybe we’d see more attractions popping up around Disney’s Hollywood Studios to capitalize on an entire land dedicated to Star Wars! Tom over at the Disney Tourist Blog made an excellent point – if Disney was looking for something to give Harry Potter a run for his money, freaking Star Wars would definitely be the juggernaut that could stand its ground like no other! 😯

Also, they mentioned something about a movie coming out in 2015 … episode 7 … hmmmmm…

Anyways, I guess the thing that really bothers me after hearing this announcement – continues to bother me, anyways … this is really nothing new – is having to hear just how much hatred and vitriol that segments of the fan community have towards George Lucas, the very same man without whom Star Wars wouldn’t even exist!!! The man just gets so. much. rage. for the prequels, and no – I didn’t think that they were great, but I got over it and don’t still demand crucifixion every time anything reminding me of the franchise mistakenly crosses my path. I don’t understand it from a fan perspective, and frankly it’s really disheartening to me from a creator’s perspective, too…

For the fans side, the best analogy I can make is with Disney World because I absolutely love that place with a passion. Over the years there have definitely been things that the mouse has done that I haven’t liked – the replacement of SpectroMagic, the closing of Pleasure Island, Stitch’s Great Escape – and if you read my website, I’m happy to point out those critiques, but I still love Disney World! And that’s what I don’t get about the nerd rage because to say that George Lucas killed Star Wars … George Lucas ruined Star Wars … Star Wars will never be the same again … but why??? 

Sometimes the fun of playing god and creating an entire universe is being able to go back and correct the mistakes that you’ve made along the way, and even if the fans liked it better the other way, it’s still his universe to meld as he sees fit. And that’s what scares me from a creator’s standpoint is that fans have gone to such great lengths to tell the man everything that he’s done from 1987-on is wrong – I think part of it is a rabid trait of geekdom that wouldn’t exist without a medium like the Internet – but it’s so many steps beyond simply refusing to buy a ticket or anymore of the merchandise, as if the shit storm will never truly end until their precious Star Wars as they remember is put back exactly the way that they remember it from 30 years ago.

It’s pretty clear that George Lucas is just tired of it all and ready to retire, and that admittedly makes me kind of sad to think that here’s this cultural icon like George Lucas – the creator of Star Wars – and after playing in that universe for nearly 40 years, fans have been such jerks to him that as a result, he doesn’t really feel like making movies anymore. He had such an incredible success with the original trilogy – people loved it that much, that in the years since he hasn’t been able to do anything without disturbing the fanbase’s perfect memory of that original story.

I’m a firm believer that a creative work, first and foremost, belongs to its creator, and whatever direction he sees fit to take that creation, that’s the direction that it should go. I think the last time I ranted about this was the whole Mass Effect ending controversy from earlier this spring, and don’t get me wrong – fans definitely have every right to say, “I didn’t like episode 1, so I’m not going to go see the other two…” but for me that’s where the feedback loop ends. To stand on the sidelines and start dictating how the story should go undermines the creator’s role in the process – it’s his story, his universe, his decisions on what lives and breathes and dies there. And it’s not right that such an incredible talent that crafted the universe of Star Wars in the first place is now ready to walk away long before he’s run out of stories to tell simply because a subset of his fans won’t let him take a shit without shouting how he’s doing it all wrong anymore.

The truth of the matter is that the Internet can be a rough playground, and sometimes fans can be just as much cruel as they are passionate.

It makes me sad because when I watch this video, I see a man who’s been forced to come to terms with the idea that the best thing he can do for his own creation at this point is just to walk away, and midi-chlorians or not, I think that the guy who first brought us to this amazing galaxy far, far away just deserves much better than that…

Pumpkin Carving Fun!

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I honestly don’t even know the last time that I carved a pumpkin, but it had to at least have been while I was still living back home up in Michigan, so … at least 9 years ago???

Anyways, this was a lot of fun and surprisingly went pretty quick once we both got the hang of how to get the guts out! I wanted to do something more unique like an Angry Bird or maybe something video game related, but I just couldn’t find a template online that I liked and I was running out of time, so I ended up just using the stickers at the back of a $4 pattern book that we bought to make my own goofy face, and there you go. 😉

I really like how they both turned out – now I’m just curious to see if we actually get any trick-or-treaters at our new doorstep come Wednesday night!  ❓

8-bit time-wasters…

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You ever have one of those nights when you look up and realize that you’ve spent the last 2.5 hours bouncing around random YouTube videos when you really should’ve been working???

Thanks, Dorkly! Better luck with that “work” again tomorrow… 😳 

Halloween Lights of Orange and Green (and Purple, too)

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I’ve never really been much into Halloween, but tonight my wife and I did a little decorating out front in hopes of better broadcasting the notion that we’ve got loads of candy waiting at our doorstep for the trick or treaters next week, and admittedly it was kind of fun!

The lights I’ve actually had just sitting in a box for a number of years – I think I bought them on clearance at Walmart one year after Halloween and just never touched them since. It was basically just 5 strings of the mini orange lights, along with a string of purple bats which you can kind of see hanging there in the window … after mixing in a single string of green lights on the column there, I thought that they made for a nice display and at least gave our house a bit of color after seeing select other houses around the neighborhood decorated with tombstones and cobwebs and skeletons and whatnot.

I’m not exactly a fan of scary Halloween, per se, but decorating with lights – now that’s something that I can get excited about, and if it gives me a little warm up for Christmas decorating here in another month, then all the better! 😀

A Second Dog, or Maybe Not???

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So where do I start?!

We’ve been watching Cleo’s brother, Jake, for the last couple of days. It was an arrangement partially made in appreciation of our friend watching Cleo at the last minute while we were up in New York for funeral stuff all week, and also partially as a reluctant trial for us to see if it would be right for us to adopt Jake and have a second dog in our home.

Not for nothing, but so far the case isn’t too strong in his favor!

It’s been something that both Sara and our friend who’s been fostering him have wanted to see for a while, but I’ve always been adamant up until now that I just thought that two dogs would be too much … that my evening walks wouldn’t be the same, and that our house would become hopelessly trashed, etc, etc… I guess I finally felt an ounce of sympathy after dealing with Sara’s grandma passing the other week, so I suggested that we give him a try for a few weeks and see how he does. And honestly, we were kinda hoping that maybe having a buddy around would kind of calm Cleo down a bit so that she isn’t so hyper and jumpy all of the time, but so far, that’s been precisely the opposite of the effect that has been witnessed here in the Sevener household! 🙁

You name it – there’s been fighting, there’s been peeing on the carpet, there’s been destruction of shoes, and at this point he’s only been here for three days!!! We’re still trying to give him the benefit of the doubt – at least 2-3 weeks minimum before we really make a decision – but it’s a little disheartening to feel like we’re moving backwards after having long-since talked Cleo out of her shoe-gnawing days. We did have a handful of incidents while we were gone where she peed inside, but honestly I think a lot of that was probably just confusion for not knowing where we were disappearing to for weeks at a time! Now that we’re back, though, I’d appreciate it if the pee went outside in the grass as opposed to inside all over my nice, clean carpet…

Also, that magical dual-leash do-jigger you see above – I’m honestly surprised to see just how well it sorta worked! I’ve officially used it twice so far and they most definitely do get tangled on occasion, especially if they both fall back simultaneously on opposite sides of me! But it’s definitely loads easier than trying to hold two separate leashes – there’s just no way that that was happening again, and at least this keeps them relatively close to one another as opposed to splitting me down the middle like a wishbone! My one big concern – if we do end up keeping Jake, I’ll definitely want to seek out a heavier duty version of it, not so much for the straps, but frankly I don’t know how much I can trust those little, metal clips holding onto their harnesses – seems like one good, coordinated tug and that metal would snap like it’s nobody’s business! 😯

Well, that’s all for now – I’ll try to remember to post more next week after we see if time helps him to settle in a bit. Something tells me that having two dogs in the house is going to make handing out candy for trick-or-treaters a whole lot of fun…  🙄

D&D Campaign Photos – the next five chapters…

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(here are a few of my favorites – full sets over here)

Important thing to note in that last pic is that the bald dude in the red cloak was actually the main bad dude whose plans to steal the crown after the king’s death we first thwarted over a year ago, which led to a whirlwind of retaliation, a civil war, the entire party’s death by having a mountain dropped on us, the thankful intervention of a god in our own favor, and I’m sure many other notably events up until this last image where we faced and defeated him before he was able to summon his own dark master into our world.

What’s curious to me, though, is what we have to expect out of our next couple of games, mainly because I don’t really know what my own character wants to do next. It’s kind of that classic paradox of what do the heroes do once they’ve saved the world, and there’s not an immediate danger for us to rush off to face, so what does my brave Adran Ealoeth do with all of his free time??? It’s something that I guess I haven’t really put a whole lot of thought into because we’ve been traveling in a single direction for so long – his own needs have really been secondary to the task at hand … others have talked of buying a tavern and even lording over a new parcel of land gifted by the throne we were defending, so I guess I need to put my head down again and really start to think about what’s important – other than saving the world and all – to my own character…