Star Wars

Best Gift Ever

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Star Wars Christmas

Best Gift Ever

There are times when the best gift at Christmas…  you are not quite sure if it was intentional or not.  I’ve talked about our relatively chill Christmas day plans for the better part of a week, and I have to say after going through it yesterday it was far better than I could have imagined.  First off we have all this amazing food…  that we will be eating for a week.  On the menu….

  • Chilli-Cheese Rotel Dip
  • Sausage Cheese Balls
  • Pulled BBQ Beef
  • White Chocolate Cranberry Clusters
  • Chocolate Cashew Clusters
  • Snickerdoodles
  • Ranch Pretzels
  • White and Milk Chocolate dipped Pretzels
  • Flakey Biscuits to heap the BBQ Beef on

It was not exactly the most conventional meal, but we grazed happily throughout the course of the original three Star Wars movies.  You cannot have read my blog over the last few months and somehow missed the fact that Star Wars was a major part of my childhood.  I went to see the original when I was roughly 2 years old in the local drive in… and was hooked from that point on.  So for Christmas it was a given that I would end up getting a bunch of Star Wars merchandise from my parents.  The best gift however was this marathon and the effect it seems to have had on my wife.  I am trying to keep my expectations tempered, but maybe just maybe we have another Star Wars fan in the family.

Granted she has always been amazing about my Star Wars thing… and has brought me home various artifacts like Star Wars Legos, or just the other night a cool set of Kylo Ren playing cards.  So even though she didn’t get why the movie was important to me… she was always super awesome about putting up with my thing.  I remember in college she even used to get into the hunt for new action figures, helping me crawl through the racks of figures to find the one or two that I didn’t already have.  The prequels pretty much killed my desire to be surrounded by action figures on my walls…  but I do pick up the occasional figure every now and then and on the wall between my monitors I have Dark Jedi Luke, Jedi Leia, Clone Emperor, Mara Jade, Admiral Thrawn, a snow gear Plo Koon, and a badass Savage Opress figure.  So yesterday I half expected the desire to watch the three originals and then go see the new one… was at least in part a gift for me.  That is until she invited one of her friends along for the journey.  After watching the originals and seeing the new one…. she came home with all of these questions that I can’t really answer before she watches the prequels.  So right now the plan is to spend today marathoning through those as well…  and I am happy as a clam when I say… it was not MY idea to do this.

Keeping it Chill

Best Gift Ever

There are a lot of things I am into that I think she would also like.  I mean she was a huge fan of the Harry Potter series and got into it long before I did, and is also a fan of the Star Trek series and has been amped to see the newer movies.  So the raw DNA of a Science Fiction and Fantasy fan is there, and I think if I could ever get her interested in say the modern Joss Whedeon Marvel films she would really enjoy them as well.  However with those… we would need to start at the very beginning chronologically and do another Marathon since each movie at least in part fleshes out another corner of the Avengers universe.  All of this said….  I am trying to keep it super chill and not put any pressure on her to like things more than she actually does.  However just having my wife ask me questions about Star Wars…  might be quite possibly the best Christmas gift I have ever received.  I mean I guess it was impossible to live with me for the last two decades and not have SOME of the Star Wars franchise to imprint on her.  She has always liked R2-D2, Chewbacca, The Jawas and the Ewoks…  and she used to laugh when I would throw a blanket over my head and say Utini.

One of the awesome things about our marriage has always been that we could have completely different likes…  but each of us would be supportive over whatever the other person was into.  She has been awesome about the daily blog thing… and the podcast… and this game or that…  because I know they really do put dents in our schedule that are theoretically “untouchable” where I need to be at a keyboard.  Similarly I am cool with the fact that there are many nights where she works in her classroom until 8pm or has this or that church activity that needs attention.  It has always amazed me at just how well we work together, when in truth we don’t have that many shared interests.  At the core has always been this willingness to go along with whatever the other person wants to do… because I think we enjoy seeing the other half excited even if we aren’t that excited ourselves.  All of this said…  I am not expecting a Christmas Miracle… and all of the sudden my wife will be as obsessed with Star Wars as I have been all of these years.  I still think its amazing however for her to be asking the same sorts of questions that I pondered all throughout my childhood and even now have nothing more than vague guesses at.  I think without a doubt though, there will be no question as to whether or not we will be going to the next several movies because if nothing else… she seems hooked on the new generation of films after watching Force Awakens last night.

 

 

 

AggroChat #88 – Force Awakens And Formulae

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Tonight Ash, Bel, Kodra and Tam talk spoiler free Star Wars Force Awakens, and a Formula for determining the most influential games

aggrochat88_720

Tonight we have a smaller crew as both Grace and Thalen were unavailable, but we still manage to record a full show.  For weeks ahead of the launch of Star Wars Episode VII – Force Awakens we talked about this show being our discussion of Star Wars.  However…  since there are already so many spoilers floating around the internet, we did not want to add to the volume.  We still absolutely talk Star Wars but we do so in a way where we discuss our feelings and impressions… and not any details of the plot.  So you can listen to the show and feel confident that you won’t get anything spoiled.

We also delve into this mission that Tam has been on lately, where he is trying to come up with a definitive list of the most influential game titles.  He has created a rubric with which to judge games, and has been delving into every game that has essentially ever been reviewed.  This is in fact a path to madness, but it is one I will cheerfully wave at Tam while he goes down.  This ends up being an interesting discussion about what makes a game influential.

On the show we discussed…

  • Star Wars – Force Awakens
  • Star Wars Battlefront
  • Destiny – Sparrow Racing League
  • Most Influential Games
  • Tetris
  • Super Mario 64
  • Sega Saturn
  • Sony Playstation
  • Nintendo 64
  • Infinity Minatures
  • Minature Gaming
  • Teaching Gaming Skills
  • Not Ready for Games of the Year Show

 

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Santa and Grumplings

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Santa Lives

I’ve been going through this strange set of emotions since getting out of the movies on Thursday night.  One of the things I am learning about myself is that I am in fact deeply susceptible to nostalgia.  Growing up I honestly thought I was not nostalgic at all, because the things I cared about never seemed to align with the things I was supposed to care about.  Photos for example are just not one of the things I care about that much, and the only time I take a photo of something is when I want to show it to someone else.  I have a pretty good memory when it comes to visual images, and I can always summon up images from the past when I want them… and as such I never placed much value in having a physical representation.  My mother on the other hand…  that is the thing she finds most important in the world and has taken volumes of photos that the world will likely never see… because she never does anything with them.  My nostalgia… seems to be firmly rooted in the things and places that gave me the most joy in the world.  The king of all of this will always be Star Wars, because it truly was my first love.  For so many years I doubted my memories, or at least doubted that I had as much fun with Star Wars as I seemed to remember.

Then Thursday night I watched Force Awakens and remembered just what it was like to experience that level of joy again.  Now I am just riding the giddy contact high of the experience, and looking forward to talking about it with anyone that has already been indoctrinated into the club.  Yesterday there was a sequence of tweets trying to decide when it was time to talk about the movie, and I guess personally… I am going to wait until January 18th.  I am going to give the world a full month to watch it before I start openly talking about spoilers and spreading the world with my theory crafting.  Spoilers are such a weird thing…. because for me personally they do not adversely effect my enjoyment of the movie.  I personally guessed at four or five of the plot points from the movie, and it was in no way tarnished for me when I saw them coming.  In fact there was a bit of strange excitement coursing through me when I realized that things were playing out in one of the ways I had imagined them.  For others though… once something is spoiled it ruins the experience, and as a result I am going to try my best not to ruin anyone else’s.

The “A” Team

Santa and Grumplings

I love the Star Wars universe, and while I was greatly disappointed for years…  shows like the Clone Wars and the current Rebels made me remember just how awesome the setting COULD be.  I think they were essentially the gateway to allowing myself to indulge in the hype leading up to Force Awakens.  The problem with Rebels is that as good as it is…  it isn’t the team of characters that I wanted to be engaged with.  Shows like it or Agents of Shield… no matter how amazing they might be… will always be stuck in the rut of being the “B” Team.  These are the characters that are ALSO in the universe…. but aren’t really the characters that you really want to be watching.  While shows like that might raise the excitement level a bit every now and then with a “special guest appearance” you know at the end of the day… you are never really going to get back the characters you care the most about.  While to some extent the new movie is setting up a brand new cast of heroes to take over the throne… in the form of Finn, Rey, Poe and Ren, it still very much feels that we are going on another adventure with the characters we grew up loving: Han, Luke, Leia, Chewie, R2, and C-3PO.

There is a continuity that other derivative products lack, and in a way I am more okay knowing the cast of the original trilogy will always play a secondary role in this new trilogy of movies.  The Avengers are still an active team… and while they exist… Agents of Shield will always be the lesser product.  Similarly no matter how cool Rebels is… and how awesome it is for filling in the gap between the prequels and rebellion era movies…  it will always be the story of people we didn’t know existed until Disney told us they did.  So in the meantime I am going to embrace the joy I am feeling, because there were points yesterday where I wanted to take my hot-wheels Millennium Falcon and go running around the office making “space” noises.  There is a kid inside me that has woken up, that has not been awake since the 80s… and I am perfectly okay with hanging out with him again.  Part of my whole mission to limit the negativity in my life, and to be less cynical…  was to be able to truly feel unbridled joy again… and this movie has paid off in spades.  Sure I am almost forty years old… and sure I probably shouldn’t be enraptured by Star Wars.  To that I say “fuck it” I get to decide what sort of Adult I am going to be, and I choose to be the one that never really grew up inside.

Grumplings

Santa and Grumplings

The most annoying part of any in game holiday event… are the things you have to fight other players for to get spawns.  In the new Winter Veil garrison event, you have to fight players for patches of snow on the ground, in the hopes that instead of getting a snowball of various kids…  you get a Grumpling pet.  Last night after looting many piles of snow I managed to get one… and now I am done touching those piles of snow.  I am not going to be one of these players that tries to profit off this event, because it is my hope that by removing myself from the picture others will have an easier time getting their own Grumplings.  Now however I am still going to be completing the daily event… until I get the damned mount.  I’ve decided to send all of my packages to Belgrace my MooCowAdin, because he seems to be the closest to getting all of the appropriate factions for the flying mount.  So among the four characters I have that can do the daily, I am hoping ONE of them gets the stupid mount.

 

Spoiler Free Review

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Doing Silly Things

So the other day I said I would be doing a spoiler free review today, since I was in theory seeing it ahead of a good deal of the potential folks that will eventually see it.  As a result I am leading off my post with the single line tweet that I sent out last night after getting home.  Now I am going to talk about the day and night itself for a bit.  I was not one of those first day ticket scroungers, in fact I ended up waiting at least a week before trying to find any.  We have a smallish theater in town within walking distance of the house…  however last night it fell in the “too damned cold” territory to even consider walking.  For Lord of the Rings I was able to simply walk in on opening night and get tickets, without any pre-order…  so I had no real doubt that I would be able to see the movie this weekend without much fuss.  The original plan was to eat dinner at Plaza De Toros  a Mexican place that I like quite a bit that just happens to conveniently border the parking lot of the movie theater.  Just to make life easier… so we could meet up at 5pm and then walk over and start standing in line around 6pm for the 7pm show.  This at least was our plan…  our plan changed.

I went home over lunch yesterday to pick my tickets up, since pre-orders still need to be printed at the theater in our setup.  I ended up having a lengthy conversation with the worker that was manning the booth, and he told me that they were seating for the 7pm show… aka the first showing as early as 4:30 so that we could go ahead and get seats.  So when I went back and talked it through with my boss, we agreed that we would simply meet at the theater around 5ish instead and either eat at the theater… or like I did and grab something really quickly on the way home.  The positive of both options is our theater has unlimited refills on both soda and popcorn, so my boss went with that option.  The only negative is that I didn’t think to warn him not to take one of the Highways that is notoriously hell to travel on during the evening rush hour… so this meant it was running about 30 minutes later than planned.  Luckily about this time another friend popped her head out of the theater and hollered at me, and saved us some seats near her, her husband that I work with, and their son who was completely amped about the experience and wearing and Ezra Bridger costume.  So there we sat in the theater for an hour and a half ahead of the start time… chatting away and killing the time.

The Movie

Spoiler Free Review

I had a lot of hope riding on this movie… but at the same time I kept trying to prepare myself for the potential of it being just as disappointing as the prequels.  In fact a good deal of my conversation with my friend was that both remember how excited we were for Phantom Menace and how disappointed we were immediately after.  I have to admit… I was not immediately in love with this movie.  Not saying I was disappointed in any fashion… but the movie has a look that is significantly different than the traditional “star wars look” for lack of a better term.  JJ Abrams simply has a different design ethic than George Lucas did… and this is perfectly okay… but I spent the first few moments of the movie “adjusting” to the style.  However at about the twenty minute mark… I was hooked and from that point through the end I was completely drawn into the world and believed that I was in fact watching a new Star Wars epic.  The characters are all excellent, and more importantly than that… their interactions…  are also awesome. There are jokes and quips… and not in a way that takes you outside of the picture.  Much of this movie had to be about passing the torch from one generation to the next… and feel like we are now firmly introduced to the conflict through the eyes of Rey, Finn, Poe Dameron, and Kylo Ren.  Not really going to delve into characters outside of the group, because those are the ones we already know quite a bit about thanks to the trailers.

What I like the most is that each of these characters is their own “new” character… and not “The New Vader” or “The New Luke”.  They are each their own person and don’t really fit any predetermined molds in the Star Wars universe.  The conflict that is set up… is one that I cannot wait to see resolved over the course of the next few movies.  In fact I am hungry to see what happens next…. which is something that never happened during the prequels.  This is the first “new” story that we have had from Star Wars on the big screen in a very long while, because the prequels had a fixed beginning and a fixed end point… and we were simply seeing how the details worked themselves out between.  This time with Force Awakens… we have no clue what is going to happen in the beginning, middle or end… and in spite of all of our machinations and predictions… we know that we know next to nothing.  There are certain aspects that I think seasoned veterans of Star Wars and the Expanded Universe might guess at…. but those guesses are never justified with a firm answer.  This movie feels very much in the tradition of A New Hope, and also feels like this grand Star Wars pen and paper adventure… played out on the screen.  The critics are more than likely not going to like it… because this is absolutely a “Star Wars” movie… and not something that is trying to get an Oscar.  That said… the costuming and use of practical effects absolutely SHOULD get an Oscar.

The little kid in me is alive and happy.  There was a period of time after the prequels where I doubted if my memories of Star Wars were really genuine.  I wondered if the universe really was as cool as I remembered it.  I am happy to say that yes…  this setting still has amazing things to show us.  Now stop reading this shit and go get tickets to see Force Awakens.