Perhaps taking their cue from Star Wars snowflakes, graphic designer Krystal Higgins has designed a series of eight relatively easy-to-make paper snowflakes based on the sigils of the major houses in Game of Thrones. In addition to being a major GOT fan, Higgins felt inspired by the franchise sigils would present a very cool challenge for people looking to make holiday patterns.
As Higgins told Wired magazine during a recent interview:
The sigil characters inspired me to get creative about how I could abstract animal shapes into a pattern, while still keeping them recognizable. The antlers on the stags, for example, were incredibly tricky, but also ended up looking incredibly cool as part of a whole snowflake. I wanted to create something that would look interesting to folks who don’t watch the show or read the books.
And while these types of designs are outside of Higgins usual repertoire, she embraced them this year as a festive project that would be inclusive for religious and secular friends alike. Seriously, who would find GOT offensive? Unless of course you object to violence or nudity in media… As for what’s next, Higgins expressed interest in animal patterns or possibly dabbling into the Doctor Who genre.
In any case, you can download the patterns for snowflakes for the sigils of house Targaryen, Stark, Lannister, Baratheon, Greyjoy, and Tully, Arryn, and Martell from her website. Merry Christmas and happy holidays! In the meantime, check out this cool video of of the Star Wars snowflakes, or download some of the patterns by clicking here.
You know, it’s been awhile since I spoke about anything related to one of the greatest science fiction franchises in history. I am of course referring to Star Wars. Lucky for me, a series of stories have popped up on the news lately, so I thought now would be the perfect time to remedy all that. And this story is quite interesting, as it has to do with Lucas’ original plan for a major plot element in the series.
In short, Lucas’ original draft for The Empire Strikes Back, which was recently leaked to the public, and in that version, Darth Vader was NOT intended to be Luke’s father. That major plot twist, which proved intrinsic to the series’ story arc, was introduced by another writer, Leigh Brackett. As a veteran Hollywood writer, and given the success of the first movie, Lucas wanted her help in making sure the script for the sequel was up to par.
Working from Lucas’ original plan, Brackett turned in an initial draft where Luke travels to Dagobah to receive instruction from Yoda, the ghosts of Obi-Wan AND his father. As for the major confrontation between Vader and Luke aboard Cloud City, the entire scene has no major twist, and instead consists of Vader offering Luke the chance to rule the Galaxy with him. Not “as father and son” mind you, just as two bad guys!
Sounds pretty weak doesn’t it? Well, turns out it gets better. In addition to there being no major twist, the original draft also had Han Solo showing Luke the basics of how to use a lightsaber (what WHAT?), featured a boatload of Wampas with the ability to freeze people, and had Han Solo spending part of the movie trying to recruit his stepfather into the Rebel Alliance.
Tragically, Brackett died shortly after sending in this first draft which was worked from Lucas’ notes, so she never got a chance to rework it. That task fell to Lawrence Kasdan and Lucas, who eventually worked from Brackett’s draft to create the film we all know and love. Alas, it was a good thing Lucas brought in some outside talent to help him with his script, or he would have had a Phantom Menace situation on his hands two decades too soon!
Going from the original story, as Lucas had it, the story not only loses most of its intrigue, but it’s also becomes bogged down in superfluousness and one-dimensionality. Part of what made Luke’s character so interesting was the inner turmoil he faced – being torn between stopping his father and wanting to help him, but also knowing that by killing him, he would risk becoming him.
What’s more, in this version Vader loses all depth and becomes a cardboard-cutout bad guy. By learning that he was in fact a once-great man who “fell from grace”, his character became far more interesting and involved. And of course, knowing that he was once good presented Luke with a third option and a resolution to his quandary – redeem his father rather than kill him, thus ending the war in a way that would not damn his own soul.
And sure, Obi-Wan did tell Luke point blank in the original movie that Vader betrayed and murdered his father, but that was what was so cool about it looking back. In that film, Alec Guinness’ abilities as an actor really made it seem like he was holding something back with Luke. Knowing that his tale was meant symbolically rather than literally just made sense. I mean, he is a warrior-mystic after all. He’s supposed to be all meta!
And really, this twist was what made the Star Wars trilogy work on so many levels. The idea of a son having to face his father, a fallen angel, in a titanic struggle of good and evil with immense personal implications and the fate of the universe hinging on the whole thing. It’s like Judea-Christian and classical mythology, Jung, Freud, and Existentialism all rolled into one!
To know that Lucas never intended it to be such, well that kind of puts a damper on the whole thing doesn’t it? But then again, it also answers a lot of nagging questions: like how the man who created the original saga could have created such fluff just twenty years later. Good thing he knew how to accept help back then, otherwise we’d have all missed out on a massive sci-fi pop cultural phenomena!
And in the meantime, enjoy some of these outtakes from the original movie which also recently emerged. Apparently, these come from the movie archives of the original film, which strangely, Lucas claimed had been destroyed. Wasn’t that the reason he couldn’t release the originals alongside the heavily CGI’d versions on DVD? Ah, who cares! Enjoy the clip:
All across North and Sub-Saharan Africa, desertification threatens farm land, pastures, townships and even cities, triggering food and water shortages and threatening wildlife. But in a startling twist, it now seems that this ecological phenomena is threatening an iconic movie set, one which science fictions fans should instantly recognize.
Yes, in the deserts of Tunisia, the town of Mos Espa is about to be reclaimed by the desert. This set was first constructed by George Lucas and his crews to act as the skyline for Tatooine in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Serving as the fictional home of Anakin Skywalker, it was here that Qui-Gon Jinn and Padme first met the cloyingly sweet blonde kid that would one day become the most evil man in the universe
And in a new study, lead by Ralph Lorenz of John Hopkins University, researchers have found that sand dunes are swiftly encroaching on the old Star Wars set and threatening to consume it. Since Mos Espa was first constructed in 1997, some sixteen years ago, Lorenz and his researchers have calculated that the sand dunes have moved a total of 130 meters.
Note the satellite images to the left, which display the Mos Espa set in 2004 and 2009 as seen from Google Earth. Between the two, one can see how the large dune wall to the right of the compound is weakened over time, and dust and sand blowing in from the desert is able to make its way into the town proper.
You can also see how the buildings are harder to make out in the 2009 image, a result of them being slowly covered by airborne sand. In time, this will reach the point where the huts are no longer visible, and will likely collapse under the weight of the desert.
The aim of this study, far from inciting Star Wars fandom to mount a campaign, was to track the progress of desertification in the Maghreb nation. One of the benefits of the Mos Espa construction, as far as Lorenz and his geomorphologists were concerned, was that it gave them a steady frame of reference. Since their interest is in understanding how sand dunes move, the Star Wars set gave them a good way to see changes in dune location.
Mos Espa layout
The report outlined the likely consequences of the approaching dunes, and what they would mean for future generations of Tatooine-tourists:
Should the barchan that forms the focus of this paper overrun the Mos Espa set, many buildings will be temporarily buried.
Their rather flimsy construction will mean roofs will likely collapse, degrading the attraction of the site when the dune moves on. This has already been seen at a smaller film set (‘Repro Haddada’…sometimes referred to online as the ‘slave quarters’)
…This structure was overrun by a barchan around 2004, and has been substantially demolished, although it is still an object of pilgrimage by Star Wars fans, who also admire the barchans a few hundred meters to the south, which are prominent in several scenes of the movie.
They were also sure to point out that even if Mos Espa survives the swiftly advancing dune, the town is still likely doomed, as other patches of desert are encroaching from other directions as well:
In the long run, Mos Espa is still threatened: the large barchan (big enough to totally submerge the site) looms about 500 m to the east. In fact this dune is often driven over en route to the Mos Espa site, reportedly by ~80% of the visiting vehicles. Although the imminent threatening barchan and other effects may degrade the site on this timescale anyway, at the observed migration rate of ~6 m/yr, this large barchan will begin overrunning the site in about 80 years.
Sad news for fandom and sci-fi geeks. But I guess it just goes to show you, nothing lasts forever. But more importantly, it demonstrates one of the principle issues of Climate Change and the planets rapidly-changing ecology. So perhaps this will have the positive effect of making more people sit up and notice, and maybe even mobilize a few to action.
After Climate Change is an issue that effects, and threatens, us all. And against enemies like world hunger, displacement, drought, famine, and flooding, we need all the help we can get! So at the risk of sounding cliche, let me just say: May the Force be with us!
Remember those iconic scenes in Star Wars when the Millennium Falcon made the jump to hyperspace? Remember how cool it looked when the star field stretched out and then the ships blasted off? And of course, every episode of Star Trek was punctuated by a jump to warp, where once again, the background stars seemed to stretch out and then hurl on past the Enterprise.
Yes, for generations, this is how people envisioned Faster-Than-Light travel. Whether it consisted of rainbow-colored streaks shooting past, or a quick distortion followed by a long, blue tunnel of bright light, these perceptions have become a staple of science fiction. But one has to wonder… in a universe where FTL was really possible, would it really look anything like this?
Using Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, four students from the University of Leicester produced a paper in January of last year where they theorized what a jump to light-speed would really look like. Based on the theory that the speed of light is the absolute threshold at which elementary particles can move in this universe, the four students – Riley Connors, Katie Dexter, Joshua Argyle, and Cameron Scoular – claimed that a ship that can exceed c would have an interesting view.
In short, they claim that the crew wouldn’t see star lines stretching out past the ship during the jump to hyperspace, but would actually see a central disc of bright light. This is due to the Doppler effect, specifically the Doppler blue shift, that results in the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, including visible light, shortening as the source of the light moves towards the observer.
Hyperspace. Nuff said?
As the ship made the jump to hyperspace, the wavelength of the light from the stars would shift out of the visible spectrum into the X-ray range. Meanwhile, Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR), which is thermal radiation that is spread fairly uniformly across the universe and is thought to be left over from the Big Bang, would shift into the visible spectrum, appearing to the crew as a central disc of bright light.
What’s more, even a ship like the Millennium Falcon would require additional energy to overcome the pressure exerted from the intense X-rays from stars that would push the ship back and cause it to slow down. The students say the pressure exerted on the ship would be comparable to that felt at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.
However, if the ship in question took its time getting up to speeds in excess of the speed of light, there would be some interesting visual effects. Given how light and the color spectrum works, as a ship continued to speed up, the stars in front of the ship would experience blueshift (shifting towards the blue end of the spectrum), while those behind it would experience redshift (shifting towards the red end).
But the moment the threshold of light speed was passed, background radiation would be all that was left to see. And once that happened, the crew would experience some rather intense radiation exposure. As Connors put it:
If the Millennium Falcon existed and really could travel that fast, sunglasses would certainly be advisable. On top of this, the ship would need something to protect the crew from harmful X-ray radiation.
And as Dexter suggested, referring to Disney’s purchase of Lucasfilm for a cool $4.05 billion: “Disney should take the physical implications of such high speed travel into account in their forthcoming films.” I won’t be holding my breath on that one. Somehow, star lines look so much cooler than a mottled, bright disc in the background, don’t you think?
Inventors Chris Malloy and Mark DeRoche turned quite a few heads back in 2012 when they displayed their hoverbike prototypes to the world. But, you know how it is with cool, new ideas. Its only a matter of time before it catches on and others are coming up with their own versions of it. And that’s exactly what happened at Prague convention center this week, where a design firm unveiled their own concept of the hoverbike.
The design firms goes by the name of Design Your Dreams Flying Bike, an amalgamation of three Czech engineering firms who joined together to fulfill a shared childhood dream. Last June, the firm shared their design specs for the electric bike which would be capable of vertical takeoff and hover-flight. And less than a year later, their efforts have resulted in something functional, and very, very cool!
Granted, the prototype isn’t quite as sleek and sophisticated as the original drawings themselves. But the project is still in the early phases, and already it has shown that the concept works. Using six horizontally mounted propellers, the 220-pound electric bike was able to lift itself into the air while an engineer on the ground controlled it with a handheld remote.
According to Milan Duchek of Design Your Dreams, the prototype will fly remotely with a dummy on the seat for now, but a version that can be piloted by a human will be ready this fall. In addition, the design team said that the final product should be as easy to maneuver as a regular bicycle, but will also have the ability to fly for between three and five minutes, using solely electric power. It will include “foolproof” stability control for takeoff and landing, and a fly-by-wire system that isn’t susceptible to outside interference.
Though the prototype bike looks like a homemade version of something out of Star Wars, the designers told the press that their inspiration came from two Czech works of science fiction: a series of books by Jaroslav Foglar about a boy with a flying bicycle, and a 1966 Karel Zeman film based on a Jules Verne novel.
Bad news though: even when the flying bike is complete, it won’t be available for commercial use. According to the engineers who built it, the purpose of the project was to bring a flying bike to fruition to see if the technology would work. Or as DYD engineer Ales Kobylik said:
Our main motivation in working on the project was neither profit nor commercial interest, but the fulfillment of our boyish dreams.
Hard to argue with that kind of logic. But for those who absolutely must own one, early indications put the cost of the prototype in the low five-figures – say, anywhere from $10,000 to $30,000. Make the team an offer, we’ll see what they have to say 😉 In the meantime, check out this video of the hoverbike performing a demonstration in Prague:
Sure, it may not be able to cut your hand off or deflect blaster shots, but this invention has geeks and engineers all experience a collective fangasm! In honor of Star Wars Day this year, the company known as Wicked Lasers debuted the Phosphorce, a laser-turned flashlight with the power to both illuminate and incinerate. Now tell me that doesn’t get your adrenaline pumping and make you wonder if it comes in designer shades and in both the single and double-bladed form!
As the video below shows, the Phosphorce is the company’s most powerful handheld laser married to a special lens. Attached, the lens turns the laser into a flashlight that produces some 500 lumens of power, making it the most powerful light on the market. Once removed, the device is back to being its usual, single-watt Spyder 3 Arctic laser, which is capable of projecting a beam up to a distance of 10km and incinerating at close range – just balloons, in case you were worried.
And if case that’s not enough, the company also designs handles like the SABER, an attachment that turns their Arctic or Krypton lasers handhelds into the most stunning approximation of a lightsaber available. Already, BMW is in talks with Wicked Lasers to use the technology to fashion laser headlamps for their cars. The laser goes for a hefty $299.95, while the lens is available for a comparatively modest $79.85.
Yeah, not the cheapest lightsaber replica on the market, but at least it comes in Arctic blue. Tell me that doesn’t bring the Jedi’s weapon to mind! And be sure to check out the video, it is sure to pop your eyes!
Well, it’s the Fourth of May again, and you know what that means… it’s time to commemorate Star Wars! And what better way to do that than to point out some Star Wars related promotions and cool stuff! And as luck would have it, my buds over at Movoto Blog have forwarded me a rather interesting real-estate proposal. It seems that after decades of living on the swampy world of Dagobah, Yoda is looking to move his hutt!
As you can see from the infographic below, it’s listed as a fixer-upper, priced to move, and even comes with an endorsement from Luke Skywalker and R2D2… sort of. The overall price is listed at a bargain-hunting $7,762, and even provides square footage (90.25, or about the size of a spacious cardboard box) and helpful directions on how to find the place. Who knew it would be in a swamp outside Morgan City, Louisiana, specifically in the Atchafalaya Basin which sits to the west of New Orleans and Baton Rouge.
Ah yes, and apparently, Yoda’s hutt is a highly improvised structure, composed of mud and salvaged components from escape pods. And it seems that the Jedi Master relies on the Force to hold it all together. So anyone planning on moving in had better have a sufficient command of the Force (or a high enough midichlorian count) to see to the structural integrity of the thing!
Much like their real-estate assessments of Hogwarts, the TARDIS from Doctor Who, and how to zombie and ninja-proof your house, this bit of comedic fangasmery is the work of Motovo’s clever staff – nerds who moonlight as prospectors and real estate agents. Be sure to check out the infographic below and see more examples of their work at motovo.com.
Harrison Ford went on Jimmy Kimmel Live recently to promote his upcoming movie 42. However, things went a bit awry when questions turned to the issue of the upcoming Star Wars relaunch and audience members began asking questions. That’s when someone from Harrison Ford’s past showed up and things got ugly, prompting Ford to say some harsh things and storm off the set.
Ha! It was hilarious! Who knew Ford and the Chewbacca had such history? Watch the clip below and have a good laugh…
You’re not going to believe this. But just 15 minutes ago, on his Facebook feed, George Takei announced that he will be starring in the upcoming Star Wars remake. Not only that, but he had a few newsworthy items to share about the upcoming sequel that the studio has not been sharing just yet. These include the name of the new film and when filming will begin.
Friends, I am thrilled to announce that I’ll be starring in the Star Wars reboot directed by JJ Abrams. I’ll be playing Master Ceti Maru, a member of the Jedi High Council. The new film, entitled “Star Wars: Galactic Empire,” is greenlit and will begin filming sometime early next year. It is truly a moment for The Star Alliance. Thanks to all my fans for their decades of support.
You may not think it, but even a little hint like the name of the film can tell you volumes. In this case, it would seem to confirm what Hamil has been saying, that the movie would be set in a time when the children of Han and Leia were growing up, a time where the Republic had been resurrected and was fighting the remnants of the Empire to take control of the Galaxy.
In addition, since he will be playing a Jedi Master, its clear that in this time period, the Jedi Order has been restored. So Luke won’t be the only one anymore. Perhaps he’ll just be the head honcho, which is a bit of a change-up ever since Yoda passed away. What’s more, Takei was sure to provided a little mockup photo to get fans in mind of what he would like sporting a Jedi robe and a lightsaber (I see he went with the Windu model). Excited yet? I know I am.
Addendum: It’s officially midnight, so Happy April Fool’s Day! George, you’re one mean SOB!
Don’t worry, that’s not the tagline for (yet) another Gangnam Style parody. It’s actually a concept for a March Madness style betting game involving Star Wars characters. Known as “This Is Madness!”, named after a favorite quote by C3P0, and designed to look like a bracket-style tournament between all of Lucasfilm’s classic characters… and the ones from the prequels too.
The tournament kicked off this past Monday, March 19th, and will continue until a winner is picked. The point of it all? To determine who is the biggest, baddest and most beloved fan favorite Star Wars character of all time! Daily matchups will take place, for which fans will get to vote by simply going to Starwars.com.
Each bracket will be for a different class of character (Jedis, Sith, Bounty Hunters, etc) until a final matchup between the light side and the dark. The winner will be announced on April 9th, and will presumably have bragging rights until Star Wars is no longer relevant… whenever that will be!
And of course, there’s a promotional video with the Dark Lord of the Sith explaining the rules of the tournament and encouraging us to vote Vader! Personally, I don’t much care who wins, so long as it isn’t that annoyingly racist caricature who’s name means container. Get it? That bloody bastard better not win anything, or I’m moving to Argentina!
Perhaps taking their cue from Star Wars snowflakes, graphic designer Krystal Higgins has designed a series of eight relatively easy-to-make paper snowflakes based on the sigils of the major houses in Game of Thrones. In addition to being a major GOT fan, Higgins felt inspired by the franchise sigils would present a very cool challenge for people looking to make holiday patterns.
Stories by Williams 