sithspit!

[melannen]

I am back from War! Yeah, yeah, y'all didn't even notice I was internetless for two weeks, because I didn't get around to making an "I'm leaving" post this year, but whatever, I am still back.

War was... War. I am now a member of the Order of the Bronze Tower apparently despite not being in the barony or in the SCA! Apparently these things are unnecessary for being given a service award (from what I understand from talking to some Pelicans, service awards mostly function to make you feel obligated to do even more service, because the sort of people who get service awards are generally the sort of people who feel obligated by that sort of thing. :P )

I continue to feel... conflicted at best about getting more involved in the Society, but treating Pennsic War as grown-up summer camp (complete with making lots of lanyards!) with a really pretty road-trip on both ends works for me; I really enjoy the group I've been camping with (many of whom also only do War), and I continue to be amazed just how *good* I feel to do two weeks of living in the open air, walking everywhere I go, with only natural light, and a diet heavy on fresh fruits and veggies, dried grains, canned meat, and mineral water. I really need to figure out how to do more of that. And there are many many pictures of plants and fungi I need get in order to post to common_nature.

Anyway, so I was off-internet (well, more-or-less, minus a couple of obligatory e-mail checks) for two weeks, but the reading material I brought was mostly fanfic, so I didn't miss it all that much. :P

My books-read list for the past two weeks is The Eagle of the Ninth, half of Dawn Wind, Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, and all the X-Wing novels. All of them.

Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor could basically be retitled How Luke Skywalker Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The RPF About Him. It's mostly a perfectly workable SW story set in the early New Republic about our heroes fighting a Darksider, but then it has this hilarious framing story/running thread about all of the holonovels etc. being published without authorization about the lives of the Heroes of the Rebellion and how Luke is not sure what to think about this.

So for the record, if you write unauthorized Star Wars fic - unlike Mindor, which was commissioned by Lucasfilm - Luke has decided he can live with what people write about him, as the more of it there is the more it drowns out the thinly disguised Imperial propaganda. Han seriously doesn't care what you write, although he would strongly prefer you work with one of the companies he gets licensing fees from (he signed his first licensing deal shortly after Yavin. It was Lando's idea. Lando thinks it is unfair that hardly anybody writes holos about him, when after all he was the one who blew the second Death Star, and he's a better General than either of them.)

It has been ages - probably a dozen years - since I'd read the X-wing novels, even though they had been among my favorites, and re-reading after all that time was interesting. They still held up, mostly, and Corran is still a good character, but it really showed up how much I've learned in the last ten years - okay, mostly how many more of the references I get now. And how much more fanfic I've read. The X-wing series was written by two different authors, about mostly OCs, and it was interesting to look at how they approach the fanfic element differently. The most obvious was that Stackpole is much more likely to reference canon - if he needs a comparison for a metaphor, or a reference to history, or a planet or something, he will whenever possible call back to something that's already an established part of the universe, whereas Allston seems more likely to rely on the hugeness of the galaxy and make stuff up. (It's a lot more obvious now because there's a lot more to the universe than when he was writing, so you notice all the things he *doesn't* reference, and in a way it really dates the novels more than some of the other pre-prequel-era stuff.)

That's part of the reason I like these, though - there's a tendency for the Star Wars novels, the early ones anyway, to have a plot of Go To Brand New Planet, Discover New People Using the Force In Whole New Way. Whereas the X-Wing stuff is right in the middle of the planets and politics and technology of the established Republic, so they have to figure out how to make that really work.

(It's pretty hard, ngl. Star Wars worldbuilding makes no sense.)

I also brought along Outbound Flight, and the RotS novelization and Shatterpoint (both written by the guy who wrote Mindor) which had been on my list for ages, but I continue to have trouble caring about prequel-era stories, apparently.

Anyway, I have finished my journal catching up! I have a lot of the more interesting stuff still unread in open tabs, though. So if you got a random comment from me on an old entry in the past couple or next few days, that's why. And I finally put a support ticket in for the "My Reading List Is Gaslighting Me" problem, so if you *don't* get a random comment from me on your old entries, I'm blaming that. :P

So, uh, a friend I only see at War mentioned to me that he rarely reads my journal because I only ever post about fannish stuff that he's not interested in. Which I had to think twice at, because it always *feels* like I keep going off-topic here and rambling about my sister's cats or county politics or whatever, but I guess I have been keeping pretty consistently fannish here for the last year or so.

I think to some extent keeping this a mostly-fannish blog helps me keep up with it, and is better for making it a blog where interesting conversations happen a lot (as long as I don't run out of fannish stuff to talk about, and I don't see that happening - oh hey I've been watching MacGyver again lately, did I mention?) but there's also the fact that I'm a lot less likely to post something here if I've already talked about it with friends in other places, and I am less likely to subject my RL friends to detailed discussions of the Stark starfighter designs in the hypothetical SW/Avengers crossover, so they're more likely to end up here than are comments about the weather or how them Os have been doing or the economy (or in-depth discussion of Artist Alley politics at anime cons, yes, because my RL is like that.)

But also I am just really not very good at talking about the hard personal stuff - in general, and online in particular. I'm sure most of you have realized that too by now, but I just wanted to say (as I've been meaning to say for awhile, and in light of my two-week backread) that I really value those of you who do, even if I don't comment much. Getting to read about your triumphs and difficulties and learning to live with yourselves is so valuable to me in so many ways. Thank you for choosing to share.

Comments

[seekingferret]

Re: Allston vs. Stackpole, I think that Allston was much more involved in creating the WEG rpg sourcebooks than Stackpole, and a lot of Allston's seemingly 'just made up' metaphors and references are really obscure references to things made up for the WEG rpg. Whereas Stackpole's canon referents are the movies and Timothy Zahn's Star Wars books (I'm fairly sure that Stackpole and Zahn were socially close when those books were being written), which you're more familiar with. Though Stackpole also refers to things from the Star Wars Adventure Journal that WEG published, which I only realized when I stumbled across a couple of old issues at a con.

[melannen]

Stackpole references Zahn heavily, but *everybody* referenced Zahn heavily - in a very real way he's the foundation of the modern EU, after all. But he also references the X-Wing comics heavily, (which I've never read, but it's pretty obvious when that's what he's doing) and all the other books that were out up to that time - in fact, several times I went "oh right, that book came out between these two X-wing novels" because he suddenly started referencing it.

And I actually do know some of the RPG sourcebooks, though only the earliest ones, but it's certainly possible I missed some references. Although referencing really obscure things you also wrote that were technically outside standard EU canon at the time probably still counts as "making stuff up" in some ways. :P

[seekingferret]

The X-Wing Rogue Squadron comics are great and you should read them. I didn't mention them because mostly I think of the X-Wing novels as just a continuation of the comics in a different medium. With the same writer responsible for both, that's basically what they are. The whole Baron Fel saga in those comics is wonderful.

It's clear that I, Jedi was written in parallel to and in close consultation with Zahn's Hand of Thrawn duology, such that they effectively form a thematic trilogy. Stackpole inserted plot hooks in I, Jedi that didn't advance his plot but set up Zahn's. That's why when I find appearances by Talon Karrde or whatever in Stackpole's earlier novels I assume it's because they were sharing ideas rather than merely because Stackpole was borrowing from Zahn's books.

[melannen]

I haven't read the X-Wing comics not because I don't want to, but because they're *way* harder to find at used book sales and at the library. :P Do they have the same OCs that appear in the books?

I kind of assumed from the book references that at least the earlier ones were set before the books and had a mostly-different set of pilots. I would love to finally get my hands on the rest of the Baron Fel saga, and the beginning of the Tycho & Winter story, and more Hobbie and Janson, and whatever that first visit to Ryloth was, and so on and so on... someday. Maybe I'll actually make it to a comicon with expendable cash this year.

[torachan]

Ugh, that definitely happens to me with reading my flist, too. And it happens just in regular reading, not any special filters. The worst part about that sort of thing is I don't know how much I'm missing! Because I'm sure there's plenty of times when something doesn't pop back in randomly, so I never knew it was missing in the first place.

I used to have missing posts on my flist on LJ, too, though, and it occasionally happens with Tumblr as well, so maybe it's just a general unreliableness of RSS feeds.

[melannen]

denise finally got back to my support request and says it's a rare but known issue with the backread by date option, unfortunately all debugging attempts so far have failed, and if I can make it happen predictably or make it happen without the by-date filter, I should definitely let them know.

It is unfortunately very hard to document on the regular reading page, because entries are always moving down the page, so nothing stays in the same place long enough to double-check myself, but yeah, I don't think it's just a dating issue.

I'm wondering if it's really all that rare, or if it's just something that's really unlikely to be detected by an average user...

I'm going to maybe poke at it some more and see if I can find any patterns, now that I know it's really happening.