independence1776 - Tumblr blog

[independence1776]

ngl I keep forgetting that Hobby Lobby is a real store that people go to. That people actually think of it as a craft store and not as a crazy Christian mass artifact smuggler. I google "Hobby Lobby" and get a page full of results that make me go "wtf is this craft supplies and operating hours shit, I thought we all knew this place for smuggling looted cuneiform tablets out of Iraq"

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Weekly Kudos Thanks

Thank you to Dolphinsong15, Rusalye, indygirl96, mikamikachuu, BrianKilroy, jcp_sob_rjl_lmep, The_MugWug_03, and one anon for leaving kudos on my fanworks last week.

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I find it curious, as an ace person that there is a joke related to cakes because my hobby is baking and pastries.

I should have taken it as some sign about me long time ago 😅

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"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

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fuck it homebrew boop button. reblog this post to boop the person you reblogged from.

[independence1776]

fuck it homebrew boop button. reblog this post to boop the person you reblogged from.

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@feanorianweek Day 2 - Maglor

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Star Wars: The Living Force by John Jackson Miller

I was incredibly wary about this book when it was first announced and remained wary of it to the point I broke my own policy of not posting a WIP so I could say, “No, that’s irrelevant to my fic as I began posting before it was published.” I was wary partly because of the blurb and partly because I didn’t (and don’t) trust the author about the Jedi. That was based solely on how he described the Order in A New Dawn, which is not exactly one of my favorite Star Wars books for several reasons. But someone whose taste I trust (aka @gffa) did enjoy The Living Force, so I checked it out of the library.

Overall: I enjoyed it. It was a fun romp and a solid Star Wars book. That said, the cast was really too large to dive in-depth into pretty much anyone’s characters except the girl Depa was trying to save. The girl was probably the most well-rounded of everyone, including the Jedi. The villain was very much a one-note. And part of my problem may have been that ultimately the book felt like it couldn’t do anything. There was no sense of danger or urgency; of course everyone would survive and the bad guys fail. It felt like it should have been character-driven and yet it wasn’t. It is also very clearly a “TPM came out 25 years ago, so we have to mark that somehow” book.

Things I disliked:

1) the author could do with a dive into what Lucas says about the Order and what attachments mean. This guy seems to think they mean connections with other people when that is manifestly not what they mean; the High Republic books state this over and over and over again, so it’s not an “expanded universe doesn’t understand” thing. It’s very much an author thing.

2) Sifo-Dyas… just didn’t make much sense being brought up as a Problem. That came out of nowhere. So did the disloyalty of the caretaker.

3) Qui-Gon is very much in the line of fanon maverick instead of the movie’s stubborn, rude, and often arrogant but still somehow kind and wise man. He’s not the character I fell in love with, in other words.

4) I’m well and truly puzzled why Depa didn’t use telekinesis to pull the comlink to her and turning it off in the climax of the book. We know she can use telekinesis. We know Jedi can do that in general; it's all over the place. So why didn’t she? She spent a lot of the book strangely de-powered.

Things I liked: There were some very good moments here. I liked the look at the worldbuilding and buereocracy. I like Jedi being Jedi and by each of them somehow getting involved in separate things that the threads came together at the end. (Of course they did. That was obvious pretty early on.) The book was more-or-less: ten Jedi help solve one world’s problems because they each somehow managed to connect with a different person in need of help in a way that will solve the plot’s problems later. Which is fine; sometimes I really do want predicatable. As I said, it’s not a bad book but I’m not sure if me being a writer helped me see the seams more clearly. I did expect the outpost to close regardless (which would have made the entire book feel futile) and it did but not quite in the way I thought and it’s a way that worked.

I am glad Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan were cameos instead of taking over. And there was room for a lot of nuance into the Order, top-down versus bottom-up view of how to best help.

Yaddle’s reversal of the “fear leads to hate” into “Courage leads to peace. Peace leads to love. Love leads to healing.” It’s a part of a longer quote. And those two paragraphs are the best part of the book.

Depa Billaba (You all know me. Of course she’d get her own section!)

When she was off doing her own undercover mission with the pirates, I thought that was cool and that Miller understood her character. And I’m folding it into what I take as canon; it matches well with the rest of her non-show appearances in Disney canon. I didn’t like a lot of the follow-through. (This ties into some of the reasons I dislike A New Dawn; I don’t think he writes women well.) I’m perfectly fine with her being captured. But after that, it felt like Miller didn’t know what to do with her. And her uncertainties and not taking a Padawan earlier because she was seemingly afraid to* and her talk with Mace about attachments (a conversation that makes absolutely zero sense given they are both on the High Council)… just don’t work. It felt like a faint retelling of much of her character arc in the Kanan comics. She also didn’t have the sense of humor she did there. Ultimately, I’m unsatisfied. Her plotline started off as something important and then fizzled by the end.

*Until that was brought up as why Depa was so driven to investigate the pirates in the region, I’d assumed it was because she was orphaned by said pirates. It would have made more sense.

On the other hand, some of the things I was worried about didn’t occur. We got nothing about her sister Sar Labooda (who may as well not exist apart from that mention in an encyclopedia and her appearance and death in the arena on Geonosis in AotC). We got nothing about Depa’s apprenticeship with Mace. We know pretty much nothing else about Chalacta apart from a mantra and that the Republic doesn’t seem to much care about its region of space. So all of that is more or less free space.

(Though her timeline is still more than a bit fuzzy and messed up. I maintain that she should not have been on the Council in the Master and Apprentice novel; she should have been the one brought on when Qui-Gon refused the seat. I even checked out Star Wars Timelines to see if that book shed any light on the matter; it doesn’t as the only time she’s mentioned is her death, which was very neatly worded to apply to either the Kanan comics or the Bad Batch show.)

All in all, I’m glad I read the book ,and I did enjoy it, but I don’t plan to buy it until it’s out in paperback.

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Kinslayer

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Headcanon: sometimes Jedi talk directly to the Force and they’re just …talking. Out loud. Sometimes in a skyward direction. Sometimes elsewhere. Just clearly not at anyone else around. And not like polite or prayerfully or anything. Like “where is it? where - oh, there it is, thank you!”, “are you karking serious?”, “So what do you think?”, “is this a good idea? My master said it was, but I wanted to check with you”, “You couldn’t have told me this earlier?”, “Suuure we’ll go into the creepy cave just because you said it’s fine, not like we have massively different understandings of what fine means”, “Hey, could you pass me that? …Thanks”, “Meddle I will not, if meddle you do not”, etc.

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3d printed start gate

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Neither romantic nor sexual nor platonic but a secret fourth thing (bonded like stray cats who cannot be adopted separately)

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Typography Tuesday: Passover Edition

This Haggadah is color coded to indicate the age of various parts of the text, creating a visually striking historical commentary.

Haggadah.   Polychrome historical Haggadah for Passover. [Hagadah Meʹir ʹenayim] With a commentary, interpretative translation, introd., notes, references, and bibliography, by Jacob Freedman. Illus. in color from rare medieval Haggadah mss.  Springfield, Mass., Jacob Freedman Liturgy Research Foundation, 1974.

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Weekly Kudos Thanks

Thank you to ladyredraven, bioticboogies, TeaCupTree, AndromedaStar, AnHellica, Brie_45_always, HarukaDunois, Quest2somewhere, Twisted_Foxlore, and one anon for leaving kudos on my fics last week.

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I don’t know if I will ever get over how incredible the Obi-Wan Kenobi show was at threading the needle of using mostly established characters, adding new characters that played into the themes that were already established, while also making it feel like it opened up a whole new world of stories to be told. Would a story about Obi-Wan and Luke have been as meaningful, if well told? It’s very possible that it could have been!  But using this opportunity to focus on Leia instead, to take two characters who never really interacted beyond a few lines said about each other, and developing an entire dynamic there, while also tying it directly to the heart of the Obi-Wan & Anakin dynamic, balancing that these two saw each other as themselves just as much as they had a connection because of the other people in their lives, I really can’t get over it. And I can’t get over the inclusion of Reva as a Jedi youngling, she’s not just a fleshed out Inquisitor there to fill up the space, she’s vital to the story being told, she is a face and a voice of the younglings that Anakin slaughtered, she is a character with a journey that is her own path to walk and she will make her own choices, but she is also a reflection of the central Star Wars character (as all characters connected to the heart of the story should be to a degree, in my opinion) in that her choice to not become like Vader illustrates Anakin’s choices all the more. Just as the Obi-Wan & Leia dynamic is a story unto itself, so is Reva’s story, but they are also part of the bigger theme of Anakin Skywalker’s legacy, they are both at the same time, just as Obi-Wan Kenobi is himself, his character is an extension of Anakin’s character on a narrative level, and later an extension of Luke’s character, that is his function in the bigger narrative, but that doesn’t mean his own story within that structure can’t be important and meaningful. The show has Anakin Skywalker’s presence looming over everything in this series, he’s not even actually in that many scenes, but I feel his ghost in almost every single frame of the story, and I’m just never getting over how good that was. I cannot comprehend how well done the character work in this show is, how the characters are serving the themes that George Lucas established, but they’re also telling a story that I was invested in.  I wanted so desperately to see that hug when Obi-Wan and Leia reunited.  I wanted so desperately to see Obi-Wan and Anakin meet one more time, to tear each other apart one more time.  I wanted so desperately to know how Reva’s story would end, how this would affect Leia going forward, how it was a love letter to the prequels movies, how it was connective tissue, the story of how they got from Point A to Point B, but also was a journey worth taking on its own, because I got to see Reva’s face crumple when she asked if she’d become him, I got to see Obi-Wan fix Leia’s droid and teach her a little about the Force, I got to see Owen come to a gentler understanding of Obi-Wan and ask if he wanted to meet Luke, I got to see Anakin absolve Obi-Wan of guilt while still trying desperately to hold onto him. I just cannot get over how it walked the fine line of established characters and something new, that I want approximately a hundred fics about Obi-Wan and Anakin’s conversations in this show, I want another hundred fics of Obi-Wan and Leia, I want a hundred fics about the life Reva could have had in a better world or where she goes from here or how she survived up to this point. I CANNOT GET OVER HOW DEFT THIS SERIES WAS AT GIVING ME THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS.

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Every single fic update there is an author trying frantically to find the right balance between a nonchalant aside of "leave a comment if you enjoyed =)" and clinging desperately to the coat tails of a random stranger, dragging along behind them on the street wailing "Please, please! I have to know what you thought! I'm desperate to talk to people about this! Ask me about the alliterative repetition! Ask me about the symbolism!"