McFlabbergasty

Episode VII: A Fistful of Credits

Episode VIII: For A Few Credits More

Episode IX: The Jedi, The Sith, and The Why The Kriff Are There Nine Of These Movies

darth_ender said:

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FTFY

Coldplay's "A Rush of Adrenaline to the Legs"


*ducks for cover behind a trash can to avoid thrown tomatoes* 

I'd like to see your treatment too, Easterhay. With that kind of word count, I bet it's quite detailed!

Jeni, Amnar, and Zero are leaving the junkyard this very moment as I am drafting the next part of the story. :P 

Bingowings said:

Get someone to observe you doing it.

Not really sure what this would accomplish. There's nothing to see. If I did this, the other person might as well think I'm just making up a bunch of BS.

Bingowings said:

You should have your ears checked too. My current inner ear problems have created some very strange effects.

If you can will it to happen try doing that in front of a doctor.

Definitely worth pursuing. I've looked around the intertubes for others who have this condition/ability. Kind of concerned that there might be something wrong with me.

asterisk8 said:

McFlabbergasty said:

Disclaimer: I'm not an endocrinologist, so I might have no idea what I'm talking about.

 

For about a decade, since my early teens, I've had an ability to induce a set of sensations within myself at will. First I feel like there is something in the back of my head that tenses just a little bit, then I feel a tickling sort of sensation throughout the backs of my legs. From the back part of the upper thighs down to the ankles. Sometimes I can't quite control the intensity. I get carried away and the tingling gets to be too much and I spasm for a second to let out the steam. I can repeatedly activate and disable this mechanism several times a second. My best guess so far is that I can somehow release small amounts of adrenaline into my system at will.

Does anybody else experience this? Any explanations? 

That actually sounds more like a mild panic attack to me. At least, when I have panic attacks, they are accompanied by a weird tenseness in the back of my head, tickling/tingling in my extremities, and an overwhelming desire to spasm to release a feeling of building energy. But a panic attack will also include a feeling of dread. How do you feel, emotionally speaking, when this happens?

The mind is an incredible thing, so I wouldn't rule out the possibility that you are able to consciously alter levels of hormones, or release some neurotransmitters. There are monks that can raise their body temperature at will, so who knows?

No I don't feel "panicked" or a sense of dread like what you are describing. I can will this sensation in calm moments when I have no distractions and obligations and also when I'm behind the wheel on the way to an appointment/class/whatever. I think I might have myself MRI'd or something to get to the bottom of this.

Is this what using the Force feels like? :P 

Disclaimer: I'm not an endocrinologist, so I might have no idea what I'm talking about.

For about a decade, since my early teens, I've had an ability to induce a set of sensations within myself at will. First I feel like there is something in the back of my head that tenses just a little bit, then I feel a tickling sort of sensation throughout the backs of my legs. From the back part of the upper thighs down to the ankles. Sometimes I can't quite control the intensity. I get carried away and the tingling gets to be too much and I spasm for a second to let out the steam. I can repeatedly activate and disable this mechanism several times a second. My best guess so far is that I can somehow release small amounts of adrenaline into my system at will.

Does anybody else experience this? Any explanations? 

Star Wars Episode VII: The Quickening

Easterhay said:

Ta - forgot about them.  And TPM used q-tips for the audience members at the pod-race which was rather amusing.

Pics NAO.

So how do you guys like it so far? Already an unspeakable travesty or a likely candidate for Disney's sequel trilogy?

Jeni is at first surprised and perplexed. She expects the Massiff to continue its pursuit. She gets up and confirms that the creature is in fact dead, then her attention turns to her mysterious helper: a lone robed figure perched on a scrap pile some distance away from the Falcon. He turns down his weapon, a scoped blaster rifle with a vibro-blade bayonet.

After getting to the ground and retrieving Zero from the hull of the Falcon, Jeni meets the figure. He pulls back his hood to reveal purple skin, young but hard-edged features laden with piercings, a bald scalp, and intense green eyes. He tells Jeni to watch her way in the junkyard wastes, inferring that she is new to these parts. Jeni is at first apprehensive of the stranger until he explains himself. 

His name is Amnar, of the planet Keshiri. He has come to Raxus Prime as part of his clan’s rite-of-passage. Amnar's task has been to find a warrior with a worthy cause to aid in order to prove his worth to his elders on Kesh. He believes he has found just such a companion.

Jeni senses a great deal of honesty in Amnar, so he gains her trust, at least to aid in his search for Dagman. She tells Amnar of her quest for the Strider as he leads her and Zero down a shortcut to the market. Amnar keeps his honed senses attuned to the signs of other junkyard predators.

--------------

Another entry coming soon-ish.

Bingowings said:

Moth3r turn the cooling units back on!

"YOU BITCH!!!!"

Ermahgerd you ruined the saga for me.

Meh. The prequels are basically dead to me anyway. I don't treat them as canon any more than I treat the Alien movies past the second one as canon in that franchise. This Topher Grace edit might be worth a shot, though...maybe.

What I'm trying to do with these sequels, in addition to telling a cohesive story, is to play with the expectations an audience might have of Star Wars. Certain OT story elements, character archetypes, famous one-liners, and even characters themselves show up in this trilogy but altered in some way.

My hope with in doing this is to ease the audience into the new iteration of Star Wars that I've concocted.

Let's just say the galaxy is heading in a different direction than the one implied by the ending of Return of the Jedi. But audiences generally don't react very well with being hit over the head by the clown hammer right out of the gate.

That's why the plot of Revenge of the Jedi is rooted in immediately-recognizable elements. Everybody knows who Han Solo is and everybody has seen the Millennium Falcon. It is my intention to use that to give Jeni's quest in this movie as much oomph as possible.

As the trilogy goes on, though, I will put in more and more pieces of what all of this is leading to until the big picture is finally clear. Sorry if I am being vague, but I don't want to spoil the fun for my audience. :)

A cloaked humanoid figure is seen making its way up a pile of scrap metal.

The other Massiff has climbed back onto the Falcon’s top surface. It takes a lightning-fast swipe at Jeni with one of its paws, making two large cuts on her arm and forcing her lightsaber away several meters, as well as dropping her down to a crawl. Cradling the wounds of her arm, Jeni hastily makes her way towards her lightsaber, which seems just out of reach on the hard durasteel of the Falcon’s outer hull.  She takes potshots at the foul beast behind her, but these can only buy her time before she can reach the more effective weapon.

The smell of rancid breath reaches Jeni’s nostrils when she is still a few feet away from her lightsaber. She turns around and the beast is almost directly on top of her. Jeni unloads several blaster rounds in the creature’s soft underbelly. The beast is driven back several paces, wincing in pain. Then the Massiff comes back for another charge just as Jeni reaches for her saber.

To her surprise a blaster bolt sears through the air and impacts the creature’s temple, dropping it in an instant.

Kool-Aid Laboratory And Experimental Oatmeal Node

Damn. Oh well, I'm sure there's something else I can name the series.

Coming 23 August 2014, Eidos Montreal presents....K.L.A.X.O.N.

I'm brainstorming a concept for a game tentatively called S.I.R.E.N., or just Siren if that is more convenient on your fingers. I am not a game developer, though I am trying to pick up the craft of programming at the moment so who knows when that will change. Point is, right now I am focusing exclusively on the writing portion of the game. I am still not entirely sure what form the gameplay will take. Currently I am trying to decide between an Freelancer-like space sim or something more like MechCommander 2 or Fallout Tactics, where the player commands a small squadron of spacecraft.

The nature of the space combat would adhere somewhat closely to actual laws of physics and how real space confrontations might work rather than the standard space opera fare with aerodynamic fighters making banked turns in World War II-style dogfights. I've done plenty of reading on the Rocketpunk Manifesto and Atomic Rockets, which has opened my eyes as to how "realistic" space warfare might actually work. The system of combat for Siren that I am thinking of at the moment would take some acceptable breaks from reality such as the inclusion of casual FTL and workable fusion reactors installed on space vessels. But things like deflector shields and dashing fighter jocks womanizing with green-skinned babes while choking back on Rigellian brandy are a no-no in my setting. Those are far too cliche.

As for the actual writing aspect, I've been trying to get together a sense of how the universe works and what kinds of stories and characters would abound in it. One of the establishing marks of the setting is that although it takes place in the future, it is not entirely our future. Rather it is the progression of an alternate history, one where John F. Kennedy was never assassinated in 1963, allowing a joint US-Soviet space program to continue and contribute to the already furious pace of space exploration's technological advancement that was occurring at the time. The Moon landing occurred a full two years before it happened in our timeline, a harbinger of the space-related developments to follow.

Over the next four decades, more scientific and research expeditions were conducted throughout the Solar System, both manned and unmanned. Outposts with a permanent rotating staff were established for research of all kinds, and in some cases resource extraction. Before the dawn of the 21st century, the Cold War came to an end on peaceful terms despite some harrowing close calls and saber-rattling between nuclear-armed Soviet and American vessels beyond Earth's atmosphere.

The pioneering use of the jumpdrive in 2003 changed everything. By maneuvering outside of a solar system's heliopause, a jumpdrive-equipped vessel can "tunnel" through space, instantly traversing distances of many light years.

The new market for resource exploitation and drive for scientific advancement allowed a number of megacorporations to take the center stage in governing humanity's affairs. The years from 2003 and 2051 are considered the golden age of the stellar-era corporations. 

But this prosperity came at a price. Increased unrest from Third World instability on Earth and resource depletion coupled with environmental degradation caused great numbers of people to become desperate enough to guinea pig themselves for destructive forms of cybernetic enhancement. With no other options, millions of people in this time were grafted with enhancements and paid to settle permanently in colonies all across civilized space. They were legally no longer considered humans and seen as dirty abominations by the more religious sections of Earth's populace. Numerous sects saw the "desecrators of the human form" as the sign of some kind of apocalyptic event. 

But this age came to an end when activists on both sides of the divide successfully reformed the economic and political structure of space activity so as to provide a more equitable arrangement for the settlers. The cyborg race was named the LeVard, after its chief martyr for equality. In response to the need for increasing the presence of the rule of law in space, several of the Earth's most powerful nations formed the Federation, an inter-governmental body for the direction of space settlement. As the years passed, the LeVard formed many free enclaves governed by traders. They became the interstellar equivalent of Renaissance-era merchant city-states like Venice.

In the latter portion of the twenty-first century, two human-habitable worlds outside the Sol system were settled by the Federation: Wolf II and Reticuli IV. The first bore a relatively cold and hostile climate, necessitating extensive genetic engineering on the part of the colonial volunteers. The second was a garden-like world that miraculously allowed for human habitation without the aid of any protective devices such as respirators or any biological alterations. 

Life was relatively peaceful in civilized space before the increasingly power-hungry Federal elite began to impose a will not much fairer than that of the megacorporations of decades past. In the 2070s, a religious movement took full force of the the majority of Reticuli IV's inhabitants, called the Vitruvian faith. The movement was named after a work of art by Leonardo da Vinci that depicted the form of a perfectly proportioned and unaltered human figure.

The beliefs of the "Truvians" were based on an assumption of the unaltered human form as being the essential keystone of all creation. They lauded the "purity" of the human form as something to be protected. Ironically many sects of the faith were willing take lives to protect the human form, both their own lives and those of the "blasphemers". They counted among their enemies all who practiced mechanical and genetic alteration. Federals, LeVard, and Wolf colonists alike. Though still being part of the Federal star empire, the Reticuli colonists harbored a strong secessionist sentiment for many years. These colonists saw the fact that their planet was naturally human-habitable as a sign from divinity that their cause was a just one.

In the Wolf system, an insurrectionist sentiment was brewing from the exploitation of the altered colonists for the extraction of resources from Wolf II's rich veins of ore. Despite the victory of civil rights that occurred in the early 2050s, the sense of "otherness" was too much for many Federal enforcement officials stationed in the Wolf colonies. Borne of an increasingly chaotic and divided homeworld, Earth guardsmen would partake in beatings and abuse of the "natives" of the Wolf system for the simple fact that they looked different. In the minds of a few destructive individuals, these physical differences removed all compunctions against cruelty. 

In 2117, following years of guerilla attacks on Reticuli IV and over a decade of non-violent disobedient demonstrations on Wolf II, the Wolf natives began to take up arms against their Federal masters. In later times this would be known as the start of the Crucible Wars. Five bitter years of fighting culminated in the Federal Fleet's bombardment of large sections of Wolf II with thermo-nuclear weapons. While quelling dissent for a brief period, this incited only more action on the part of the Truvian rebels of Reticuli IV (much to the surprise of the Federal top brass, who believed that they would win the support of Reticuli IV if they took decisive action against the Wolf rebels, not lose it). 

Commandeering Federal ships, the Reticuli fighters turned the tables on the Federal aggressors, if only in their star system. LeVard fought both for and against the Federation, reflecting on a profiteering nature they had ironically inherited from their former corporate masters. The Truvians temporarily set aside their grievances with the LeVard and Wolf rebels, who had by this point taken to simply calling themselves Wolves, and led the charge towards toppling the Federation by any means possible. This state of affairs persisted for three years.

In 2125, the Truvians had seized a starship equipped with a jumpdrive, allowing their forces to strike Sol. Their suicide attack included their best pilots and vessels, though even some of these were freighters equipped with bolted-on machine guns and laser arrays. With an insane kind of courage borne of religious fervor the Truvians struck a crippling blow against the Federation. For the Truvians it was a Pyrrhic victory, but the Federals saw utter defeat.

For four years, communications and transport from the Federal core systems, Sol and Alpha Centauri, had all but ceased. The destruction wrought by the 2125 Battle of Earth meant that many parts of the vital stellar infrastructure had been crippled or utterly destroyed. The Federation effectively ceased to exist for four bloody years. In this time, warfare between nations on Earth for control of now-limited resources and doomed prospects took many forms, from conventional land battles to cyber-age infiltrations and viral attacks using biological abominations bred for the wholesale destruction of human life. 

But the story was different outside of the Federal core systems. Independent settlements finally became full-fledged states in their own right. The LeVard expanded their mercantile operations, the Truvians set to work on maintaining a human-centric empire, and the Wolves won over many settlements that were formerly being oppressed by the Federals.

The establishment of the New Federation in 2129 brought forth a new status quo, the Crucible Wars having come to a long-sought-after end. No longer could Earth expect to control its former possessions by the use of force. The other powers (Truvians, Wolves, and LeVard) had matured into nation-states, or some variation thereof, in their own right. Instead the Federals had to use diplomacy and deterrence to maintain their will. It seemed that for time being, a fractured and tense, but workable, peace had finally been re-established.

In 2150, in a previously-unexplored star system, Federal explorers had found numerous settlements of unknown origin on many planets and other bodies. No known expeditions were ever assigned to the system in the past, under any of humanity's governments, corporations, or other agencies. It seemed possible that humans met the first concrete example of intelligent extra-terrestrial life. But the discovery was kept secret as soon as it was reported to the Federal top brass. The system was reportedly placed off limits and the findings of the 2150 expedition kept strictly classified. 

Fast forward three years. The Federal government has created a new program known as SIREN, or Special Intelligence and Reconnaissance Expeditionary Node. The agency recruits the best pilots from Federal worlds to undertake black operations to ensure the security of all Federal interests. As a SIREN pilot, you will operate above the law and above the sky to accomplish your objectives.

Welcome to the year 2153. A new kind of war awaits you.

So what do you all think?

Here's the deal: Texas can leave only if we can make up for it by purchasing or invading and stealing Quebec from our neighbors to the North.

Shut up and give me your votes for Emperor of the Universe. 

One detail I forgot to include: Jeni left Zero to explore the bowels of the ship before she went to investigate the cockpit. 

Next part coming soon.

Jeni jumps a chasm to her right. The predator lands in a scrap heap of metal starship parts and old droid wirings; the Jedi lands on one part of the Falcon’s fore docking clamps. The other Massiff drools in hunger, then lets out a snarl of aggression before charging towards her. Jeni unloads several rounds of her blaster pistol on the beast, but these only succeed in aggravating the creature further. The big animal pounces forth and Jeni hurls herself to the other side of the broken sensor dish assembly on the Falcon’s top surface. She quickly ignites her saber as the Massiff bolts towards her, plunging the weapon forward and skewering the beast’s torso on her blade. The slobbering monster lies silent, but its brother claws its way up the side of the ship to pursue Jeni.

You hit the nail on the head, Easterhay. I felt that having all three members of the original trilogy's main character group would have cast an enormous shadow over Jeni. By killing off what is generally agreed to be the most charismatic and memorable of the three OT heroes, I enhance Han's poignancy as a character and provide Jeni a motivation to do what she does in Episode VII, laying a lot of important groundwork for her character development in the following two films.

And I deliberately echoed certain themes and elements of the OT, like the whole thing about the main character being lied to about how their father died. 

Maybe you could post your treatment too, Easterhay! 

Adium said:

If Nolan was able to save Batman from the depths of hell that was the 90s Batman films...

 

He might be able to save Star Wars. Just maybe.

I agree with the whole Nolan saving Batman part, but I have trouble seeing him fit in with the Star Wars mythos. His strength appears to lie in telling stories that would be too gritty, realistic, and morally gray for Star Wars.

Alison Brie as Leia

Nathan Fillion as Han

Michael C. Hall as Luke

Case. Closed.