For me the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars is a symbol of freedom. It was the pirate vessel of the smuggler Han Solo and became the premier deterrent against tyranny in the plight against the evil Empire. I love the ship in the fictional context for which it is presented. When I ride the Star Tours Ride at the Disney Parks I always hope for the beginning shown below, where the Falcon is sitting in a hanger surrounded by Imperial troops before suddenly leaping off the deck to launch itself into a firefight in space before escaping. There is no presidential address in human history which moves me more than seeing the Falcon sitting there at the opening of the Star Tours ride. The video below does not capture the mood completely, only in reference. On the actual ride, it is quite spectacular because visually it is captivating, but metaphorically, it is multi-dimensional—and important. There is no level of sign stimuli more appealing, no sporting event more dramatic, and no political event more powerful to me than watching the Millennium Falcon in flight.
I became hooked on the new Star Wars game called X-Wing Miniatures because of the fantastic model they had made of the Millennium Falcon. There has never been another more meticulous model of such a thing ever produced to my knowledge for the simple task of playing a game. But that game has deep combinations of options that are much more dynamic and interesting than any game of chess known to intellectual circles. The 3’X3’ game surface of a typical X-Wing game holds seemingly infinite strategies to use against an opponent which is refreshingly wonderful for strategy prone war gamers—such as myself. It has been many years since I have loved something so much as I love Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures.
I look for reasons to play with the Millennium Falcon at every opportunity, but because it is such a powerful ship I have found that I can’t use it the way I want as I have been teaching players new to the game to play using simpler rules instead of my Falcon build which involves many complex options. I have been looking for a great support ship for my Falcon that points-out right at 65 points. I shudder to consider spending so much on one ship in the game, but if my reason to play the game is to play the Millennium Falcon, then I owe it to the game to find a way to justify the experience. Most 100 point games in X-Wing come out to three ships, sometimes four or five. So tying up 65 points on my Falcon build is a steep price indeed. That means the Falcon will be continuously outnumbered and will have to take a lot of abuse to survive—which is ironically the actual role it had in the Star Wars mythology. Winning is not guaranteed under such conditions, but it’s the way I like to play the game. It requires excellent piloting instead of attacking opponents with mass, which is usually the best strategy for everything.
The ship I found to support my Falcon is the HWK-290, which just came out on Wave 3 from Fantasy Flight Games. Manufactured by the Corellian Engineering Corporation in the decades preceding the Battle of Naboo, the HWK-290 was a concentrated effort by talented shipwrights at breaking into a new market. Focusing on making the new design appeal to the wealthy of high society, the HWK-290 was an attempt at capturing business outside of its normal audiences.
Major marketing research was conducted on the demographic segment CEC sought to capitalize upon. As such, they designed the ship to appeal to entrepreneurs and wealthy merchants. One concern of the individuals questioned during the research phase was that the current designs of the time were often delayed at checkpoints and customs stations because they were armed; it was thought that the time it took goods to be delivered could possibly be reduced by removing the armaments of the ships. Additionally the majority of those interviewed said that the ideal ship would not only be fast but aesthetically pleasing as well, unlike most freighters, which are bulky in appearance.
The research provoked a design totally independent of the iconic YT-series freighters, which tended to be associated with the less savoury elements of society. The HWK-290 prototype had the appearance of a large bird of prey and when displayed at trade shows and conventions brought about many questions as to the availability of the ship. Designers also listened to initial feedback regarding the ship and made minor modifications to the interior until it was determined that the right balance of aesthetics and functionality were achieved. At that point, production began in earnest.
When the HWK-290 rolled off the production line, it was an unarmed, extremely fast, agile ship that could outmaneuver and outrun most fighters and had largest weight capacity for carrying cargo of any freighter up to 30 meters long. It also contained an impressive state of the art sensor array for a ship of its size and class, the purpose of which was to detect trouble before falling victim to it. Additionally, it was a lot more luxurious inside than normal freighters, boasting large passenger and sleeping areas, entertainment consoles and a cockpit that was designed with the comfort of the pilot and co-pilot in mind.
While only seeing relatively moderate success in contrast to that of the YT series, production of the HWK-290 was discontinued during the Clone Wars in favor of military production. Despite no longer being manufactured, the HWK-290 has found popularity in the inventories of smugglers and pirate groups, a far cry from the original clientele for whom it was initially designed.
I ordered the HWK-290 well in advance of its release date, and it shipped to me from American Hobby Supply in a box coming from Fantasy Flight Games. As I was helping my daughters get set up for their big party over the weekend, knowing that at least one of my nephews from out-of-town was coming, I was hoping my HWK-290 would arrive in time for the party so I could fly it while teaching him about the game. Sure enough the tracking information showed that my HWK-290 was coming and it arrived right on time on my front porch. Receiving that package was one of the most thrilling things I have put my hands on in years. That statement is not in reference to a lack of options in my life—quite contrary. But in my life mythology is extremely important, and the X-Wing game is a perfect symbiotic relationship of hobby model building and strategy mixed with deep metaphorical mythology. In that context the HWK-290 is the perfect complement to my Millennium Falcon and it was exciting to put my hands on it after thinking about it so much.
The reason I love that ship so much even though it is comparatively slow as opposed to the A-Wings and Tie Fighters is that both my Falcon and HWK-290 feature a 360 degree shooting radius. The strategy I plan to use with these two ships is not for everyone as the key to winning with them will be in maneuvering strategy. When the package arrived the day was a picture perfect sunny day in Southern Ohio, the sky was cloudless and the temperature was in the lower 70s. It was a weekend day with little pressure other than the upcoming party at my kid’s house for my first grandson. Opening the package from Fantasy Flight Games with the HWK-290 so carefully packaged within the box revealed the climax of such sentiments. At that moment it was a perfect day in every respect.
Of course I played with it that night as I showed my nephew how the game worked. It was challenging to fly, but I got used to it quickly and can see how it will play out in many future strategies to my liking. But seeing the HWK-290 parked next to my Millennium Falcon brings back to my mind that wonderful opening on the Star Tours Ride at Hollywood Studios, where the Falcon begins in captivity, frees itself, nearly collides with a cruiser in space during an intense battle only to escape in a nick of time into the safety of hyperspace. The HWK-290 and the Millennium Falcon go together well and I am excited for the many wonderful adventures that await those two during epic battles yet to be fought.
I have a running fantasy that someday the government will show up on my doorstep with tyrannical intentions and shred off the pretext of decency for open warfare. At that time I will be free to do what I do best and have loved since my feet could carry me upward, and that is to fight—fight for independence, fight for respect, fight for the human race—fight for anything—but fight. Now when I say fight, I don’t mean “serving” for some greater cause made up by a statist government. I mean fighting where my strategy and effort destroy an opponent no matter how great the numbers or odds of victory, the worse, the more attractive. So the fantasy of a large statist government having the audacity to believe that they will win my submission with force is an attractive one to me.
I do not make a good soldier material, or a sports player who simply does what somebody else dictates. That is not the kind of fighting that I’m good at. In sports I never wanted to be a player, only the coach or the owner of a franchise, never some meat head player who was simply a field soldier. In the military, I never wanted to be a soldier, only a commander. But the way the human race is set up, they expect people to run through some kind of social initiation period where they start on the bottom and work their way up. However, by the time that such people find themselves in charge, they have been beaten down into submission and lose the ability to “think” uniquely. So I avoid all structured war games like the plague, and always have. When I play at war whether it is politics, business, or physical submission of one group over another, I require being in charge otherwise I’m just not interested. If people shut up and listen, they find that they benefit greatly by doing what I tell them. I don’t get out of such arrangements anything from the participates—any level of camaraderie, any back slapping from social respect—any feeling of “fitting in” to the structure of human existence. I simply enjoy winning in games of conflict.
One of the greatest aspects of being human is that we are thinking creatures and find many ways to entertain ourselves. Of the many things invented to entertain the human race, war games for me have always been the thing that I most enjoy. When I was a kid I ran into tabletop war gaming from a military history class I took where famous Revolutionary War battles could be re-enacted. As an adult my wife introduced me to similar games such as the Star Wars: Assault on Hoth which we played nearly every night during the first couple years of our marriage. When I started having kids I played a lot of video games with them—all of which were about war, fighting, and combat. I never approached the games as an escape from reality, but as the only way I could do the types of things I enjoyed doing without destroying the fabric of the world around me. Then of course there was the Wiz Kids Pirate Constructible Strategy Game that I have discussed in great detail here before, which my family spent a good five solid years playing together.
As fate would have it, one of my son-in-laws is a serious table top gamer. He plays games I never had the patience for like Magic the Gathering relentlessly and will play any board game that has ever been invented. He simply loves games. He along with my nephews over the past summer introduced me to the Dungeons and Dragons like game, Hero Quest which I enjoyed greatly. But I have since discovered something much, much cooler—Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures by Fantasy Flight Games. This game has all the things I enjoy and have only found possible since LucasArts produced the old video game X-Wing, which was a combat flight simulator that I often spent entire nights playing. As video games became better and moved online, Star Wars: Galaxies had Jump to Hyperspace, which was the latest evolution of the old X-Wing game, but it has since left the scene since Star Wars: The Old Republic arrived. There was a void in my heart that was there in the years between the exit of Jump to Hyperspace and the creation of Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures that wasn’t filled by anything else. Now that I have discovered X-Wing Miniatures, it has been like revisiting my favorite games of the past with new updated spins which should be expected with evolution, and I have been soaking up. I have enjoyed myself more since the discovery of X-Wing Miniatures than I can remember consistently in decades. I have been buying up ships for the game like crazy and getting very serious about it.
Both of my son-in-laws have also been getting into the game, so over the weekend we went to Yattaquest in Mt. Healthy to purchase a mat for our X-Wing Miniatures game as the playing surface is supposed to be a 3’X3’ area and we wanted something nice. So we went to Yattaquest and saw that the place was absolutely rocking with activity as they had a game night where the back room was filled with players. I was stunned how many other people were playing these games for the same reasons that I do, and I was shocked by how many different games were on the shelf at Yattaquest. There was an entire section for Warhammer—it was simply amazing.
I picked up my game mat and the last two ships they had for X-Wing Miniatures, a couple of A-Wings.
Then all my kids along with my wife went to Sci-Fi Cincinnati over in Northgate Mall and found two Y-Wing Fighters and a Tie Fighter Advanced, which are both extremely rare. I bought them up knowing that they were selling for over $50 dollars a piece on the internet because of their rarity. I felt I had just uncovered a gold nugget—a rare treasure and it made my entire weekend.
We arrived home late after the mall had closed and began playing X-Wing as a family with the game ending at around 3 AM. We then played most of the next day and I can report that it is some of the most fun I have had in years. It has many of the elements that I personally enjoy more than anything, it’s about miniature detail models, strategy, technology, large concepts, and it has a creativity level that is limited only by the player—which is very attractive to me. After our very successful weekend of playing X-Wing Miniatures, I treated myself to a rare privilege; I pre-ordered a ship that I am hungry to get as a compliment to my Millennium Falcon builds, the new HWK-290. In a 100-point game, the HWK-290 will provide for me the perfect support for my aggressive style of game play and I am very happy to see it come available as it does not technically ship to the general public until September 11th. Fantasy Flight Games pre-released HWK-290s during Gen Con in Indianapolis, but until then and since nobody has put their hands on them.
The ship is a sentimental favorite for me; it’s from the video game called Dark Forces which my daughters used to play with me. So it meant more than just a game piece for X-Wing Miniatures to make the purchase, I am just ecstatic that it will be coming to me. It is a unique item that I can’t wait to put my hands on, and it feels good to have something which drums up so much happiness. Yes, there are a lot of very bad things going on in the world, and I have written about many of them here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom. But the new game X-Wing Miniatures has given me new juice where few things prior provided. I simply love the game for what it does. But more than anything it is allowing me to build a squad that has the Millennium Falcon as a tactical option with the HWK-290.
I don’t socialize much, but it was nice to see so many people with similar interests at Yattaquest. The place was huge and very busy as business was good. I’m obviously not alone in my love of combat because most of those games were themed around conflict resolution. As I stood in the center of Yattaquest I had the sense that if the first American Revolution started in pubs around New England, then the second and third will be in places like Yattaquest. The game players were simply enjoying some escapist fun while not compromising their minds in the process. Those people are not compliant statists of the type who built the trouble of LBJ’s Great Society. They are rebels, commanders, and tacticians that nobody else takes serious as they have fallen through the cracks of the establishment only to become the next sleeping giants awakened during the next great crises. But never before that I can recall did so many people flock to games like Warhammer, Magic the Gathering, and X-Wing Miniatures as they do now. I attempted with all my resources to find Y-Wing fighters but could not, because they were sold out everywhere I looked, even on Ebay and other online outlets. I found them by chance at Sci-Fi Cincinnati and quickly bought them up. They weren’t sold out because the company didn’t make enough of them—quite the contrary—they were sold out because the demand is that high. I find that extremely encouraging.
I might have to wait for my fantasy of a statist government gone mad showing up on my door step to declare war against me and my family. Obama can’t even make a decision against Syria, so I’m not worried about progressives making a visible move against the American people who would cost them terribly—because such things at least require courage, which they lack. But until then, I love that there are games like X-Wing Miniatures that I can play with my family late into the night and all the next day. War gaming is a good substitute for the real thing and I love being a member of the human race because it invents such things. But one thing that is a running theme among these gamers is that submission is not an option. They enjoy war gaming because players contemplate resistance and wish to play out scenarios that bring about such results. The exchange is peaceful so long as participants have an outlet. But heaven forbid that places like Yattaquest didn’t exist. These are not the games of our grandparents, these are the direct response to large-scale statism, and the minds drawn to them are not compliant.
I’ve bought cars, homes, taken exotic vacations and raised families. I’ve been successful, won many real battles and have enjoyed my life immensely in many capacities. But let me just state that when I purchased the HWK-290 for $14.95 a chill of delight went up my spine that I can’t get from anything else in this world…………….and the reason is beyond the comprehension of the average statist politician. Only people who play such games understand.
The worldwide total box office take for Disney’s The Lone Ranger was $239,131,00 which is respectable. It was hardly the box office flop that the entertainment industry has attempted to project it to be. I felt that The Lone Ranger deserved a bit of defense because it was a hack of a good movie. I heavily promoted it, I loved the film, and I am sure that when it hits the home theater market, it will do excessively well. Disney spent the enormous sum of $215 million on the production of the modern western plus many tens of millions on advertising hoping the picture would bring in a billion dollars as a summertime blockbuster. But the money wasn’t there. By the time the summer box office market hit the Fourth of July, movie goers had already spent their money on superhero pictures like Iron Man 3 and Man of Steel. Money was still spent on children’s films like Monster’s U and Disney’s Planes, but for the most part, movie audiences had run out of money leaving many studio films to fail at the box office. But when it came to The Lone Ranger, there was a hatred from the entertainment community that caused them to even turn against Johnny Depp, which I found fascinating, and I know exactly why. A good portion of the why is seen in a totally unrelated Blaze Television piece that Glenn Beck did about his experiences on a real western ranch. The entertainment community in Hollywood’s Wilshire Blvd and Broadway in New York has grown to despise the “flyover states” and Glenn Beck is part of that New York culture which is where he made his fame and fortune. But wisely, he has moved away in search for truth and discovered the America that the rest of us already know about, and he is touched by the results.
The Lone Ranger as a Disney film was about these good ol’ fashioned attributes of self-reliance and rugged individualism. The movie will be looked back upon as a success as it will become a fan favorite in the years to come once it gets away from the entertainment machine that is rooted in progressive political causes. The Lone Ranger was in fact too good for the modern film community. They did not want it to do well because they didn’t want to have to compete against it with future remakes and copy-cat attempts by other studios. Modern progressives do not want to revisit the era of the American western. They do not want western values to exist in American culture for many of the reasons Glenn Beck uttered in his short video clip above.
The movie business is changing dramatically, and industry insiders know it will not be to their advantage. They resent Disney as a family film studio and the amount of money they generate. Disney thankfully holds the rights to Marvel Comics, Pixar, their own slate of family programming and now the massive franchise of Star Wars which I’m going to state emphatically is set to change the world with “western values.” Star Wars is a modern western. George Lucas made Star Wars in the spirit of the old Saturday morning serials that made The Lone Ranger so popular and there is little that the world can do at this point to stop the explosion of Star Wars that is about to burst upon the world. Movie studios attempting fixed progressive social messages can see that Disney is positioned to get the “family friendly” message out to the flyover states for the next 20 years while they collapse under the weight of competition.
That competition is driven by union labor. The cost to make movies is too high because labor demands are too ridiculously over-rated and most studios cannot make films that will garner over $500 million in worldwide market sales which is what it takes to cover modern production costs. So many studios will drown within the next decade because they will have to produce more comedies, more chick flicks, and more small pictures that are not so effects driven, because during the summer of 2013, many of them took a bath that they drowned in. The impact of 2013 won’t be seen until 2015. In that year, Disney will become the most dominant film studio in entertainment as the rest of the entertainment establishment reels. Other studios will have to file for bankruptcy. They will not be able to compete.
Disney has their own internal marketing machine, their own amusement park revenue, and they own ABC, ESPN and many other media outlets, so they can afford to have the rest of the industry turn their back on them, which they did when The Lone Ranger was released. Critics went after the film more for the power that Disney had, than because the film was bad. The industry wanted to see Disney fail because they know what’s coming, and they resent the filmmaker Jerry Bruckheimer openly naming himself a conservative while he was promoting The Lone Ranger. That is where the real hatred for The Lone Ranger filmmakers and the film itself stemmed from. Disney is not making movies for the Los Angeles and New York markets, but for the other 48 states that are the “flyovers.”
When Star Wars hits the release phase, Lucasfilm under the protection of Disney is going to produce the most intense schedule of family programming ever seen in the motion picture, and television industry. I have read just about every Star Wars novel, and I can report that there is so much wealth in that story line that literature has never seen anything like it. When that material becomes television shows, cartoons on the Disney Channel, more novels, more movies, more video games, entertainment will be changed forever. And Star Wars is not a progressive production—it is traditional in the way that The Lone Ranger was a western set in the desert during a historical past; Star Wars is a western set in the distant past in deep space.
When it is wondered what the Huffington Post and Glenn Beck have in common, it is Star Wars. The Huffington Post covers every move of the Star Wars production with keen interest and if anybody has read any books by Glenn Beck Star Wars references are common, especially in his novel The Overton Window. When Star Wars hits theaters in the winter of 2015 after Avengers Two dominates the summer box office the world will change in entertainment. A new bar will be set, and many studios will collapse under the pressure. They know this instinctively and they took out their frustration on The Lone Ranger.
In the end, The Lone Ranger will get the last laugh. It will not be a financial loss for the Disney studio as it will easily cover its marketing budget with home sales on Blu Ray. But more than that, The Lone Ranger is one of the many influences of Star Wars. The values of The Lone Ranger are the values of Jaina Solo who will be the star of the next Star Wars film. She will go down in history as the strongest female protagonist in any movie at any point in time, and Disney will be the studio that can take credit for it. Disney will not need the New York and Los Angeles media in their court. They will have the “fly over states” and a very hungry international market that is poised to consume the intensely “western” values of Star Wars which will eclipse everything else produced by all other studios. In the end, The Lone Ranger produced by the Disney Company will ride off into the sunset knowing the part it played in the creation. Critics attacked The Lone Ranger not because it was a bad movie, but because of the values it articulated. But even their parade of insults did not prevent the film from doing respectable business. For Disney however, the best is yet to come, and for those who were afraid of The Lone Ranger, wait till the impact of the new generation of Star Wars hits a youth that is so hungry for heroes that they can think of little else. The emotional void left by our modern progressive society will fill quickly with values that were born in the American western.
And no group of progressives, Fabian socialists, or open communists will be able to stop it this time……………………………………….
The western is back. But this time the horse will be replaced by space ships, the gun and the whip by the lightsaber of Jaina Solo.
Since receiving the new game X-Wing Miniatures, I have been reading the rule book extensively and mock playing several games against myself so I can understand all the different scenarios. I find the game endlessly intriguing, and an amazing achievement. It is fun, fast, and free in many ways that sustain the best attributes of a gaming experience. I simply love it. My wife with a polite jest asked me as we were logging on the other day to play Star Wars: The Old Republic as I was reading the X-Wing rule book, if we were being “White and Nerdy”—a reference to the old Weird Al Yankovic satirical song. I told her, “absolutely, and proud of it!” At the current moment I have a number of very key strategies in real life that are being played out and I have learned that over time, the best way for me to stay engaged and keep my mind sharp enough to deal with things on a large-scale is to give my mind a vacation while in the heat of the events. By means of vacation I don’t mean a physical vacation which we take often enough—and costs many thousands of dollars every time we do it. I mean a vacation that the mind enjoys, and during the year 2013 that has been The Old Republic which she and I play often. We enjoy our short trips to the Star Wars galaxy and they are always beneficial. But of late, I have found the new X-Wing Miniatures strategy game to be even more intriguing, and infinitely fascinating.
It can’t be missed that even though Weird Al is poking fun at nerds in his music video of “White and Nerdy” that many of the attributes exhibited in the video are good ones, intelligence, moral aptitude, social innocence, creativity among them. And the humor of that video is that it is more or less true. I know, and have known a lot of nerds, and they are like the people in the “White and Nerdy” video. However since that video came out, “White and Nerdy” types have not declined in number throughout American society, but have rather increased. To get a sample, just visit Gen Con in Indianapolis each August and meet the members of the “gaming” culture, people who enjoy strategy games to a larger extent than I do. They are people who spend even more time playing The Old Republic than my wife and I, and they are every bit into the new Star Wars Miniatures strategy game.
Outsiders might say that the gaming industry is being driven by a desire for escapism—that many of those “gamers” would rather play Dungeons and Dragons than participate in the political process. It is highly likely that many of the people who attended this year’s Gen Con did not vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama in the last election, and instead played games from Fantasy Flight around their kitchen tables. So that demographic is being overlooked in poll counts. These “White and Nerdy” types are not watching Fox News, CNN, or showing up for President Obama’s latest diatribes about education funding. Most of them find the entire political process repulsive, and have elected to drop out of it all together. They are either currant Ron Paul supporters, or future supporters of his son, Rand. And until the political machine gives them the kind of candidate they can get excited about, they will spend their time and effort of leisure playing the kind of games sold at Gen Con. Listen to the following broadcast about gaming from the guys at Mos Eisley Radio to get some perspective.
Playing these kinds of games is not an escape from reality in the same way that watching television is, or watching sports. I know a lot of mainstream people who get very excited about their Fantasy Football picks or their latest score on a golf course. The people who play games like Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures are choosing to spend their leisure time in a very thinking type of scenario. You have to enjoy thinking to be good at a game like X-Wing Miniatures. For me that is the grand appeal. I simply love that game. At 2013’s Gen Con Fantasy Flight Games who produce the X-WingMiniatures game made a grand announcement, displaying for the first time they are taking the epic table top game and “going big” with it. They are producing the Tantive IV corvette and the Rebel Transport in a scale that has not been seen in any strategy game. The enthusiasm present upon that announcement can be seen in the interview below. The prospect of playing a game that features those large ships in a strategy format is very exciting to me. I am already planning giant matches that take up specially made tabletops taking up entire basements. It was in reviewing these recent announcements that provoked me to read so intensely the X-Wing rule book.
Tantive IV
“Tear this ship apart until you’ve found those plans and bring me the passengers. I want them alive!”
–Darth Vader, Star Wars: A New Hope
The Tantive IV is perhaps the most famous of all CR90 corvettes. Not only that, it is the first starship to appear in the classic Star Wars trilogy. We see it fly across the screen, racing from right to left across the bright surface of Tatooine, firing its rear lasers, until the shape of its hull is nearly lost behind the glow of its eleven ion turbine engines.
Coming soon to X-Wing, the Tantive IV Expansion Pack allows you to command the starship that first hooked us into the greatest space opera of all time!
Designed for use in Cinematic Play and the new Epic tournament format, the Tantive IV miniature doesn’t match the 1/270 scale shared by those starships legal within the game’s standard tournament format. Instead, this carefully detailed and pre-painted miniature is sculpted at a relative scale that feels good on the tabletop, alongside the game’s starfighters and other huge ships. In addition to the miniature, the expansion features new missions that promote deeply thematic play experiences, whether played individually or linked into a larger campaign, and Imperial players will have their chance to try to capture this notorious Rebel blockade runner.
The Tantive IV won’t be legal for standard tournaments, but you’ll be able to bring it to battle in both the Cinematic Play and Epic tournament format. Furthermore, you’ll gain the opportunity to crew it with the indomitable Rebel hero, Leia Organa!
Rebel Transport
“The first transport is away.”
–Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
When the Empire launched a massive assault against the Rebellion’s Echo Base, it dealt the Rebel Alliance a tremendous blow. Still, the Rebellion’s losses could have been much greater. They were lucky to escape with the majority of their command structure intact, and the very fact the Rebellion was able to continue its liberation efforts after the battle owed much to the GR-75 medium transport and the role it played during the famous evacuation effort.
With new rules, one Rebel transport miniature, one X-wing miniature with an alternate paint scheme, and a wealth of new ship cards, upgrades, and missions, the Rebel Transport Expansion Pack allows you to recreate the drama of the Rebellion’s desperate escape from Hoth.
Like the Tantive IV, the Rebel transport is too large for standard tournament play. Smaller than the CR90 corvette, the GR-75 medium transport is nonetheless large enough to dwarf its starfighter escorts. Even though the Rebel transport is depicted at a scale that allows you to maneuver it in battle, it is still so large that it comes with multiple new damage decks to track hits against different sections of its hull.
I thoroughly enjoy the kind of people who attend Gen Con, even though they tend not to be intensely social, or politically active. For them, playing those types of games are done for the same reason I do it, to preserve their mind in a rebellion against a society that looks down on those who are “White and Nerdy,” or otherwise, those who wish to think, and be genuinely good people. I have seldom encountered another person who attends Gen Con regularly and spends their spare time playing games like this to be overtly “bad,” or “malicious.” They are genuinely good, as their hobby is “thinking.” These games just give them the mechanism to do so in an entertaining format.
If games like X-Wing Miniatures were not so popular then the game would not be expanding into a large format with the new ships discussed above. So the delight is two-fold when hearing these kinds of announcements. First, it is nice to see creativity permeating our culture in such a positive way. Second, it is nice to see so many people excited about it. It is nice to see people genuinely happy about something that doesn’t involve drugs, sex, or debauchery, but does involve thinking. The demographic of “White and Nerdy” types who love Gen Con, and share with me a passion for X-Wing are a group who at some point will become interested in what is going on in the “outside world.” That time will come when they don’t have money for Gen Con any longer, or have the ability to stay up all night playing X-Wing or The Old Republic. For a government addicted to statism, many of these game players use fantasy strategy to give themselves a vacation away from the types of people who are not “White and Nerdy” and are willing to avoid them to keep the peace. But, when it comes a time that those “White and Nerdy” types can no longer enjoy their leisure time, then the ramifications will not be pleasant for the establishment. The future largest demographic growth sector is not women voters, Latinos, or even African Americans…………it is the “White and Nerdy” types who simply want to be left alone to think, but if prevented, can become the statist’s worst nightmare. It is unwise to ignore them. Because they are smart! And they “think” as a hobby, something that modern politics requires people to avoid.
Mechanisms like these types of games work in tandem with difficult real life strategies because they are essentially “concept” building exercises. As I’ve explained in these pages on previous articles, before any idea in real life can be understood, it must be held as a “concept.” A concept is like a bowl holding water. The bigger the bowl, the more water it holds. If the bowl is too small, it can only hold so much water. If a concept is too small, it cannot hold big ideas or strategies that are required to solve complicated problems. These days, small concepts are advocated by statism so much of society does not have the ability to hold large concepts in their minds. They cannot wrap their thoughts around them. By playing games like X-Wing Miniatures or some other variation of strategy game the practice of “concept building” is exercised allowing a mind to hold larger ideals. This is why these kinds of games are a tremendous benefit to the people who play them, and those who don’t are always at a tactical disadvantage.
NEW ANIMATED SERIES STAR WARS REBELS COMING FALL 2014
May 20, 2013
Production has begun on Star Wars Rebels, an exciting, all-new animated television series based on one of the greatest entertainment franchises of all time. Scheduled to premiere in fall 2014 as a one-hour special telecast on Disney Channel, it will be followed by a series on Disney XD channels around the world.
Leading the development of the series is a creative team of exceptional talent. Screenwriter/producer Simon Kinberg (X-Men: First Class,Sherlock Holmes, Mr. & Mrs. Smith) is an executive producer on Star Wars Rebels and will write the premiere episode. He is joined by Dave Filoni as executive producer, who served as supervising director of the Emmy nominated Star Wars: The Clone Wars since 2008. Executive producer Greg Weisman brings with him a wealth of animation experience with credits such as Young Justice, The Spectacular Spider-Man and Gargoyles.
Gary Marsh, president and chief creative officer, Disney Channels Worldwide, said, “The entire team at Lucasfilm has provided extraordinary creativity and innovation for over three decades, and we’re thrilled to be bringing the expansive and imaginative world of Star Wars to Disney XD’s viewers.”
“I couldn’t be more excited to explore new corners of the Star Wars universe,” said Kathleen Kennedy, president, Lucasfilm. “I think Star Wars Rebels will capture the look, feel and fun that both kids and their parents love about Star Wars.”
The action-filled series is set between the events of Episode III and IV — an era spanning almost two decades never-before explored on-screen.Star Wars Rebels takes place in a time where the Empire is securing its grip on the galaxy and hunting down the last of the Jedi Knights as a fledgling rebellion against the Empire is taking shape. Details about the show are a closely guarded secret at this point.
Star Wars Rebels will be produced by Lucasfilm Animation, featuring many of the key talents that made Star Wars: The Clone Wars. Fans attending Star Wars Celebration Europe will be the first to get an exclusive look at the new series. Casting will be announced at a later date. More information about this developing project will be found on StarWars.com and on Facebook at facebook.com/starwarsrebels.
Every year I look forward to the Star Wars weekends at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. It is one of the wonderful opportunities for philosophy, fantasy, ingenuity and the best aspects of human nature to converge at a palace of capitalism and celebrate the existence of one of the greatest stories of all time. I love the energy, optimism, and opportunity that Star Wars offers individuals and families everywhere. Many die-hard Star Wars fans converge every year in the middle of May to attend the fabulous Star WarsWeekend events. For those who cannot attend, I offer these clips from the spectacle taken during the opening day ceremonies on Friday, May 17, 2013.
Sit back, grab a snack and enjoy the fun and pleasure of entertainment shown in the videos below!
Fear is the most abused emotion that potential dictators use to advance their positions. Anytime an individual or organization of any kind uses fear to attempt to move emotions into seeing their point of view, their argument will be a weak one that contains hidden intentions deceitful in nature. Overcoming fear is therefore the primary task of any potential modern-day hero and is one of the most prevalent themes in my most recent novel, Tail of the Dragon. The main character Rick Stevens is a man who has incredible command of fear, and is motivated to respond more aggressively when the strategy of fear is thrown in his direction by forces who seek to rule him. In order to write about such a character I felt I needed to face down any fears that might linger in my own mind, so I organized a motorcycle trip with my wife and son-in-law across southern Ohio to the extremely haunted Moonville Tunnel in Vinton County, to do some rappelling off that ghost town monument. Later, we planned to head down to Point Pleasant, West Virginia to visit the 8th Annual Mothman Festival, which is an outdoor exhibition of fanfare to celebrate the framed monster which terrorized the citizens there in the 1966. For me, one of the scariest books I’ve ever read was the Mothman Prophesies by John Keel which was made into a Richard Gere film many years after the publication. The non-fiction book was truly alarming stuff and captures wonderfully the very mysterious happenings that occur routinely in southeastern Ohio, where monsters, murders, and supernatural events are rather commonplace. These endeavors lead to the video below which is Part VI of The Making of Tail of the Dragon the novel. Click here to see the previous installment.
When we left early on a chilly September morning in Ohio with the tinge of autumn in the air, we knew it would be the last major motorcycle trip of the year as the weather was simply getting too cold for long distance riding. I was nearly finished with the manuscript of Tail of the Dragon and was set to turn it into the publisher by Christmas of that year. Even though I had a formal invite to publish the book, I still had to go through the process of having it accepted out of nearly 2000 other submissions, so it was not a done deal at the time. American Book only publishes roughly 80 titles a year, so the odds were still against the novel being put into print. After all the work I had done on the book over the summer and all the travel which preceded this supernatural journey which has been chronicled in previous “Making Of” submissions, there was a good chance that Tail of the Dragon would not make it through the publication process. So the anxiety was mounting for me. It is one thing to engage in a creative process, which is what I had been doing, and enjoying. It is quite another to begin thinking of such endeavors as a business enterprise, which was the phase that I was at. I still needed to nail down some of the character traits of Rick Stevens fearlessness, which was difficult to do with the anxiety I was feeling over the publication of the book, so I needed an “EXTREME” situation to bring my own mind out of it. So my son-in-law and I decided to tackle several supernatural themes on a long day trip to the east.
Rappelling at Moonville is something my family had always wanted to do. The tunnel itself cuts through a steep hillside and runs through where the ghost town used to reside. It’s an interesting engineering feat for a group of people who built the tunnel during the period of the Civil War. The town Moonville lived and died due to the mining of iron for the war, as the area was rich with iron mines which appear to be connected to the supernatural happenings—something to do with effect on gravitational waves and how the mind perceives them. I would attribute this heavy concentration of iron to the heavy reporting of ghosts in the buildings at Ohio University at Athens just a few miles away, and the swarm of Big Foot sightings that occur in the area. I am happy with the footage I was able to get during the event. It takes viewers on an interesting journey across the face of the tunnel in a way that only a rope can provide. It really gives an appreciation for how human beings were able to create such a tunnel in the first place before modern excavating equipment large enough for a train to travel through. The area at the time of Moonville’s rise to power was one of the most remote places in The United States, yet people built the large tunnel essentially by hand.
For whatever the reason, whether by reputation, or some chemical reaction in the brain caused by the iron deep in the ground, or actual inter-dimensional beings that use such places as points to and from other planes of reality, Moonville is an intimidating place. On a previous visit my family took to Moonville around midnight, we found local college kids camped out in the tunnel attempting to brave their fears against the supernatural with collective reassurance and drugs. They dealt with that subtle hostility of the place with chemical evasion and communal reassurance. But on our motorcycle trip to Moonville with all our equipment packed on the back of our bikes, we were pretty much alone. We had the tunnel to ourselves with only the ghosts to witness our time there. That made rappelling off the tunnel a unique experience that is not easily duplicated.
We had no obvious paranormal encounters on this visit to the Mooville Tunnel. Other than the obvious uneasy feeling that accompanies the place, it was a peaceful and beautiful day. The ride to the tunnel was long, and cold as the morning air had been very chilly, in the lower 40s. My wife stayed cold well into the afternoon. After a few hours of rappelling my son-in-law and I warmed up and began to sweat a bit. By mid-afternoon, the temperature was up to the mid-seventies as we found our motorcycles where we had parked them along the dirt road in Vinton County from the short hike into the hills to the tunnel entrance. The railroad which ran through the area is now long gone as the only real relic from the period is the tunnel and some dilapidated old railroad bridges that travel west across a swampy lowland. Our next destination was the Mothman Festival at Point Pleasant, West Virginia about an hour’s drive to the south.
We arrived to a town packed to the rim with people coming to see the various paranormal oriented exhibits celebrating the haunting of the mysterious Mothman who appeared there the year leading up to a major bridge collapse that killed many from the town. The Mothman terrorized members of Point Pleasant solidly for 13 months up to the bridge collapse. It is an excellent example of one of the largest group hauntings in American history. For me, coming to the actual site was a way to put sights and smells to the words painted on my mind from that terrifying book, which is excellent. The book, unlike the Richard Gere film, went even further than just the strange Mothman creature into the realm of the paranormal. In the book, Keel covered many mysterious elements that ended up becoming major motion pictures elsewhere. The movie Men in Black produced by Steven Spielberg was a comedy look at an actual phenomena that took place in Point Pleasant during the Mothman huantings, leaving many to wonder who the government looking Men in Black really were. They behaved like FBI, or CIA agents, but proved to be something else altogether. Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and appears to have read TheMothman Prophesies in his youth, because his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind seemed deeply inspired by The Mothman Prophesies. Close Encounters took place on the Indiana, Ohio border in the same general region of the country and to this day, no filmmaker has made a better movie on the subject of unidentified flying object sightings than Spielberg’s Close Encounters. Much of activity that occurred in Close Encounters actually happened at Point Pleasant during the Mothman hauntings. For a solid year between 1966 to 1967, journalist John Keel chronicled some of the craziest paranormal activity ever recorded in one area with the exception of Area 51. I always believed that some of the U.F.O. activity was from experimental aircraft at the relatively nearby Wright Patterson Air Force Base, but only a few of The Mothman Prophesies U.F.O. sightings could be explained away with experimental aircraft. There seems to be more to those stories that defy observable explanation at this current time.
Whatever it was, the entire town has found a way to relieve their tension over those events, and that is to have a festival every September to celebrate the strange happenings. For me, it was haunting to look at the actual buildings and locations first hand as I read about them in the book. It was difficult to imagine why such a remote place had provoked so much paranormal activity, but it had. To me the huantings at Moonville and Point Pleasant over a long period of time had common elements that were directly related to the region. There is something dark and menacing in those places. The locals don’t notice it much as they have only ever known such fear present in their lives. But for those who come from outside that area, the tinge is easy to detect. Standing on the banks of the river at the Mothman Festival I spoke with my son-in-law about TheYellow Creek Massacre which was a brutal killing of several Mingos by Virginia frontiersmen on April 30, 1774 which was one of the main incidents that contributed to Lord Dunmore’s War. That terrible incident occurred nearly where we were standing as outlined in a favorite book of ours, The Frontiersman by Allen Eckert.
Chief Logan was a good friend of the English-speaking settlers in the region and was away on a hunt but his wife Mellana, his brother Taylaynee, Taylaynee’s son Molnah, and Taylaynee’s sister Koonay were among the slain. Koonay was also the wife of John Gibson a prominent trader between the English and various Native American groups who at the time of the massacre was on a trading expedition to the Shawnee.
The Greathouse group lured the Mingo group under Taylaynee into their camp with a promise of liquor and sport. Then they sprung an ambush on the Mingos and shot them dead. After the killings many of the bodies were mutilated. In a particular brutal killing Jacob Greathouse ripped open Koonay’s abdomen and removed and scalped her unborn son. The only member of the first group who was not killed was Koonay’s two-year-old daughter who was eventually returned to the care of her father, John Gibson, after she had for a time been in the care of William Crawford. To me, the coincidence between the two events, the killing of the Mingo group in 1774 and the terrible events of the Mothman haunting in 1966 along with all the crazy UFO sightings and the mysterious Men in Black were somehow connected. Such a concentration of strange events in the same area not to mention the collapse of the Silver Bridge right before Christmas at the end of the 13 month Mothman hauntings killing 46 people on December 15th 1967 are more than a coincidence. Fear lives on the banks of the Ohio River in Point Pleasant, West Virginia for reasons that extend deep into human logic and history.
The travel to these places I didn’t expect to solve any of those lingering riddles. However, I did want to get a sense of how Rick Stevens in Tail of the Dragon would deal with ever-present fear, as he contended with a legal system representing the entire country coming after him during the greatest car chase in the history of car chases. I’m not a very skittish person by nature, I am used to a certain amount of ever-present danger. But it is quite something else to put the mind into the kind of situation that Rick Stevens finds himself involved in during the events of my novel. Studying the people of Point Pleasant at the festival, and climbing around in the deep woods of the Moonville Tunnel actually set my mind right on the issue.
We returned home later that evening well before the sun had set. The experience was surreal. We had traveled nearly 400 miles that day yet I was writing that night the final touches of Tail of the Dragon to meet my submission deadlines. The trip had moved so quickly that it seemed like we had never even left that day. My anxiety over that deadline had evaporated after the hard ride realizing that fear is really just a state of mind. My family had stepped over fear and had a nice trip that day in the land of the supernatural. What we discovered was that most of what anyone has to fear is mostly in the mind, and it is easy in such states of consciousness to see how silly it is for society to build their entire civilization on “fear.” Ultimately Rick Stevens in Tail of the Dragon lives his life beyond the grip of fear which infuriates the “fear monger” controllers represented by the police and their puppet master politicians. When Rick stands before a judge in Tail of the Dragon with the threat of life imprisonment for defending himself, he behaves with a level of confidence and fearlessness that is simply unfathomable in modern society. But to tell a story of real freedom in the human mind, it is “fear” that must be overcome, and for Rick Stevens he must deal with the worst of it in Tail of the Dragon.
It is this premise against fear that eventually helped the novel jump out over those thousands of other manuscripts to become published, so the work was well worth it. Fear is the means that is used to control massive portions of the population whether the fear is generated from a supernatural source or a political fear monger. The intent is the same, to control the behavior of individuals away from freedom and toward tyranny. Rick Stevens in Tail of the Dragon is committed to living his life without fear, and this causes him great danger from those who insist that he stay under their control. But like the ghosts of Moonville, Ohio, the real fear that the authorities have to impose on Stevens is only mental. Once it is realized that man is superior to the ideas of the infantile authority driven dictators of politics and power it is soon discovered that real power is really generated among the human race in their ability to generate, or deny fear. If a person develops the ability to live beyond the realm of fear, they will discover how foolish such notions used to be for them, and they will find freedom there to greet them. It is on that side of the mental spectrum that readers are discovering such freedom through the life of Rick Stevens. A life without fear sets the mind into the kind of focus which is rare in the history of mankind, a life that Rick Stevens achieved with a $20 million dollar muscle car in a car chase to end all car chases, in the novel Tail of the Dragon.
Now, here is a clip from one of our previous visits.
The Emperor is coming to the biggest Star Warsparty in Europe, July 26-28, 2013 in Essen, Germany.
Ian McDiarmid, the actor who unforgettably played the evil galactic mastermind and the ultimate villain of the Star Wars Saga, will make a rare convention appearance at Star Wars Celebration Europe, appearing on-stage and signing autographs.
This summer’s event will mark the first Celebration in Europe at which the highly sought-after actor will appear to sign autographs and chat on the Celebration Stage, offering attendees a rare opportunity to hear about the making of Star Wars from his perspective.
In 1983, McDiarmid embodied the full depth of the dark side as the Emperor in Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi, his face hidden under intensive makeup and his eyes concealed behind yellow contact lenses. When his true face was revealed as the apparently kind and helpful Senator Palpatine in Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace (1999), he projected a different kind of evil – a subtle manipulator of galactic events, a villain hidden in plain sight. As the prequels progressed, so too did Palpatine’s plans until finally, in Revenge of the Sith (2005), McDiarmid got to play evil at its fullest, and revealed the true power of Darth Sidious.
Star Wars Celebrations bring fans of all ages together, from all points of the globe, to celebrate the pop-culture phenomenon that is Star Wars. From its young fans of Star Wars: The Clone Wars to die-hards fueled by the nostalgia for the original Star Wars trilogy; curious, casual followers; gamers, readers, costumers or collectors — there’s something for everyone at Celebration.
Ahsoka, one of the premier Jedi Knights who has defended the Old Republic valiantly has been set up by the mysterious unseen actions of a Sith Lord, which isn’t revealed fully until the actions in the feature film Revenge of the Sith, which was released by Lucasfilm into movie theaters in 2005.
The shocking finale to Season 5 of Star Wars: The Clone Wars has arrived, with major revelations that will leave characters forever changed. Ahsoka is wrongly accused for sedition and murder, and is to be prosecuted in the High Courts of the Galactic Republic by a zealous Admiral Tarkin. Seemingly abandoned, Ahsoka’s last hope lies in Anakin Skywalker, who hunts the Coruscant underworld for the real murderer in “The Wrong Jedi,” Saturday, March 2nd at 9:30am ET/PT on Cartoon Network.
This episode – the culmination of five years of development of Ahsoka Tano’s character and her relationship with Anakin – is personally helmed by Dave Filoni, who serves as episodic director in addition to being the supervising director for the series. Underscoring the significance of the finale, composer Kevin Kiner arranged an orchestral score for this episode to better resemble the full, classical score found in the Star Wars feature films.
The episode they spent so much time talking about in the Google Meeting is called The Lawless. It was quite spectacular. It’s hard to believe that Dave and his crew was able to cover such a large expanse of story in just over 20 minutes, but the results are exceptional by any standard of cinema endeavor. I hope Star Wars: Clone Wars sticks around for a while, because after 5 years of broadcasting, they are every bit as good if not better than when they first aired in the late summer of 2008 with the feature film of the same name. Dave Filoni is a wonderful Star Wars director that in the context of history will give J.J. Abrams a run for his money in the magic and lore that has become the Star Wars Mythology. I am looking forward to many more future episodes so I can watch them with my grandson and introduce him to such a vast wilderness of ideas that is Star Wars in a morality play that is unequaled in the history of the world.
The Overmanwarrior 