I’ve spent a couple of hours trawling through Ralph McQuarrie‘s concept art for the original Star Wars trilogy. Yesterday, McQuarrie passed away, leaving behind a legacy that’s impossible to crop for a featured image on this post.
I mean, I could open up the image editor and chop it down to a 750×200 bastardisation, but would you want to? Click on that top image for the full view of the Skywalker/Vader showdown from The Empire Strikes Back. Spend a little time on Google Images. It’ll be worth it.
Image of the Week
It was a week of good images (I found this one inordinately funny), but our winner is a visual pitch for Back to the Future IV, co-starring Will Smith.
This is heavy.
Found on reddit, from an original photo-manipulation found in this gallery.
CSICON Weekly Round-Up
Before we start, you might want to bake up some treats. Here’s a link for some inspiration, and I’ll see you back here in about fourteen hours when they’re done.
- For a few days there’s been a couple of new faces here in the CSICON helicarrier. Turns out they’re the How to Murder Time guys, and they’ve joined up with CSICON as part of the plan for world domination. I mean decimation. No, wait, the first thing. Ignore the second one.
- Jack recounted how Capcom’s beat-em-up reality show got ugly, like, really ugly. Way to represent the geek crowd, guys.
- The first clip from The Hunger Games was released this week, causing great discomfort to pigs, apples, hedonistic gamesmasters and those among us who suddenly remembered Jennifer Lawrence is playing a sixteen-year-old.
- Reviews happened, as well: Black Mirror (awesome), DC Nation (varied), and Touch (about as good as a nice, cold bottle of Fanta; take from that what you will).
- Just what the hell is that giant flying snake in the Avengers (Assemble) trailer? Gail Simone suggested it was Galactus’s boner, but Breki had a more… plausible suggestion.
- And for our regulars, this week’s Tuesday Trope was on alternate universes and somehow I didn’t mention Fringe, while Anna took a look at the best body-swapping plots for Friday Five without foaming at the mouth or having a rage blackout at the mention of Lindsey Lohan. This week has been a restrained one for the CSICON lot.
Sunday Afternoon Reading
- Could brain-training games be used to treat schizophrenia? Erika Check Hayden weighs up the evidence for Nature.
- Do our relationships with our smartphones change what it means to be human? An interesting essay on artificial intelligence, IRL connectivity and the seeds of transhumanism in the First World.
- Finally, Discover Magazine offers tips on how to survive the end of the universe, assuming you’ve survived the trillions of years between now and then. One problem not addressed: where to put your record-breaking collection of letters from the Queen?
Thought For The Week
This week, one of the candidates for the next President of the Most Powerful Country on the Planet spent three days calling his constituents “sluts” and asking if he can watch them have sex. Rush Limbaugh claims he was trying to be ‘humorous’ with his terrible comments. With support for the Democrats in the minority, I give it less than two years before we’re all living in a dystopian future. Not even the fun Mad Max kind of dystopia. I’m talking The Handmaid’s Tale.
It’s one of those rare instances where the UK gets to be the obnoxious hipster nation of the UN, because here, we’ve been on the slope towards a dystopian society for a few years. It’s a restrained, stiff-upper-lip kind of oppression as opposed to the yee-haw brand-name insanity you get in the States, certainly, but an awfulness nonetheless.
We’ve had the boot stomping on our collective face since before it was cool.