Tuesday, November 20, 2007
A strange thought by this blog's standards.
Apparently Cinderella's stepmother in the Disney film was named Lady Tremaine. Any relation to the head of the Imperial Inquisition in Star Wars?
On Zelda precursors...
A passing thought. You sometimes hear people speak of Ridley Scott's Legend as the likeliest immediate precursor to The Legend of Zelda.
These people are, of course, wrong.
(Apologies to Amazon for leeching their bandwidth. :))
These people are, of course, wrong.
(Apologies to Amazon for leeching their bandwidth. :))
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
An explanation for everyone's least favorite sedentary sandworm...
Perhaps the quintessence of everything wrong with Return of the Jedi is the Sarlacc. It's a monstrous creature that comes out of nowhere, goes to nowhere (why is it never mentioned anywhere else in the series?), could never defend itself against a hungry Krayt dragon, has a ridiculous energy-budget problem (like the Matrix, only worse), is all-around ridiculous and incapable of existing, but is still there on the camera, the world's ugliest man-eating antlion, and one of the worst booby-traps in the history of immersive fantastic fiction. What exactly is it within the story, why is it there, and why did the Heroes of Yavin not take the Falcon back and blow it up?
I think I've figured out an explanation for the first two: it's the larval stage of a space slug. (As to the third, I suspect Lucas didn't stop to think about it, as shown by his talking about how putting the new, revised, Special Edition, even-more-like-a-larval-space-slug Sarlacc into more shots of the battle made the scene "more fun." In-universe explanation, I have no idea...)
Consider that space slugs are rare enough to be accounted mythical, at least if the Extended Universe is to be any indication -- at any rate, Han and Leia certainly had no idea what they had just landed in. But why would it go to the trouble of maintaining a breathable atmosphere somewhere around 1 atmospheric pressure, in that case?
The one explanation that really fits -- for the space slug and the Sarlacc both -- is to assume that, kind of following Dune, the "space slugs" were biological terraformers. Their eggs would be dropped on a planet of almost any parameters (thus the ability to survive in pretty much any conditions, such as the void of space and the Dune Sea), they'd hatch into and mature through their sedentary larval stage -- in which their teeth would shift down to the "mouth" position of the Sarlacc and fuse together into space-slug proportions, and the tentacles would, perhaps, remain the same size as they currently were, developing into fine sensors -- the space slug's equivalent of mammalian whiskers.
So, what about the internal atmosphere? It doesn't make any sense for a bio-engineered terraformer to maintain a human-breathable internal atmosphere (with appropriate atmospheric pressure, despite the probable need to keep up an atmospheric overpressure to keep out miscellaneous nastiness), but the space slug in TESB certainly did. This is either for the benefit of hominid passengers, or, more likely, an accident of the terraforming process -- it's releasing breathable atmosphere, so some of it is in the space slug itself.
As to who did the bioengineering, my money's on the Rakata, a very powerful race which eventually turned to evil. The Duinogwuin would also be a candidate for the original genetic engineer; so would the Charon, the Yuuzhan Vong, the Columi, the Qella... There are a large number of ancient species with genetic engineering abilities in the Star Wars universe. (Most of this is the Marvel Comics problem, of course.)
If this is the case, then Jabba might even be throwing his enemies into the most comfortable place on Tatooine -- at least, the only place on the planet with decent humidity and insulation from airborne grit. Food and water supply might become a problem, though... well, were it not for the fleshy walls. (In Soviet Russia, YOU eat SARLACC! Probably doesn't taste like oysters, though. Sci-fi tentacles do not indicate membership in order Mollusca; and the molluscs have dark or zombie-like skin, and suckers on their tentacles -- no living creature has the not-very-useful suckerless tentacles that one sees all the time in sci-fi.)
So, how did it get to Tatooine? Pete Takeshi's theory is that the Anoat asteroid-belt space slug had something to do with it. The only other asteroid belt like Anoat that we see in the Original Trilogy is the ruins of Alderaan; perhaps there was a civilization in Hoth system tens of thousands of years ago, which fell in a war that left Hoth in an enormously long nuclear winter, and Anoat a ruin, stranding a space slug (remember, terraformer) on one of the asteroids there. Its eggs would then have flown off and wandered the universe, and one of them must have splashed down in the Dune Sea not too long ago...
How does it evade predators and dehydration? For the second, remember that these things are designed to be dropped more or less anywhere -- they'd be designed to be reasonably resilient. For the first, and for how it keeps from being buried in the dunes (a fate which would befall it in five seconds flat; after all, sand dunes _move_), it could probably dive into the sand. Remember that it is a larval space slug...
Speaking of which, this implies that a space slug in its intended conditions and in its adult form is more like a sandworm. I wonder whether there would be three stages to a terraformer-worm's life, the sedentary/larval stage, the adult "sandworm" stage, and a post-adult, sedentary "breeding" stage -- so that the giant space slug of TESB was in its third stage, and was thus releasing those eggs that were flying off randomly into the void. A self-perpetuating system along those lines could be handy, making the terraformer worms "fire and forget" if there wasn't any need to use their command centers.
This would also explain where all the oxygen on Tatooine is coming from. Remember how in Dune the sandworms' very strange internal chemical processes released oxygen among other useful chemicals. There's less vegetation on Tatooine than there ever was on Arrakis, and no parallel process occurring to explain Tatooine's breathable atmosphere, leaving us with about one source. Nice worldbuilding, Lucas, not least with how no one ever thought to check. Exactly how scientifically incurious are these people? (But given that a single civilization endured in recognizable form for twenty-five thousand years, this is not the only thing they have little curiosity about.)
As to "gradually digested over a period of a thousand years," who would Jabba have asked? The Jawas. In all probability, they made up a ridiculous story to keep their kids from going too close to the strange thing that landed in the desert; and either they kept repeating it until they believed it themselves, or they told it to Jabba and he didn't think to ask how detailed their information was.
The Extended Universe has more creatures adapted to deep space, and they also get a whole lot of free energy. The "Star Dragons" are the most extreme example, and suggest an operant mechanism up to a point. (Gizzards lined with palladium for cold fusion?)
Update: This is now in TV Tropes' WildMassGuessing for Return of the Jedi. Another merit of this theory: it explains why no one else, of all the very large number of very nasty people in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, ever bothered to throw their prisoners into the Sarlacc: nobody else was too clever for the xenobiologists.
Update 2: And why is the Sarlacc so aggressive? Because it hatched on Tatooine alone, with neither a mommy sandworm nor Rakata technicians with bulldozers to feed it boulders or forests or very large piles of ash or whatever it is that larval sandworms eat. (Energy value is irrelevant -- it generates its own power, remember? -- but structural value is not; it can't grow without sources of protein and, most likely, sources of metal as well. This suggests that anyone eaten by it would be eaten after all -- but that means not-so-gradually digested over a period of a thousand intervals of 7.2 seconds (i.e., a total of two hours). Of course, it's the thought that counts, so Jabba's still going to Jedi Hell; my bet is that his fate involves a very large pile of salt.
(Some structural editing, as well as the new update, 5/14/10. I need to play KOTOR again -- more games need wars among tropical cannibals descended from an ancient dead civilization that thoroughly deserves its deadness.)
I think I've figured out an explanation for the first two: it's the larval stage of a space slug. (As to the third, I suspect Lucas didn't stop to think about it, as shown by his talking about how putting the new, revised, Special Edition, even-more-like-a-larval-space-slug Sarlacc into more shots of the battle made the scene "more fun." In-universe explanation, I have no idea...)
Consider that space slugs are rare enough to be accounted mythical, at least if the Extended Universe is to be any indication -- at any rate, Han and Leia certainly had no idea what they had just landed in. But why would it go to the trouble of maintaining a breathable atmosphere somewhere around 1 atmospheric pressure, in that case?
The one explanation that really fits -- for the space slug and the Sarlacc both -- is to assume that, kind of following Dune, the "space slugs" were biological terraformers. Their eggs would be dropped on a planet of almost any parameters (thus the ability to survive in pretty much any conditions, such as the void of space and the Dune Sea), they'd hatch into and mature through their sedentary larval stage -- in which their teeth would shift down to the "mouth" position of the Sarlacc and fuse together into space-slug proportions, and the tentacles would, perhaps, remain the same size as they currently were, developing into fine sensors -- the space slug's equivalent of mammalian whiskers.
So, what about the internal atmosphere? It doesn't make any sense for a bio-engineered terraformer to maintain a human-breathable internal atmosphere (with appropriate atmospheric pressure, despite the probable need to keep up an atmospheric overpressure to keep out miscellaneous nastiness), but the space slug in TESB certainly did. This is either for the benefit of hominid passengers, or, more likely, an accident of the terraforming process -- it's releasing breathable atmosphere, so some of it is in the space slug itself.
As to who did the bioengineering, my money's on the Rakata, a very powerful race which eventually turned to evil. The Duinogwuin would also be a candidate for the original genetic engineer; so would the Charon, the Yuuzhan Vong, the Columi, the Qella... There are a large number of ancient species with genetic engineering abilities in the Star Wars universe. (Most of this is the Marvel Comics problem, of course.)
If this is the case, then Jabba might even be throwing his enemies into the most comfortable place on Tatooine -- at least, the only place on the planet with decent humidity and insulation from airborne grit. Food and water supply might become a problem, though... well, were it not for the fleshy walls. (In Soviet Russia, YOU eat SARLACC! Probably doesn't taste like oysters, though. Sci-fi tentacles do not indicate membership in order Mollusca; and the molluscs have dark or zombie-like skin, and suckers on their tentacles -- no living creature has the not-very-useful suckerless tentacles that one sees all the time in sci-fi.)
So, how did it get to Tatooine? Pete Takeshi's theory is that the Anoat asteroid-belt space slug had something to do with it. The only other asteroid belt like Anoat that we see in the Original Trilogy is the ruins of Alderaan; perhaps there was a civilization in Hoth system tens of thousands of years ago, which fell in a war that left Hoth in an enormously long nuclear winter, and Anoat a ruin, stranding a space slug (remember, terraformer) on one of the asteroids there. Its eggs would then have flown off and wandered the universe, and one of them must have splashed down in the Dune Sea not too long ago...
How does it evade predators and dehydration? For the second, remember that these things are designed to be dropped more or less anywhere -- they'd be designed to be reasonably resilient. For the first, and for how it keeps from being buried in the dunes (a fate which would befall it in five seconds flat; after all, sand dunes _move_), it could probably dive into the sand. Remember that it is a larval space slug...
Speaking of which, this implies that a space slug in its intended conditions and in its adult form is more like a sandworm. I wonder whether there would be three stages to a terraformer-worm's life, the sedentary/larval stage, the adult "sandworm" stage, and a post-adult, sedentary "breeding" stage -- so that the giant space slug of TESB was in its third stage, and was thus releasing those eggs that were flying off randomly into the void. A self-perpetuating system along those lines could be handy, making the terraformer worms "fire and forget" if there wasn't any need to use their command centers.
This would also explain where all the oxygen on Tatooine is coming from. Remember how in Dune the sandworms' very strange internal chemical processes released oxygen among other useful chemicals. There's less vegetation on Tatooine than there ever was on Arrakis, and no parallel process occurring to explain Tatooine's breathable atmosphere, leaving us with about one source. Nice worldbuilding, Lucas, not least with how no one ever thought to check. Exactly how scientifically incurious are these people? (But given that a single civilization endured in recognizable form for twenty-five thousand years, this is not the only thing they have little curiosity about.)
As to "gradually digested over a period of a thousand years," who would Jabba have asked? The Jawas. In all probability, they made up a ridiculous story to keep their kids from going too close to the strange thing that landed in the desert; and either they kept repeating it until they believed it themselves, or they told it to Jabba and he didn't think to ask how detailed their information was.
The Extended Universe has more creatures adapted to deep space, and they also get a whole lot of free energy. The "Star Dragons" are the most extreme example, and suggest an operant mechanism up to a point. (Gizzards lined with palladium for cold fusion?)
Update: This is now in TV Tropes' WildMassGuessing for Return of the Jedi. Another merit of this theory: it explains why no one else, of all the very large number of very nasty people in the Galaxy Far, Far Away, ever bothered to throw their prisoners into the Sarlacc: nobody else was too clever for the xenobiologists.
Update 2: And why is the Sarlacc so aggressive? Because it hatched on Tatooine alone, with neither a mommy sandworm nor Rakata technicians with bulldozers to feed it boulders or forests or very large piles of ash or whatever it is that larval sandworms eat. (Energy value is irrelevant -- it generates its own power, remember? -- but structural value is not; it can't grow without sources of protein and, most likely, sources of metal as well. This suggests that anyone eaten by it would be eaten after all -- but that means not-so-gradually digested over a period of a thousand intervals of 7.2 seconds (i.e., a total of two hours). Of course, it's the thought that counts, so Jabba's still going to Jedi Hell; my bet is that his fate involves a very large pile of salt.
(Some structural editing, as well as the new update, 5/14/10. I need to play KOTOR again -- more games need wars among tropical cannibals descended from an ancient dead civilization that thoroughly deserves its deadness.)
Saturday, June 30, 2007
Blogger's Search for Meaning
So Blogger has this tool to claim old blogs. And I claimed this one, because it's mine and because it's old.
For the most part, I wanted to make this more of a place where I could objectively and seriously discuss cartoons and other nerdy stuff, while I could leave Spoiler Warning as the place for me to rage and fume. This doesn't really work because:
- It's hard to get objective and/or serious about cartoons or other nerdly stuff.
- I'd like to think I've gotten a little more serious with Spoiler Warning.
- At least when I am not deliberately linking to videos like dramatic chipmunks or really crappy German synth-pop.
- I think I'd like to repurpose this blog as a more collaborative environment for my friends and fellow bloggers to report in. Let's see if I still have any.
- Friends or fellow bloggers? Yes.
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