New Members Introduction

Thanks!

 

welcome to you too, @heatersintheocean!
looks like you're already finding your way around!
how are you enjoying the new canon EU?

 

Thanks! Glad to be here!

 

Oh, thank you, guys! Or in my mother language: Vielen lieben Dank

From a new one to a new one: Welcome here! Can I ask you, what your point against SW was before High School? Why didn't you like it? That is really interesting for me...

 

Well, I remember some kids in a grade higher than me bringing the VHS tape in and watching and totally geeking out. And I was young and just didn't get it. It looked stupid. None of my friends were into it either. Then starting Junior High I met a new friend who was totally into and then I met more friends that were into it. So I gave it another tried and loved it! And then the Special Editions came out and then news of the Prequels so I joined the fandom and never left!

 

Hi everyone! My name is Kelsey and I'm from Pennsylvania.

I've been a fan of Star Wars for only a few years. Starting with The Force Awakens. Which I saw for the first time in theaters in January of 2016.

Ever since that amazing first experience I've been very interested in learning as much as I can about the history of Star Wars. Although I still need to sit down and watch the original trilogy...

Hope to enjoy my time here! This will be my first time in a Star Wars fan forum.

 

Thank you very much!

 

I never did introduce myself properly, so I suppose I shall do so now.

My name is the same as my username.
I'm rounding the corner to the 40's, married, and have 2 daughters.
I live in Alaska. I have lived in Alaska for most of my life.
I've gone to almost every state in the continental United States, and I've lived in South Korea for a year.

I grew up in the 80's and 90's so New Wave, Pop, Heavy Metal, Hip Hop, and Punk Rock all were regular parts of my culture.
So was film. Film was the coolest dream job to work towards growing up. Everyone that I knew was either trying to work on getting into music, or film.
I grew up on an island; Kodiak. So our community circle was small, and close. We ended up typically doing things as groups.
We didn't have a multimedia lab, for example, or any computer classes. No way to practice film.
So one of the guys' Dad worked at the borough, and swindled a deal to get his Dad to draft a program for all of us that was effectively a college course on lone with $100,000 grant for resources, and borrowed the website development professor from the local college as a teacher.
Since no one in charge of the class officially knew what was needed for the class, or how to even go about teaching the class, our rag-tag troop basically just ordered a large media supply book and went through ordering all of the computers, software, and camera equipment that we thought would probably be required.
Then we just did whatever we wanted to do as long as we had a finished product of some kind by the end of the year.

It was purely exploratory for the first couple of years, and then those of us from the first couple of years turned around as "assistants" in the last of our years because we could outline what made sense to teach new folks better through first hand knowledge.
So it more or less became a fluid workshop style and it's where we bit our teeth for the first time into serious analytical consumption of the film industry.

I never assumed I would be doing anything other than working behind a camera growing up. I was a bit shocked when I found myself making a decision to walk away from that path, but it ultimately made sense, due to meeting my wonderful wife and paying attention to the idea of good return on investment from a job (gearing up and pushing into camera work doesn't start off very charming, and it doesn't pay very consistently or greatly...really, ever, and you're gone a lot).

So I left it behind and took a different path.
It's still in my heart, however, and always has been since the first time I saw Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark in the theaters and realized the characters on the screen weren't like animations; they were real people and there was a whole physical process going on to make that image beyond someone drawing it with some device (basically, as a little kid I thought live action film was basically what we would call CGI live-action today. I didn't think of computers, but I just thought that's what was going on somehow). After that, it was buying every tape and book that I could get a copy of regarding the making of Star Wars.

Outside of film, I also dabbled in Biblical exegesis and textual analysis for a couple of decades until I was satisfied anthropologically with nagging questions - consequently living with some Greek Orthodox monks for about a year or so along the way.
I started a comic book and grabbed two friends to write and color, got a publisher, got screwed out of my control because I was an idiot 18 something year old who didn't read or think contracts through very well, ended up in a stalemate with the publisher, and quit. The publisher tried to find an outside artist to follow up but every attempt lacked the spark that I was bringing to the character's feel...which makes sense because they were out of my head.
20 years later, I finally received the rights back in full after the publisher finally lost interest in trying to push them into use.
Unfortunately, I don't have the energy or passion anymore to draw comics - maybe one day off in the distance future.
I also played in a few punk rock bands as the song writer and rhythm guitarist, and that bloomed into a general self-education of music theory and history, and still is my favorite hobby today. Though these days, I do everything digitally and work on more fleshed out compositions that fuse EDM, New Wave, and Punk Rock formats into a merger of sorts, while at the same time I love experimenting as well as attempting varieties of symphonic composition with a digital combination.
I dabbled in MMORPG's as one of the conceptual and logical game designer's (basically math and logical outline of the mechanical rules of the system) for a start up company that went bust within a year of the game's launch of production, but meh. I got paid a small bit, and it was an interesting ride and I learned that I don't want to do that as a job. lol

For fun, I do things like make excel programs for music theory analysis, construct formulas to improve music streaming audio regulation quality, analyse data related to the composition of atoms and stars and draft comparisons between the two sets of data, paint occasionally, make catapults with my daughters, read things on the history of science, counterpoint music theory, quantum physics of the early 30's, books on Samaria, Hattusa, Israel and Judah, etc... basically history in that region, and here and there work on practicing my screenplay skills (which I would rate...meh-ish currently).

I work for a cable company as an network maintenance change analyst - basically means you look at everything the company does for maintenance and try to spot problems with the plans. It's a pretty nice gig. Cheap service, decent medical, salary wage, banker's hours, 2.5 days leave a month. I'm not complaining.

Shows we currently watch are things like Sherlock, rewatching Murder She Wrote and TNG sometimes, The Librarians, The Good Place, Stranger Things, Murdoch Mysteries...basically things that make you think or spark the imagination without being too melodramatic and stress-filled with nonsense.

Other than that, not much.
Just chilling around enjoying Star Wars when they come along.

Here's pictures.

My wife and I at the lake.


My daughter's and I starting the catapult build (it was about 3 foot high).


Cheers,
Jayson

 

Haha!
I do tend to write long-winded. Sorry about that.

Cheers,
Jayson

 

It was very educational.

I was fine with everything right up until a Priest visited and we got training on proper greetings.
I'm not really capable of bowing the knee; it's just something that doesn't make intuitive sense for me, so kissing a ring because another human is supposed to be special in some manner wasn't possible.
He got to me in the line of greeting and I just reached out, shook his hand, and greeted him politely like I do everyone else.
He didn't seem to mind one way or the other, but the monks about had a heart attack, and I got a talking to afterwards.

I just shrugged and pointed out that it's a good thing I'm not a monk or a part of the church in any way - I was just a guy living with them and taking advantage of that opportunity to read through their library.

Outside of that, it was really interesting. I definitely found that if I ever hit a point where life fell apart and I wanted to pull a Luke Skywalker Ahch-To move, I'd be pretty comfortable just going off to a monastery and pretending that I believed in their ideas (I'm what's called an apatheist - meaning, I don't care about the gods; I'm more interested in how humans react to believing in gods than the gods themselves).

It was a very peaceful life style, that's for sure. In many respects it was quite a bit like the military. The primary difference was the physical exercise and the notion of combat, but daily life was pretty similar in that in both experiences I didn't have to think much about the responsibilities of normal life as all of those concerns were facilitated to an easy level or entirely handled for me. All I had to do, really, in both life styles was show up, follow along, and go about my own hobbies when there was time.

It did help push me toward a perspective that monastic life isn't a solution to any idea of 'balance' by my measure because any 'peace' achieved in that way is done so on Life-Lite mode. You're not really immersed in regular human life. You've pulled out of it, shut everything off but the most basic essentials for life; attachments are just not there. You're not stressing about taxes, bills, mortgages, children, etc...
I ended up with a philosophy that true balance can only be achieved through immersion, not through detachment, as how can wholeness be considered attained if it was achieved through a partitioned version of typical human existence?
I could probably find wholeness, balance, and peace on the moon rather easily, but that's not really a challenge.

Being a spouse, parent, and wrapped up in the world of business and finding wholeness, balance, and peace - that's an accomplishment.


Nice to see a screenwriter!
I'm not a very good one. I'm far better at the conceptual layer, world building, and editing other people's screenplays than I am at writing my own.
My fall out is always dialogue. I can write dialogue for other people's characters, for some reason, but if I'm creating everything from scratch...phew....it's rough going. My dialogue is pretty wooden.

I've got one story idea simmering. I'm trying to brush up my skills before moving it up further as it's a bit big of a story concept to wield, and involves managing fantasy and science fiction concepts alongside ancient bronze age world-view philosophies in an attempt to rephrase those world views in a way more palatable to the modern mind - mainly because I think the ideas I'm working off of are fascinatingly different and wrapping your head around such different ways of seeing the world ontologically is pretty provocative. But it'll be a while before I think I'm up to speed enough for that endeavor.
For the time-being, I'm picking away at rewriting ANH for practice. What I've done is challenged myself to rewrite it without the first act, so that it's only a 2 act screenplay, and bump up Luke and Leia's value and aptitude in the show at the same time.
Not because the story needs it; just because it's a good exercise.

Cheers!
Jayson

 

Can Somebody Please Explain To Me How The Leveling Up System Works On This Website?

 

the more you post and the more positive ratings you accrue, the more credits you get (and badge, titles. etc.). : D

 

Hi! I'm so glad to be here. This seems like a really nice community, and I haven't yet seen any of the toxicity that I often find online.

I'm a long-time Star Wars fan, though for me Star Wars started as something that my Dad shared with me. Now I get to share it with my kids. I think my oldest likes it mostly because I do (she's very much a people pleaser). But she always loves watching it with me at the very least. My middle child says she doesn't like it but I think she's just being contrary (she likes to do that). My youngest son has a crush on Asokha, and he generally likes the movies as well.