Despite being woefully behind on the Star Wars transmedia juggernaut, I decided to watch the live-action Ahsoka series this week. While I haven’t seen the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars or Star Wars Rebels, which provide the major narrative threads for Ahsoka, I’ve kept up enough with the plot points tangentially (sometimes via LEGO) to respect the characterological mining and intertextual connections that make Ahsoka an interesting story that also does a lot of fan service.
And, I don’t mean fan service in a negative way. The animated stories that provide the foundation for this new live-action series are what kept the Star Wars universe alive for a lot of fans and introduced that universe to a new set of fans. Star Wars might not have have needed an animated lifeline in the same way that Star Trek did in the 1970s, but the animated stories and the fact that it was created forthrightly as canon shows how live-action and animation can both do the heavy lifting of transmedia storytelling of such an important cultural franchise as is Star Wars.
When I was walking past this mausoleum in Green-Wood Cemetery last month–a mausoleum that I had passed many times over the past two years–I did a double take, because I thought there was a sculpture in the gable vent that I hadn’t noticed before. What I thought was a stone carving was instead a cute creature–a rascally raccoon enjoying the sun on a mild day from the safety of his hidey-hole in a stone structure, lacking context, is akin to a wee mammal’s mansion. Or, repurposing William Gibson’s aphorism, the raccoon “finds its own use for things.”
I have two big problems. One is a Kenner 1979 Millennium Falcon, which is 22″ long and a little over three pounds. The other is the much larger Hasbro 2008 Legacy Collection Millennium, which is 32″ long and weighs 15 pounds. Living with these hunks of junk in a small Brooklyn apartment presents a problem–where to put them?
For awhile, I’ve had two 4′ desks in an L-shape configuration. One is my ancient IKEA 47″ x 24″ artificial wood with metal legs desk, which had been holding the Falcons. The other is a Costco 48″ folding plastic desk, which I had setup to use my computer and laptop on. I wanted to put the Costco desk away to free up some living room floor space, so I thought about adding a shelf to the Ikea desk would be the solution.
I used to have a series of lightweight shelves on my Ikea desk to display LEGO sets, which I wrote about here. I discarded those when we moved from Carroll Gardens to Park Slope, which is fine as they were not wide enough or strong enough to support the two Falcons.
I already had screws, brackets, and support plates. I also had a 4″ x 12″ x 1″ board that I had used to extend the IKEA desk’s table top for lightweight objects. I took this board off the IKEA desk and intended to use it as my new shelf.
What remained needing were two supports for the shelf. Yesterday, I walked to the Brooklyn Lowes to buy two 2″ x 4″ x 2′ studs (total $4) for the shelf supports.
The corners of the IKEA desk are more substantial to support the installation of its four legs. Therefore, I wanted to mount the shelf’s two supports through that particle board instead of the weaker honeycomb core of the desk top. I drilled pilot holes 3/4″ from either side of the desk top at 1″ and 2 1/2″ from the back of the desk top to correspond with the pilot holes I centered on the 2″ x 4″ supports at the same measurements. I drove 3″ deck screws from the bottom of the desk top into the bottom of the 2″ x 4″ shelf supports.
I provided extra support with a flat metal plate on the back and an L-shaped bracket on the front.
Taking the shelf, I measured and drilled pilot holes on its back end at 1 1/4″ from either side at 1″ and 2 1/2″. The shelf is 48″ long but the desk is only 47″ long, so the shelf hangs over its supports by 1/2″ on either side. To secure the shelf to the supports, I drove 1 7/8″ deck screws through the shelf into the support from the top.
I reinforced the shelf with a metal bracket on the back of each support and an L-shaped support on the inside under the shelf.
I had to slide Y’s electric piano over an inch to give my shelf about 1/2″ clearance from my Ray “Bones” Rodriguez Powell-Peralta skateboard hanging on the wall.
Looking at the “BIG” 2008 Millennium Falcon on the shelf, you can see that the landing gear comfortably fit on the 12″ (11 1/4″ actual) shelf when positioned longways. As you can see in the first photo on this post, the smaller 1979 Falcon can fit in any orientation and currently facing toward the front of the desk.
I’ll keep an eye on the shelf to see if it needs any additional support on the front with heavy duty shelf brackets. It was already warped as shown above. I positioned the warp side up, so it might not need any further work.
If you decide to build a similar back-mounted shelf on a lightweight desk like my IKEA one, be aware that the desk’s weight might not be enough to counterbalance the weight of objects that you put on the shelf, leading it to fall over backwards (if it isn’t positioned against a wall to halt it’s movement).
In NYC, I suppose desks and shelves are like buildings–if you want more space, you gotta go up!
I was taking photos of objects on my desk and this configuration of Little My and The Groke from Tove Jannsen’s Moomin standing in front of Fox Mulder’s UFO poster from The X-Files gave me a chuckle. I thought, if only there had been a “The Moomins and the UFO” book. A quick Google search reminded me that there had been an episode of the Japanese 1990-1991 Moomin anime in which UFOs visited Moominvalley titled “A Close Encounter With Aliens.” A child alien visits, officialdom searches for him, the Moomin characters discover his technology, Moominmama is accidentally shrunk, Stinky steals the shrink ray machine, it is destroyed, and the child alien’s parents show up to collect their little one and set things right. I want to believe (in Moominvalley).
I’m very happy to announce the launch of a new open educational resource (OER) that I’ve been working on for awhile!
It’s called Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT). It’s over 60,000 words and includes additional resources that can be helpful for readers, students, and instructors.
YASFT is released under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Creative Commons License. It’s freely available to be read as it is. However, if anyone would like to use it in another way, there are licensing terms that must be followed: “This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.”
You can find YASFT under the Teaching menu above or directly here.
Its abstract and table of contents are included below.
Abstract
Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook (YASFT) is an open educational resource or OER, meaning it is freely available for anyone to use and learn with. It provides a chronological history of Science Fiction (SF) with an emphasis on literature and film, and it includes other useful resources, such as a glossary of terms, an extensive list of SF definitions, additional resources, a syllabus with hyperlinked readings available online, and video lectures. It tells a story, but not the only story, about SF history. It’s also an experiment in using generative artificial intelligence (AI) to assist with editing a large body of text, in this case over 60,000 words.
Table of Contents
Front Matter What is YASFT? Who made YASFT? Why was YASFT made? Why is it called YASFT? How can YASFT be used? How was YASFT made? Acknowledgements Preface Origins of Science Fiction Early Fantastic Stories Scientific Revolution Age of Enlightenment Romanticism The Gothic Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Science-Saturated Novel Victor Frankenstein’s Hubris Critique of the Age of Enlightenment Tabula Rasa Proto-SF Historical Context Edgar Allan Poe Nathaniel Hawthorne Jules Verne H. G. Wells E. M. Forster Pulp SF Historical Context Overview of Pulp SF Hugo Gernsback E. E. “Doc” Smith C. L. Moore Edgar Rice Burroughs H. P. Lovecraft SF Film Serials of the 1930s and 1940s Buck Rogers Flash Gordon Golden Age SF Historical Context Overview of Golden Age SF John W. Campbell, Jr. Isaac Asimov Ray Bradbury Robert A. Heinlein Frank Herbert Tom Godwin SF Film Through the 1950s Film vs. Literature Early SF Film 1950s SF Film Boom Forbidden Planet New Wave SF Historical Context Overview of New Wave SF J.G. Ballard Harlan Ellison Philip K. Dick Samuel R. Delany Star Trek “The City on the Edge of Forever” Feminist SF Historical Context Beginnings of Feminist SF Definitions of Feminist SF Joanna Russ Marge Piercy Pamela Zoline James Tiptree, Jr. Ursula K. Le Guin Octavia E. Butler Afrofuturism Steven Barnes Tananarive Due Nalo Hopkinson Nnedi Okorafor Cyberpunk Historical Context Coining the Cyberpunk Term Cyberpunk Characteristics William Gibson Sprawl Trilogy and Stories Hermes 2000 and Floppy Disk eBooks The X-Files, “Kill Switch” Bruce Sterling Pat Cadigan Contemporary Science Fiction Historical Context Ted Chiang N. K. Jemisin Cory Doctorow Charlie Jane Anders Martha Wells Mary Robinette Kowal Ken Liu R. F. Kuang SF Film from 1960 Onward 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Global Perspective: Taiwanese SF Brief Taiwanese History Taiwanese SF Overview Taiwanese Fandom Cultural Comparisons Issues with Translation How to Keep Up With Science Fiction Appendices Appendix 1: Glossary of Science Fiction Terms Appendix 2: Chronological List of SF Definitions of Science Fiction with MLA Citations Appendix 3: Further Reading Textbooks Readers Teaching Online Research Appendix 4: Sample Syllabus with Hyperlinked Readings Appendix 5: Lecture Videos Appendix 6: Version History
