In the rare bit of news that could blow Hurricane Sandy off the map, Disney announced today that it had purchased Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion—and announced that the company will debut Star War Episode VII in 2015. “It’s now time for me to pass Star Wars on to a new generation of filmmakers,” George Lucas said in the official announcement of the transaction, in what is a substantial understatement, given the creative quality of the prequels. “I’ve always believed that Star Wars could live beyond me, and I thought it was important to set up the transition during my lifetime.”

While this opens up a new chapter in the cinematic development of the Star Wars universe, that doesn’t mean Disney will be flying off into uncharted territory. The Star Wars Expanded Universe includes a huge number of licensed books (not to mention video games, comic books, graphic novels, and animated television series) that lay out the story of the franchise’s main characters, and in some cases, their distant descendants. Given that Disney will need to woo legions of long-term fans who love the larger Star Wars universe and were burned to greater or lesser extents by the awfulness of the prequels, and will certainly want to keep monetizing the expanded universe, I expect they’ll preserve that continuity. The question is just which stories they decide to use as source material. Here are five options:

1. Heir To The Empire: One of the most venerable entries in the Expanded Universe, this series of three novels, also known as the Thrawn trilogy, explore one of the most fascinating problems left behind in the wake of the battle of Yavin: how do you clean up a counterinsurgency that includes highly trained admirals with considerable industrial resources and military hardware at their disposal, not to mention a Dark Jedi? Chock-full of military strategy, major roles for all the core characters, and a romantic foil for Luke Skywalker who isn’t secretly his sister—the awesome former Imperial agent Mara Jade—Heir to the Empire is probably the strongest contender for Episode VII, and Episodes VIII and IX to follow—that is, if you want to stick with the original characters.

2. X-Wing: Rogue Squadron: That said, the smartest thing for this new franchise to do would be to move beyond the core cast Luke and Leia Skywalker and Han Solo. The actors who played them are too old to reprise their roles in storylines set relatively soon after the events of Return of the Jedi, and too iconic to be replaced. But there are a lot of terrific other stories set in the Star Wars universe, and for my money, the best is Michael Stackpole’s X-Wing quartet, which involves Wedge Antilles, a minor character who survived both Death Star runs, setting up a new commando squad of flying aces. The franchise introduced Corran Horn, a Corellian Security Force veteran (basically, a Star Wars cop), who joins the squadron and learns more about his family history, and the forces that make him such a remarkable pilot. It also featured Ysanne Isard, one of the great villains of the Expanded Universe era, a former Imperial agent who seizes control of Coruscant, the Imperial capital planet, and then when she risks losing control of it, wages a biological war on non-human species that can only be fought with an extremely expensive cartelized medicine. It’s still an Imperial-New Republic showdown, but in foregrounding commando skills, conflicts between humans and non-humans, smugglers, and trade wars, the Rogue Squadron books explored strikingly new dynamics and made the Star Wars universe a much richer, more thoughtful place.

3. Yuuzhan Vong: If you want to throw out the conflict between the New Republic and the Empire—by this point in the Expanded Universe a breakaway state called the Imperial Remnant—Disney could tell the long-arc story of the Yuuzhan Vong invasion of the galaxy. A wacky conquering species that worships pain, views mechanical technology as an abomination, and terraforms planets to their needs, the Yuuzhan Vong unites the New Republic and the Empire, explores all sorts of complex new dynamics in the Force, and gets seriously violent and crazy. This franchise could be an amazing match for a monster-builder like Guillermo del Toro or an innovator like District 9 director Neill Blomkamp. But it’s probably too far out of the core Star Wars brand for this to happen.

4. Legacy of the Force: The most conservative choice, but probably also the most sensible one, is probably for Disney to skip forward a generation. This franchise explores the rise of Han and Leia’s twins, Jacen and Jaina Solo, as powerful Jedi Knights in their own right, and stages a very different kind of deadly familial showdown as Jacen’s arrogance leads him to the Dark Side, and Jaina rises as the Sword of the Jedi, the greatest warrior of the order. There are big romances, explorations of Han Solo’s home planet, Corellia, the tragic death of Luke Skywalker’s wife, Mara Jade, and lots of other collective drama. I wouldn’t mind a Legacy of the Force series. But it would be giving away a lot of potential to truly develop the world George Lucas built, with much greater nuance than he lent to the prequels.

5. Indie Star Wars: There is a lot of delightfully weird stuff in the Expanded Universe, including The Courtship of Princess Leia, in which Han finally tries to get it together to put a ring on it, but not without kidnapping, incredibly awful attempts at cooking, and a bunch of Force-sensitive witches with pet Rancors; Children of the Jedi, which literally involves Luke Skywalker having ghost sex; Truce at Bakura, which involves soul-stealing aliens invading the fragile New Republic; and superweapon stories like The Crystal Star and Showdown at Centerpoint. I think, however, we’re safe from an adaptation of Splinter of the Mind’s Eye, which was written before the big Luke and Leia reveal, and reads as disturbingly sexual in retrospect.

Yesterday, word came out that NBC, which already renewed Up All Night in the face of low ratings and overhauled the family sitcom’s core premise, will put the the single-camera comedy on hiatus again and bring it back as a multi-camera show taped in front of a live studio audience. I wish I thought that would help. When it debuted last fall, Up All Night, which was created by a woman, had a high proportion of female writers, and was a smart take on fathers staying home to raise children, was one of the shows I wanted most to turn out to be wonderful. But every step of the way, Up All Night‘s doubled down on its worst elements rather than recognizing what its strengths are. The number of cameras doesn’t seem to be at the heart of where Up All Night‘s gone wrong.

There’s no question that family sitcoms can be popular even when the families they put on screen are richer, and cooler, and better-looking than our own. But the charm of a show like Modern Family, when it works, is that it emphasizes that no matter how gorgeous Jay and Gloria’s house is, no matter how little Phil’s real estate business seems to have been impacted by the recession, their emotional and familial problems (if not their financial ones) seemed rather similar to our own. Up All Night, by contrast, took a family that already wasn’t much like our own, from Reagan’s job in the entertainment business, to their sprawling, gorgeous California home, and made them seem even less relateable.

Increasingly, Reagan and Chris seem more like irritating hipster archetypes than actual people. One of the running jokes on the show has been their irritation with a squarer neighbor couple, Gene and Terry, who had a child around the same time that they did. I can see how Gene and Terry’s enthusiasm could seem grating, complicating Reagan and Chris’s attempts to retain their pre-baby identity as a cool couple. But that cool-couple posturing actually comes across as a great deal more irritating than anything Gene and Terry get up to, and disproportionately mean, as a result. It’s one thing to show your main characters having the kind of night out on the town Regan and Chris regularly enjoyed before they had Amy. It’s quite another, as in one recent example, to watch Reagan make an utter fool of herself trying to seem cool at a coffee shop full of younger consumers. New Girl recently pulled off a joke like this beautifully in an episode where Schmidt fell all over himself trying to impress his new hipster neighbors, but the show balanced it by making the kids themselves as ludicrous as Schmidt’s posturing. But in Up All Night, Reagan just came across as ridiculous and desperate. More and more, I’m finding myself not sympathetic to Reagan and Chris but repulsed by their pettiness.

That’s part in parcel with an odd tonal decision the show’s made in the wake of the decision to cancel Ava’s talk show at the beginning of the first season. I initially praised that move because it seemed like an attempt to deescalate the show’s slightly more hyperreal elements and to focus clearly on what Up All Night does best: getting at the pleasure and anxiety that comes with accepting that being a parent is the most important part of your identity. Instead, the show subbed in Chris’ brother as comic relief rather than Ava’s shows, and in having Chris go back to work, albeit as a contractor, jettisoned the most interesting perspective Up All Night had to offer: what it means for a man to experience the same loss of identity and expectation that he’ll live his whole life through his child that women are excepted to accept without complaint every day. That was genuinely novel and often movingly executed (unlike the crude approach of network-mate Guys With Kids), letting Will Arnett be something other than the crazy-eyed nut he’s so often pigeonholed as.

I miss that show, and Jason Lee, marvelously down-to-earth as Ava’s boyfriend. Up All Night seems to assume that his work as a contractor was the interesting bit of his character, rather than his essential decency, his flashes of temper and frustration with Ava’s ridiculousness. That’s the kind of character you could build a show around, using a regular guy perspective to humanize characters who live their lives at a greater distance from the average American experience. And when Reagan was working on Ava’s show, she filled that role herself. Up All Night has opted to do the reverse, having rarified people treat everyday life as if it’s hard or distastefully uncool. And it’ll have trouble when it goes in front of a live audience if the viewers are laughing at Chris and Reagan instead of with them.

The bridge is yours.

-U.K. broadcasters are trying to break the time boundaries for adult content and cursing.

-Not making spinoffs about annoying supporting characters who are tolerable only in limited doses seems like a reasonable strategy.

-I’d be pretty excited to see this movie.

-Shakeups at Apple.

-Not so much with the “Wicca good, and love the earth and women power and I’ll be over here”:

Blogger Molly McIsaac has a post up about her experiences cosplaying as superheroines at San Diego Comic Con and elsewhere, and what it feels like to discover that people—including those who later ask you to pose for them—have been taking pictures of your rear end and trading them on the internet that’s helped me clarify some of my thinking about sexual harassment at conventions. Specifically, these paragraphs stood out to me:

Several people have tried to make this argument to me: If you didn’t want people photographing your butt, you shouldn’t wear the costumes that you wear.

FUCK. THAT. That’s like telling women not to wear short skirts if she doesn’t want to be raped. These characters are drawn in very little clothing due to art direction and wanting to make sales – and I love them and want to portray them despite what they are drawn wearing. I don’t want to be burka Wonder Woman – I want to be Wonder Woman in all her sexy hot pants glory.

We as a geek community have some of the most rampant sexism and misogyny I have ever seen. Women in cosplay are treated as pieces of meat, on display to satisfy a man’s fantasy of that character. We are without personality or interests, and there’s no way people will believe that we actually know ANYTHING about the character we’re dressed up as (especially if we are hot). I don’t know the reasons for this – I have theories, but that’s for another time entirely. But the behavior I have witnessed over the years is abysmal. And it’s not okay.

For some people, like McIsaac, cosplaying may be about claiming the sexual and physical power of the character she’s portraying. For some people, the fact that a character is sexually appealing or wears revealing clothes may be a secondary impact. But whether cosplaying is a sexual act or not, engaging sexually with someone still requires their consent. They’re a person, not an image, with the right to set their own terms of your interaction with them. And taking pictures of someone’s ass, specifically, rather than of their whole costume from the front, is a sexual act. The fact that folks are doing so furtively, attempting to avoid an interaction that might lead to their being denied permission for their actions, suggests that they’re pretty aware they’re doing so without consent. And if you know you’re sneaking around, and also want to be a decent person, that should probably make you think. As she puts it, cosplay is not a permission slip. There isn’t a lower level of scrutiny for people who take furtive shots of a woman’s behind at a convention or while she’s at school. A creepshot is still a creepshot, no matter where it’s taken and what a woman is wearing.

There was something supremely strange yesterday about the spectacle of CNN’s chief business correspondent, Ali Velshi, standing outside in Atlantic City and getting battered by the rain from Hurricane Sandy. It’s odd enough that news networks drop all other subjects, foreign and domestic, when a big storm bears down on the U.S. (not that such storms shouldn’t be covered). But there’s something particularly strange about the decision to focus on on-the-ground reporters, rather than on reporting on actual disaster management, most of the decisions about which are made inside government and non-profit offices, rather than at the edge of bodies of water. And it’s particularly strange that we’ve focused on making reporters take risks that carry with them very little possible information reward.

There wasn’t much information that Velshi was communicating that he couldn’t have conveyed from inside the building: it’s not as if he couldn’t have told CNN viewers that the streets were flooded without standing in the street with water lapping over his boots and the wind tearing at his clothes, or that power in Atlantic City had gone out. For much of his time on air, Velshi wasn’t actually verbally communicating information and observations at all: he was just the focus of shots showing him being buffeted by gusts of wind. The point of having him out in the storm was to show him being vulnerable to it, despite the fact that all government officials, in-studio anchors, and people with any damn sense agree that you should not actually venture out into a hurricane at risk to yourself and the people who may have to come rescue you. I understand that there’s an extent to which storm reporting is a visual medium, but the same image repeated over and over again doesn’t actually convey new information. And showing Velshi talking about events, like the reported flooding of the New York Stock Exchange, that he couldn’t possibly have been party to or been able to verify or deny, in the storm is a weird form of novelty reporting. He was out there because it’s nerve-wracking and exciting to see him out there, not because it furthered CNN’s reporting in a substantial way for him to be there.

There are enough reasons journalists have to consider whether or not to take serious risks that are absolutely necessary for them to incur in order to get information that wouldn’t be available otherwise. It wouldn’t be remotely amusing for us to watch Lara Logan experience sexual assault in Egypt or Anthony Shadid die of an asthma attack in Syria, even though those scenes might have given more precise context on the stories they were covering than people standing around in raincoats possibly could about the specifics of a hurricane. So there’s something deeply strange about the idea that we treat seeing Velshi and his colleagues out in the storm as if they’re entertainment or information, that there’s this competitive streak about which correspondents stay out longest, when we could maybe get substantive information about relief efforts or available resources instead. Or as my friend Katie Welsh tweeted, “Dear CNN, If your reporter has to HOLD ON TO A TREE, we DO NOT WANT TO WATCH THEM OUT THERE.”

Last week, I wrote about what a catharsis Tina Fey’s slam on “grey-faced men with $2 haircuts” was, a reminder that what’s been going on in our national political discourse around women’s reproductive is not a serious, equitable exchange of ideas, but a sustained and bogus attack, and that it’s okay to feel an impolite level of frustration. For the same reason, I found this video from the This Is Personal campaign of the National Women’s Law Center pretty delightful:

While to be a joke, schtick has to be funny, the best jokes are genuinely revealing. The idea that a politician thinks that women’s bodies prevent them from ever getting pregnant when they’re raped has horrible implications for policy-making, but considered neutrally—or through a medieval gate-keeping metaphor—it’s genuinely, awfully hilarious and tells us an enormous amount about the people who believe these things. And while humor can be a great way to broach issues that it would be impossible to talk about head-on otherwise (see: C.K., Louis), this video is a necessary reminder that humor’s power to reveal the truth can also be one of the fastest ways to marginalize truly absurd ideas, rather than giving them space to be taken seriously.