The bridge is yours.

-There is no place that Star Wars can’t penetrate, even Pintrest.

-Why is it so hard to get people to adopt new musical intstruments?

-Go inside John Waters’ house in Baltimore.

-NBC: still not taking my suggestions.

-I would totally watch a show where Justice Sonia Sotomayor solves fairy-tale disputes. Someone call the USA Network!

The Family Research Council, an organization plagued by the fear that someone, sometime might be getting away with something fun, has gone after Star Wars: The Old Republic, because the game allows players to choose to have their characters be in same-sex relationships. As Tony Perkins said in his radio broadcast:

In a new Star Wars game, the biggest threat to the empire may be homosexual activists! Hello, I’m Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. In a galaxy not so far far away, Star Wars gamers have already gone to the dark side. The new video game, Star Wars: The Old Republic, has added a special feature: gay relationships. Bioware, the company that developed the game, said it’s launching a same-sex romance component to satisfy some complaints. That surprised a lot of gamers, since Bioware had made it clear in 2009 that “gay” and “lesbian” don’t exist in the Star Wars universe. Since the announcement, homosexuals have been celebrating the news, but parents sure aren’t. On the game’s website, there are more than 300 pages of comments–a lot of them expressing anger that their kids will be exposed to this Star Warped way of thinking. You can join them by logging on and speaking up. It’s time to show companies who the Force is really with!

First, to bring the geek and the sexual orientation history, saying that our same sexual orientation identity categories don’t exist a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away isn’t remotely the same thing as saying that males and females of any of the Star Wars universe species don’t form same-gender relationships. Sexual orientation is a relatively new concept, but dudes and dudes or ladies and ladies? Not so much.

But I really think things like this are useful because of the way they illustrate right-wing fears and the right wing agenda. Folks like the Family Research Council are invested in declaring that sexual orientation is a choice because then they can push back against the idea of legal protections for LGBT people. But they also would prefer for the possibility of same-sex relationships to be eradicated and made illegal on the off chance that someone actually chooses to be in one, that someone might decide that a relationship with someone of their own gender is more satisfying on every level than a heterosexual relationship. That’s the real terror here, that the vision right-wingers are offering of a mother, father, and however many kids you get if you don’t use birth control might not appeal to everyone. Trying to keep gay relationships illegal or unrecognized, in video games or in the real world, is a last-ditch effort you make when you’re afraid your own messaging isn’t working.

The bridge is yours. Quite literally:

Star Wars Uncut: Director’s Cut from Casey Pugh on Vimeo.

The bridge is yours.

-Turning hallucinations into music.

-The Hunger Games: boosting the economy of the Pitcairn Islands!

-Woo, Jedi origin stories.

-Ladies (Still) Love Cool James.

-More Azelia Banks to get you through your day:

The Times Magazine’s profile of George Lucas is very interesting, particularly in its description of how his long-term girlfriend, Mellody Hobson, or as Al Sharpton calls her, “black America’s business princess,” has transmitted Lucas’s dedication to racial equality and channeled it more directly into politics, whether calling Obama a Jedi or showing up for the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. And it captures his determination to make Red Tails a truly black movie (he’s joked about Spike Lee making a prequel to it):

“They say, Now, who are you making this for?”

“I’m making it for black teenagers.”…

“And you’re going to be very patriotic — you’re making a black movie that’s patriotic?”

“They have a right to have their history just like anybody else does,” Lucas said. “And they have a right to have it kind of Hollywood-ized and aggrandized and made corny and wonderful just like anybody else does. Even if that’s not the fashion right now.” [...]

To execute his popcorn vision of “Red Tails,” Lucas turned to Anthony Hemingway, a 36-year-old director who made his name on TV shows like “The Wire.” Hemingway, who had never directed a feature film, comes from the church of David Simon, which values moral murkiness over naïveté, documentary detail about East Baltimore over an ethnography of the Ewok village. It was like hiring a “Hill Street Blues” veteran to direct “Return of the Jedi.”

But from the beginning, Lucas wanted “Red Tails” to have a black director. “I thought, This is the proper way to do this,” he said. Indeed, to scan the credits in “Red Tails” is to see Lucas’s fidelity to African-American filmmakers. There are two black writers and a black executive producer. Terence Blanchard, a Spike Lee collaborator (“Jungle Fever,” “Malcolm X”), wrote the score, and Art Sims, another Lee veteran, designed the one-sheet.

I really hope Red Tails does well not simply to disprove the idea that black leads can’t open blockbusters or that black history is a niche genre. Lucas has said that this will be his last blockbuster. So if the movie makes bank, maybe Lucas could do for black artists what Tyler Perry hasn’t entirely done yet, and what Queen Latifah still might do: spread the wealth and give a financial springboard to projects that could be commercially viable if only they could find financing and support, and an imprimatur that would reassure distributors. The battle might be to get individual non-white (or for that matter, female) writers and directors credentialed and established. But the war is about getting a lot of them in the game.

The bridge is yours.

-The Force is growing stronger. Particularly in the Czech Republic.

-Anti-heroine recommendations from the great Heather Havrilesky.

-James Franco, jerk.

-Piracy turns out to be irresistible even to the people who fight it, sometimes.

-Are these the most underrated actors on television?

The bridge is yours.

-Get banned from Modern Warfare 3, come back in 13.5 years.

-Howard Stern will helpfully inform us who has talent.

-Hey NPR, antiheroes aren’t a sudden new trend.

-If you win the Millenium Falcon in a game of sabacc, I guess you get to give it as a Christmas present.

-Gary Busey deals Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign a critical blow.

-Woo Wild Flag!

The bridge is yours.

-The EFF is pushing to get device jailbreaking exempted from copyright law.

-The room of one’s own problem is still a problem.

-If Showtime wants to dominate my mid-season TV calendar, they are making a pretty effective pitch

-Ahh, the nerd economy.

-Given the way he treats characters, getting all his favorite actors and subjecting them to terrible things in a haunted cabin seems like an inevitable destination for Joss Whedon.

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The bridge is yours.

-I’m not a huge short story person, but the new Don DeLillo sounds fantastic.

-Michael Fassbender has ideas for a new X-Men movie, but I just want to see Wolverine fight the Spanish Civil War.

-I wonder what it would mean for TV storytelling if the Supreme Court dramatically limited indecency regulation.

-The IMDb age discrimination suit heats up.

-I can retire now. I have everything I’ve ever wanted:

Tim Carmody asked for a feminist interpretation of this video running around the internet in which a four-year-old reaches the climactic scene of The Empire Strikes Back, the attention to which has focused on the slack-jawed little boy rather than his slightly older sister:

I sort of appreciate that his sister, even if she’s seen this before, smiles when she gets the news. There is something pretty satisfying satisfying about the reveal. Luke is pretty much impossible in Empire Strikes Back, being stupid about riding late, ditching the Rebels pretty much sans explanation (I bet Mon Mothma was most seriously displeased), underestimating Yoda, and ditching his training. Finding out Vader’s his father isn’t just a validation of Yoda’s teaching, etc. It feels kind of like the just reward for being semi-bratty. Of course, the whole getting-your-hand-chopped-off thing is a little much, and serves us to remind us that Vader is not exactly good parent material. That Luke and Leia ended up being reasonably decent people is testament to Obi-Wan’s skills as an adoption agent.