Frankensticker?! I love the idea. Would you be willing to show how you made it? I assume it's like, very carefully cut the stickers such that they can be fit together, but is it that they fit together with overlap, or fit together like making them puzzle pieces where the edges go together?
Nonbinary Enemy of the State Waluigi is AMAZING I love it
(NonBinary Enemy Of The State Waluigi Here)
Step 1: Have a bunch of stickers you want to combine, a general idea of how you want them to go together, a really sharp x-acto knife, and a self-healing cutting mat:
Hypnotic TV by Argibi
Astronaut by WeTheSciency (though she seems to be Out Of Stock at the moment)
Mini They/Them by GutsAndGlitter
2.I wanted to use a lot of the tight corners on the Astronaut, so, (leaving the backing on) I very carefully removed the edge around them, and saved it for another project:
3. I then cut a flap into the TV because I wanted to use the Spiral as a background
4. I then did a test-fit of the pieces to make sure they looked the way I wanted together
5. I decided that the spiral would work better elsewhere, and used another leftover piece I'd Saved For Later (Queer UFO by BoyPilotGoods) to put stars in the screen behind them instead.
I might take the UFO from that sticker and add it in to this composition later...
6. I used a few tiny pieces of duct tape (it comes off the backings easily) to keep the pieces together and at the angles I wanted. I'll keep the backings on the stickers until I have a surface I want to put the entire piece on.
7. When I have a place for them, I'll peel the backing off of each piece, and then weave the pieces back together. A good thing about Vinyl stickers is that they're really tough and you can put them down and peel them back up a couple dozen times until they're angled the way I want, and then the whole thing goes on the surface I want!
Seeing everyone hyped about star wars and honestly it's a franchise I've been wanting to get into, is there a particular order in how I should watch the film's (and or series)?
Welcome to the fandom! I'd be thrilled to have you join us here!
Quick background primer before I answer the question. The Star Wars fandom loves using abbreviations and shortened names wherever possible to refer to the various films/series/other media, and it can get pretty confusing if you're unfamiliar with the lingo. You'll see the following used pretty regularly:
The Skywalker Saga: the three main trilogies (PT/OT/ST), which all focus on the Skywalker family. This is a new term that's often used by Disney; fan usage is so-so.
The Lucas Saga: the six movies (Episodes 1-6) that George Lucas, (SW's creator) made, wrote, and/or directed himself.
PT/OT/ST: refers to the three main "trilogies" of movies: The Prequel Trilogy (Episodes 1-3), the Original Trilogy (Episodes 4-6) and the Sequel Trilogy (Episodes 7-9).
Individual Movie Abbreviations: The Phantom Menace (TPM), Attack of the Clones (AOTC), Revenge of the Sith (ROTS), A New Hope (ANH), The Empire Strikes Back (ESB), Return of the Jedi (ROTJ), The Force Awakens (TFA), The Last Jedi (TLJ), and The Rise of Skywalker (TROS). Occasionally Rogue One gets shortened to RO. Solo does not get shortened.
The movies are called "episodes" because Lucas considered them to be individual entries in a larger story. They're numbered based on the chronological order in which their events occur. So Episode 1 (The Phantom Menace) was the 4th movie to be released but tells the earliest events that occur chronologically (movie-wise).
Now for the movies, I have two different but equally clear answers to this question, and which one you choose depends on your personal preference:
Release Order: Release order means watching the "Original Trilogy" movies (A New Hope->Empire Strikes Back->Return of the Jedi) that came out in the 70s/80s first. Then watch the prequel trilogy (The Phantom Menace->Attack of the Clones->Revenge of the Sith), which came out in the early 2000s, and finally the sequel trilogy (The Force Awakens->The Last Jedi->Rise of Skywalker). You can watch the two anthology films (Solo and Rogue One) in whichever order you prefer at any point after finishing the OT and PT.
Chronological Order: Watching in chronological order means you watch the movies in the order in which the movie's events occur within the timeline. This would mean watching Episodes 1-3, then watching Solo and Rogue One (in that order), and then watching Episodes 4-9 in the order they're numbered.
Note: There's a nearly 20 year time gap between the end of Revenge of the Sith and the beginning of A New Hope. Solo takes place ~10 years after ROTS/9 years before ANH. Rogue One takes place right before ANH starts and effectively serves as a background prequel. I personally recommend waiting until you've seen the entirety of the Lucas saga (Eps 1-6) before watching either one, because they were created to be supplementary material to those movies, but if you're doing a pure chronological watch, they both come before ANH.
tl;dr "either watch 1) Episodes 4-6->1-3->7-9, or 2) Episodes 1-9. The two anthology films (Rogue One and Solo) can be watched in any order at any point after you watch Episodes 1-6."
Both orders have their pros and cons. If you'd prefer to start with a war-based drama that has a happy ending and better collective script, I'd start with the original trilogy (A New Hope). If you'd like a romance-based Greek tragedy that has better worldbuilding and a lot of fun action sequences, I'd start with the prequel trilogy (The Phantom Menace).
Everything else is fun and adds to your experience, but is extraneous. The movies generally tell a complete story. If you want to be a movies-only fan, that's perfectly acceptable. However, there's a wide variety of other Star Wars-based media for you to consume and enjoy if you find yourself interested in the wider Star Wars universe. If you're interested in those, I'm going to put the rest of this answer behind a 'read more' since it's getting a bit long.
In the current canon, the principal form of "extra media" is the television shows. I'm going to list them in timeline/chronological order for clarity:
The Clone Wars (TCW): the 7 season animated television series that takes place in between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith. TCW is an anthology-based show principally focusing on Anakin and Obi-Wan (and Anakin's apprentice Ahsoka Tano) as they fight in the Clone Wars. Show has ended.
The Bad Batch: starts basically immediately after ROTS concludes, focuses on a group of clones after the rise of the Empire. You will not understand this series if you haven't watched TCW. It's basically one of the few Star Wars shows that can't stand alone, since it's effectively a direct sequel to a few episodes of TCW. Currently airing.
Obi-Wan Kenobi (Kenobi): Kenobi is focused on Obi-Wan, one of the main characters of the Lucas saga (Eps. 1-6), and explores his attempts to protect the Skywalker children while hiding from the Empire. It takes place in the 19 year gap in between ROTS and ANH and starts approximately 10 years after ROTS concludes. Show has ended.
Andor: a show focused on Cassian Andor, one of the protagonists of Rogue One, and the other founders of the Rebellion as they fight the Empire. Takes place about 5 years before ANH. Currently airing.
Star Wars Rebels (Rebels): a 4 season animated television series that focuses on a "found family" of rebels fighting against the Empire. Starts about 4 years pre-A New Hope and runs to about 6 months before it starts. Show has ended.
The Mandalorian: Currently 2 seasons with a third on the way, Mando is a live-action show that takes place five years after the events of ROTJ and stars The Mandalorian, a lone bounty hunter who goes on the run to protect "The Child." Currently airing.
The Book of Boba Fett (TBOBF): a direct spin-off of The Mandalorian, this show follows bounty hunter Boba Fett from The Mandalorian and other Star Wars media as he establishes himself as the new crime lord of Jabba the Hutt's former territory. Show has ended.
There's also a variety of video games that take place within the Star Wars universe. The most popular ones include Jedi: Fallen Order, which tracks a survivor of the Jedi Genocide in between ROTS and ANH, and the Knights of the Old Republic (KOTOR) RPG games, which take place approximately 10,000 years before the events of the movies and focus on the great Jedi-Sith Wars.
There used to be all of these very pretty and easily-to-follow visual timelines that helped orient fans as to when a piece of media chronologically took place within the timeline, but when Disney bought Star Wars and discontinued the Expanded Universe (EU) to create the new/current canon, that also made all of those timelines lowkey obsolete and Disney has chosen not to continue making them.
Anyway, if you're interested in reading any of the books/comics, that's honestly worth an entirely separate answer on its own so I'm not going to answer that here, but let me know if you get through the movies and are interested in getting into that corner of the SW universe! I hope this wasn't too overwhelming for you and is easy enough to follow; let me know if it's not. And like I said at the beginning of the post, welcome to the fandom!
Moving on to the next venue at Music Hall for the Towel Folding Demonstration. After seeing Yuda’s handy works, I was keen to learn something from this event. For this demonstration, we were sharing a towel as the table was too small to have one for each person. A real life stateroom attendant was on hand to teach us the techniques. After a lots of rolling and twisting, a Rabbit form took shape.
For our next animal, we had to let the rabbit go and start from afresh. First we folded the towel then we roll this corner and after more twist and turn, ta-da, a Dog! For those interested, here is the Towel Folding Booklet that Royal Caribbean gave to each of the participants at the end of the demonstration.
Hi! So now that the IB’s just about finished chewing me up and spitting me back out, I decided I would make a little post about one of the weirder things (imo) that I had to do for them... a TOK presentation.
A bit of background - Basically, I ended up having to do two TOK presentations, so I guess I’ve spent a whole lot of time thinking these kinds of things over: my first presentation was invalidated by my TOK teacher when my partner used a script to present, and so I had to create a new presentation in my second year in order to actually get a grade in.
My second presentation went far better than my first one (thank goodness), and I think one of the reasons it did was because I was free to do my own thinking and was free to use Real-Life Situations (RLS’es) that my partner may not have read/seen/heard of/been comfortable exploring.
However, there are also upsides to having a partner - you get someone that’s academically obligated to let you bounce ideas off them, and you have someone that can serve as motivation to get your part done early/on-time. I just happened to be in a self-motivated mood during prep time for my second presentation, and happened to have a good idea of what I wanted to explore - so completing my presentation independently worked out extremely well.
Now- the actual presentation... there are probably a couple of things you wanna do:
Find an interesting RLS that you feel comfortable spending a lot of time analysing
Make a Knowledge Question (KQ) out of your RLS
(optional) Find another interesting RLS that also addresses your KQ
Determine your conclusion
For #1 (the RLS) - Some resources that I found helpful to start thinking in a TOK-like manner, and to quickly discover some interesting RLS’es or general topics of exploration were through these two YouTube channels:
The Nerdwriter: https://www.youtube.com/user/Nerdwriter1
PBS Idea Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/pbsideachannel
There’s a heck of a lot of interesting ideas and discussions about knowledge and important, relevant topics in these creators’ videos, and their discussion formats reminded me a lot of how a TOK presentation might be structured!
Typically, I feel like the IB likes it when your RLS’es are from very different Areas of Knowledge (AOK’s) - for example, one from Maths and one from Literature, or one Natural Sciences and one Arts. It may help you to show differing perspectives to one KQ without doing as much work or analysis to try and show differences within similar AOK’s, which is great- both for you and for your diploma grade!
For #2 (the KQ) - One of the really obvious things that occurred to me really late and probably would’ve made my life a lot easier is: your KQ always has to be explicitly about knowledge. For example: my KQ was ‘To what extent does cultural knowledge affect our behaviour?’. Before, I wasn’t quite sure exactly what a good KQ was supposed to be about or to contain, but once I was informed that it was best to concern knowledge (thus, Theory of Knowledge; duh, Miranda...), it was a lot easier to deal with.
It’s a general trend for KQ’s to be about the extent to which knowledge affects a ‘something else’ - in my case, the ‘something else’ happened to be behaviour.
KQ’s can be pretty unwieldy, I think- they’re quite vague so that they can apply to multiple AOK’s and/or WOK’s, but they also have to have a certain level of specificity so that they can’t apply to just about everything. Generally, it’s best to keep it simple, but have specific terminology in a KQ.
For #3 (another RLS) - This all depends on whether you’re completing a presentation alone or in a group, but I’ve always felt like having at least 2 RLS’es was the best, especially for a ‘to what extent...’ KQ. Having 2 RLS’es allows you to explore two different sides or perspectives of an issue and can allow you to make a conclusion that says knowledge may affect your ‘something else’ to ‘a great extent’/’to a lesser extent’/’to some extent’, rather than having to come to a definitive ‘yes/no’ answer that having only 1 RLS may force you to.
For #4 (the conclusion) - As I’m sure you’ve heard in your TOK class many, many times before, coming to a conclusion doesn’t always have to mean a ‘yes/no’ answer; it’s perfectly valid (and even encouraged!) for your conclusion to be ‘to a great extent’/’to some extent’. Oftentimes, there may be a different answer to your KQ from within different AOK’s, and it’s completely appropriate to acknowledge this, and explain that knowledge affects your ‘something else’ to some extent, rather than try to make one of your RLS’es conform.
For the presentation format - I don’t think there’s a definitive plan that your presentation needs to follow as long as everything’s in a logical order, but a trustworthy, tried-and-tested one that looks good on your TK-PPD would be:
Introduce KQ
Define terms within KQ
Introduce & explain 1st RLS
Define relevant terms in 1st RLS
Analyse 1st RLS in relation to KQ
Introduce & explain 2nd RLS
Define relevant terms
Analyse in relation to KQ
Conclusion & short summary of both RLS analyses to justify conclusion
& one last tip/trick, if I may! - You don’t have to explicitly state which Ways of Knowing (WOK’s) that you’ve used or people in your RLS have used in order to gather knowledge! Instead, you can still get the points and be a little more subtle about it by using language associated with the WOK - for example, ‘she believed’, ‘she saw’, ‘she felt’, ‘she remembered’ for the WOK’s of Faith, Sense Perception, Emotion, and Memory, respectively.
But that’s all for now! Sorry for the suuuuper long ramble about the TOK presentation, and good luck to all you whose souls have been sucked out by the IB!
If anyone wants to talk about anything IB-related, please feel free to shoot me a message!
