it's apparently 0.5 degrees fahrenheit (-17.5ºC! 255.65 K! 460.17 Ra! -1.68°Rø!) in Chicago. which, I found out earlier tonight, is too cold to stand around waiting for the train, especially if you're like me and forget that the little salad-bar-heat-lamps on the platform don't actually do anything to provide any warmth. Relying on my apartment's steam heat isn't much better, but it's tolerable. Knowing that I'd have to venture out into the cold and because I was fed up with trying to download a copy of EndNote from the Northwestern IT site, I somehow found my way back to the Wookiepedia.
I should start with this. I'm amused by the incredibly specific wikis out there. HeroesWiki was useful as I remained fascinated by the show's nosedive toward awfulness (plus, it was the only place I've found the most hilarious screen-cap of any television show in the history of television and confirmed that I wasn't losing my mind and that Peter did indeed taunt Sylar with, no joke, "I'm the most special!") I've written about Lostpedia before, which is a pretty good resource even if the "theories" pages do tend to get a little wacky. There appear to be wikis for everything else in existence, but one of the first of these I found was the "Wookieepedia", an incredibly large, overly extensive Star Wars wiki. Perhaps spurred on by a recent Alt Text concerning incredibly minute details in Star Wars canon, and the fact that it's incredibly cold, I wound up on the entry on Hoth.
I understand that fandom tends to concern itself with getting every single detail about every single detail, but I was somewhat surprised to see that there's evidently some source out there which gives an Average Planetary Temperature for a planet that, in terms of the movies, is important for right around twenty minutes. I'm not sure how you just assert that it's -61ºC (I guess you want it to be really, really cold, but not so cold that the carbon dioxide is going to start depositing out of the air), but it's nice to know that the authors of the authors of a book for a roleplaying game decided on a number, and that that number as good as fact for the Wookieepedia. Deciding on the climatology of minor fictional worlds in movies isn't what I spend my time doing, but I'm not really in a position to knock it too much.
What confuses me is this. I'm not sure whose fault this is (the authors of the eight sources listed on the page of something which isn't in the movies or the editors of the wiki), but when you've set up a resource where you can find long detailed pages about anyone who anyone has ever written about ever as well as Jedi who appear to have been named while the author was bored and in the kitchen or watching their cat walk across the keyboard, it's a bit disappointing that it's just called a "knobby white spider". That's what I'd call it, but I don't even count as someone who liked the movies in comparison with the editors of the wiki.
It's just sad, is all.
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