Star Wars Cantina Patrons 34: Jawas

So, this is it, the last video. Or was the last one the last video?

Either way, this one's about Jawas.

Star Wars Cantina Patron 33: Garindan

I'm still not sure if this should've been an episode or not. Is Garindan in the Cantina?

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 32: Wioslea

While I'm still not convinced that Wioslea was in the Mos Eisley Cantina, let's take a not-brief-enough look at him.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 31: Figrin D'an and the Modal Nodes

Couldn't find my set of the Cantina Band, but I'm sure it'll turn up.

Poor Man's Refrigerator

The family cabin used to be powered by a gas generator, that you had to pull start for electricity.  But after a few years, my dad and brother set up some solar panels, so we'd get a few hours of 'lectricity each day before we'd have to turn on the generator at night.  And then, they got enough car batteries charged up by the solar panels that you could have power until somebody plugged in a hairdryer or portable refrigerator, and then the lights would flicker and go out.  And because of that, I have never, ever, ever, never, ever considered using the plug-in cooler or mini-fridge at the cabin . . . even though they're effing there.

This week, because of Harrison Ford's birthday (okay, it was last week now--and two weeks ago by the time I'm actually publishing this), I bought a banana cream pie to take to the cabin, to eat, yes, all by myself.

But life experience has taught me a thing or two, and one of those lessons is that banana cream pies go bad ridiculously fast if they are not refrigerated, and then they don't even taste like banana cream pie . . . I'm not sure what they even taste like after that.*

So, I came up with this brilliant idea--something that has worked as a fridge substitute for me for the last two years: fill up the bathroom sink with ice cold underground spring water, then place the soda, bacon, hamburger patties, apples, or head of lettuce in it . . . and it will stay cold for hours.  And I thought, "So, why not do it with the pie as well?"  Problem solved.

Oh, I was clever as can be, but as Oingo Boingo taught us: "Don't forget, you've only got so many tricks, my friend; No one lives forever."  When I went to eat my pie, I discovered that yes, it had stayed cool, but the water had also seeped into the pie tray, eventually filling it with water and submerging it in the pool.  Nicely chilled slop, anyone?

*The other lesson I have learned in my long life is, you have to eat the mango in one sitting, because it will dry out and turn brown within a literal hour or so, even though you don't want to eat the whole mango at once.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 30: Lak Sivrak

Rish talks about the wolfman, Lak Sivrak, late of the 1997 Special Edition. 

Note 1: The Cantina reshoots were in Los Angeles, not Marin County. 

Note 2: This episode appears out of order because I couldn't find the figure.  Turns out, it was within me all along (ouch).

A Birthday Favor

This is no big deal, really, and I wasn't going to mention it, but I'm at the cabin right now, and glancing out the side window, I can see the remains of a tree, handily chopped into segments with a chainsaw, then abandoned.  The last time I was here, it was my birthday, and even though I knew my brother was going to be working at the cabin, I came up anyway, because it was 103 degrees at home, and I hadn't been able to come up on my usual day, and just wanted to sit and edit audio and record a story and shoot a couple more Star Wars guy videos.  But when I got here, my brother had just finished sanding the big front doors, which are on this spring strung so tightly that it has hit me in the back of the legs and the arse, oh, twenty times or more (sometimes I think about getting your fingers in the way, or my nephew, now seven, getting his little fingers broken by that unnecessarily-dangerous metal door).  My brother showed off what he'd done, telling me it had taken him three hours to get it done . . . and there was still the back door to do.  Immediately, he handed over the sander, and put me to work.  In it for the long haul (after all, this is essentially his cabin, not mine, and I recognize that I'm up there in the one percent Bernie Sanders always bitches about that I have access to it), I put on my headphones and listened to songs as I sanded away all the peeling, sun-bleached paint from a couple of years ago.

At one point, while I was working, I thought I saw a bit of red movement on the other side of the cabin, but didn't hear anything, what with the sander and the music (I am lucky to have downloaded enough songs onto my phone to go running a dozen different nights and never hear the same song twice--except for the first night, you know how that goes).  But not too long after, I heard the older man in the cabin next door start up his chainsaw, and go to work on some of the dead trees on his property.*  I paused in my sanding when I heard the big cracking sound that signifies that gravity is taking over where sawing left off, and stepped around the side just in time to see a thirty foot tree fall, from the neighbor's property all the way across to ours.  And where that tree landed . . . was where I had parked my car an hour before.

My car was not there, however.  While I'd been sanding, my brother had gone upstairs, found my keys from beside my laptop, gone down, started it and moved it to the other side of the gravel driveway, then replaced the keys.  When I talked to him, he said, "I just had a feeling that tree was not going to go where he wanted it to."  And he'd been right.  My brother admitted, however, that he'd been more worried that the neighbor's fallen tree would have landed on the big white propane tank on the very edge of our property.  That, the man had missed.

Well, it's not much of a blogpost, but I'll admit that it was a pretty kind birthday gift, so I thought I'd say something.  And I'll further say that, after my brother went home, the neighbor cut down two more dead trees . . . and one of them indeed landed right onto our big propane tank.  Fun.

*This is something we have to do (or rather, my brother has to do it, and I have to stack the wood) every single year.  It's not a large property that my dad built his cabin on--maybe half an acre, maybe a quarter--but there are easily a hundred trees on it, in various states of growth.  And one of those states is death, my friend . . . something you'll become intimately aware of very soon.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 29: Wuher

Rish didn't buy the bartender Wuher, in protest of his No Blasters policy.

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 28: Dice Ibegon

Another cool name for a character that . . . wait, is Dice Ibegon cool?

The Illustrated Man(boy)

The next physical book I aim to publish is the first Lara & the Witch volume, which includes five and a half stories, from "Like A Good Neighbor" to "Here To Help."  As a bonus to those who purchased the actual book (as opposed to the digital versions), I included a bonus flash piece (newly-named "A Short Interlude") and after looking at what Big was doing with one of his future collections (though at the rate he's going, it's probably already available), I wanted to throw some illustrations into it.

One of the ideas I had for an image would be of Old Widow Holcomb, young and beautiful, but with her true old woman face creeping in on one side, similar to how Steve Ditko would show Peter Parker with half of his face as Spider-man.

Anyway, I did my best to get an image of a young and vibrant black-haired woman, and then one of an old one, and see if I couldn't merge the two.  It didn't really work Dikto-style, but I was able to take part of the old woman's features, resize them, and paste them onto the young woman's.  And I thought it looked pretty good, so I sent it to Big.

Maybe add a streak of grey in her hair on the right side?

He thought it could look better, though, and revised it himself with a program of his that works surprisingly well at smoothing out edges or replacing problematic images (such as hands with eight fingers or cars not touching the ground or Rish Outfield with his arm around a woman).  It works great at expanding on what's already there (for example, he put out a book recently, but misjudged the page count, so he had to adjust the cover to be bigger, and he had the program extrapolate what would naturally be beyond the borders of the finished art), but not at creating stuff out of whole cloth (or whole pixels).

Big fixed the lips on the old side, because it bothered him that they didn't match.

Big Version 1

So, this one doesn't look too bad.  But what it looks to me is cool Eighties prosthetic makeup being applied to a section of her face.  Cool makeup, but not really a transformation or revelation, which was more my intention.

Big Version 2

Big smoothed out her forehead, and it looks a little bit less makeup-y, but I told Big that I had actually liked the dividing line between her young visage and the old one, and that the lips were not MEANT to match.

Big Version 3

So, he made it VERY obvious, a split down the middle kind of thing, so you could see beauty on one side, and ugly on the other.  I explained that, at least in my head, what I wanted was the idea of the youth and looks being an outer shell, with the ugly old self being the layer underneath.

Big Version 4

So Big did this one, which has more of an eggshell quality splitting the two, and does seem to have a false skin layer feeling, kind of like Diana on the 1983 V miniseries.

So, what did I do?  Like an infuriating sitcom character, I told him I liked the original just fine, and just to go with that.  Don't you despise that kind of person?

Star Wars Cantina Patrons 27: M'iiyoom Onith

 

M'iiyoom Onith? What, another of these aliens with the unpronounceable, ridiculous names? Maybe we should stop doing this series.