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First couple of batches of dice are out, sanded, and inked! Every attempt I get a little bit better at pouring them, but they're still frustratingly full of bubbles. I've chosen to lean into that with some of them, but I have a sneaking suspicion the vast majority of these learning dice are going to end up as charms and ornaments and not get used in the conventional way.
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Keeping up with last week's nostalgia, here's a picture from 2013. An alley in Corfu City, Corfu, which I visited during Easter celebrations. Despite not being religious-- and thus, not really knowing what was going on-- I really loved that trip. There was something kind of magical about the crowds and their passion and their joy.
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There's a very particular kind of feeling some pieces of music give me, a swooping sort of sudden understanding of the vastness of the universe. I've done my best to put those pieces together into these two playlists. They're largely similar, but limitations of availability and licensing means that they are pretty different, too. Enjoy!


On 8tracks

OR

On Spotify

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A fit of nostalgia had me going through old vacation photos, so in honor of that, this week's photography Thursday is from a 2007 trip to Greece.
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Since I’m not done going on Star Wars rants, it’s time to discuss one of the more criticized narrative, uh, choices made in ROTS: the death of Padme Amidala.

I would like to preface this by saying that the woman dying in childbirth trope is both overdone and kind of misogynistic, and the idea of Padme Amidala of all people dying of a broken heart is dumb as shit.

BUT

THAT SAID

Padme's death as a concept is not, fundamentally, as dumb and nonsensical as it feels. It was poorly executed, but it’s not, at its core, a bad idea.

(I feel kind of dirty)

 

My arguments are as follows:

  • Touched on in my last rant, but Sith using the Force to drain the life out of people is a thing that they can do. Palpatine draining Padme to save Anakin’s life while also removing a stabilizing force from both him and the galaxy as a whole is very Sheev.
  • Pregnancy and birth is actually pretty dangerous and puts a lot of stress on the body. Women die less in the modern era in childbirth, but it still does happen, even with proper care.
  • They were on the run from the Empire when Padme went into labor. Any medical facility they stopped at would have to have been illicit or at the very least small and out of the way, to avoid capture.
  • Humans are only one of millions of species. The droids at this (small, questionably competent) medical facility may or may not have had data packages on human care.
  • Any medical facility Obi-wan or Padme would have been familiar with would most likely have been one either associated with the war effort or smuggling. As such, even if the droids did have data on how to treat humans, it would have been geared towards traumatic injury rather then obstetrics. Just as Obi-wan have been more likely to know battlefield medicine, so too would the droids.
  • That weird cone thing is clearly terrible for human birth, but it's possible that it works perfectly fine for the birthing of whatever local species most commonly used this facility, if the facility is less of a back alley doctor and more of a poorly staffed small town hospital.
  • “Death by broken heart” could be a mistranslation of “death by heart attack”.
  • Meta point number one: if we’re already going to be killing off a woman to complete a man’s narrative arc, Padme needed to die at the dawn of the Empire to symbolically have Anakin’s ties to the Republic die and close out his story.
    • Counterpoint: Padme dying not in childbirth, but in the course of establishing the Rebellion would actually be more poetically appropriate: she died trying to undo the mistakes her husband made trying to save her. Also it would be more in character. And just less awful in general.
  • Meta point number two: Padme’s death was written into the script of the original trilogy. She has to die at some point, and killing her off-screen would have been bad in a totally different way.
    • Counterpoint: Leia describes Padme as “beautiful, but sad,” implying that she had some level of first-hand knowledge of her, so Padme didn’t have to die right away. This also supports my idea of Padme the Rebellion agent.

In conclusion: Padme’s death, as shown on screen, sucks shit. However, it could have been justified with the addition of some context and narrative groundwork. That said, Padme dying later on in the course of rebelling against the Empire would have made more sense with less effort, as well as being less misogynistic overall.

 

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Recently, I was part of an argument discussion regarding Obi-wan’s role in Padme’s death by childbirth in ROTS. In it, the question was raised of, “Why didn’t Obi-wan heal Padme? Surely he could have had enough Force healing to do the equivalence of chest compressions until a real doctor could get there.”

Short answer: no, he couldn’t have.

Long answer, Watsonian:

-        Obi-wan doesn’t have Force healing. It’s just not a talent he possesses, just like psychometry is also not a talent he possesses but other Jedi do.

o      There was an argument made that he should have been able to “brute force it”. I think this is horseshit, for the reasons outlined below.

-        While there are many uses of the Force that are unconscious—increased reflexes, mild precognition, “I have a bad feeling about this”—using the Force on things outside of oneself has been shown to require a certain amount of training and mental discipline. It takes sustained mental effort to affect minds, lift objects, and, indeed, heal.

o      This is right after Order 66 and the fight on Mustafar. That’s a lot of trauma for a regular, non-psychic person. The thing about trauma is that it makes it hard to think. Everything’s a panic response. Think about the last time you were stressed, and how hard it was to remember to do things, let alone get up the wherewithal to do them. Now add the death of everything you know and everyone you love, which you got to feel on the inside of your head. Obi-wan was mentally bleeding out; even if healing occurred to him, it’s unlikely he could have been able to affect any real change.

-        Obi-wan is a diplomat-soldier, not a doctor.

o      Bodies are intensely complicated things, and learning how to properly treat them takes years. Years Obi-wan spent learning galactic law and politics, because that was more directly relevant to his job.

§       While taking care of Anakin Skywalker, known trouble magnet.

o      Even if Obi-wan did learn some medicine, it would have likely been battlefield medicine, not obstetrics. Learning how to avoid bleeding out while things are exploding is a set of skills different from learning how to give birth.

-        Draining life from one person and giving it to another is an established Sith skill; it is not unreasonable to assume that Palpatine drained Padme to stabilize Anakin. Whatever Force powers Obi-wan had left at that point would have been insufficient to overcome that, assuming Obi-wan even realized what exactly was going on.

 

Long answer, Doylist:

-        While Force healing is a thing that exists in later installments of Star Wars, it is unknown if it existed during ROTS.

o      Lucas has gone on record as conceiving of the Star Wars that he puts on screen and the Star Wars that fans put in books to be two different universes, and Force healing did not appear on screen until the sequel trilogy.

o      Lucas made shit up as he was going along. There’s a reason plot threads in ANH don’t link up quite right to the rest of the series. So if Lucas didn’t think of Force healing when ROTS was being written, it functionally didn’t exist.

-        George Lucas was more interested in the fairy-tale element of the hero’s mother dying in childbirth more than he was interested in that scene actually making sense. Relatedly, he is welcome to Catch These Hands.

 

Long answer, miscellaneous:

-        Can’t say I’m thrilled with an argument that boils down to “Obi-wan Kenobi could have fixed everything had he just tried harder and been better”

o      It relates to a train of thought I see cropping up in fandom sometimes, and that other people have also pointed out and discussed, where the way people talk about Order 66 drifts awfully close to “the Jedi were out of touch and unpopular, so they had their genocide coming.”

o      As a bit of in-universe propaganda, I live for this thought process, I really do. The idea of people in the gffa thinking “well the Jedi were corrupt and fell due to their own hubris” and then never examining what they’re actually justifying? Sublime. Phenomenal. Love it. Real life people buying into this thought process? Not thrilled. A group of people bringing about the violent, bloody end of their culture and people—including children and elderly—because they weren’t nice enough or didn’t solve other people’s problems enough….isn’t a take I’m thrilled about.

o      Also, Obi-wan is one dude. One very competent dude, but one dude. One human, mortal dude. He can’t do everything, fix everyone, always be on top of everything, always have the exact right answer. He’s going to fumble, and fall, and make mistakes, and say exactly the wrong thing, and miss obvious solutions to problems because he just didn’t see them. He already hates himself enough; we don’t need to go finding more blame to pile on.

-        During the argument, and in thinking about it afterward, I think the main point of contention was around perceptions of the Force and a Jedi’s relationship with it.

o      To put it in D&D terms, I see all Jedi as magic users, but not all as the same class.

§       Wizards, clerics, druids, etc., might all be magic users, but they are all fundamentally different. There is a certain degree of overlap, but they also just flat-out have different spell lists. At the end of the day, a wizard will not be able to fill a paladin-shaped hole.

·       In this conception, the question that was asked is, “Why didn’t the wizard cast healing word?”

o      Wizards don’t get healing spells. At no point would the wizard have had access to healing word. He can’t cast healing word, because that’s not something the class can do.

o      Wizards can only cast spells they have spent the time, in-game, to copy down into their spell book. He never copied down healing word, or any other healing spell.

o      Healing word is a 1st-level spell, and all this wizard had left was cantrips. Even if he did have healing word because of in-game justification and a permissive DM, he couldn’t have cast it.

·       Related question: “Why didn’t the wizard ever take a level in paladin? Even one level of a multiclass would give him lay on hands, you’d think he’d want that.”

o      Because when you can spend your action with lay on hands and save one person, or you can spend it on meteor swarm and save a bunch of people, meteor swarm wins every time.

o      However, others see all Jedi as all the same class, but of differing domains.

§       In this conception, all Jedi are working from the same base spell list, but differ in what spells they have to prepare vs which ones they get automatically. The question then is not, “Why didn’t the wizard cast healing word?” but rather, “Why didn’t the knowledge domain cleric prepare healing word?”

·       The point of being out of spell slots still stands, but this is a much more reasonable question to be asking.
 

 

In summation: let the tired man rest and stop trying to blame him for everything that goes wrong in Star Wars.

anundine: flowers (Default)
At long last my my dice molds came in, so I can finally start achieving my dream of suffocating under a mountain of clicky math rocks.


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Inlay's done, sanding's done, all that's left is to paint in faux-ivory and ebony and do the final polish! I'm super proud of the sanding job-- the picture doesn't show it, but there's this lovely soft sheen to the wood and it's baby soft to the touch, like rose petals.



 

Some notes: 
-previous pictures show the wood to be much glossier. This is because when I made Bad News the first time, it was the week before the con I meant to debut it at, so I sprayed on half a can of acrylic sealant and called it a day. That's been removed in favor of a more traditional walnut oil polish (to be applied).
-to remove the acrylic, I've got two different methods. One is....significantly easier, but requires specialized tools.
       Option 1: With relatively heavy grit sandpaper-- I think I used 100?-- go after the polish. Wipe down with a rag soaked in isopropyl alcohol. Scrape remaining softened bits of polish with a sturdy knife. Repeat until the sawdust is wood-colored instead of whiteish-grey.
       Option 2: Use a card scraper. Get on with your life.
- Up next is testing various paints and how they respond to the wood and the finish. I've got oil paint, milk paint, and india ink on a test block. So far, oil paint is dead last in the rankings because it takes five millions years to dry and I am not a patient person.

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I visited the Grand Canyon for the first time back in January, and I'm still not totally over how cool it was.
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while working on a project....that requires the use of many blades and also power tools.....the way i have most often injured myself.......IS WITH A SHARPIE. HOW.
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Every time I think to myself "home stretch now" I find something else to do, so god knows when this will be "done" BUT I've made great strides nevertheless.


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now if you'll all excuse me, i'm going to go cry big baby tears over the clone wars
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I've talked about this before, but I've wanted to put brass inlay on Bad News since pretty much the moment I made the gun in the first place. With the weather getting nice-- and with all the time at home-- I've finally put my money where my mouth is and started in on that.


After a series of experiments, I discovered that the easiest way to cut clean channels to the appropriate depth was to first cut a relatively shallow guide with a carving tool and then deepen/widen as needed with a flex shaft tool (ie, a dremel but Beefy).

Channels cut, adding the wire is just a matter of shaping, cutting, and tapping with a rawhide mallet-- I like to shape the curls on the wire spool and then cut them off once they fit. I also add a dot of super glue to the channel and spread it in with a needle before tapping in the wire. Sure, theoretically, tension should hold the wire in there just fine, but I live in a constant state of mild paranoia and really enjoy the insurance.

From there, it's just a matter of grinding the brass flush with the wood, then sanding and polishing. I've taken to cycling through the steps, to give the motor of the flex shaft time to cool and my hand different things to complain about, and I've been making great progress.

 





 

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SO IN THE IN THE HELLSCAPE THAT IS CURRENT LIFE I AM PROUD TO BRING YOU A CRUMB OF GOOD NEWS

8TRACKS IS BACK, BABY

BACK TO THE LAND OF TAGGED CHARACTER PLAYLISTS I GO
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Saw these on a walk in the woods a few weeks ago.
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I have no earthly idea what these flowers are called, but they've been blooming in the front yard every spring as long as I can remember.

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(Part 1 here)

Step one of making prop guns: having a plan. Nailed step one. These are all to scale with the exception of the rifle, on account of that one being just a little bit too big to fit on the sketchbook page.





 
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I recon if y'all've followed me in the first place, you're not unopposed to process pictures. So here, for your edification and entertainment, and in lieu of actual progress shots: the original sketches of the plague doctor, from first ideas to working plan.



                  

   
 

As you can see, I moved away from the heavy armor into a more steampunk look fairly early, because it's easier to sew fabric than it is to sew leather. Also, fabric breathes a hell of a lot more than leather does, and if I'm gonna wear this to a convention I would really rather not be an entity comprised entirely of sweat. (That's why I decided on a coat that covered me from throat to wrists over a shirt and vest-- shirt and vest is less sewing, but more layers. With the coat I can totally get away with having on a bra and nothing else. Sure, I'll have to launder the coat more... but the reduced sweating is so, so worth it.)

 

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  \
 

The neighbor's apple tree is in full bloom, and there was something really magical about the way the sun was hitting it the other day.
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my new hobby is scribbling down critical role quotes i guess

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