Heroes included at no extra cost
If you’re not interested in a very brief rant about Star Wars figures, you might as well skip this one.
I see that the only way to get a 3.75″ scale Maz Kanata figure is going to be in a box set that repackages all the Finn and Rey figures that didn’t sell individually last fall. It’s kind of cringeworthy because the trailers made it very clear: these people, they are who the movie is about. Oh, and Han and Chewie show up too. We knew these people, and the new X-Wing pilot, were our new heroes.
Of course, in the southern states (such as where I hail from), Rey and Finn were peg warmers. It was almost as if everyone was rejecting the notion that a woman and a black guy were the heroes of the new Star Wars. (What, did they think Mace Windu was a fluke?)
So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go ahead and get this new box set, just for Maz. Maz is cool; Maz almost makes the movie and I’m beyond happy that she’s already confirmed as being in the next one. I will then take the spare Rey, Finn and BB-8 – all of whom I already have – and put them in my ’78 Kenner Falcon, which sits in the box 364 days out of the year. I will enclose a handwritten note about how foolish people still were in 2015, and how I expect whoever is receiving the note (and the ship and its new crew) to do, and be, better than we were in 2015.
Maybe it’ll be my grandkids.
Maybe it’ll be someone else’s grandkids.
Maybe it’ll be somebody who gets the message, in which case the Millennium Falcon once again saves the day.… Read more
For better or worse, my son has grown up in a microcosm, a 
There’s a time-honored engineering practice called a fit check. You take real pieces of real stuff – even if it’s not quite to full factory specs – and make sure it at least fits together the way it’s supposed to. If it doesn’t, you refine the shape and size and do another fit check. When everything fits, you’re good to go. Even though it was never meant to fly into space, the shuttle Enterprise (seen here) spent a lot of time strapped to real fuel tanks and real booster rockets at Kennedy and at Vandenberg AFB, because it was the only fully-constructed shuttle that could be spared for fit checks. … 
It’s not very long (hey, no comments from the peanut gallery), and to be honest I’m a little embarrassed about posting it. You’d think these would be reasonably easy to get. But these are supposedly mass-marketed things that have yet to make an appearance in my neck of the woods. The heck?
Anyone who’s wondering what my take on the whole Lucasfilm/Disney/Star Wars Episode VII thing is… I haven’t really got one yet. We have no idea what’s going to be done with it. And if I don’t like what I see coming down the pike, I can sit it out like I have with the glut of novels in years past. It’s no skin off my back. I’ve got the original untouched, pre-special-edition movies on my home media server. I’ve gotten what I need out of the deal. (Seen above: the internet reacts, as if a million geeks suddenly cried out, and suddenly kept crying out, despite the fact that the best science fiction movie of this century’s first decade was actually WALL-E.)
On this day five years ago, my life changed. I had a brand new, huge responsibility. These days, I have a huge responsibility, a gaming buddy, a Star Wars-watching buddy, a music-listening buddy, a reading buddy, and just the best kiddo in the world.