SpacePirateApocalypse

I’m not sure I care for holding the zine symposium in the gym at psu. It’s kind of bleak, the lighting is bad, and they have this awful plastic floor covering. The old venue had windows, so you could see outside and it had better foot traffic, and seemed to be crowded every time I went, unlike the gym, which seemed pretty much empty. It reminded me of the year they held Stumptown Comics fest in the Convention Center, and the rumor was that were more creators there than fans the entire weekend. Sadness.

Maybe all the people are waiting till tomorrow? Maybe I am just bleak because I was all alone most of the day. Next year I should find someone else to table with/ next to. I say that every time. I said hi to a few old friends, anyway… Good to see Zapp is back in action.

[aug 31st edit, in case you come across this post googling for pdx zine symposium months from now: I had a lot of fun, made back my table fee and then some, the volunteers were great, the zinesters were great, the visitors were great, and I would recommend that you get a table there next year. Don't let my surliness about the venue dissuade you from tabling or going to look at all the zines...]

I’ll be tabling at the Portland Zine Symposium this weekend, selling buttons, t-shirts, etchings, and minicomic versions of Cooking with Anne, Shot to Death, and Robot. I will also be giving away a tiny free minicomic. So, if you happen to be around Portland, you should stop by and harrass me about never updating, or what my next project is going to be.

A couple of sketches from PDXPopnow. They aren’t really working for me, but I suppose that’s how one gets better…

My computer hard drive failed the other day, taking with it all of my art. I was to blame. Since I am now 100% digital, this is even worse than it would have been in the past when I could always rescan stuff. I have hopefully learned a lesson about regular backups, especially considering my penchant for borking my HD by accident. (In other news, my emails, written documents, and resumes survived because I have switched to google for all that… So that’s pretty neat, actually.)

I wish.

I’m still working on getting the size of the handwriting to be consistent. It is apparently a challenge when I don’t have an actual piece of paper to write on…

Have you seen Sita Sings the Blues? If not, you should. It’s good, it’s free, and you can feel good about using bittorrent for something legal. The movie has these three academics discussing the Sita/Rama legend who constantly disagree with each other over the specifics of what happened, and just how completely dickheaded the various mythological characters were. There is apparently a lot room for interpretation, and it’s pretty fun to watch people have a good natured debate about it.

I’ve been thinking about Star Wars lately (episode IV, A New Hope, if you think I have to be specific) and how it is supposedly told from the point of view of the droids, how they bicker, how R2D2′s constant lying drives the plot of the movie from the very beginning, and how C3PO is almost completely clueless at all times.  Star Wars is a story told from a particular point of view by unreliable narrators.

“He says it’s nothing, sir. Merely a malfunction, pay it no mind.”

This brings me to the whole Han shot first thing. It amuses me to think of the different firing orders in the various editions as being the result of R2D2 and C3PO bickering like the academics in Sita Sings the Blues. They are telling the story to whoever they tell it to, and they keep going “Han Shot First,” “No, R2, Greedo shot first.” “No, they shot at the same time. Well, maybe Greedo didn’t shoot at all. Dead bounty hunters don’t pull triggers.” Probably who shot first changes every time they tell it.

The droids they weren’t even in the cantina, so they don’t even have first hand knowledge of the events. At best, they would have heard about Greedo from Han, who is also not a reliable narrator. If you like your retcons to be meta and postmodern (as I do), then you can explain the whole Han Shot First controversy that way; the Mos Eisley cantina shootout comes to us second-hand via two liars and a fool. There is no way that anyone can say anything definitive about the order that shots were fired. We can almost be sure that Han had a shootout with a Greedo in the cantina after he met with Ben and Luke, but even that is problematic.

At the time Han is supposed to have shot Greedo, there were stormtroopers in the cantina investigating a maiming (Ben chopped the arm off mr “Death Penalty in Twelve Systems”). It’s why Ben and Luke left the cantina. These stormtroopers would probably be specifically tasked with law enforcement, and not regular troops. An investigation like that takes some time, even if all they intended to do was round up the usual suspects. So they would obviously still be in the cantina a minute later when Greedo is supposed to have confronted Han. Surely they wouldn’t have let Han just casually shoot someone and walk away. Surely Han was smart enough not to blow someone away right in front of the cops. Even if we imagine that they are the worst, most slackerly investigators it is possible for them to be, even if we imagine that they casually glanced around and left without doing a damn thing, they would still have been right outside the cantina when Han had his little tete-a-tete with Greedo.

A more logical explanation of the whole Greedo scene is that it is something Han made up later, maybe to look tougher or impress Leia. It’s not really important why. Han was a scoundrel, after all, and notoriously so.  Lying was par for the course for him. Check out the “oh, please” look Ben gives him over the “Kessel Run in twelve parsecs” line. Further, Han was the only character to see this so-called shootout, and they all left Mos Eisley right after the shootout. It’s not the sort of thing that anyone would have been able to fact check, even if they had been so inclined.

Han, relaxing alone in the Mos Eisley cantina.

Han didn’t shoot. Greedo was a lie.

OK, the site is basically working again. Still some fiddly bits, but it works better than the old site ever did, and with any luck at all the coming days will see me dust the place off, and start posting more regular updates to the blog and the comic. Not, mind, that I ever post on a regular schedule, but if you check back occasionally, you should find new stuff…

The comic that is updating right now (Space) is supposed to be a sort sci-fi/historical fiction kind of thing, on the theme of loneliness and wide open spaces. Bits of it have been kicking around in my head for years, sort of, and I expect I’ll be working on it for a while.

Ok, then. The archive order problem is at least partially sorted. Note to self: if you have a cache plugin turned on, you will not be able to see changes to the website till you rebuild the cache. Remembering this will save you a lot of frustration.