Day 535, Quasi-Quarantine: Shifting Loyalties Make Howzer A Compelling Character -- And Build

 

One of our favorite secondary characters from the first season of "Star Wars: The Bad Batch" is Howzer, the conflicted clone captain from the "Devil's Deal" and "Rescue on Ryloth" episodes.

Stationed on the planet Ryloth to assist the Twi'leks in maintaining peace, his arc had him initially siding with the Imperial backers before shifting to the Resistance effort. Unaffected by the customary clone inhibitor chip, Howzer was able to show individualism and question authority.

Howzer was eventually arrested by Crosshair's troops, but not before assisting the family of Hera Syndulla, who would go on to fame as the incomparable pilot of the Ghost, call sign Spectre 2.

With teal blue Phase II armor and DC-17 and DC-15A weapons, Howzer stands out with a distinctive look. Photographs perhaps don't best capture our effort to re-create him, but we managed to paint a blank Phase II helmet, as well as a torso and legs.

My building partner was thrilled with the result -- despite needing some tweaks here and there -- and so was I. We're hoping this memorable character makes further appearances in subsequent "Bad Batch" seasons so we can make additional builds involving him.

Day 534, Quasi-Quarantine: When The Deshaun Watson Trade Rumors Still Won't Quit

 

It would be peak Dolphins to trade several first- and second-round picks for a player with a $156 million contract who is currently facing 22 civil lawsuits, 10 criminal complaints, and extensive FBI involvement.

Which probably means it's going to happen. 🤦

Limerick Friday #515: Re-Arranging Presentation Deck Chairs On The Titanic -- Day 531

Blind eyes turned

Lessons never learned

With incompetence riddled

Leadership fiddled

While the company burned

First week of school

Has been mostly cool

But a question before I go

I just need to know

Can you drink in carpool?

College football is nigh

Excitement is high

But full stadium numbers

Just kinda make me wonder

How many fans are gonna die?

Millennials with feels

Brokering deals

Promotions undeserved

Raises for time served

Meritocracy, for reals?

Every loss by a run

Heartbreaks at the gun

Under an injury raid

The Mets continue to fade

Another season that looks done

Last time ...

Day 530, Quasi-Quarantine: Unexpected "A Swim In The Pond In The Rain" Offers Insights From A Love Affair With The Short Story

"Fiction helps us remember that everything remains to be seen. It's a sacrament dedicated to this end. We can't always feel as open to the world as we feel at the end of a beautiful story, but feeling that way even briefly reminds us that such a state exists and creates the aspiration in us to strive to be in that state more often."

In the unexpected "A Swim in the Pond in the Rain," George Saunders expands on his teaching curriculum at Syracuse to offer an exploration of the short story format. With a subtitle of "In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life," he relies on Russian masters to do so.

"In the first pulse of a story, the writer is like a juggler, throwing bowling pins into the air. The rest of the story is the catching of those pins. At any point in the story, certain pins are up there and we can feel them. We'd better feel them. If not, the story has nothing out of which to make its meaning."

"A story is not like real life; it's like a table with just a few things on it. The 'meaning' of the table is made by the choice of things and their relation to one another ... That's really all a story is: a limited set of elements that we read against one another."

"A Swim in the Pond in the Rain" examines structure, pacing, energy, revision, causality, and a myriad other topics. Doing so in the context of Anton Chekhov, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolai Gogol gives Saunders the opportunity to apply contemporary philosophies to established classics.

Saunders spends a lot of time articulating the importance of the relationship that is constantly being built between writer and reader.

"We might think of a story this way: the reader is sitting in the sidecar of a motorcycle the writer is driving. In a well-told story, reader and writer are so close together that they're one unit. My job as the writer is to keep the distance between motorcycle and sidecar small, so that when I go right, you go right. When I, at the end of the story, take the motorcycle off the cliff, you have no choice but to follow. (I haven't, so far, given you any reason to distance yourself from me.) If the space between motorcycle and sidecar gets too great, when I corner, you fail to hear about it, and fall out of relationship with me and get bored or irritated and stop reading and go off to watch a movie. Then there's no character development or plot or voice or politics or theme. There's no anything." 

I was familiar with Saunders's work through "Lincoln in the Bardo" (an honorable-mention nominee for the 2019 Scooties). In this one, he never verges into the procedural, but his nuggets (under the category of TICHN: "things I couldn't help noticing") are both instructive and revealing. 

"Yes: it's a harsh form, the short story.

"Harsh as a joke, a song, a note from the gallows."

While certainly no how-to book, this work is full of advice on (as advertised) writing, reading, and, well, life. Saunders's passion for the short story format and these authors in particular shines through, and he includes some fascinating exercises in the appendices.

"You don't need an idea to start a story. You just need a sentence. Where does that sentence come from? Wherever. It doesn't have to be anything special. It will become something special, over time, as you keep reacting to it. Reacting to that sentence, then changing it, hoping to divest it of some of its ordinariness or sloth, is ... writing. That's all writing is or needs to be. We'll find our voice and ethos and distinguish ourselves from all the other writers in the world without needing to make any big overarching decisions, just by the thousands of small ones we make as we revise."

The reading can be a bit intense in sections, but the reward is worth the toil. "A Swim in a Pond in the Rain" is a love letter to short stories in general, an inspiration to writers of all stripes, and a review of some of the most impactful short stories ever written. It would be hard to ask too much more of such a book.

"A well-written bit of prose is like a beautifully hand-painted kite, lying there on the grass. It's nice. We admire it. Causality is the wind that then comes along and lifts it up. The kite is then a beautiful thing made even more beautiful by the fact that it's doing what it was made to do."

Day 529, Quasi-Quarantine: Quick Mid-Week Work Mood Update

 

Day 528, Quasi-Quarantine: Arts & Crafting Our Way To An Epic "Scorch"

 

While my building partner and I have gravitated to purchasing a handful of custom Lego clone helmets, I have the most fun painting blank or existing helmets to match clones that we like.

That's why the creation of RC-1262 -- nicknamed "Scorch" -- was so rewarding. A clone commando who served as part of the elite Delta Squad alongside Boss, Fixer, and Sev (who has been featured here previously), Scorch has a distinctive look that was cool to replicate.

We painted an existing Mandalorian helmet, painted a torso and legs with his trademark yellow color, and pieced together a tactical backpack. First featured in a "Star Wars: The Clone Wars" episode called "Witches of the Mist," he carried DC-17m and DC-15A guns in canon, though those are harder to get hands on.

According to Wookieepedia, Scorch's story got significantly darker after the rise of the Empire, which is why his appearance in "Star Wars: The Bad Batch" ("War-Mantle" episode) gave us mixed feelings. While it was very cool to see him in action, he emerged as a trainer of the first generation of Imperial stormtroopers and was involved in the capture of Hunter after a mission to free Gregor.

Will we see him again in the next season of "The Bad Batch"? Here's to hoping.

Day 527, Quasi-Quarantine: All The Back-To-School Questions, Emotions, & Jitters

 

Seeing old friends, no contact tracing, making new friends, global pandemic, in-person learning, questionable safety protocols, rekindling social skills, no virtual option.

Not nervous. Everything will be fine.

Limerick Friday #514: There Goes the Summer -- Day 524

Traditional August bummer

The last days of summer

School starts again

Stay safe if we can

As our nation just gets dumber

Welcome to Mets baseball

And the annual freefall

Injuries galore

At-bats that make you snore

I miss Shea, y'all

Low-morale condition

Spurring attrition

Rudderless leaders

Yield to bottom-feeders

No strategy, all wishin'

Hoping for wins

On needles and pins

The OL blows

That's how it goes

When you follow the 'Fins

Ignorance reigns

Mouth-breather stains

Logic lost

At what cost

America's dying strains

Last time ...

Day 523, Quasi-Quarantine: Uneven "Can't Even" Still Manages To Be Instructive And Revelatory

"Millennials have been denigrated and mischaracterized, blamed for struggling in situations that set us up to fail. But if we have the endurance and aptitude and wherewithal to work ourselves this deeply into the ground, we also have the strength to fight. We have little savings and less stability. Our anger is barely contained. We're a pile of ashes smoldering, a bad memory of our best selves. Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose."

In "Can't Even," Anne Helen Petersen works hard to dig out the millennial origin story in a way that overturns lazy and automatic characterizations of the generation. Pinpointing the erosion of employee rights, the rise of student debt, and the onslaught of the gig economy, she describes how the 73 million millennials have found themselves inheriting the worst job market in 80 years.

"Left to its own devices, capitalism is not benevolent. That's hard for many Americans to hear or think about, having been raised to adulate capitalism, but the fact remains: If the goal is always growth at any cost, then employees, like machine parts, are exploitable, as longs the productivity continues to go up and the profit margins continue to rise. But for a brief period of time, after the Great Depression and before the recessions of the 1970s, capitalism was -- at least in America -- somewhat more humane. Still imperfect, still exclusionary, still subject to market whims. But proof that the way we do things today doesn't have to be the way we do things in the future."

"The gig economy isn't replacing the traditional economy. It's propping it up in a way that convinces people it's not broken."

Petersen relies on impactful stats to help shed light on this generation. She is able to construct a vivid line from the disappearance of pension plans and the middle class to the rise of "concerted cultivation" parenting techniques and the soaring cost of child care -- all of which contribute to the prevalence of burnout.

"Millennials live with the reality that we're going to work forever, die before we pay off our student loans, potentially bankrupt our children with our care, or get wiped out in a global apocalypse."

"But the myth of the wholly self-made American, like all myths, relies on some sort of sustained willful ignorance -- often perpetuated by those who've already benefited from them."

Petersen even updated the book with a quick commentary on the coronavirus and it has exacerbated and shined a light on existing problems.

Granted, "Can't Even" is rampant with avoidable grammar issues. It's also littered with assumptions -- however, these may be unavoidable when you're trying to represent an entire generation. But as a non-millennial, I learned things reading this book - that's a win, in my estimation, as well as a call to continue to try to understand the generation that likely will need to salvage the post-reality society.

"The overarching clarity offered by this pandemic is that it's not any single generation that's broken, or fucked, or failed. It's the system itself."

" ... The refrains we return to -- that we're a land of opportunity, that we're a benevolent world superpower -- are false. That's a deeply discombobulating realization, but it's one that people who haven't navigated our world with the privileges of whiteness, middle class-ness, or citizenship have understood for some time. Some people are just now realizing the extent of the brokenness. Others have understood it, and mourned it, their entire lives."

Day 522, Quasi-Quarantine: The Summer Of "The Bad Batch" Hits Hyperspace

 

In a time of seemingly endless upheaval and confusion, one of the few constants this summer has been "The Bad Batch."

The number of shows that both kids enjoy can be counted on one finger, and this is it. One of the cool things about "The Bad Batch" is that you can see yourself in at least one character, whether it's Omega's relentless positivity, Echo's ability to overcome obstacles, Hunter's stoic leadership, Tech's bottomless pit of cleverness, or Wrecker's fearless aggression, there is something for everyone.

Additionally, the long-rumored Bad Batch shuttle ("The Havoc Marauder") was recently released by Lego, ending a months-long wait for my building partner. Our daily walks would inevitably include some mention of his wish that August would arrive, and bring with it the new set.

As we prepare to kiss another summer goodbye and send the kids back into the swirling vortex of school, emotions are running high. Something tells me we'll need to rely on the Bad Batch for more and more lessons as the months go by.

It would be hard to ask for a better model ...

Day 521, Quasi-Quarantine: "Parks and Recreation" Finds Its Center With Ron Swanson

 

So I largely missed out on "Parks and Recreation" when it was on the air, mostly dismissing it as a ripoff of "The Office" and moving on to other shows.

I mean, I wasn't wrong.

However, so many jokes and scenes from the show have entered the cultural lexicon that I figured it was time to check it out. While I'm still finding it somewhat difficult to fully commit, the "Ron and Tammy" episode from season two justified a lot of my attention.

Featuring the incredible Megan Mullaly as Ron Swanson's ex-wife, this episode had me rolling from start to finish. To this point in the series -- roughly halfway through the second season -- Nick Offerman (as Swanson) has been grossly underused.

I'm hoping this is the point where that changes, and "Parks and Recreation" moves to much more Ron Swanson and much less Tom Haverford.

"Every time she laughs, an angel dies. Even telemarketers avoid her."

Day 520, Quasi-Quarantine: The Painstaking Process Of Producing The Premier Pilot Warthog

One of our favorite obscure clone troopers is Warthog, a dynamic pilot in the Republic Navy's Hunter Squadron.

Often serving as the wingman for Jedi General Plo Koon, Warthog also joined the 104th Battalion at times to provide aerial support under Commander Wolffe.

Warthog was an ace pilot, most often flying BTL-B Y-wings, V-19 Torrents, or Z-95 starfighters. His most high-profile missions came in the Assault on Gwori, the First Battle of Felucia, and the Rescue on Kadavo.

Replicating Warthog's distinctive helmet was a definite challenge. Starting with a blank clone pilot helmet, we used a toothpick to mirror the design displayed in "The Clone Wars." 

The result was actually a bit better than we had anticipated -- and it has held up through numerous follow-up missions that feature Warthog piloting any number of Rebel or Resistance vehicles into battle.

Day 516, Quasi-Quarantine: Mesmerizing "Klara and the Sun" Tackles AI Questions Head On

"Then let me ask you something else. Let me ask you this. Do you believe in the human heart? I don't mean simply the organ, obviously. I'm speaking in the poetic sense. The human heart. Do you think there is such a thing? Something that makes each of us special and individual? And if we just suppose that there is. Then you don't think, in order to truly learn Josie, you'd have to learn not just her mannerisms but what's deeply inside her? Wouldn't you have to learn her heart?"

The incomparable Kazuo Ishiguro has once more tackled the theme of master and servant, this time using the broad genre of science fiction to explore the matter in "Klara and the Sun."

Playing with themes of light and shadow, the novel starts at a slow pace, but the final third of the book pulses with intensity. As an "artificial friend" is posed with the question of what it would mean to "continue" its human child owner, the AF shows itself capable of perhaps more human emotions and reasoning than humans themselves.

A simple examination of what it means for a robot to come to terms with the exhibition of complex emotions quickly gains complexity as "Klara and the Sun" becomes a satire of meritocracy, to borrow a phrase from The Atlantic.

"I'd never before seen anything that gave, all at once, so many signals of anger and the wish to destroy ... At that moment it felt to me some great error had been made that the creature should be allowed to stand in the Sun's pattern at all, that this bull belonged somewhere deep in the ground far within the mud and darkness, and its presence on the grass could only have awful consequences."

As the work races to a close, environmentalism, the caste system, and governmental conditions come under examination -- a fitting novel for the time of quasi-quarantine. 

"'I do apologize, Paul,' Miss Helen said, 'for suggesting you and your new friends were fascists. I shouldn't have done so. It's just you did say you were all white people and all from the ranks of the former professional elites. You did say that. And that you were having to arm yourself quite extensively against other types. Which does all sound a little on the fascistic side ...'"

"Klara and the Sun" is occasionally undermined by its own flat prose, but the questions it raises and the very real pathos it explores makes the read both timely and fascinating.

"There's nothing there. Nothing inside Josie that's beyond the Klara of this world to continue."

Day 515, Quasi-Quarantine: Piecing Together "The Dude" In Nags Head

 

There's few better rainy-day-at-the-beach activities than crushing a puzzle, and it's even better when "The Big Lebowski" is involved.

With extended family helping, we knocked this one out in a respectable amount of time, despite the relative lack of color and gradient.

8.5/10, would team up at the OBX to solve again.

But that's, like, your opinion, man.

Day 514, Quasi-Quarantine: Wave Scooter Gets A New Color Rush Helmet

Previously, we've introduced you to Clone Trooper Wave Scooter and his dolphin-inspired helmet, as well as the 13th Legion, Dolphin Battalion trooper.

Well, with another (likely) ill-fated Dolphins season nigh, it's high time to review another Wave Scooter alternate helmet.

This design uses a custom clone pilot helmet that arrives as a blank white product. We painted it in Miami colors, and the result has held up fairly well. 

With repeated use, touchups will be required (that's unavoidable), but for now, Wave Scooter is geared up for a new year. Let the humility commence.

Day 513, Quasi-Quarantine: The Beach Detox

 

Fighting that back-to-work, missing-the-beach, nothing-makes-sense, who-am-I feeling ...