Star Wars, Disguises and Lego

One of my favorite themes of the Star Wars series is that of "being in disguise". Han and Luke disguise themselves as Stormtroopers in Star Wars, Luke has to fight his inner demons in the disguise of Vader on Dagobah, and Lando and Leia don disguises to infiltrate Jabba's palace in Return of the Jedi. Even the end of Jedi has Darth Vader removing his disguise, revealing his true self to his son before death takes him. Is the series an extended metaphor for the masks we all wear?

Perhaps.

To a child, to this child anyway, disguises meant two figures for the price of one. It's Luke Skywalker and a Stormtrooper. It's Lando and some guy wearing a weird animal on his head. It's Leia and Boushh, the feared bounty hunter!

Who was Boushh? While Boushh's backstory has since been filled in in the Extended Universe, as kids we had no idea. It was clear that Boushh was as fearsome as Boba Fett (the epitome of cool). But Boushh was even more sinister, willing to destroy himself with a Thermal Detonator if he didn't get his way. Now, a Thermal Detonator was the eight year old Erik equivalent of a tactical nuclear weapon, so you get the idea. More badass than Boba Fett? I sure thought so. But it's Princess Leia under there? "Someone who loves you"? Leia, who had to be rescued in the first movie, is the one doing the rescuing in the end. Take that, childhood conceptions of femininity!



It's great to go to the movies when you're eight.

KoLego Contest Entry Complete!

I submitted my entry for The Kingdom of Loathing Lego contest today. Details on the contest are here, while my entry is here. Top prize is a cool two and a half million meat.

The Kingdom of Loathing is a silly computer game I'm obsessed with. It uses meat as currency. While 2.5 million meat seems like a fantastic prize, if I sold that ammount on eBay it wouldn't cover an extra value meal. But the prevailing theme behind the game is that the author is saying: "I made this. I like it. It's fun". And other people like it too. The author of the game now makes his living building this world and people donate money to him to keep it going.

In a nutshell, its' what I want my life to be. Not building php-based online RPG's, but doing something fun, that I enjoy, that other people also enjoy. It might seem idealistic, but it seems that letting people have fun from what I create is a hell of a way to make a living.

Trouble is, it's not as simple as giving custom legos to the apartment people for rent every month. But having people say "Nekosoft, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen!" makes it a lot easier to want to follow my bliss.

In which I break Blogger

If no one can ever post to Blogger again, the fault is mine. If the nascent proto-journalism of the blogsphere is lost to the mists of apache.catalina.valve error pages, the face on the effigies will be mine.

But, in my defense, I only wanted to change my template to something that (a) had the navagation/information links on the left hand side rather than the right and (b) wasn't orange. In the process, I broke Blogger.

Hopefully this is just a temporary series of an "internal error that keep the server from fulfilling the requests" but in the event that is it not, I apologize for ruining the internet.

Update: Take those effigies back to Effigies "R" Us, as it turns out that logging out and logging back in again solves a great many problems.