The Desert Mermaid

I wasn't planning to write this, mind you, but then this scene--set somewhere in the middle of The Force Awakens--showed up in a dream and then it WOULD NOT GO AWAY until I wrote it. So, you know. Blame the dream. And my current slight bout of hypomania, which is space-opera-themed. Y'all, I just finished the first Doctors! book's overhaul and I can already tell you that the sequel's gonna be EPIC.

But anyway. This had to come out first.

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( Spoilers! )

GUYS, GUYS, I'VE HAD AN AMAZING THOUGHT.

WHAT IF GEORGE LUCAS KNEW WHAT HE WAS DOING THE WHOLE TIME?

I mean, maybe somehow his deal with the devil meant he could see the future, or at any rate he still had some hope for his own sequels, so back in the early 90s he knew that Disney would eventually scrap the Expanded Universe, which even though it's full of silly shit has some fun stuff in it.* So he decided to spare the fans the angst of losing all that, while still allowing for sequels which didn't follow it.

But how to do it?

Why, by splitting the timeline, of course! And this was back before that was the rad thing to do, so the guy was a visionary.

And he could do it. He had the upcoming Special Editions. All he had to do was make one little change to them. Something that represented an actual character choice, that might split off the universes, but wouldn't take too much from the sacred movies themselves. So he made it a tiny thing, something that had a few reverberations through the rest of the Special Edition Trilogy (like who was hired to do the floorshow at Jabba's palace, etc.), but that he naively hoped wouldn't even register with fans.

That's right.

George Lucas split the timelines by altering who shot first.

TAKE THAT, NERDS. GEORGE LUCAS HAS WORKED TIRELESSLY TO PRESERVE MARA JADE AND THE SOLO KIDS AND THRAWN, AND ALL YOU DO IS BITCH ABOUT IT. FOR SHAME.

And that's my crazy conspiracy theory for the night.


*What? I like the Solo kids! At least, I did before ... well, that's a whole other Sarlacc Pit, isn't it.

So they've found that there's water in Martian soil, but that it'll take some processing to actually get to it. Well, that'll be handy once we get up there and start to HOLY SHIT WAIT A SECOND.

MOISTURE FARMERS. The water is eventually going to have to be extracted by MOISTURE FARMERS.

That's right. We are one step closer to living in a Star Wars universe.

God DAMN, science is good.

Have y'all BEEN to Disneyland? There has been Star Wars all up in that shit for years. AND IT HAS BEEN AWESOME.

Also, I will not be joining the howling over the prospect of Episode VII. I am zen in the knowledge that I already have the correct Star Wars series safely stored on nine Laser Discs, and the master copy of the actual canon is already in my head. So you just do your thing, Disney and Lucas, for YOU CANNOT TOUCH ME.

Ahh, post-holiday crash time. It was great to have my brother here, but when it’s for a visit, and when it’s the holidays, it’s also exhausting. (He seemed pretty tired by the end of the week, too.) On the other hand, going back to routine means going back to getting yelled at by angry patients or showing clueless patrons how to use the Scary New DVD Dispensinators.* Maybe I’ll stick with the exhausting holidays.

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MY SISTER: Whoa! Where’d Christmas go?!

ME: I don’t know. I woke up this morning and it had vanished. It’s like we got the Grinch a week late.

MY SISTER: Dude, if the Grinch had waited a week to steal Christmas, can you imagine how much those Whos would’ve paid him to do that very thing?

ME: Sure, the business is seasonal, but it’s quite lucrative!

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At least I can get the sewing machine up and running again now the tree is down. Rocket needs clothes—and fortunately, I have a whole wardrobe planned out for her. I may have to start with her nightshirt, since it’s pajama time at the Treehouse. But I’m looking forward to making her a flight suit. Not to mention shiny clothes. Lightning bolts all the way, baby!

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Speaking of dolls, I hereby decree that American Girl needs to quit bundling accessories in with big old furniture items. 2012’s unappealing Girl of the Year has a whole batch of little thingy-things that can only be gotten if you drop a chunk of money on her big loft bed. This time around I’m not really devastated—none of those items really catch my interest—but it’s an obnoxious trend. And it was rather frustrating a couple years ago when you could only get Lanie’s nifty cooking gear and food items if you bought her FORTY-POUND TRAILER CAMPER. Yeah, I may have a strange love for doll-sized accessories, but give me a break here.

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Just found out why that sad bloodhound next door hasn’t been howling lately: she fell over dead a couple weeks ago. I’m gonna miss that dog.

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Aside from the epic movie-watching experience of both Real Star Wars and Dumb Star Wars,** my brother finally got me to watch Memento, the inside-out and backwards movie. Stylistically it was a fun movie, enough to get past the idea that Everybody Is An Asshole just because figuring out the precise nature of everyone’s assholery still made it entertaining.

But the part I had really wanted to see was how they portrayed the concept of an acute case of anterograde amnesia. Leonard keeps insisting that he doesn’t have amnesia, but what he means is he doesn’t have Hollywood amnesia. Science-types note that Memento is one of just two movies that accurately portray a real form of amnesia. (The other? Finding Nemo.)

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I haven’t forgotten that y’all want the recipe for the awesome pizza I made the other night. And as soon as I figure out how the hell I made it, I’ll let you know.

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Fortunately, I have saved Skyward Sword for the post-holiday crash. Off to start that now.


*My sister has convinced me to watch Phineas and Ferb. That show should NOT be as damn entertaining as it is. I feel like some kind of Brony now.

**Mom on Emperor Palpatine in Return of the Jedi: "He reminds me of a lot of the nuns I had in Catholic school."

To the long list of reasons why I don’t plan to be a parent, you can add the fact that I’d probably mess this up, too:



These are the important things one must consider when having kids.


ETA: The quote is from Jon Stewart on his four-year-old son's tastes. Gonna take some deprogramming to fix that.

Okay, everyone! Meme time wrapup. Y’all asked me questions, and now I provide the answers in the Mystery Characters Doing Stuff Meme! The players were:

1. Bilbo Baggins
2. Toph Bei Fong
3. Pilot
4.Pyanfar Chanur
5. Hank McCoy/Beast
6. Granny Weatherwax
7. Donald Duck
8. Digger-Of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels
9. Data
10. Old Spice Guy
11. Daja Kisubo
12. Keladry of Mindelan
13. Lando Calrissian
14. Uncle General Iroh
15. The Joker

Put them all together, and ( hijinks ensue! )

Snagged from Geek King And God, Wil Wheaton, just a little late for Star Wars Day:



Y’all, I fucking recognize a lot of that footage. I should really not be admitting this, but I trust you nerds.

- I tell you, there is nothing like the pointless futzing of Wind Waker to put one in a pleasant stupor. I think some game designer went mad with power and made a game composed entirely of side quests, and somebody forcibly injected a couple of temples in there just so gamers could get their bearings. You can spend hours just wandering around on the ocean dredging up treasure boxes. And every time you get a New Item you gotta make the round of islands again to see if it'll do anything. It's GREAT.

- I finally got my hands on a copy of The Lando Calrissian Adventures. I never understood quite why Lando was the forgotten character. I was always kind of impressed with the way he behaved when pushed into a corner in Empire—it’s not particularly savory, but selling out some guy you’ve never heard of to protect your entire city is a pragmatic call, the lesser of two evils. And when Vader starts to make the lesser of two evils just as evil as the greater one, he tries diplomacy, and when that fails him, he takes the gonzo option.

Also, he destroyed the second Death Star. Yes, I realize that Luke had already done one, but I don’t think the destroyed planets would have cared if the Death Star was old meme.

- Speaking of crazy space adventures, I have figured out another reason writers make series—they have too damn many plots to fit into one book. So even though I plan to concentrate on the OGYAFE after Doctors! gets squared around, I may have to scribble a few things about Dweiji and the Princess, since we have achieved a Plot, and maybe even a Sequel. Hell, that might be more marketable than Doctors!, because even though it’s in the same universe, it’s your basic garden variety Crazy Space Adventure. (People wonder why I love space opera—it’s because this genre's “garden variety” garden contains shit like crystal plants and Grovebacks and such.)

- One more thing on science fiction, and it’s definitely a Bad Sign: I also have picked up the urge to actually write some of those alien-written paperbacks Dweiji keeps in her ship. Yes. I now want to write AU fic—not fic in an alternate universe, but stuff that counts as fiction in my alternate universe. YES I AM CRAZY.

- In Making Stuff News, I think I’ve worked out a way to make Kuen’s tablet—basically, a computer for someone with different aesthetics. And I am hoping the sewmonster bites me again soon, because I have a boatload of projects to do. I’m going to try at least to get something done for Daja before her birthday.

- I have found another good fall-asleep thing in my iPod: language tapes. The weird thing is, I hate listening to people talking on the radio when I'm awake. It's distracting and somehow unsettling. But when I'm not trying to do anything and have the voices on low, it's nice. Background noise or something.

- I’m wondering if my recent lethargy is related to a lack of proper food. I seem to get this regularly. I’ll see if once again recalibrating my diet so that it isn’t mostly pizza bagels and Girl Scout cookies helps.

And now to quit procrastinating and get my ass back into Doctors! I should be done by now, dammit.