Star Wednesday: Epic Force Princess Leia

When Carrie Fisher suffered a heart attack two days before Christmas, I decided that I would honor her by writing about a Princess Leia toy for this week’s “Star Wednesday” entry. What a shock it was to read on Tuesday that she had passed away. Rest in Peace, Carrie Fisher. What a doo doo year this has been. As I combed through my shelves in search of the perfect tribute, I found a definite absence of Princess Leia toys. I have a few action figures, but not much more. I have entire shelves in my Star Wars room dedicated to… (read more)

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Christmas Traditions

It all goes back to that Unity Candle ceremony. When Susan and I got married in 1995, we lit a unity candle during our wedding ceremony. As music played (or maybe somebody sang), each of us started with our own lit candle, and with those we lit a third candle before extinguishing our own. The ceremony is supposed to represent that instead of “you” and “me,” it’s now “us.” I argued, unsuccessfully, that we should keep the original candles lit — after all, even after marriage, there’s still a “you” and a “me,” right? When it comes to Christmas traditions… (read more)

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Revisiting RetroPie

I’ve seen a lot of articles over the past month (most recently this one on Ars Technica) suggesting that people who can’t find one of those new NES Classic systems in stores should build their own using a Raspberry Pi. I even mentioned the Raspberry Pi as an alternative to a real NES back in September in my Guide to (Many) NES Alternatives article. Since then I’ve had several people ask me how difficult and time consuming it is to get a Raspberry Pi emulation system up and running from scratch. Today, I decided to build one from scratch. For… (read more)

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Rogue One (Spoiler Free)

To the casual fan, the Star Wars timeline can be a bit confusing. As most people know by now, the original trilogy of films (Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi) were Episodes 4-6 in the Star Wars timeline. The prequels (The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith) are Episodes 1-3, which means they were released after the original trilogy, but chronologically take place prior to it. Last year’s The Force Awakens, Episode 7, takes place thirty years after Return of the Jedi. When you start getting into how many years… (read more)

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Star Wednesday: Movie Posters

A few years back my dad bought me the movie posters for, at that time, all six Star Wars films. My wife framed them. I hung them in our movie room when we moved into our new house. They’re pretty awesome. When you collect “a little bit” of something, space isn’t an issue. Everyone has room on their desk or nightstand for a couple of small items. If you’re really into something, maybe you’ll hang a shelf and fill it up with trinkets. In my Star Wars room, which is approximately 10′ x 14′, every square inch of wall space… (read more)

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Fifteenth Birthdays

I spent some time today trying to remember my fifteenth birthday. The birthdays that bookend that one are crystal clear. When I turned fourteen in 1987 I got a motorcycle, and when I turned sixteen in 1989 I got my first car, but that fifteenth birthday remains fuzzy. 1988 was either the year I got my first “real” skateboard (a Fred Smith III model from Alva) or my second Commodore 1541 disk drive. Both cost roughly the same in 1988, so it could have been either one. I guess what sticks out the most about my fifteenth birthday is that,… (read more)

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Another Semester Down

At 5 p.m. on Thursday, I left the University of Oklahoma seven credit hours closer to a graduate degree in Professional Writing. Fourteen credit hours down, eighteen to go. This semester I took Tutorial and Creative Nonfiction. In Creative Nonfiction we developed nonfiction book proposals. Throughout the semester we wrote query letters, researched markets, developed chapter summaries, penned a synopsis of our books, and even wrote sample chapters. I didn’t realize how much work we had done until the end of the semester, when we assembled all of those components into a single proposal. In addition to that project, we… (read more)

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Mountain Lodge Restaurant (Gone)

Susan and I are sticklers for eating at local restaurants while away from home. McDonald’s is McDonald’s no matter where you go, but local restaurants are where you find the local food and local flavor. Most often, it’s where you’ll find the local people, too. This past summer while vacationing in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, we ate breakfast at the Mountain Lodge Restaurant. We were driving south down Parkway (the main road that runs through the center of Gatlinburg) in search of breakfast when we passed a sign welcoming us to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We quickly did a u-turn,… (read more)

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Star Wednesday: Comic Books

I have never been a comic book guy, neither as a kid nor as an adult. I can easily count on one hand all my childhood memories involving comic books. My great Grandma Brown had a small stack of them in her living room that I used to flip through each time we visited. One time, at a garage sale, my mom bought me a stack of horror-themed comic books. My dad had a collection of Star Wars comic books that he kept in his bedroom. That’s pretty much it. Many years ago, my dad bequeathed his collection of Star… (read more)

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Thankful for School

I am thankful for all the obvious things one should be thankful for (life, health, work), but one thing that hit me this week was how thankful I am for the graduate writing program I’m enrolled in. I’ve attended college for lots of reasons over the years — because I wanted to start something, because I needed to finish something, because I didn’t know what else to do — but right now, I’m going to school because I want to. We are paying for my classes out of pocket, and it’s not cheap. That’s not any kind of badge of… (read more)

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