<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n
So, something great about this strip is it actually required a real, out-of-the-house quest. Most of these strips can be done from the comfort of a cave. Issac goes through and grabs every single screenshot from the movies, copies Dad’s original text, formats, and sends it to me. I, then, format everything site-side, write up my little quips and notes, and schedule it for Sunday, one second after midnight.<\/p>\n
But this week, the strip contained a real life photo. The picture of the core rule book for the official Star Wars tabletop RPG. We talked about sizing up the original picture and doing some garbage sharpening on it and hoping it would look okay but…yeah, that looked…bad.<\/p>\n
The next idea was just find the book and take a new picture. Easy, right?<\/p>\n
Nope. Dad’s original copy, which I can only assume(?) he had, is lost to time. Maybe this was a picture of a book one of his players had? Maybe he asked one of his brothers for a shot of it?<\/p>\n
I didn’t feel like contacting every single one of his old table, and some extended family, to see if they had this one book they might<\/em> have had in 2006.<\/p>\nWe could have looked up an eBay listing for one and snagged a screenshot, but…there’s an ick to just skimming someone’s photo without asking, and I’m personally against weird and confusing chats with eBay sellers when I have no intention of buying their product. They didn’t list it as some sort of strange modeling gig for a web-comic they may or may not have heard of.<\/p>\n
So Issac and I jumped in the car and went to every comic book store within a thirty mile radius.<\/p>\n
And then called every place within a two hundred<\/em> mile radius.<\/p>\nQuickly the search turned into an awkward, stumbling interaction with confused comic-book store owners.\u00a0 I ask about the book I’m looking for, and they shake their heads. The book is out of print and most old copies have fallen apart, they are prized and hard to come by. The new edition is out, and new, like…new new. ‘You’ll be lucky to find a copy’ new.<\/p>\n
They tell me to look on eBay and I (with an appropriate amount of shame) explain I don’t actually want to buy <\/em>the book, but instead…take a picture of it? They tell me to just take a screenshot, like our original idea, and I just agree and leave, getting nowhere. I find a place that has it three hours away, and when I ask if they could just send me a picture of it, they laugh and hang up.<\/p>\nShout out to ‘Your Parent’s Basement’ in Butler PA, for not only not<\/em> laughing in my face, but also being super professional and helpful even though I wasn’t there to give them money. I don’t know what it’s like to be there as a customer, but they were excellent sports about the whole thing and let me peruse their library of rentals without paying the usual entry cost. They seem to be a place you rent tables for board and tabletop games? I think? Instructions unclear, but staff cool as hell about weirdos asking to take pictures with their products.<\/p>\nAnyway, we didn’t end up finding the book at all, we realized we could print a very ink-heavy and wasteful front page of a PDF and stick it on a blank stack of paper. Charlie surprised us all with pizza when we got home, and so the scene was set. We grabbed some of our own tabletop gear and made a whole set of it. Actually turned out to be a lot of fun. And loose printed PDF copies of handbooks are super common these days anyway, so really, it’s\u00a0authentic<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It would have been pleasing if this extra-large (double, actually) comic had ended up being number \u201cXL\u201d. Missed it by one. (What kind of a dork obsesses over details like that? Sheesh.) I\u2019m sure this is an unexpected turn of events. Don\u2019t worry, I know where this is going. You don\u2019t. Ha ha. –\u00a0 Shamus, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[631],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-56299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dm-of-the-rings-remaster"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56299"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56305,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56299\/revisions\/56305"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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