Skinnytroopers
"The original stormtrooper was 5ft 10in and 110lbs."
Is that correct? That is remarkably light if so.
Two years ago, the helmet of an Empire Strikes Back stormtrooper fetched $120,000 (£92,736) at US auction. An Imperial TIE fighter pilot's helmet, said to be one of just 12 made for A New Hope, went the following year for £180,000 ($233,244) – something the BBC's Antiques Roadshow presenter Fiona Bruce dismissed as a "piece of …
I was a skinny bugger when I was 18. I was 5'10" and weighed 148lbs. If I'd been 110lbs at that height I think my GP would have taken one look at me and called Social Services.
Skinny by 1990's standards would to be fair probably have been considered practically morbidly obese in the 1970's before the advent of computer games, TV, etc. Those days you'd have been playing outside and burning lots of energy because there was literally nothing else to do and food was relatively expensive so you wouldn't have had as much of it.
Skinny by 1990's standards would to be fair probably have been considered practically morbidly obese in ...
Blahblah. 110lbs is less than 50kg, or 7st 12lb, BMI* of 15 or "very severely underweight". I know you only ate coal and lived in a shoebox in the 70s, and kids today don't know how good they got it, but no storm trooper was 110lb.
* Oh god, I mentioned BMI. Any chance of avoiding the 70 replies saying how BMI is meaningless and just wrong for you and agree that a BMI of 15 is inconceivably low for a storm trooper. I'm sure your BMI of 30 is all muscle and that you are very tall, you don't need to explain.
"it's the New Hope stormtrooper that's in demand, mostly by men, mostly aged between 30 and 40."
Yet none of them in that age range saw New Hope in the cinema first time round (or at least they would be to young to remember). I would have expected that age group to be more interested in Empire or Jedi troopers and the New Hope trooper buyers to be 44+.
This is true, but while the film did great, the toys didn't start selling well until about 81. So if you are 40yrs old now, your earliest memorys might be the plethora of Star Wars 1 and 2 toys, so you could want them as much as any other adult toy.
P.S. Sorry, nobody really used the exact numerals or subtitles back then, they were referred to as "the first one" and "the second one". Then came the 3rd one... "the one with Ewoks".
It's quite a while since I watched the original trilogy, but I can't recall there being any real differences between the stormtroopers in those films (not counting things like the snow troops from Empire and the speeder bike fellas from Jedi..or the dudes with the natty red get-up in Jedi). I'd always thought the differences didn't creep in until the Clones
Sandtrooper? If I can't get one of those suits, can I buy a Stormpeople costume instead? Did we watch the same movie 40 years ago? And yes, I'm that old. When over 50 you are, look this good you will not!
(My nerd rage has made me strong with the Dark Side!)
on a popular American tech/social media site, was another handwringing article about how "most Millenials don't have $1K to make a down payment on a home".
This article, and its glimpse into the premium "nostalgia" market, is pretty much the hard truth as "why". Not "economy", not "jobs", or the Boogeyman in Chief. It's constant, deliberate, personal choice of priorities.
Not a politically correct observation to make, but when you know people who dump 4 or 5K a year just in personal carry-around electronics, new TVs every two years, hundred dollar bar tabs every single weekend, and an overseas vacation every summer, who then complain about not having savings enough to buy some Limited Edition Collectible Robot Figurine, well, you may sympathize because that's a damn cool kit but "what the hell did you expect" comes to mind. That sh*t adds up into real money real fast when you care to look at it.
Or even more expensive by a couple orders of magnitude, is having two or more children.
Me, as a nerd, and not having kids, means I could choose some stupid expensive toys and still come out on top. But frankly I'd rather spend money on the tools to replicate my own. Vacuum forming and silicon casting molds on a borrowed item FTW.
$1K? The standard down payment on a house is between 5% and 20%. Outside the truly desperate parts of Detroit and Baltimore, I don't where you'd get a house for $20K.
But anyway, Yes, kids today. I do think, though, that you need to remember that there are levels of income at which there isn't a lot of prospect of austerity every amounting to serious--down payment or college tuition--levels of savings.
(a) "people who dump 4 or 5K a year just in personal carry-around electronics", etc
and
(b) "most Millenials don't have $1K to make a down payment on a home"
It is possible that these are (i) mostly different groups of millenials/people, and (ii) both statements are exaggerated. But then it wouldn't surprise me if there was at least some overlap...
Why should the young have to "borrow" off of some faceless bankster crook just to get a roof over their heads?
If a young person was to leave school at 16, work the various minimum wages throughout their teens and twenties on a 40 hour week. They would need to work 11 years, without spending any money on food, water, housing, warmth, hygiene, literally spending nothing except taxes, in order to save up enough money for a cheap home.
What is really sad, is this appears to be an accepted situation of a "normal society".
It really isn't, and it really shouldn't be
I started 3d printing a multipart, wearable Stormtrooper helmet from Thingiverse last Friday. Must have been all the fortieth anniversary hullabaloo that precipitated it. I'm figuring that it'll take around 120 hours of printing time plus 10 - 20 hours finishing. Might even have to build in an amp with the output frequency limited to 500-2500 Hz, for that Stormtrooper sound.
I have no idea what I'll do with it when it's finished. Maybe that Mozart bust in my basement needs headgear?
Of course you can. Pick the "right" area of a city and you can almost certainly buy for well under £100k. It might not be ready to move into instantly without some basic tidying up and a lick of paint, but nothing a couple days of work can't make acceptable.
A lot of the TV shows about buying and selling property, doing them up etc. has raised expectations for many people such that they expect a house they are buying to not only be perfect but to already be decorated in their own personal style.
...and this is just a drop in the ocean of insanity.
Touching on the subject of scarcity, I wonder how long this species has left on this rock.
Judging by our choice of socioeconomic value system, not very long.
So long, and thanks for all the fish