Ichibancon 2020 – page 7
Don’t worry, folks, it’s not as bad as it looks… or it doesn’t look as bad as it is, I’m not sure. While the crack itself is fairly sizable, nothing really fell OFF; there’s not holes in the dome or anything like that. And since my Servo’s custom design includes a solid black dome, the crack’s basically invisibly unless you’re looking CREEPILY close. Some glue on the inside and fresh paint on the outside, and ol’ Servo should hold together just fine.
HOWEVER, this little incident has definitely put the scare in me, thanks to what I learned afterwards. After asking around about a replacement dome, just in case, I’ve been told that the company that made the traditional Tom Servo head mini-gumball machine has discontinued that model. In other words, Servo heads are now a limited resource. That’s doubly bad for me, since MY Servo doesn’t even have the “standard” gumball head but a special sports variant (you can see it in the comics, but the dome actually has a soccer ball pattern) that’d probably be even harder to track down. I mean, I’ve seen some similar-looking knock-offs online, but I’m not really a fan of dropping money on one if I’m not 100% sure it’ll fit on the puppet’s current head. So… yeah, gonna need to be even more careful with Servo in the near future.
…and if anybody out there just happens to have a secret stash of sports-themed 9.5″ Carousel snack dispensers hidden away somewhere, let me know!
Well, that makes it obvious how it probably happened. The Concrete Floor made the thing riddled with tiny, invisible cracks, like the ones on every plane of glass, which may have been amplified by regular wear-and-tear and packaging, before a final, sudden, shock brought them all to a visible level. If it had been another solid concrete floor, instead of thin carpet, then it might have shattered completely.
Now i just have this mental image of all the tiny cracks and damages the puppet’s endured over the years finally reaching a crisis point, and the whole thing just spontaneously collapsing into a pile of rubble all at once. Like the car in The Blues Brothers.
That’s pretty much the idea I was working off of. Honestly, though, I’m probably wrong, it’s likely something more along the lines of “it hit the exact same spot as it did the concrete, thus cracked”, or “the place it hit on the concrete was the best place for it to hit” or some other obscure thing neither I nor anyone else would be able to guess without detailed research. I often am wrong with my wild guesses on how reality works.
I should also admit that I didn’t exactly spend a lot of time rolling around on the convention center floor, so I can’t really speak for how much softer the hall floors actually were. I mean, we naturally ASSUME it’s gonna be softer than bare concrete, but I’ve been places where the carpet might as well just be painted on.
Unfortunately you fight entropy but entropy always wins.
My favorite john Mellencamp song 😀