You ever stumble onto someone's website, and get yanked in by the gravitational pull of the sheer density and quality of what lay within? Often one will quickly smell the depths of obsessive knowledge, the burnt ozone of laser focus, with a hint of the sadness of incompletion, a touch of admiration, a waft of slight pity, and the hint of creeping around the edges of true dysfunction. It is the smell of treasure, and it lets you know you are going to be reading every page, every post, to learn what this person knows, to know everything about them, and to marvel at their brilliance and / or shake your head at their follies.
Those are very special sites.
This is not one of those.
It got me thinking though... You can't scrounge useful or interesting information off of Mypace. To call it a shell of its former self would be more than generous. Usenet has a fared a little better perhaps, but is still cold and unhospitable as a proto-social media. Facebook is a garish neon city that looks to be buzzing with activity from a distance, until you get closer and realize that despite the noise, it is eerily empty except some boomers wandering aimlessly, perpetually late to every party, and a lot of robots trying to sell you things. Twitter has built a Thunderdome, invited a few million of the worst people in the world over, convinced each of them that SCIENCE&trade has shown that every opinion they've ever had has been right, that regular people are desperate to hear what they say, and that the world needs them to point out everything that appears to be a problem. Only catch is the rules: No humor, no friendship, nothing is ever OK, nothing is ever not completely serious, you can never not be upset, and by the way, there will be a few evil bot for every human, always busy at work on unfathomable projects with mysterious goals.
All this to say, I found a picture of a Jawa that had been lost to me for a really long time. Let me back up. One day in the late early or early mid 90s, I was a not-quite teenager spending the afternoon at a shopping mall with my friend. Shopping malls back then were somehow activities unto themselves. After spending whatever meager scraps of money we brought at the foodcourt, we were walking past a store that doesn't exist anymore, like Montgomery Ward or Mervyn's, when I saw a guy wearing a t-shirt that would (mildly) change the course of my life for the next 27 years or so.
Summarized, the shirt featured a Jawa, front and center, hefting a comically large wrench. This basic formula somehow immediately connected with my squishy little brain in ways that I couldn't begin to understand at the time. The graphic tee industry was just coming online at the time, so seeing apparently bespoke art from a franchise like Star Wars (which was having a mini-renaissance, but was nothing like the ubiquitous presence we know today), was already a massive hook. It was a signal of shared understanding, of two kindred souls who had delved deep into obscurity that few others had experienced. It elevated the simple background character to iconography. The massive wrench and the glowing eyes shrouded behind the wrench-bearer told the story of Jawa life. Not mighty in strength of arms, and somewhat on the fearful side, the Jawa excels in the life of a scavenger and salvager. The girthy implement implies that they are so expert or persistent that they can tackle galactic scale projects. While not necessarily brave, they understand the wages of their survival, and a brave sould might always be counted on to be first to walk down the ramp of the sandcrawler and assess the situation so that the critical business might proceed in force. While leading a life that many might seen by some as low, the Jawas appear to have great cultural grit and highly admirable qualities. The wrench has also become one of humanity's symbols for repair, mechanical skill, and tinkering, so those inclined to such things may feel a sense of kinship just by seeing it. Can't remember if I told him cool shirt or not.
Years later, I remembered this mildly magical moment and turned to the internet to find that shirt. The design was not to found, despite my moderate skill in driving the mighty engines of search. Every few years or so, I'd try again. As the accuracy of memory inevitably began to fail, the image of what I had seen began to morph to some degree. I began to wonder if it was custom art hand screen-printed. I seemed to recall the art being in a very graphic style, in the spirit of David Gonzales' Homies art that were ubiquitous then and figures and tagging art. After a point I started to wonder if I had seen it correctly at all... Maybe it was something else, and my Star Wars addled brain translated it to Jawa.
Until last week, when my mind strayed from work and decided to punch "jawa with wrench" into Google.
The shirt had been added to a collector's archive website. The dates lined up perfectly, and there was even a bread crumb: SW Galaxies I Art. This lead me to a set of art trading cards that I didn't know about, which had apparently been used on a t-shirt. Artist Greg Theaktson, quietly legendary figure in the comics world, and interestingly, this kind of thing does not necessarily appear to have much in common with other examples of his body of work. Bookmarked an in depth interview with him for later to try to get a start finding out how he got roped into Star Wars back in those days. But most importantly, I have high quality versions of the art, which have presumably lain buried for years without sufficient written data to correlate to the visual data.
It is a bit different from what my memory had gentled it into over the long years. I expected a Homies inspired scene complete with chrome text and the shelltoe of a Chuck peeking out of the folds of the robe. However, this is unquestionably it. I can even see how my brain translated the perspective and details on the robe into the later mental versions. And after all this time, I had found it.
I immediately ping it to my family's Discord channel. They are somewhat less impressed.
That's OK, these types of things are mostly significant because of their extremely personal nature.