Via Laughing Squid.
Topic Archive: Found on the Web
Just about everyone must have seen the incredible steampunk keyboards custom built by Datamancer – but this one was new to me. I guess he’s been busy.
And it’s pretty much right up my street, so if anyone’s got about $1500 or so lying around, well, Christmas is coming, right?
This art deco computer keyboard was a custom project for the counter at Cinema 16:9 in Lansdowne, Pennsylvania. It’s made of wood and chrome with bright white LEDs and reworked vintage typewriter keys. I’d sure love to spend my days hovering over one like it.
Some of his other recent work is a series of ‘Aviator‘ keyboards, which are sort of halfway between the Deco keyboard and his earlier steampunkery: the Aviator’s a Dieselpunk model. Among the notes and sketches at the Datamancer site are some other Art Deco bits in progress. I guess I’ll be checking back more often now!
At i09, Jess Nevins continues the history of science fiction pulp magazines by bursting into their golden age with the beginning of John W. Campbell’s long term at the helm of Astounding.
Nevins tracks the number of sf pulps across the years – through the war and its paper rationing, not to mention the military service of many 
authors (which, come to think of it, he doesn’t mention – but pulps being what they were, those publishers would surely have printed something if they were able).
It’s also interesting to see which writers were publishing in each market even though their dizzying array of pseudonyms would make a complete list nearly impossible. But if you look carefully you can see the progress of fan writers like the Futurians beginning to break into the kinds of magazines that they’d lately been reading.
Just last night I read Leigh Brackett’s The Veil of Astellar and Henry Kuttner’s We Guard the Black Planet! – both from the years that Nevins covers here – so this article was nicely timed for me.
I can’t imagine how I’ve managed to miss the paintings of Eric Joyner, but now that I’ve corrected that I can at least enjoy sharing them with you.
A San Francisco illustrator, Joyner has painted this series of pictures that combine larger than life, vintage toy robots with other toys, world domination, and – inevitably! – donuts.
His Tin World series shows us a universe where giant robots really do look like old tin toys. Let the rest of the world beware! Shown above is what’s possibly my favorite: Fog of War, in which the situation does look pretty dire. Giant donuts roll out across the landscape amid the punishing fire of robots in their pressed-tin rockets, while robot soldiers march over the battlefield with their sparkers sparking and their lights flashing.
Robo Kong, on the other hand, is a more intimate view of the top of the Empire State Building… where the eponymous robot swats at determined baby pilots in their tin toy airplanes.
The series is all wrapped up in the book Robots and Donuts, while individual pictures are also available as prints.
Tauhid Bondia, formerly of the webcomic Good Ship Chronicles, has now embarked on a graphical multiple-choice adventure series called Epicsplosion.
This is so much like my own Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual that it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside even though feeling warm and fuzzy inside is kind of a scary thought, when you think about it, which now that I’ve done it is something that I discourage.
Epicsplosion uses animated gifs for its illustrations and can be a little harder (as in ‘more likely to be fatal’) on the characters than what I do in my stories. What really interests me here is that Tauhid seems to be posting updates to the stories live. I ruled that out because it wasn’t possible for me to keep up with all the possible threads in anything like a timely way. So I’m really interested to see how that works out over there.
Tauhid’s also either bravely or foolishly using the trademarked phrase "Choose Your Own Adventure". We’ll see how that works out, too. I’m in your corner, buddy.
So pop on over and sit in the driver’s seat of Tripp Roguestar’s Space-filled Adventure!
Note that there’s some language there that may not be safe for work or for religious fundamentalists, each of which will have to take its chances.
From Gajitz: an article about an early 1950s "Atomic Energy Lab" toy kit with nifty experiments, a Geiger counter, and… wait for it… real uranium.
You are in a maze of twisty e-readers, all alike:
This is possibly the coolest use I’ve heard of for an e-reader device.
As I said previously I have two strong feelings about e-readers: first, that the devices are inherently neat and desirable; and second, that the licensing restrictions on e-books make them a terribly stupid thing to buy.
This is something else: it’s a Kindle-formatted web interface to several of the old Infocom text adventures (as I write, Zork 1-3). Kindle users can connect to the web site and type their way through the craziness. Of course I used to rely so heavily on my scribbled maps when I played these that the player might also want to pack a notebook along.
It’s truly interactive because it’s communicating with an interpreter on the Internet. It would also be possible to convert a multiple-choice adventure game for the Kindle by starting with one long HTML file with internal anchor links, and converting from there: that end product, though, would be an actual e-book. This is something else, and it’s a great idea!
Via Ars Technica.
Over at The Way the Future Blogs, Frederik Pohl shows us that his 2010 Hugo award for "Best Fan Writer" has touched down after its continent-spanning flight.
Now if you’re familiar with his decades of professional work as a science fiction writer and editor you might be muttering "Fan Writer…?" to yourself and, believe me, I understand, but Pohl’s earned the award in at least one of two ways: first for his blog – whose name is a play on his retrospective book The Way the Future Was
If you read the book
On a related note I’ve recently enjoyed a happily rambling interview with Pohl and Jack Vance at the Starship Sofa site. It’s probably more a conversation than an interview. And that’s probably why I liked it so well.
Over at Golden Age Comic Book Stories there’s a terrific collection of Virgil Finlay illustrations for The Complete Book of Space Travel by Albro Gaul (1956).
Yes, it might have been a little premature to call it "Complete" – it would still be premature to call it that, after all – but nonetheless it’s a great opportunity for Finlay to explore everything from cross sections of space ships, construction, astronomy, space stations, and even the occasional dinosaur.
I never fail to marvel at that guy’s inks.
Speaking of ink, today’s offerings at the site also include some early 1960’s Frazetta illustrations and a great batch of Edgar Rice Burroughs illustrations by J. Allen St. John. That Mister Doortree. He just can’t be stopped!
Mister Doortree’s time traveling scanner does it again with a collection of sixty-five covers from Famous Fantastic Mysteries magazine, featuring art by Virgil Finlay, Frank R. Paul, Lawrence Sterne Stevens, Raphael DeSoto and Norman Saunders.
Famous Fantastic Mysteries ran from 1939 to 1953. I have a particular soft spot for this magazine because it was the original home of so many stories by H. Rider Haggard, Talbot Mundy, A. Merritt and others which I read in reprints when I was a tadpole. It’s now struck me that the logo from the later issues looks like a parent to the title plate for Fantastic Stories, in which I read new fiction in those same tadpole days.
You just can’t go wrong with titles like Radio Planet and the Ant Men.
