Dave Stevens, possibly remembered best for his comic book character The Rocketeer, has died after a long battle with leukemia.
Although I never met the man I’ve always been certain he was living in exactly the right world.
From some who did know him:
Dave Stevens at The Beat
Mark Evanier Remembers Dave Stevens
There’s a complex back story behind this 17″ tall toy rocket ship. To be honest, I still don’t understand it, though its wildlife-friendly nature has some ominous overtones for us puny humans.
I’m going to ignore that bit, though, because the toy rocket itself is just amazingly cool. They’re available in limited numbers (the two other colors, not shown here, are sold out already) from rocketworld.org. They zip right up to the upper reaches of my niftyometer.
I just found this via Statcounter (the artist, Brian Crick, is linking to me) and I got a kick out of the retrofuturistic travel poster from Crick’s own immense personal project – like mine, a work of years. Check out the gallery.
But honestly, it’s worth a visit just for the incredibly cool rocket ship and flying saucer in the site’s page design. Mmmmm, rockets.
Hot off the web pages of Golden Age Comic Book Stories is this eight page story by Murphy Anderson, from Planet Comics in 1945.
I have to admit I’m not sure why our hero’s actually named Star Pirate, why he hangs out with an obese space pirate named Blackbeard, or whether he actually is a pirate. He seems like a pretty straight arrow to me.
But none of that’s very important when you discover that you’re in a world where towering robots buy all the slaves at a slave auction and almost no one is curious about why they want them; or when you find that there’s a mad scientist at work, which of course is reassuring – but most importantly, we learn here that dipping people in tallow will preserve them in a state of suspended animation. Hot? Yes. Disgusting? You bet. But oh, so useful.
The story spans two posts on this page.
Now if we were to quibble, we might call this a Laser Lyre rather than a Laser Harp: it’s got a limited range, and the arrangement of the “strings” is more lyre-like than harp-like. But we don’t get to quibble because we aren’t clever enough to build one ourselves, are we?
This is the brainchild of Stephen Hobley, a photographer from Indianapolis. The “Laser Harp” is one of his side projects – another was the conversion of a player piano into a computer case.
Hobley has posted a brief tour of the Laser Harp’s workings here, with more information at his blog. And while you’re there, don’t miss his photographs of Indianapolis’ decaying Union Station – really nice stuff there!
One nice thing (well, sometimes) about rendering tests is that for a few minutes at a time, I’ve got nothing to do. Now in fact that’s often frustrating, but not always – for example, now. Look what I found – here are some cool 
slumped glass night lights and other gewgaws from the workshop of my aunt, Paulette Martin. Love that Kokopelli!
Paulette’s off in the southwest, which has seeped into some of her work with its patterns and themes. Her Smugmug account has photos of these objects and loads more, including lamps , vases, and window pieces.
Part 6 of Ars Technica’s excellent History of the Amiga Computer is now online. It takes us through the tumultuous and important years of 1986 and 1987 and – as always – tells the story of some very smart moves which – as always – are completely negated by bizarre corporate decisions. On the block this time are large parts of Commodore’s own engineering staff, who began to design the new Amiga models, along with Commodore’s new CEO Thomas Rattigan.
In order to follow up the soft launched Amiga 1000 Rattigan decided to split the Amiga line into a high and low end model. He felt that the Amiga 1000 fell at a price point the market didn’t understand (too high for a consumer computer, too low for a business computer) and the Amiga 500 and 2000 were meant to fix that by giving each market a machine to love.
Apart from their form factor and expandability they were essentially the same machine, which meant – to me, and to artists like me – that the Amiga 500 made a perfect entry level system, especially when its RAM was expanded to one, count it, one megabyte. That was considered a crazy amount of RAM in those days. We also meet Trip Hawkins, founder of Electronic Arts, and Dan Silva, author of the seminal paint program Deluxe Paint.
I’ve been enjoying these articles all along but it’s getting more exciting to me here because this is about where I arrived. Good reading.
If you missed them, here are the earlier chapters:
I’ve been watching the resources at the Library of Congress’ web site for years now. They’ve published a lot of vintage photography, posters, and other materials, most of which were produced by government agencies. In general the government-produced work, like posters and photography from the Depression-era WPA projects, are in the public domain (though it’s necessary to check the status of a particular work, and easy since they most often include the rights status of these images).
But now the Library of Congress has branched out into Flickr streams. There’s a large selection of images in (so far) two collections: 1930s-40s in Color is a rare selection of over 1600 color photographs from that period, while News in the 1910s includes 1500 out of the Library’s nearly 40,000 glass negatives from the Bain News Service, circa 1910-1912.
Easy enough to get lost in those virtual stacks. Leave breadcrumbs!
3D modeler Niko Moritz has a portfolio site that’s populated with a series of wonderful streamline cars and trucks (and, well, planes and boats) based on designs and prototypes that weren’t always put into production. There are some real gems here.
Above is his model of a fuel tank truck design that was patented in 1937, but possibly never built. He’s based it on a period White coe truck, also the foundation for the teardrop marvel shown at right. Both are based on designs by Alexis De Sakhnoffsky.
Other highlights include the classic Cord 810, Jaguar XKE and XK120, and the Hupmobile Skylark. Oh.. and there’s some modern gunge, too :).
It’s hard to imagine a situation in which I would not want one of these. It would have been awesome back when I was commuting over 50 miles in Southern California – in those days, I wanted a personal airship – but since this jet pack is meant for parachutists and doesn’t allow you to take off from your driveway, I guess it wouldn’t have been the perfect solution.
Anyway it’s amazing; two small engines power what’s otherwise a glider that allows a parachutist to travel up to 200 kilometers through the air after leaping out of an airplane at 33,000 feet. (An unpowered version promises 50 kilometers of travel, and is quite a bit lighter, to boot).
Since the powered version weighs at least 80 pounds we’re looking at a new upside to having special forces paratroopers invade us, wherever we happen to be – they’ll probably have to leave their awesome jetpacks behind. Woot!
