T-shirts on sale at Retropolis Transit, Saga Shirts, and Hot Wax Tees

Filed under Works in Progress

Space Piracy: Career for the Future!		Sword of Light (An Claidheamh Soluis)

 
From now till midnight (Mountain Time) on April 11, you can get a discount of up to 17% off any order at all (no minimums) on T-Shirts and aluminum water bottles from The Retropolis Transit Authority, Saga Shirts, and Hot Wax Tees.

It’s another one of those computationally intensive discounts that varies from item to item. On a dark colored shirt you’ll get about 17% off; on a light colored shirt, about 14%. But the best part about this sale is that there is no minimum order – you can get the price break even on an order for a single shirt. Though from my point of view the savings on an order of, say, twenty or thirty shirts are so amazingly, um, amazing, that you should probably just mortgage the house and think big, here.

That’s just me, of course.

[tags]t-shirts, tee shirts, saga shirts, retropolis transit authority, hot wax tees, retro future, sci fi, celtic art, celtic design, swing, swing dance, music, nerdy, geeky[/tags]

Archival prints orders are temporarily farkled

Filed under Works in Progress

I just heard from two different visitors to my Celtic Art & Retro-Futuristic Design web site that they were unable to place an order for my archival prints. It looks like something’s changed at the DeviantArt web site, where the orders are processed.

I’ll get it sorted out shortly, or possibly longly, but in the meantime the prints are all available here.

Slide scanning, and some of my fantasy watercolors from the 1980’s

Filed under Works in Progress

A few days ago while I was lighting a scene in 3DS Max I remembered an old watercolor of mine from the early 1980s. As I was working on that painting – the scriptorium of the Riddle Masters, from Patricia McKillip’s Riddle of Stars trilogy – I drew a floor plan of the scriptorium to figure out where the windows were, and where the light was coming from.

That’s something I rarely did (I’m not even sure if I ever did it again) but it struck me as pretty smart, in retrospect, and similar to the way I place my lights in a 3D scene.

I guess it stuck in my mind. A week or so back I’d pawed through a lot of old photographs and slides, and I knew I had a slide of that painting. So I fired up my scanner and stuck its transparency attachment into it.

Now, I’ve never used that thing before and it baffled me in five or six different ways before I got it all set up. There’s all kinds of smart, and I think I found one that I don’t have this morning.

But I digress.

I found that slide, and a bunch of others, and eventually I got scans of them. But what a disappointment! There was only one time when I had really good transparencies shot by a professional photographer. These, on the other hand, I shot myself with a 35mm camera. What used to look pretty good in a slide viewer turned out to be so out of focus that it’s pretty hard to get anything decent out of them. I still don’t have a presentable scan of that Riddle Masters painting.

Here are a couple that more or less worked, at least in these low resolutions; some of my old watercolors from 1980 and 1982.

I remember painting the centaur in the summer of 1980, soon after a week spent in Yosemite Valley. (That’s a whole story in itself.) I painted it on some paper I’d bought a few months earlier in Greece. I loved that paper, and I never found anything else that was quite like it. I had to look up the second picture, though – I don’t remember much about it. My notes showed that it, like the centaur, went to my friends and frequent-flying patrons Corey and Lori Cole – but then I crossed that out, so maybe I discovered I was wrong. It’s a mystery.

The only work of mine that’s ever been collectible is from jobs I’d done several years before these, for early role playing games and modules by Wee Warriors and Dave Hargrave’s Arduin. But between you and me… when I did that work I was just a kid, and they’re about what you’d expect from a kid, really. I remember these paintings from the 1980s with a lot more affection, and they’ve aged better.

Thrilling Tales: back in the mad doctor’s laboratory

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I’ve got just a few days left before I need to shift back to the illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book, so I’m trying all the harder to make some more progress on my other Thrilling Tale, which is Part Two of The Toaster With Two Brains. As you see here I’m back in the laboratory of Doctor Rognvald in the Tower of the Brain Thieves.

That’s not, in fact, where the story begins; but because this Tale will go live all at once, rather than in a serial, I don’t have to start at the beginning. This is the sixth of about a hundred and twenty illustrations. So, you know, although I’m happy to be making progress, the progress isn’t all that measurable just yet. It’s a marathon – not a sprint.

There’s something potentially pretty neat in the wind. It’s so speculative that I can’t say a thing about it and (speculative things being what they are) it’ll probably be quite awhile before that changes, if ever. Consider it a mystery, and cross your fingers for me.

Two-day T-Shirt sale at the Retropolis Transit Authority and Saga Shirts

Filed under Works in Progress

On the left: Ctheltic Cthulhu. On the right: Tell it to My Giant Robot.

It’s time again for an arithmetically confusing T-Shirt Sale at the Retropolis Transit Authority and Saga Shirts: this time, through tomorrow, March 29, you can save up to 24% on an order of $50 or more by using the coupon code:

BIGMONDAYBLUES

The system will run a complicated, perplexing, and (possibly) intentionally obtuse calculation on your order and then it’ll spit out your discount. It varies a bit from one type of item to another – but on dark colored shirts it looks like about 24%. Which is not anything you should be sneezing at, at least until you’ve paid for what you’re sneezing on. It’s just common courtesy, after all.

Anyway, the deal’s over at midnight (Mountain Time) on March 29. So get clicking.

Thrilling Tales: Update on The Toaster With TWO BRAINS

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

I know it can quiet when I’m busy over here, since ‘busy’ brings on my sophisticated system of Tunnel Vision. This means that I’m not too well aware of anything else. But when my blog gets sort of empty and echoing that’s usually a sign that a whole heck of a lot is going on. Which, it turns out, has been the case.

I’ve finished the script for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS and I’m liking it a lot; as the second act of the story it’s got a lot more action, for one thing, as things become more clear and more frantic at pretty much the same time. I’ve followed the "narrower, longer" style of story branches that I described earlier and the result is that you can read through the story from several viewpoints at different stages; and while there aren’t usually as many options to choose, the options that are there lead to very different events within a story that still arrives at the same place at the same time.

I like it a lot; hopefully you will too, though because of the time I spend on the illustrations you won’t be seeing it for roughly a year.

I’ve finished entering the story data in the form the web site needs, and today I’ve completed the images and HTML for all the new inventory items. There’s about two weeks on my calendar before I go back to the illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book – so I even have some time to make a start on the Two Brains illustrations before that happens.

Four T-Shirts to Answer the Question: Is the Glass Half Empty, or is it Half Full?

Filed under Works in Progress

Today, your friends at the Retropolis Transit Authority* present you with four answers to that eternal question: is the glass half empty, or is it half full?

These four bits of wisdom have been carefully devised to apply, in evenly divided quarters, to the entire human population. So there’s that sorted out, then.

Whether you’re a spaceman who’s grateful that his glass is 50% atmosphere, or an engineer who realizes that the specifications for the glass included too much overage, or a demented subatomic physicist who knows that the glass itself is mainly empty space, or – finally – if you’re that guy who makes sure nothing gets wasted at the bar (excepting himself), well, there’s a T-shirt here for you, bub. Or bubette.

Now, on to glasses with a variable fill rate… for the glass harmonica!

*Me.

First milestone for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

The noisemakers and trumpets in the Secret Laboratory are making as much noise as you’d hear at a Retropolitan chess tournament because this morning I finished the first draft for Part Two of The Toaster With TWO BRAINS.

It’s just five pages (or "nodes") short of Part One, in length, but when I’m done it’ll probably be just about exactly the same. The story is following that different interactive structure I described earlier with story branches that are longer, but narrower, and I figure I’ll be adding a small number of very minor alternate nodes to fill it out a bit.

Also I haven’t done a lot with new inventory items, and I may want to review that, too. But it’s a pretty reliable first draft and with that, anyway, I’m pretty happy.

I got a little bit stuck as I tried to start the final section. I cleared my mental palate by working for a few days on a new set of T-shirt designs. (They’re not up yet: there will be four – or possibly five – in the set, and I’ve only done three so far.)

Once I’d reset my brain by doing those the rest of the TWO BRAINS script came together pretty quickly.

Of course I need to go over it and make a lot of changes. That ought to be all done well before April 4th, which my calendar tells me is the day when I have to switch back over to the next illustrations for The Lair of the Clockwork Book. In fact I wouldn’t mind having some TWO BRAINS illustrations done by then, too. But we’ll just see.

I’m glad to see that the page updates feed worked properly yesterday – I’m not sure what went wrong in the first place so I can’t be sure that it’s fixed, either, but we look good so far.

Coming Thursday: Page update notifications for the Thrilling Tales

Filed under Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual, Works in Progress

Well, in response to a reader request I’ve just added a page update notification for Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. It seems to be working just fine, but I’m interested in seeing how everything behaves in a real-life test. We’ll see that on Thursday morning when the next page goes live.

The page update notifications will be available through an RSS feed here, in my Webomator blog. The RSS link will go on the Thrilling Tales front page. I’m not sure I want those updates to actually appear here in the blog, though: that might be annoying for my readers or for folks on Facebook, since these blog posts get echoed over there. I guess I’ll see how it all works and then deal with where it all works.