Win an artist’s proof of my cover art for “Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom”

Filed under Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom, Works in Progress

Some lucky – or, at least, some random – attendee at this month’s Arisia convention in Boston will be going home with a signed proof of the poster version of my dust jacket art for Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom.

How could that happen? Well, throughout the weekend they’ll be selling raffle tickets for this and other Fabulous Prizes; and then on Sunday there’ll be a drawing. Proceeds from the raffle will go to the Alzheimer’s Association in memory of Sir Terry Pratchett.

The final poster will eventually be available to the public, but that won’t happen for a while. So this is your chance to steal a march on those folks next door who always get the first dust jacket posters for anything I do. You know those people. You hate those people. They’re just so smarmy.

It’s worth a trip to Boston, just to show them who’s boss.

So if this all sounds great to you, but you have no idea what Arisia is, you can read all about “New England’s largest, most diverse Sci-Fi and Fantasy Convention” right over here.

Hey, Ursula Vernon and Stephanie Law are going to be there. I’m thinking it’s worth your time. And of course there’s the added bonus of a signed print of the Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom cover, for someone who could be you.

Fun and games with Javascript animations

Filed under Web Development, Works in Progress

I’ve just finished up about twelve days of work on a set of Javascript animations for a web site. The site itself won’t be reachable until some time next year, so I can’t show you that. But here you can see a few individual frames and elements from the set.

Because they’re meant for the web, there are very few frames. I have to allow enough time after the page loads, and before the animation plays, for all the frames to get loaded. For that reason there’s a very simple animation that plays first, and there are only two animations on each page.

There are usually two things going on in each animation. There’s a primary motion that carries the element around the page, and a secondary action that’s sometimes a limited animation within the element, and sometimes a special effect.

This meant I needed to use Javascript’s setInterval() function twice. The first time sets the delay before the animation starts, while the second one sets the frame rate for everything that happens, once it does. I never had to set a third interval, though I did schedule some updates to occur on every second or third frame.

The site’s page layout responds to the browser window’s width and it changes any time the window’s resized. That did lead to some conceptual weirdness. I can’t predict how large the browser window is, or whether its size may change between one frame and the next. In some cases I had to deal with unexpected outcomes when I resized the browser.

Everything seems to work now. There’s just one case – an element that travels along an arc – in which phones may have trouble keeping up with the frame rate. I can’t test that because I don’t use a mobile phone. But the math in that one instance is fairly intense; I don’t think any of the other animations will present a problem.

And I may even do one or two more before you get a chance to see them. But, honestly, this was just a twelve-day obsession. I really ought to be working on something else. It’s just that it’s nearly impossible for me to leave something alone when it almost, almost works.

Volto-Vac announces its newest robot: the Ursatron

Filed under Works in Progress

That’s about all I know about the Ursatron. Heck, until this morning I had no idea what to call him. But I’m sure I’ll figure out a thing or two about him in times to come.

You’ll be the second to know.

Starting Wednesday: Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror

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

What do you do after you’ve dropped a building on your boss’ head? Well, in many cases, you rethink your life. There are also those who dance around the building, singing about it. But we pretend we don’t know those people.

Even at the Retropolis Registry of Patents there are several approaches to this kind of trauma. Violet, the Registrar’s secretary, is in the “rethink your life” camp; Investigator Bowman is off on a tangent of his own. He’d just really rather not have to spend any time down in the Registry Vault (the “Patent Registry Models and Samples Repository”).

Nobody likes to go down there. It’s full of the working models and prototypes for every invention that’s ever come out of Retropolis’ Experimental Research District. If you get posted down in the Vault, you can’t help knowing that at any time something really dangerous and irreversible is likely to happen. And when it doesn’t happen? Well, there’s a statistically identical chance that it’s going to happen now. That sort of thing can wear you down.

Really dangerous and irreversible things almost never happen, of course. Almost never.

Meanwhile the Registry is expecting its new Registrar (again) and so that’s what’s on Violet’s mind. She’s made a resolution not to do anything to this one.

We’ll see how that goes, starting on Wednesday, in Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror.

A poster for the Retropolis Courier Service

Filed under Works in Progress

Deliveries seem simple, don’t they? Pick up Thing A from Place B, then take it over to Place C. But it gets surprisingly complicated if Place B is clear on the other side of the City of Tomorrow, hundreds of miles away; and if Thing A turns out to be a Cardiophilic Moisture Eliminator, well. Boy Howdy! You’ve got all kinds of trouble.

That’s why we leave package deliveries to the valiant, well-trained delivery persons of the Retropolis Courier Service.

We’ve all admired their splendid livery, and we’ve envied them their compact, high-flying scooters; we’ve gratefully handed them our (usually non-Cardiophilic) packages, and we’ve taken their speedy deliveries from faraway parts.

Very few of us have sent anything into – or out of – the Experimental Research District. But if we have, or if we do, it will be a specially trained Route X Courier who makes sure that package arrives at its destination with a low, low incidence of unpleasant side effects. Special rates apply.

So here we see Grace Keaton, a Route X Courier herself. She seem to be the poster person for the Courier Service.

And of course this is a poster, over at Retropolis; it’s also an archival print, and a coffee mug.

Grace is a character I invented for a sequel to Slaves of the Switchboard of Doom. She’s now had a cameo in Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory and she’ll probably return in the sixth Retropolis Registry of Patents story. That’s something I need to get to work on right about now.

By which I mean I don’t really know, myself. Oh, and if you missed it, you can click on the first image to see it way, way bigger. Or you could just click here.

Some changes and housekeeping at Retropolis: the art of the future that never was

Filed under Works in Progress

If there was a single cause – an inciting incident – for some of my recent changes at Retropolis, it was probably the loss of one of the vendors I use to make the merchandise I sell there.

But one thing led to another thing, and then there was this thing that popped up after that, and before I knew it I’d reworked some of the existing Retropolis pages. Is it over? Hard to say.

But I started with the home page, and then moved on to the bookstore page (a big improvement!) and just now I finished reworking the “About Retropolis” page, too. I made some minor changes to product images in the Retropolis Travel Bureau section. Some necessary surgery to the menus led to other changes. Like I said, one thing led to another.

“About Retropolis” really did need an update, once I thought about it. Now it’s got newer art and a slightly different and more interesting, and, frankly, laborious layout that no one but me may really appreciate.

There’s some lingering weirdness in the site’s overall layout (which dates from The Days of Browsers We Will Not Speak Of) and I could handle things in a far more sensible way today. But I don’t think I will. Even I am not that crazy. Not this morning, anyhow.

Starting Wednesday: Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory

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

This Wednesday marks the beginning of the fourth Retropolis Registry of Patents story at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual.

This time, Violet and Ben Bowman have to deal with the problems of Professor Wilcox and the Floating Laboratory. This story stands apart from the earlier Registry of Patents stories because it’s told almost completely from Violet’s point of view. Ben is active, but offstage, for nearly the entire time.

And this gives us a chance to take a closer look at Violet, and her quest for a promotion, and what that kind of promotion means to a robot who was designed to be a secretary. If her single-minded devotion to her goal seemed excessive earlier, you may find that it’s both more and less excessive than it seemed. Or you may find that she’s the most horrific employee a manager could imagine. A lot of this depends on your perspective.

There’s a cameo appearance by Grace Keaton, courier and graduate student; there’s an air traffic emergency; there’s an example of the lingering, malevolent feuds that can rise up to divide neighbors, especially if each of those neighbors is a mad scientist; there’s an imminent, terrifying threat to a fishing vacation; and there’s an office betting pool, because it’s an office.

It’s an almost ordinary day at the Registry of Patents. Starting Wednesday!

Two views of Ben Bowman’s office at the Retropolis Registry of Patents

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

I learned the hard way not to build complete environments for my illustrations. If you’re making a game – with free-floating player characters and cameras – you really want to build the whole thing. I mean, you don’t want the player to turn around and see that the world stopped while no one was looking.

But I’m not building games any more. And I found, often enough to notice, that if I built a complete and seamless set for a picture I would spend forever on it; and at the end the results wouldn’t be as good as if I’d worried only about what background I needed for the pictures I was actually making.

There are exceptions. I built a complete in-the-round set for Doctor Rognvald’s lab in Trapped in the Tower of the Brain Thieves, for example; but I was going to be rendering a lot of pictures in that one environment. So it made sense.

I’m working now on the last illustration for Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror (coming in late November!). Up to that point we’ve closed every one of the Registry stories back at Violet’s desk in the Registry of Patents. But there’s a Reason why that changes here, and for that same Reason we will spend a lot of time in Ben’s office when we come to the sixth and finalish Registry of Patents story.

So I’ve built three whole sides of Ben’s office. Will we ever see the back wall? No idea. That may be where he’s stashed his televideo phone: I couldn’t find it anyplace else.

But apart from that mysterious back wall, we can see here the not-very-large office where Ben Bowman spends his days when he isn’t out in the field. He’s got a lot of books and manuals, stacks of files and boxes, and two whole card catalogs of… well, he doesn’t really know what’s in those. He never looked. I think there’s a pastrami sandwich somewhere in the right-hand cabinet, though.

There are industrial safety posters, because, well, of course there are; a science reference poster; and a blackboard. Also, I really like his carpet and I wonder where I could get one like it.

There’s a contrast between this working area and Violet’s. Ben’s a messy organic person, while Violet is mechanical and… not messy. But there’s also this: as a secretary, Violet’s desk is no more than the gateway to the Registrar’s office. She doesn’t really have a space of her own. So part of the difference we see is that Ben has staked a claim on his space, while Violet is still scheming to get an office where she might do the same thing. At that point, how would Violet’s office look? It’s an interesting question.

But I can guarantee that we won’t see an answer to it any time soon.

The Asynchronous Bombastitron and other devices

Filed under Works in Progress

In a few illustrations for my fifth Retropolis Registry of Patents story I need to show a large number of devices in the vault where the Registry stores models and prototypes for patented inventions. So I’ve been working on a collection of these devices. You can see three of them here.

There’s no better place to begin than with the Asynchronous Bombastitron (above). This is pretty clearly an amended design, since in a prototype you wouldn’t see the warning notices.

Also, we should note that the Asynchronous Bombastitron features the hand-driven wheel preferred by skilled operators. In this it differs from the Synchronous Bombastitron – a favorite of amateurs and beginners – because it’s only with a hand-turned wheel that the experienced operator can exercise a nuanced, subtle control over the subject’s rotation.

The stepper motor of the Synchronous Bombastitron does make the device’s operation much simpler. But – as in most things – familiarity with the task leads one to try for those small, portentous flourishes that are only possible with the asynchronous version of the machine.

To the right we see the Melodious Subsonic Plasmatron, a machine whose function is entirely obvious from its name. We needn’t explain it here.

The third of these devices is so peculiar that I’m still trying to figure out what it does. You can’t discount the possibility that it doesn’t do anything (except to be interesting) but if that’s the case I don’t see why it was necessary to patent it. It seems to act on a large scale, but that’s about all I can be sure of.

This is far more information than you’ll find when Ben Bowman in the Vault of Terror begins, in November, at Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual. By the time we encounter these machines there will be too much going on for any kind of explanation beyond “Let’s hope they don’t power up the Bombastitron.”

But it’s an election year. That hope’s certain to be smashed flatter than Subsonic Plasma.

Through September 21st, get free standard shipping on all my T-shirts

Filed under Works in Progress

Early as it is, I find myself looking out the window for signs of Autumn. The ornithopters are hanging out on the roofs and trees… and, anyway, ornithopters are mechanical. Any time you see them flying South for the winter you can be pretty sure that they’re just messing with you.

They do like their little jokes.

On the other hand, I always look forward with dread to the last T-shirt sale of the season. Is this it? I don’t know. But it could be.

Embrace the pessimism! Get right over to Retropolis or The Celtic Art Works (or even the Pulp-O-Mizer) and fill your shopping cart with T-shirts in time to enjoy free standard shipping on one* two or one hundred of them**.

The free shipping sale runs through September 21st. All you have to do is enter the coupon code SUNSET16 during your checkout and then sit by the window, watching the deceptive ornithopters, and wait for the postperson to come.

*Well, apparently they changed their minds. It’s now free standard shipping on orders of $30 or more.

** One hundred T-shirts is the recommended daily allowance.